Description
Most political economic analysis on migration have historically focused on a migrant sending/receiving country divide, and on labour migration and remittance patterns. Few scholars have problematised it considering their interconnections with various migration statuses, the political economy of war and conflicts, and to the issues of forced (and mostly irregular) displacement. This paper addresses that, by focusing on the interconnectedness of legal and illegal, state and non-state, economies funded by forced displacement patterns, which both emerge as a result of the creation of migrant control and regulation strategies and help reinforce them. I do so by analysing three cases: 1) Afghans and Haitians coming to Brazil after the Taliban takeover and the 2010 earthquake, respectively; 2) the cross-border irregular movement of migrants in the Darién region, which borders Colombia and Panamá; and 3) the creation of a Ministry for the Salvadoran Diaspora by Nayib Bukele’s government in 2021. By placing the forced migrants themselves as the market from which to profit from, this paper demonstrates the unequal structures of these dynamics, as products and basis of the colonial matrix of power (Grosfoguel and Quijano), their dehumanising effects (as human-commodities (Mbembe), and their embeddedness in current neoliberal interests of the capital.
