Description
It is hard to deny the existence of a certain (post)colonial moment in migration and border studies. Over the past decade, authors have been increasingly attentive to the afterlives of colonialism in current border/ing regimes, bringing to the fore the ways in which borders continually operate within racial registers as well as their role in maintaining and deepening historical inequalities caused by empire, colonial accumulation, and so forth.
Engaging with that literature, this paper makes the case that Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’ can be construed through the use of ‘settler-coloniality’ as a heuristic. Engaging with critical race scholars and indigenous scholarship on ‘settler coloniality’, I argue that the ‘arrival’ of migrants from the Global South in Europe’s soil operates as a challenge to Europe’s colonial position as ‘the universal settler’. The challenging to this order, I point out, brings with it anxieties that Europe is not only being 'invaded', but also that its resources are being 'appropriated' and that its 'culture' runs the risk of disappearing. Within such framework, border regimes become the very locus to mollify or eliminate such anxieties, reaffirming and securing Europe's privileged and monopolistic position as 'settler'.
