Internal frontiers, marked bodies and the experience of being out of place. International migration in the context of global capitalism's logic of exploitation and exclusion.

Abstract

Global capitalism's logic of discrimination, exploitation and exclusion can helpfully be illuminated by the concept of 'the frontier'. Frontiers are a necessary feature of migration and inevitably generate an "us" and a "them". The concept of an "internal frontier" carries this geopolitical boundary-making over into the everday experience of immigrants, experienced in their very bodily being. "Fortress Europe" constructs the immigrant as a threat; the result is the immigrant's experience of being marked out as ill-fitting, inappropriate and out of place.