In June 2011, this journal published a special issue on ‘Land: A New Wave of Accumulation by Dispossession in Africa?’ (Vol. 38, No. 128, June 2011). Its premise was that processes of underdevelopment are being repeated on a greater scale than in the previous decade, and furthermore that there is a qualitative difference in the ways in which land and land transformation are shaping Africa's political economy. An earlier issue examined mining, resources and underdevelopment (Vol. 35, No. 117, September 2008). Here, questions were raised about contemporary similarities with previous lootings of Africa's resources. This article will examine, in a similar light, not only how people are inevitably displaced as a consequence of such waves of accumulation, but moreover, how labour-power continues to become a source of accumulation in a separate but related process to displacement. This article revisits and foregrounds the importance of labour mobility as a core element of imperialistic relations.
This article is based on the findings from ethnographic life history and interview data collected between 2007 and 2009 in Senegal, Mauritania and Spain and on further observations of migration routes in Burkina Faso and Mali. The fieldwork developed around clusters of migrants at many stages of the journey between West Africa and Southern Europe and in sending households, incorporating stayers, failed attempts and periods of immobility. It was located in several convergence points of several routes, made possible because without the elusive visa, migrants' journeys are chanelled and constrained by borders and checkpoints, transport infrastructure and the availability of informal employment. Even with visas, limits to legality lead migrants into unexpected places, including step-wise channels of migration (Cross 2009). Numerous countries feature in migrants' histories, commonly showing direct passage through the Sahel countries (for lack of work opportunity), followed by longer stages with detention and casual labour in two or more of the Saharan countries of Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. This does not represent a ‘global’ phenomenon but a regional one (Baldwin-Edwards 2004). The passage through several countries and the range of destinations is often caused by borders rather than indicating that their importance has diminished. Conflict and instability in parts of the Sahara, combined with border enforcements and deportations from one destination or transit country to another, amount to a turbulent and volatile trajectory for the migrant and changes in spatial patterns of migration from year to year.1
To conceptualise this labour mobility, it is necessary to consider the range of trajectories encountered in the journey north, rather than focusing on one location, network or ‘successful’ route. We must be panoramic in scope, but to rein in a coherent analysis, this article is particularly focused on connecting the processes that lead to emigration from Senegal, and to entry to the labour market in Spain. These links are most cogently established in an interpretive political economy approach.
This article brings to light a question that is unresolved and pertinent a quarter-century after its formulation:
… because not all migrations are determined by demand for wage labour, and because not all migrations result from individual choice under structural constraint, the connection between capitalism and migration should not be conceived as a necessarily direct one but may be, at the very least, a mediated connection. Moreover, the positions to which migrants are recruited, characterised as they are by various forms of physical and legal compulsion, suggest again that we need to establish the nature of the relationship between capitalism and unfree labour. (Miles 1987, 6)
The apparent chaos of migration cannot be sufficiently explained by a single existing theory, nor can we be deterministic about its outcomes. However, the most comprehensive framework of analysis is rooted in modern economic dispossession and in the continual demand for unfree labour, both mediated by the processes and local meanings of capitalist globalisation. Without this demand, migrants would not disappear into the desert and sea in uncountable numbers, with a lesser proportion ultimately entering northern labour markets that are nonetheless essential to the growth of those economies.2 The changing characteristics of migration offer new insight into the contemporary dynamics and struggles in the relationship between capitalism and labour mobility.
We begin by placing this migration in geographical perspective and examining its mechanisms. This will elicit the continuing importance of engaging with theories of labour mobility that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and were subsequently abandoned in the post-structural era (Amin 1972; Meillassoux 1975; Burawoy 1980; Miles 1987; Cohen 1987). The focus here is on the connections with patterns of labour mobility that were established in colonial labour regimes and further developed as European countries called upon their African ‘labour reserves’ in postwar development. These are patterns that are not only caused by unequal development, but also reproduce and aggravate it (Amin 1995, 32). There are also substantive discontinuities, which this article links with recent forms of dispossession.
The growing significance of step-wise migration
In the latter part of the twentieth century, migrants began to break away from colonial labour systems and their routes diversified, adopting a voluntary appearance in light of previous regimes. However, a focus on the successful routes underpinning a ‘culture’ of migration, and on the apparent agency in this mobility, would obscure the more volatile picture of new upheavals related to the political and economic crises of conflict, mass expulsions and the collapse of industries.3 In Senegal, structural adjustment programmes led the elites to abandon their ambitions for development, leading the youth to a culture of making do and ‘managing’ (la débrouille) in the informal sector or increasingly to heading abroad (Diop 2008, 20; see Lemarchand 1992, 187). Also, established migration strategies, on which some communities were already dependent, were destabilised in West Africa while at the same time, the European Union was in the process of consolidating its ‘Fortress’ and closing its external borders. These phenomena in West Africa and Europe lend themselves to the ‘suicide crossing’ through the extremes of desert and sea (Manuh, cited in Albert 2008, 14).
The ‘irregular’ journey towards Europe begins with a small amount of money, and the migrant must usually stop to work for cash on the way to the destination. This type of migration has been categorised as ‘step-wise’ because there are steps or stages from the migrant's place of origin to the destination. In one analysis of Africa–Europe migration, ‘step-wise’ is synonymous with ‘transit’ migration, and a less problematic or politicised term (Schapendonk 2010, 114). It overcomes the Eurocentric assumption that all sub-Saharans entering the Sahara are in ‘transit’ to Europe. It encompasses the channels of refugees, labour migrants and transit migrants that converge in Saharan hubs and fishing ports and this is essential because migrants move between these channels. Significant examples of moving across channels include: (1) migrants who intended an onward journey to Europe, but either fail or are deterred by the dangers of several days at sea, thus becoming labour migrants in the erstwhile transit country; (2) similarly, migrants who enter in boats from West Africa when they run out of supplies along the coasts of Mauritania and Morocco; and by air when expelled from European countries; (3) in reverse, sub-Saharan migrants who enter the Sahara for seasonal work or to work for an undetermined length of time, but the will or the opportunity develops for an onward journey to Europe, particularly if working in the West African peninsulas of departure towards the Canary Islands. Thus they become ‘transit’ migrants; (4) labour or transit migrants who become refugees as a result of local instability; and (5) refugees who become labour or transit migrants as they integrate in Saharan zones of recruitment.
By extension to these scenarios, it is impossible to quantify the number of migrants who are heading to Europe. The corollary of this is that not all migrations northwards are in the interests of European capitalism. There is greater consistency in the processes of dispossession that lead to the journey, which are the local outcome of the geographical expansion of capital. For the receiving end, north of the Mediterranean, there is a continuous and broadly controllable supply of labour, on which certain economic sectors are dependent. Having appropriated the ‘step-wise’ description to encompass this journey into the unknown, it is illuminating to see how it fails Dennis Conway's (1980) ‘clarification of the mechanism’:
… it appears necessary to reaffirm step-wise migration as a process of human spatial behaviour in which individuals or families embark on a migration path of acculturation which gradually takes them by way of intermediate steps, from a traditional-rural environment to a modern urban environment. (Conway 1980, 8)
The diversity of migrants and the multifarious nature of the migration preclude Conway's characterisation as movement through a ‘spatial hierarchy’. Reactive border controls militate against the prospects of migrants carving out a stable route as their attempts continue. It cannot be reduced to an urban or rural phenomenon. The irrelevance of urban–rural explanations corroborate more broadly with the complexity of post-structural adjustment African migrations, which do not follow linear models and sometimes reveal counterurbanising trends (Potts 2011, 19). Contrary to the pattern of a spatial hierarchy, migration in West Africa is historically linked with underdevelopment and this continues in new migrations. We examine this connection in two Senegalese coastal communities, which have experienced dispossessions under particular, local circumstances. At the same time, the characteristics of this wave of emigration are typical of trans-Saharan or trans-Atlantic departures from other parts of West Africa, owing to the economic pressures that lead to emigration, and which are subsequently reproduced in processes of underdevelopment.
Dispossession, migration and underdevelopment in Thiaroye-sur-Mer and Rufisque, Senegal
Thiaroye-sur-Mer and Rufisque are roughly nine kilometres apart on Senegal's Route Nationale 1 (see Figure 1). They are traditionally Lebu fishing communities. Their proximity to the capital, however, lends the youth Dakaroise levels of education, training and aspiration. This twenty-first century wave of emigration reveals discontinuity with the geographical patterns established in Samir Amin's (1972) ‘Africa of the colonial economy’,4 in which West African coastal areas were supported by labour from the hinterland as the trade focus shifted towards the Atlantic.
Rufisque, located to the south of the Cap-Vert Peninsula, is one of the four colonial ‘communes’ of French West Africa, along with Dakar, Gorée and Saint Louis. It is now considered to be a suburb of Dakar, although the use of horse and carriages in the narrow streets of the Diokoul district contrasts sharply with the capital. Thiaroye-sur-Mer is located in the outskirts of Dakar in an area of heavy industry and high population density. It is known for the ‘pirogue phenomenon’ wherein successful navigations to the Canary Islands at the start of the 2000s led to further attempts on a larger and sometimes disastrous scale. In March 2006, 162 youths were lost at sea in two pirogues (small wooden boats) leaving from the beach (Bouilly 2008a). These and other losses did not in themselves internationalise the devastation to this particular community; it was instead the mobilisation by bereaved mothers and relatives into the Collective of Women for the Fight Against Clandestine Emigration. These case studies will show the dynamics of dispossession and local resistance, explained in the testimonies of migrants and the activities of the Collective.
Dispossession and accumulation
The primary cited reason for clandestine emigration is that fishing is in crisis and is no longer profitable, the outcome of fishing agreements that have been signed between the Senegalese state and European companies. There was an increase in the number of foreign ships from Europe and East Asia that keep their fleets in the Senegalese waters, undermining artisanal fishing (Mbow and Tamba 2007, 5–6). According to local fishermen, the ensuing loss of access to pelagic resources is exacerbated by the expensiveness of materials and fuel for ever-longer fishing expeditions. This combines with the lowered selling-price of fish. A heap of it gains less than 15 pence, and it is the contradiction between these earnings and price hikes in purchased food that resonate with the dynamics of the colonial economy (Amin 1972).
Prices of food and oil increased steeply following the devaluation of the CFA franc (FCFA) in 1994, at which point remittances from Europe gained particular importance in many Senegalese communities. Food prices increased sharply again before the global economic downturn towards the end of 2008. In the year leading up to July 2008, the purchase price of rice in Dakar increased by 113% of the average 2002–2007 price (Cohen and Garrett 2009, 13). A food crisis of this scale is not attributable to poor weather, low grain reserves, high oil prices and increased global consumption but instead these fluctuations expose a precarious food system, constructed on corporate power (Bush 2010, 120–121). This unbalanced system might be exacerbated by a further currency devaluation if France looks south to alleviate the Eurozone crisis (Thiaw 2012). A returned migrant explained moreover that the financial system is a source of dispossession: it is not possible to save money with a local wage, and when the need for loans subsequently arises, this requires the mortgaging of houses and other possessions (interview, Rufisque, 24 June 2008).
Migrants' personal histories intersect with Harvey's criteria for accumulation by dispossession, which include the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; neo-colonial and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); the monetisation of exchange and taxation; national debt; and the credit system (Harvey 2003, 145). This recent wave of accumulation finds young adults barely able to maintain the houses that their parents and grandparents constructed.
These forms of modern economic dispossession are created because capital accumulation persists in its primitive form, continuing with the ‘historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (Marx 1867/1970, 715). Labourers continue to be separated from the means by which they can realise their labour, and this continues on an expanding scale (Fine and Saad-Filho 2004, 75). The separation is reproduced and expansive because some people become incorporated in the capitalist economy, whereas its growth depends on the accumulation of raw materials and labour from beyond its own boundaries. Where this is not possible, owners of capital instead find ways to create the ‘other’ by means of dispossession. This was evident when, at the start of the 1980s, land organised around family networks was commodified and the Lebu progressively lost their land. Returning migrants could buy this commodified land, leading to a rise in land value and the ‘negotiated expulsion’ of the poorest to areas away from the centre (Tall 2008, 52–57). To view returned migrants as the new accumulators, however, would obscure the dispossession and unfree labour that precedes, and importantly succeeds, this role as migrants crossing the Atlantic and the Sahara recount their experiences of selling up what their parents have gained. The dispossession was caused not by returning migrants but by the trickled-down and locally articulated macroeconomic changes that are described above.
In the Diokoul district of Rufisque, young people have turned to carpentry, welding and building. The daily wage for a carpenter is FCFA 1500–2000 (£1.85–£2.45) and there are frequent claims that wages are not paid. Furthermore, work is rarely available, particularly after recent factory closures. One resident complained, ‘if you stay here for a few hours, you'll see the house filled up like a national football team. We spend the whole day here drinking tea’ (interview, Rufisque, 2 July 2008).
Clandestine emigration to Europe
This wave of accumulation has led some married fathers to sail into the Atlantic alongside younger men, distinguishing this mobility from the ‘rite-of-passage’ to gain autonomy that has explained other Senegalese migrations (Willems 2008, 282; Mbodji 2008). One such fisherman failed five attempts to reach the Canary Islands. He explained that in staying, he could provide some funds to the household, but ‘say the flour mill breaks down, I can't repair it because we consume what I earn from day to day’ (interview, Rufisque, 18 June 2008).
If the upkeep of houses and productive materials is impossible with current household incomes, it is unsurprising that these would be mortgaged or sold on to fund a migrant going to Europe. This was the dynamic in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, where families sold land, houses and jewels to pay their sons for the journey, and the decision-making was largely led by mothers (Bouilly 2008b, 18). A combination of early successful crossings from Thiaroye's beach and a greater severity of poverty than in Rufisque contributed to the broad acceptance of sea crossings and then the high incidence of tragedies there. Unemployment here had reached 80%, almost double that of the Senegal average, at the peak of the pirogue phenomenon (Bouilly 2008a).
The Collective of Women for the Fight Against Clandestine Emigration in Thiaroye-sur-Mer is composed of more than 350 women, each of whom make monthly payments into a tontine, an informal form of saving and credit. This fund provides rice, soap and oil each month. The Collective processes cereals, fruits, vegetables and seafood, then sells it nationally, to neighbouring countries and also to Europe (Sow 2012). Credits of up to 50,000 francs CFA (€76.22) are available to the most vulnerable women in the group to fund them in income-generating activities (Chauzy 2006, 7). The Collective also lends over €15,000 per year to repatriated migrants so they can re-establish themselves (Gano 2012). It has gained donor funding from the Spanish Commission for Assistance to Refugees (CEAR) and more than 100 small businesses had been sponsored by 2006 (Chauzy 2006). It has successfully lobbied for visas and sensitisation to migration routes, but its activities also encourage local development as a solution to the loss of young people. More precisely, these activities are based on meeting subsistence needs, on equipping workers, and on establishing a marketplace for producers and traders. One failed clandestine migrant gained a horse and carriage so that he could access markets for fish at a distance from the beach (interview, Thiaroye-sur-Mer, 3 June 2008). For this community endowed with marine resources and artisanal skills, the significance of accumulation by dispossession is clear. Both here and in Rufisque, there was the common sentiment that ‘young people should have the materials and the means to do their trade’ (interview, Thiaroye-sur-Mer, 6 June 2008).
In contrast to the family-driven phenomenon in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, secret departures dominated the clandestine journeys from Rufisque. One young man told his mother that he was going to Tambacounda (in the east of Senegal), but then called her after some days to shock her with the news that he was in Spain (interview, Rufisque, 2 July 2008). Similar departures, in which friends and parents were uninformed, led to fears in the district that others would leave without warning. One stayer, who was deterred from attempting to go to Europe by his mother, explained: ‘At times [mother] has phoned me at the building site to see whether I have left or not’ (interview, Rufisque, 20 June 2008). This secrecy was also found among step-wise migrants in the Sahara and in another shared characteristic, migrants in Rufisque often emigrated without paying cash at the start. ‘I didn't pay because I'm a fisherman’, explained one resident, who was repatriated upon arrival in Tenerife (interview, Rufisque, 18 June 2008). Mechanical or medical knowledge, or friendship with the captain, are also a strong currency.
Legal emigration
From March 2007 to the end of 2008, around 500 Senegalese workers were recruited on temporary visas to work in Spain's fishing and farming sectors (IRIN 2008). When asking the youth about contracts and visas, the response was frequently that you need bras longs (long arms – friends in high places) in order to benefit. A failed migrant from Thiaroye-sur-Mer claimed, ‘the Spanish government wanted to grant visas in the fishing domain but the Senegalese state gave them to their close relatives, people who hadn't mastered the sea at all’ (interview, Thiaroye-sur-Mer, 3 June 2008). Rufisque, however, possesses households with such political connections, owing to its historical role in Senegal's political development.
Both illegal and legal forms of emigration are yet insecure for the migrant and by extension the family that benefits. One young woman, with the help of her uncle, had received a rural work contract for two years which pre-dated the agreement between Senegal and Spain. Her mother explained that once the contract had finished, she had to stay in Spain and look for other work (interview, Rufisque, 24 June 2008). Another respondent's two sons, both fishermen, had tried clandestine emigration. One obtained a free pirogue journey to Spain through colleagues. The other sold his pirogue and then gained a fishing contract (interview, Rufisque, 2 July 2008). During the eight-month term, he sent remittances to his household via Western Union. It expired a month before our interview, and his mother explained:
These days, he goes to the port to seek work. He's not with any acquaintance. He's alone because he resigned from his work before the end of his contract, to avoid them taking him back to Senegal just after it ends. (ibid.)
Summarising the experiences of other parents, she complained that, ‘contrary to what is thought about the contracts, emigration of the recipients hasn't changed a great deal’ (interview, Rufisque, 2 July 2008). This is because the time abroad required to secure household funds, beyond daily consumption, exceeds the terms of the visa. An emigrant working in a factory in Spain would earn €800 per month, at least 10 times the wage of a local carpenter or builder. However, showing one example of an expense that is not covered by workers' subsistence, one returned migrant explained:
Travelling to Europe is firstly to meet the needs of the house. Emigrants must also think of investing to prepare for their retirement. For investment, emigrants will have to do 15 years abroad. (Interview, Rufisque, 24 June 2008)
This serious shortfall arises because the sending community reproduces, nourishes, houses, trains and habituates workers (Cohen 1987). Capitalist interests seek to pay the labour force at the lowest possible cost, and this can be done by externalising the cost of labour renewal to sending economies (Burawoy 1980). The means of renewal (new recruits to fill vacancies) are thus separated from those of maintenance (workers' day-to-day subsistence) (Burawoy 1980, 149). The emerging picture, therefore, is one of underdevelopment, in which temporary and rotating labour migration simultaneously preserves and exploits the domestic economy (Meillassoux 1975, 109–111). A paradox emerges, in which the ‘domestic’ sector needs to be preserved in order to keep supplying low-cost workers, but also its destruction has enabled such exploitation to occur. This means that at least one member must continue to earn wages in the capitalist sphere if the community is to avoid destruction.
Entry to Spain's labour market: the case of Catalonia
Having examined the economic and social processes that underpin emigration from Thiaroye-sur-Mer and Rufisque, this section focuses on another essential component of the West Africa-Europe migration regime, that of the Spanish labour market. Spain halted clandestine migration through the Strait of Gibraltar in 2003 and into its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco during 2005. It significantly reduced illegal entries to the Canary Islands when the number of fishing boats from West Africa peaked in 2006. More recently, it was dealing with another wave of sub-Saharan migrants in Isla de Tierra, an uninhabited Spanish rock close to Melilla (El País 2012). All of these routes are dangerous and deadly, placing greater pressure on the Spanish government to block them. However, shootings of migrants who attempted to enter Ceuta and Melilla, deportations in North Africa to remote desert areas, and shipwrecks arriving in Spain's waters from as far as Guinea reveal a danger created by the EU's border regime and its clients in Africa as well as the natural hazards of desert and sea (Traoré 2007). This section focuses on the ‘successful’ migrants who bypass the deterrents, either by crossing the intercontinental boundary without documentation, or by exceeding the period or terms of legality set out in visa arrangements (see previous section).
To recap, this analysis of the migration regime is centred on clusters of migrants in particular locations, rather than a single route. My informants in the autonomous region of Catalonia started their epic journeys in numerous West African towns and villages. Most step-wise migrants' first point of arrival was in the Canary Islands or Andalusia, after which they were flown to Catalonia by the authorities, or reached it through further steps. At the end of 2008, 17.5% of the working population in this region were foreign-born, more than twice the national average (Pajares 2009, 4). Barcelona, its capital, was a well-known target for Senegalese migrants. The Wolof ‘Barça mba Barzakh!’ (Barça or the afterlife) exclamation is well-known in Dakar and is connected with local enthusiasm for the successful football team. At this time, Barcelona enjoyed a higher growth rate, at 8.4% from 2006–2007, than the Spanish average of 3.9%, and employment was also higher. However, its boom ended in the global economic downturn at the end of 2008, which caused 228,300 job losses in construction across Spain, followed by losses in industry and services, whilst agricultural jobs increased by 14,000 (EIU 2009a, 14–16). Agricultural centres in Catalonia therefore grew in importance as poles for undocumented labour.
In Barcelona, a trader from the Casamance region in the southern part of Senegal has occupied a series of buildings, periodically being moved on by the police. In 2008, he secured an apartment building with an adjoining restaurant and housed migrants from Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda. He explained that 10 years ago, people came legally, but now most Africans he met had arrived on fishing boats. He would lend his residence papers to undocumented migrants (interviews, 17, 18, 20 August 2008). Africans, mainly from the North and West, comprise the largest immigrant population in the Catalonian provinces of Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, totalling over 11,000 people in 2008 before reducing to less than 8000 in 2011 (INE 2011). Immigrants who do not have residence papers or who have entered illegally and received expulsion orders may register on the Padrón (Municipal register). Because registered migrants were entitled to healthcare at this time, it was thought that the figures were reasonably accurate (Sandell 2006, cited in de Haas 2008, 34). A report by ACCEM (Spanish Catholic Commission on Migration), however, estimated 1500–2000 unregistered migrants in Salt, a municipality of Girona in which African telecentres, restaurants and other businesses are predominant. The overall foreign population there increased from 6.1% in 2000 to 37.5% in 2007 according to the town census. The study found that almost half of the unemployed migrant population were unregistered (Benabid 2008, 2–3). They are likely to have entered the country without detection.
One migrant from Cameroon reached Catalonia through a typical step-wise journey. It took him around five years to reach Spain, often delayed by long treks to circumvent checkpoints, or by stops in border towns where he would earn the money to pay smugglers. He passed through Chad, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, avoiding officials, working and sending remittances to pay for his mother's medication, but eventually he saved enough funds for the crammed boat journey across the Mediterranean and survived it. On arrival, as with other migrants, he was detained for 40 days, then was released and issued with a deportation order (interview, Barcelona, 26 February 2008). In another case, a groundnut farmer from Gambia was driven to migrate when his crops would not sell. He sought work in several West African countries and while working as a seaman in Senegal, he was offered a free passage to Spain from Diogué, located at the estuary of the Casamance River and close to the border with Guinea-Bissau. Boat migrations from Casamance increased when patrols were intensified around the Dakar region in 2006. When asked whether he felt danger on the boat, he explained:
A French trawler escorted us for around two days, giving us food to prevent us from being detained in Morocco. They decided they can't leave us in the sea to die and they can't let us go to jail in Morocco. They brought us near to the Spanish coast and called the Spanish authorities. (Interview, Barcelona, 25 February 2008)
This kind of exceptional fortune echoes in other migrants' histories. One Gambian university tutor had been placed under intense surveillance by the government, eventually setting off in haste on a step-wise journey that incorporated rural work. Eventually reaching Morocco, he received help from soldiers in Tanger when he was able to offer translation skills. He explained: ‘They needed to communicate with some of the people there, and I could speak for them… so actually my knowledge paid off the villains!’ (interview, Salt, Girona, 23 February 2008). Once in Spain, the reliance on chance continues. A woman from Edo State in Nigeria explained her arrival in Gran Canaria:
I came here through Libya. Libya through Algeria. Algeria through Morocco. I came through the ‘patera’ [small boat], in the sea, in 2001. The journey almost took me one year on the road. When I came here I was talking to the police and they interviewed me. They separated everything when we were in Las Palmas; after, they let all of us come, but deported some people. It depends on luck. (Interview, Salt, Girona, 23 February 2008)
In spite of having visible and notorious anti-immigration controls, Spain's economic and social conditions have ‘activated’ its inequality with sending countries, encouraging migrants to take the risk of entering (Sassen 1999, 136–137). They have moved independently through a ‘chain of work’, ‘a job network that enables people to circulate from a more peripheral area to one that is less so’, producing goods and services in a similar pattern to commodity chains; also resembling the ‘hopping’ of capital (Martínez Veiga 1999, 110; Ferguson 2007, 38). The ports and transit towns in West and North Africa offer areas to exchange information, seek work, pool resources and sometimes secure the onward journey to Spain, and then Spain's agricultural and industrial centres continue this pattern within an unfree labour regime.
Alternatively, the pattern begins in Spain. A Nigerian migrant living in Salt, Girona, had obtained a three-month visa in Lagos and flew to Spain with his brother in November 2005. He worked in a telecentre in Salt for five months, which was owned by an associate, then lost his legal status. He had to seek work with an agent and entered into informal agricultural work (interview, Salt, 23 February 2008). Documented workers would earn €6 or €7 per hour, but those without papers would earn €4 after the agent had taken a cut.
The pressures of capital on labour costs
In our case study of Spain as a receiving country, it is important to note two things: firstly that it was a country of emigration only 25 years ago, and secondly that it has been considered as a marginal state in the EU, characterised by high unemployment and a large underground economy. Spain converged with the GDP per capita of OECD countries and experienced higher than average growth by 2005. It is still, however, considered to be in a marginal position vis-à-vis Europe (Amin 2010). Supporting this perception, it fared worse than the OECD average in the global financial crisis in 2008 with a steeper rise in unemployment and a more pronounced dip in GDP growth (EIU 2009b, 20).
Spain has been under sustained pressure from the international financial institutions to keep its labour costs down. Overall growth increased by 6.3% annually between 1996 and 2000, then 8.4% annually up to 2006, while salaries decreased from 5.3% to 3.1% over the same period (Martín Urriza 2007, 16). Furthermore, Catalonia became the main contributor to Spain's growth, followed by Madrid and Andalusia (OECD 2009a, 18). Spain's growth was the result of ‘increased labour utilisation and capital accumulation’ (OECD 2009b, 104). This principally concerned the construction and tourism sectors, which utilise cheap labour by employing temporary workers and a foreign labour force. In 2006, the Spanish Workers' Commissions (CC OO) calculated labour costs in Spain at 54.5% of each product unit, below the Eurozone average of 56.5% and lower than Italy, Germany, France and the United Kingdom (Martín Urriza 2007, 21). Times both of growth and of recession in Spain show the continuous role of cheap labour in accumulation. Its comparative advantage in labour costs signifies a large and growing pressure to pay the labour force at a lower rate than the cost of reproduction and subsistence (Bush 2007, 57). As residential construction and private consumption ceased to drive growth, Spain was subjected to further pressure from international organisations to improve its productivity at lower costs (IMF 2009, 4).
This pressure is alleviated with a system of unfree wage labour, characterised by political and legal constraints which inhibit free circulation in the labour market. Political-legal restrictions are:
… specifically intended to restrict the circulation of certain categories of labour-power within the labour market. Such restrictions may be overdetermined by related political constraints (e.g., the absence of the right to vote) but the latter do not by themselves constitute the defining feature of unfree labour. (Miles 1987, 33)
Forms of unfree labour, therefore incorporating the visa arrangements between Spain and Senegal, are both ‘anomalous’ and ‘necessary’ to capitalism (Miles 1987). They are anomalous because free wage labour tends to dominate, but they are necessary because the historical role of cheap labour in economic growth obstructs the universalisation of wages. In the contemporary context of ‘irregular’ migration into the EU, border regimes are key to restricting the circulation of those who enter. States legitimate this labour regime by defining the relationship between free and unfree workers, through legal and ideological means and in the policing of the frontiers (Cohen 1987, 26).
The role of ideology in unfree labour
Robert Miles (1987) argued that production relations are inseparable from political and ideological relations, and specifically from the process of racialisation, where racism is a dominant ideological element. This is because the expansion of capitalism established social relations, which would be abstracted to ‘race relations’, and these relations would develop their role as unfree labour in commodity production (Miles 1987, 9). This illuminates the dialectical relationship between the political and the economic. State managers and capitalists promote their respective territorial and economic logics of power, but enter into interdependent partnership with each other in the regulation of migrant workers. This understanding of territorial power vis-à-vis the flow and circulation of capital enables a richer analysis of ‘contradictory’ migration regimes than a framework of ‘realist’ international relations or Marxism alone (Harvey 2003; Ashman and Callinicos 2006, 111–116).
Prime Minister José María Aznar's EU chairmanship in 2002 played a crucial role in the construction of immigrants as a threat to the EU. The term ‘illegal immigration’ was persistently deployed in connection with public safety and was explicitly connected with crime. It was argued that international solidarity with all human beings would permit more illegal immigration. This exemplified a ‘preformulation of racism by the elites’ (van Dijk 2005, 20). Aznar stimulated anti-immigrant sentiment as an acceptable element of political discourse in Spain.
Claude Meillassoux argued that the discrimination serves dual purposes: firstly to create an atmosphere of racism, propagated by the far right, which enables the overexploitation of ‘underdeveloped’ peoples; and secondly to keep migrants in a state of fear and crush demands for improved conditions. This also divides immigrants and indigenous workers, thus diminishing the scope for resistance (Meillassoux 1975, 120–122). Racism, xenophobia and other ideologies of discrimination are essential to the operation of a double labour market, which produces two categories of worker: those who are integrated and reproduce wholly within the capitalist sphere; and migrants who only partially reproduce themselves within the capitalist sphere. A major structural economic reform in Spain's austerity era, during which youth unemployment has soared to 47%, is to merge the double labour market by relaxing labour laws so that it is easier and cheaper to fire workers (Economist 2012). Despite this, the demand for migrant labour will continue because migrants are excluded from receiving any ‘indirect wages’ in the form of family allowance, pensions, unemployment benefits and sickness cover. Their sending households will cover these costs. Tontines, explained earlier as a pooled fund, are used in Catalonia and will also go some way to buffering underemployment and unforeseen expenses (Sow 2007, 40). The labour literature from Meillassoux and others might have missed such local dynamics, but this does not undermine their main observations.
Since Meillassoux's argument about the political economy of racism, the issue has intensified. Migration policies in receiving countries have ‘hidden agendas’, which are rhetorically against immigration but in reality encourage it (see below). Having created the double labour market, the power of nationalism and racism in destination countries in turn makes it preferable for politicians, social movements and the media to continue propagating public opinion against immigration (Castles, 2003, 214). Although the discrimination dynamic may have been ‘efficient’ in postwar France it is not clear in contemporary Spain's context that controls on immigrant workers ‘make it easier to fix their length of stay in accordance with the needs of economy’ (Meillassoux, 1975, 122). Unmanageable borders and shipwrecks at Spain's gateway add to its limited ability to control increasingly resourceful foreigners in the labour market. However, this attempt to regulate labour is explicit in EU policy5 and is what the Spanish state attempts to do.
Controlling the labour market
Numbers of clandestine migrants and their degree of employment elude the official and speculative data and are excluded from global labour policy (Cillo and Perocco 2008). However, it is widely understood, not least by successive Spanish governments, that migrant labour is a structural factor in the economy and is managed to suit particular labour demands (Sabater and Domingo 2012, 193; van Dijk 2005, 20; Rius Sant 2006a). Amnesties have featured in Spain's migration politics since it became a labour-receiving country, but if migrants were entirely legal and incorporated, they would no longer fulfil this role.
Table 1 shows key regularisation programmes that were enacted between Spain's first immigration law in 1985 through to the Settlement Programme from 2006–2009. The programmes targeted particular groups of migrants, such as those who lost their legal status in 1996, and agricultural workers in 2005. For the latter programme, just over 90% of sub-Saharan applicants were successful in Barcelona Province (Sabater and Domingo 2012, 200). These programmes were limited in their numbers, time frames, type of permit and role, often ‘segmenting’ workers into agricultural or domestic work and then returning them to an ‘illegal’ status.
| Year | Population affected | No. of permits granted | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985–6 | Illegally resident workers and families. Must have job offer. | 23,000 | Connected with 1985 Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners, viewing immigrants as temporary workers who need to be regulated. Total 44,000 applicants. Short-term legalisation; difficult to renew and slow bureaucratic process; 50–75% of eligible migrants did not apply (lack of infrastructure). |
| 1991–2 | Illegally resident workers and families; rejected/ pending asylum seekers. | 109,135 | Total 135,393 applicants. Permits restricted to economic sectors; 3 years later 26–50% estimated not to have renewed permits. |
| 1996 | Immigrants who have lost legal status (59%); family members of immigrants with permits (34%). | 21,300 | Total 25,000 applicants. 13,800 gained work and residence permits; 7500 gained residence permits. |
| 2000–1 | (1) Work permit or residence permit in previous 3 years. | 153,463 | 247,598 applicants; beneficiaries worked in agriculture, domestic service or construction. |
| (2) Prove settlement or ‘roots’ in Spain. | 221,083 | 350,000 applicants; beneficiaries mainly in domestic service and construction. | |
| 2005 | Normalisation programme. | 575,000 | Work permits, 1 year (renewable). 10,100 Senegalese applicants were successful. |
| Registered for at least 6 months and offered work contract of at least 6 months/3 months for agriculture. | (84,027 in Barcelona) | 90.6% success rate for sub-Saharan Africans in Barcelona. | |
| 2006 | Illegal residents | 100,000 (20,000 in Barcelona) | Work permits; must return to country to obtain visas. |
| 2006–9 | Settlement programme | 2009: | |
| Labour settlement: must have lived in Spain for at least 2 years and can prove existence of a labour relationship. | 79,433 (21,458 in Barcelona) | 43.7% success rate for sub-Saharan Africans in Barcelona (mainly Gambian and Senegalese applicants). More than a third of these failed to change from Labour Settlement permit to ordinary work permit. | |
| Social settlement: has lived in Spain for 3 years, can produce a work contract and has proven links with the local community | Lapsing into illegality was found to be frequent in this programme. | ||
| Sources: Mendoza (2000, 6–7); Rius Sant (2006); Rius (2008); Levinson (2005, 48–50); Sabater and Domingo (2012, 196, 200, 207). |
A government delegate in Barcelona stated that 980 out of 4700 cases of expulsion were enforced during 2008, leaving almost 80% of the illegalised migrants in restricted circulation (El Periódico de Catalunya 2008). Their future and that of the household is subjected to the vagaries of policy and economy. This was evident in 2001 when, early in the year, 133 destitute sub-Saharan migrants staying in Barcelona's Plaza Catalunya were regularised by agreement between the city council, the Generalitat (government of Catalonia) and the Spanish government. The cohort was living under non-enforced expulsion orders (Rius Sant 2006b). Eight months later, 120 sub-Saharan migrants were forcibly evicted from the same space in an early morning raid (Noguer and Costa-Pau 2001).
Conclusion: more than a mediated connection
… the threat of starvation and the lack of alternatives compelled the ‘free’ labourers ‘voluntarily’ to sign up to the labour contract and ‘spontaneously’ turn up to work even under the most appalling conditions (Fine and Saad-Filho 2004, 81)
In the separate but interdependent processes of economic dispossession and the utilisation of migrant labour, capitalism adopts a regulatory role. This alludes to the ongoing and expansive nature of accumulation, but the primitive accumulation that directly and strategically linked dispossession with entry to the labour market in colonial era labour systems, becomes accumulation by dispossession. The former process opened up the path to the geographical expansion of capital, yet the latter has disrupted this path that was already opened up (Harvey 2003, 164). In other words, people are thrown out of the global economy – discarded and sometimes reincorporated. Therefore, there are ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman 2004), people who are left behind by ‘modernisation’ and become unemployed, unpaid, imprisoned, destitute, lost at sea or perishing in the desert. At the same time, the creation of labour reserves persists, incorporating people in capitalist development by arbitrarily admitting members of this industrial reserve army into an institutionally racist and exploitative labour market. People struggle and mobilise against these oscillating extremes of abjection and overexploitation, which reflect the forms of exclusion and inclusion that are created by this logic.
Note on contributor
Hannah Cross gained her PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds in 2011. She is a lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester. She is also a member of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy.