Description
The reproduction of the global agri-food system is conditional on the exploitation of migrant labour, prompting the question why have migrants become the stand-in labour force for exploitation in agriculture? This paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a genealogy of the UK Seasonal Visa Scheme. The paper examines the governmentality of the border by identifying four colonial technologies that enable and sustain this exploitation: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights. I argue that while borders are reconfigured to facilitate capital accumulation, the origins of the visa regime are rooted in colonial statecraft designed to control and discipline subjects. Recentering the productive power of exploitative border regimes as artefacts of colonial governance, I show how the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on colonial statecraft, and that it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. While racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, it is the state constructed border regimes —and the colonial rationalities that underpin statecraft—that explains how.
