The economy of migration. Knowledge, accounting, and debt

ABSTRACT

What we propose in this paper is to elaborate on what it means to consider ‘migration’ as part of an oikonomia. This is not an ‘economic perspective on migration’ but a genealogy of migration as a way of managing people in light of both colonial divides and questions of labor and race. First, we argue that ‘migration’ is constituted as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings and of belonging within a reference space of governed territories. We illustrate how migration is born out of the specific accounting inventions made by Ernst Ravenstein. Second, we argue that the accounting of a singular thing called migration only starts to take off when nineteenth-century empire reaches its tipping point. Third, we illustrate how this accounting constitutes a form of double bookkeeping. To record or register migration is to make a record of what the nation would be if the people marked as migrants were not present, and it is to simultaneously record what it costs the nation now that they are. In this oikonomia, migration is enacted as a form of debt.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• debt
• accounting
• Oikonomia
• knowledge production

Introduction: migration and/as oikonomia

There appears to be a widespread belief that it is or can be known what ‘migration’ is, and that migration is prior to this knowing. According to that belief, there can be knowledge production about migration, and a governing of migration. In this contribution, we seek not to critique that belief but, perhaps, to secularize it, which is to say that we provide an alternative account of the constitution and genealogical itinerary of migration. We seek to show how migration is constituted in and through the knowledges, beliefs and problematizations in which it figures, and we seek to outline, in a preliminary way, the contours of the conditions of possibility for knowledges and beliefs about migration (see also the introduction to this special issue, Amelung, Scheel, and van Reekum 2024). In particular, our contribution is informed by the idea that any production of knowledge or belief about migration will not be able to keep constant its own vantage point and that what needs to be understood is always a configuration in which ‘migration’ and nation-state, or the international system of nation-states, or any territorial organization of borders, figure simultaneously. This simultaneity or co-incidence gives rise to a relation that, if taken seriously as relation, precludes the possibility of claiming independence and stability across history for the place from which migration is observed. If we take seriously the configuration or relation for which we can use as shorthand the migration configuration, then neither element in this configuration can be known without the other, and the constitution of the one term necessarily affects the other. This makes the science of migration such a peculiar endeavor, understood fully only when the creed or, as we shall argue, the credo or credit it is invested in, is taken seriously. Migration science, whether dogmatic or critical, ‘reflexive’, i.e. heretical, needs to claim to be able to cut off the branch on which it sits if it does not center on the migration configuration that includes its own vantage point. The situation is more than merely analogous to the one described by Nahum Chandler in X – The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought: ‘Any configuration that can be remarked is produced only in and through the dynamic torsions of such relation. [This] sets afoot a peculiar asymmetrical symmetry’ (Chandler 2014, 150).

As we seek to show, in the case of migration, asymmetrical symmetry can be fruitfully understood as an economy of migration. The migration configuration entails the practical achievement of a bifurcation between settled nativity and migratory relocations through what we argue is a mode of accounting. The organizing logic at the heart of this accounting is that discrete events of migration come to diminish, with each migrant counted, a world in which migration didn’t happen. Migration, we argue, is enacted through a double accounting that sets off actual tallies of lives against the number of lives that would have been counted were migration not to have happened. This enacts a temporal bifurcation: while we know that we coexist here-and-now and have a history together, we produce facts of this togetherness by quite literally archiving and keeping present an unrealized timeline in which coexistence didn’t happen. This is accounted for as the settled, naturalized population. The second twist is that these natives now have to live with the addition of those coded as migrants. In this mode of accounting, then, a migrant is someone who might not have been here – ‘here’ signifying the location from which the accounting is performed.

The ‘economy of migration’ we outline here is of the order of oikonomia, i.e. of the governance or management of the nation as a household (Agamben 2011; Milbank 2017; Mitropoulos 2012). Xenophon gives a classic statement of oikonomia in his Oeconomicus, where he describes it in ways similar to Aristotle: as a form of administration or management of the household and property, including, thus, the domain of ‘economic affairs’ in the modern sense. Xenophon, however, extends the application of oikonomia to the army and the polis. He describes a key technique of order as part of oikonomia, which he calls taxis and by which he means the ability to assign fixed places to objects so that they may be found. For Xenophon, fixing the places of things is both possible and desirable with objects but not possible with humans, for whom ‘no place of meeting has been fixed’ (Xenophon 1923, 439). A human, he says, you may take a long time searching, and all the while he (sic) may be searching you. However, in contemporary conceptions of oikonomia by Agamben (2011) and Mitropoulos (2012), oikonomia very much involves the government of people. For us, likewise, oikonomia marks the simultaneity and the co-constitutive entanglement of the management of people that go by the name of ‘migration’ and the management of ‘the economy’.

In this article, we outline the contours of this oikonomia of migration. We do so as part of a larger genealogical analysis of migration. Here, we zoom in on the invention of Ernst Ravenstein, an invention we believe to be key to the migration configuration: the abstraction of net flows from the actual dwelling of people that returns to those people in the form of differentiation between ‘natives’ and ‘migrants’. As we show, this invention cannot be understood without situating it in what Denise Ferreira Da Silva (2007) calls ‘Euro-white’ contexts, i.e. European and North American concerns over both empire and coloniality, and labor. We do not want to claim that ‘migration’ is or cannot be something different in other contexts, and so our contribution can be considered as not seeking universal applicability, but we do note that the global infrastructure of nation-states and the bordered management of populations, whatever else it is, is also an ongoing effect of Euro-white coloniality (Sharma 2020; Walia 2021). We first show how the specific mode of accounting invented by Ernst Ravenstein gave rise to the birth of ‘migration’ as we know it in contemporary state and knowledge infrastructures. The subsequent section then situates migration in a more encompassing oikonomia and teases out the logic of debt that underwrites the economy of migration. The section following this specifies this by providing some examples of how and where we see this logic at work, after which we outline how calls for linking migration to reparations tend to operate within the same economy of migration. We end with a concluding section that provides some speculative propositions on a way forward for those inclined to think of themselves as ‘migration scholars’. Here, we build especially on the work of Harney and Moten (2013) on ‘bad debt’ to specify, minimally for epistemic purposes, one way out of the economy of migration.

Accounting for migration

Let us first ask: How was migration born as an object of accounting that turns lands and people into an abstract phenomenon consisting of net flows of ‘migrants’? Which inventions and tests need to be enacted to start experimenting with facts of migration? Here, we seek to show how crucial steps in the genealogy of migration are taken in Ravenstein’s famous articles entitled ‘The Laws of Migration’ (Ravenstein 1885; 1889). But first, what do we mean by ‘accounting’? Accounting, as Miranda Joseph has said, consists of a variety of ‘complex performative representational practices’ that can be ‘deployed to create, sustain or transform social relations’ (Joseph 2014: x). Like Joseph, we take accounting to consist of both numerical and narrative practices, but we emphasize the importance of their combination. To speak of accounting is to acknowledge that migration is constituted by such numerical and narrative practices. As Michael Power has shown, accounting involves ‘object formation’ in consecutive phases he specifies as follows: ‘object formation; object elaboration; activity orchestration; and practice stabilization via infrastructure’ (Power 2015, 44). From this perspective, border infrastructure (Dijstelbloem 2021) can be seen as one processual element of migration accounting. Several authors have likewise shown how the visualization of migration is co-constitutive of migration (Boersma 2019; Schinkel 2017; Tazzioli and Walters 2016; Van Reekum 2019; Van Reekum and Schinkel 2017). Likewise, migration has been fruitfully analyzed as enacted through data practices (Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019). By focusing on accounting, we seek to specify this. Accounting consists of all the instances of visualization, identification, quantification, signification and imagination that allow the production of: (1) numerical tables of migrants to be compiled that are assumed to represent abstract processes of spatio-temporally specific forms of coming and going and of belonging, and that, as we argue, are always implicitly or explicitly offset against similar tables signifying the counterfactual scenario of ‘no migration’; (2) discursive accounts of ‘migration’, including projections, conceptualizations, problematizations, and all the discursive forms of policing known as ‘migration policy’.

In this section, we seek to show how the birth of migration was enabled by the very specific kind of accounting that became canonical after the work of Ernst Ravenstein. Ravenstein’s key invention is to project a singular phenomenon, on par with other, generic concepts of social vision such as ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘civilization’ and ‘empire’, beyond the empirical instances of his data. What Ravenstein aims to demonstrate and mobilizes his statistical skill and cartographic creativity to capture (Bahoken 2013), is the reality of an experimental facticity: migration (Alderson 2009). He does so by establishing that the parish records from which he draws his statistical analyses do not merely add up to an accidental aggregate of movements but, when graphed according to net flows between conjoined parishes, are shaped according to recognizable patterns that coincide with politico-economic processes such as industrialization (wage labor) and marriage (household formation), all of which are situated in the internal dynamics of empire. These are his famous ‘Currents of Migration’ (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. An enhanced version of Ravenstein’s original production featured in ‘The Laws of Migration’ (1885). Source: Bahoken (2013).

This situatedness matters in what is a crucial step in the birth of the migration configuration. Whatever else migration might become, it will consist of torsions and folds of a genealogical itinerary that starts amidst Euro-white empire. Likewise, however else migration comes to be understood, its birth cannot be disentangled from a specific problematic of labor.

The crucial assent of the migration configuration in Ravenstein’s foundational migration research is not the study of mobility but the discovery of generalizable relocations – geo-social re-orderings – that follow and feed the social reproduction of labor’s availability. In other words, migration is a concern not for the mobility it assumes, but for the more or less predictable reorganization of settlement that is its probabilistic outcome. It is upon this conceptual invention of migration-qua-aggregated-relocations that a scientific, law-seeking viewpoint becomes thinkable. Ravenstein invents a vantage point from which to look at recordings of movements, to thereby visualize migration. Only from this viewpoint does it begin to make sense to calculate net flows – to add and subtract dislocations – between bounded territories. That is, they can be so added and subtracted because they are taken to be instances of one and the same social generality. This operation returns to the scholar’s eye a definite pattern – law-like ‘currents’ – that comes to provide substance to the idea that adding and subtracting makes sense. An experimental loop is set in motion (Hacking 2007).

Indeed, knowing and possibly intervening in migration has been deeply concerned with standardization that, if anything, should secure the quantitative comparability of recorded instances. International coordination efforts to standardize the meaning of migration took off with the 1891 meeting of the International Statistical Institute. Among the first institutions engaged in this was the International Labour Office, which, in the early twentieth century, noted much inconsistency (Ferenczi 1929). The ILO was primarily interested in charting migration because of its consequences for labor. Prior to WW-II, the ILO remained the main institution that sought to settle what migration is, after which the UN and the OECD took over.

Of course, efforts at standardization are still underway and problems of standardization persist (Dijstelbloem 2017; Fassmann, Reeger, and Sievers 2009; Kelly 1987; Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019). Population statisticians continue to worry that ‘[i]n many countries, the definition of migration is determined by the way migration is measured’ (Willekens 1994: 8). However, we are not concerned primarily with instances of successful standardization but with how the very effort at standardization already projects the thing to be standardized, if only as a thing to be concerned with, to be studied and pragmatically captured. The 1924 International Conference on Emigration and Immigration in Rome adopted the first standard definitions of migration and migrants out of a twofold desire for comparability and regulation (Kraly and Gnanasekaran 1987).

In what has been called a comparity space (Schinkel 2016) things can begin to emerge as already comparable even before they could be quantifiable. In other words, things that are being compared need to already be, to some degree, comparable in order for the comparison (e.g. the qualification of sameness and difference) to succeed at all. They need to share a comparity space, the crafting of which is often an elaborate socio-technical accomplishment. For the topic of this contribution, this means that the facts about migration are in a way much less consequential than the ongoing production of the facticity of migration. The quantitative comparison of migration statistics is secondary to the accomplishment of establishing comparability at all, because this comparability gives plausibility to the existence of an aggregate, generalizable phenomenon: migration. Migration is born as an object of attention and problematization with a view to both the regulation of and its consequences for labor. As in Ravenstein’s work, migration is discovered where labor – wage laborers and households, for instance – become spatially re-ordered. It is here that borders – conjoined parishes, for instance – become at once sensory technologies and regulatory impositions.

However, the birth of migration happens with respect to a transformation in the very question of labor populations. Migration emerged in the US when, in 1820, the first official statistics were kept (Ferenczi 1929), and it became a ‘problem’ only later in the nineteenth century in the wake, primarily, of Asians arriving there (Lowe 1996). The birth of the migration configuration and its entanglement with both coloniality, race and labor in US contexts becomes apparent in Ross’s statement that

[D]ams against the color races, with spillways of course for students, merchants and travellers, will presently enclose the white man’s world. Within this area minor dams will protect the high wages of the less prolific peoples against the surplus labor of the more prolific. (Ross 1919; quoted in: Da Silva 2007, 216)

In Europe, migration only really starts to become an issue with the demise of empire. Migration is a postcolonial question par excellence (Sharma 2020). European colonial settlers were not called or counted as ‘migrants’. The moment ‘migrants’ become a matter of concern is the moment colonial empire reaches its tipping point, and when that happens, all the ways in which these ‘migrants’ were always already entangled with ‘Europe’ become invisibilized (Bhambra 2017a; Mayblin and Turner 2021). They are then re-encountered, as if dealing with aliens. Migration becomes a concern for Euro-white government and science when the possibility of movement in geo-racial space is reversed when Euro-white states – potentially or actually – become ‘receiving countries’.

This dynamic of empire already structures Ravenstein’s work, in which the dynamic of the metropolis – the imperial, organizing center of all movement – is such that, ultimately, ‘the attractive force of one of our rapidly increasing cities makes its influence felt to the most remote corner of the Empire’ (Ravenstein 1876, 20). The crucial pivot is one that moves from forms of dispersal – conquest and settler colonialism – to the possibility of forms of relocation wherein populations cross a colonial divide and the concomitant global color lines, so that ‘migrants’ become people observed as a concern in which race and labor are entangled (cf. Du Bois 1935, 700–701). It is these relocations that are found to be appropriate for the accounting techniques implied in the concept of migration.

Stricker (2019, 471) has given a crucial account of the tensions that a shift from an imperial to an international point of view amount to by arguing that ‘[t]he case of migration statistics is remarkable because it shows that the international perspective on migration was both anchored in imperial visions of governing the world and affiliated to a new national ordering of people and territories’. At stake conceptually is how to bring two phenomena that, from an imperial point of view, refer to distinct processes – ‘emigration’ as the white settlement of colonized territories and ‘immigration’ as the transfer of laboring people – within new practices of accounting (first developed by the ILO) that enact the comparability of emigration and immigration between national entities and thereby imply the calculation of net flows. Not only does this shift attenuate the need for standardization, but it also introduces the anxious possibility that white lives become comparable with those of non-white others. As such, the emerging comparity space of international migration does not extinguish but rather translates the colonial problematic of geo-racial supremacy. Indeed, Stricker highlights the care taken by ILO-statisticians in advocating an international point of view:

[T]he broadest possible definition of an emigrant has been adopted, a definition which includes not merely all persons changing their residence from one country to another but also all persons going from one continent to another with a view to residing there for over a year, even if the destination was a colonial possession of the country to which the migrant belonged. (Ferenczi 1929, 55–56; quoted from Stricker 2019, 481, italics added)

Much of the debates about the consistency and comparability of migration statistics initially revolved around the problem of colonial borders and their unstable definitions of nationals and aliens (ILO 1932). If the world can become known as populated by ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’, as a cartography of settled national territories across which vectors of migration flow, if all emigrants are per definition immigrants, the importance of governing the differential access to rights and citizenship of Euro-white nations is at once reconceptualized and attenuated. In other words, the concept formation of migration establishes, along with the practices of accounting themselves, the question of how a loss of imperial distinction between emigration and immigration is to be managed.

What is advocated as a universal, properly scientific, bird’s eye view of migration, is much better understood as the enactment of a new problematic of government and one that was already apparent in Ravenstein’s experimentations with patterns of net flows: what is gained and lost through migration? And more specifically: what do ‘we, the Euro-white natives’ gain and lose through migration? Migration becomes a matter of national, economic gains and losses, of comparable and subtractable quantities. Migration attains conceptual clarity here not because it is known to affect ‘the economy’ or ‘public finances’, but inversely because it renders comparable and calculable what was previously qualitatively different: the relation between the Euro-white citizen and the colonial, racially subordinate subject. Far from the dissolution of local viewpoints into a universal one, what we are dealing with is the introduction of a new question of coloniality and empire that carries the name ‘migration’.

Migration as debt

So far, we have attempted to specify how a new problematic of migration was assembled. Taking seriously that we are here describing the birth of migration, means to consider it an anachronism to speak of seventh or sixteenth century ‘migration’. Migration is not people moving about. It is the specific mode of accounting we have described, the genealogical situatedness of which can be historically pinpointed. Today, as a practice of accounting, the problematic of migration is no longer engaged in the description of peoples’ movements within civilizational expansions that compose a world under white patronage. However, far from contradicting such descriptions of the world, knowledge production of migration twists this imperialist worldview into a new composition. In short, migration becomes a matter of flows-across-territories and thereby enacts a bifurcated world of underlying, Westphalian territoriality with auxiliary, secondary relocations moving across it. As Besteman aptly summarizes:

[A]t the very moment that former colonies were transitioning to independence, former colonizers were working to ensure the hegemony of an international structure to control population movement, enforce the nation-state as the only internationally recognized political belonging, and make certain that they could retain supreme authority over who crossed their borders. (2016, 62)

What coloniality loses in civilizational telos, it gains in rendering extraneous the very event of migration that epistemic-cum-administrative practices are set up to capture in an internationally standardizing practice that today, as Meissner and Taylor show (2024, this issue), frequently involve the use of ‘big data’, digital data infrastructures and data science.

Crucially, parallel to the post-imperial reordering of territories and the flows across them now identifiable as ‘migration’ is the birth of ‘the economy’ as a separate, nationally bounded sphere of production and consumption. As Timothy Mitchell has shown, the concept of ‘an economy’ (a national economy) did not exist prior to the twentieth century. It arose or, as he argues, it is an artefact that was made only in the 1930s, and precisely in response to the same post-imperial situation Besteman describes as crucial for the birth of what is conventionally called a global system of ‘migration management’:

The economy appeared in the context of the collapse of an imperial order. World-encircling arrangements of investment, management, production, information, and trade based on the political control of colonial resources gave way to arrangements based on ostensibly national economies. (…) The nation, and the national economy in particular, provided the format of what could appear as a postimperial political topography. (…) The development of economies provided the forms and formulas through which European colonial powers could attempt to restructure the relationship with their colonies in the mid-twentieth century (…). (Mitchell 2002, 83–84)

This simultaneous birth of a system of nation-states, and their ‘international structure to control population movement’, with a system of nationally differentiated economies is, we argue, not so much a coincidence as it is indicative of the co-constitutive rise of post-imperial formations of the government of labor populations. Such formations therefore place a premium on measurement, even in contexts where this leads to outcomes already prima facie at odds with logic unless their post-imperial character is taken into account. In her contribution to this issue, Inken Bartels for instance shows how the IOM insists on measurements even in countries participating in ECOWAS, giving rise to the measurement of ‘illegal migration’ in what is a free movement zone (Bartels 2024).

The double accounting of migration means that some people get to be coded as potentially absent, as those who might not have been here. As such, they impose a potential burden that, in the economy of migration, appears as a cost. In Euro-white settings, migration is therefore commonly understood as requiring certain sacrifices from native publics. Migration will cost something. In the language of economics, migration presents a ‘native population’ with an opportunity cost: the benefits that would have accrued to the nation in the absence of migration, benefits now missed out on. It constitutes a deviation from the normalcy of a population keeping to itself, a disruptive deviation from the counterfactual scenario of ‘no migration’, the costly refutation of a null hypothesis of a nation without migration. It imposes a burden, effort, or accommodation that per definition could have been avoided had migrants not appeared. These damages cannot be compensated on the side of the natives. No amount of addition or subtraction on their side – births, deaths, naturalizations, expulsions – changes the fact that the events of migration add and subtract surplus population. This is because the question of gains and losses is not a matter of factual circumstance but immanent to the accounting practices of the migration configuration as such. If migration can be desirable or even rational from the point of view of the natives – the figure of the expat and labor migration programs more broadly come to mind –, it is because these variants of migration are seen to repay, through a realization of potential value, the loss that they nonetheless have to have made.

Migration thus appears as debt. This debt is the exact inverse of, and makes up for, the opportunity cost incurred by the nation that could have fared better in the absence of that which is accounted for as ‘migration’. But since we are in the world of belief and the counterfactual, no limits are set to this debt, which can be indefinitely projected into the future, as a claim on the future availability of labor value. And, crucially, this logic of debt can and has been decoupled from the very logic of ‘mobility’ it claims to be based on. As Ann-Kathrin Will (2024) shows in her contribution to this issue, the category ‘migration background’ in Germany expands the status of ‘migrant’ to people who never crossed a border. Likewise, in what Schinkel (2017, 104–105) has called the ‘genealogization’ of migration, the figure of the ‘nth generation migrant’ has given rise to a steady reservoir of racially identifiable persons that can show up on the credit side of the economy of migration but without necessarily ever having crossed a border.

Qua accounting, migration inscribes, with each count, some outstanding debt to be settled, some opportunity cost or loss to be compensated for the excess or surplus that ‘migrants’ constitute. This loss is the loss of a counterfactual situation, a situation we might call the native scenario, a scenario of an imagined untainted whiteness, yet it is very real in its consequences. Migration politics is, then, the history of controversies, interventions and resolutions that coalesce around the indebtedness of the migrants and the management of the native demand to be satisfied. This latter point is important, as ‘migration management’, or what we here understand as oikonomia, is always population management as such, and this includes the ‘native’, ‘non-migrant’ population. Even though, on this side of the balance of accounts, it comes down to compensations rather than costs, the economy of migration also pertains to the availability of their labor. It concerns the availability of labor as such, only differentially so, mediated by the racializations that migration as debt makes possible: ‘migrants do the work that natives don’t want to’.

Any accounting of migration introduces a question of indebtedness. Not because the participants in such situations happen to have certain convictions or commitments about the proper relation between native and migrant, but because this relationality could have only been registered, verified, and visualized through a mnemonic-administrative contrast between a world in which migration did happen and one in which it did not happen, the world of the native scenario. It is because migration accounting enacts a native public that is now capable of remembering that they could have been without others that a question of debt and repayment is immanent to its production of knowledge. The asymmetric attribution of debt, then, is also one of the ways in which migration enacts race: it calibrates differential availability for extraction by sorting people on the basis of the registration and attribution of relations of blood and/or soil. The accounting of migration thereby expresses a variety of concrete attempts to attend to debt. Below, we discuss some of these: first, two moral modalities, and then their monetary modalities.

Migration: moral and monetary debt

Perhaps the most acute example of a moral modality of the economy of migration is the question of gratitude. In her study of Somali refugee settlement in Maine, Besteman describes the politics of gratitude that shape public concerns:

A common question from the audience at public presentations offered by Somalis to explain their history is, ‘Are you grateful to be here?’ People have suggested to me that Somalis should publish thank-you letters in the local newspapers to let other Lewiston residents know how grateful they are. (2016, 164)

Note how an offering is here itself an occasion to ask for gratitude. Migration cannot be done through reciprocity or translation. It requires an asymmetrical and continued repair of native loss.

Contextually quite different yet conceptually similar, we can understand how the need for civic enculturation policy in Europe was expressed in the early 1990s. One of its key proponents in the Netherlands argued that:

If one demands newcomers to adapt to Dutch society and let them achieve something by employing them, one takes away the odium of profiteers who just come in and use our institutions and provisions. So that will also affect the native population, who will be more inclined to accept them and will deem this to be a just and equitable approach. In this way people can earn their own presence.¹

As in France and the UK, not only is presence something to be earned (van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011), which effectively means to repair some loss at the side of a native public, but the performance of effort on the side of migrants – by completing an enculturation course, for instance – is significant precisely because it indicates a recognition of and submission to the relationality of debt. This is why critiques of enculturation programs as ‘assimilationist’, while not necessarily wrong, tend to fall short in recognizing that performance is what counts. Central is a publicly demonstrated effort to make up for the imposition the migrant must be in the oikonomia of migration. Indeed, accounting of migration acts to administer the asymmetrical implications of hospitality and accommodation that follow from its inscriptions of debts. Concrete relationships and exchanges between natives and migrants happen, again per definition, in the natives’ time and therefore must appear to have taken the natives’ time.

But time is money, so while these examples illustrate how indebtedness plays out in moral and justificatory ways, debt also figures in specifically financial terms. Migration as debt is also quite literally economic debt. The cost of migration is widely present in research programs and controversies over the fiscal sustainability of public spending (Hansen 2021, 29) and the distributive effects on households and enterprises. Attempts to perform such calculations turn out to be exceedingly complex as costs of migrant accommodation must not only be diminished by any realized benefits of their availability but also offset against a cost–benefit analysis in which migration had never taken place. Economists typically capitalize on what are often called ‘natural experiments’ to stand in for the speculative conception of the problem. As Jonathan Portes (2019, 13) summarizes in a recent essay on the economics of migration:

The most famous research evidence on this in the developed world comes from David Card’s 1990 study of the Mariel boatlift. The 1980 movement of Cuban refugees to the United States represented a huge ‘supply shock’ of mostly low-skilled immigrants into Miami, Florida’s labor market. Card found, surprisingly, that the impact on native wages was very small. This result was so controversial that economists are still arguing about it, nearly 30 years after it was published (…). [A] huge body of subsequent research, both in the United States and elsewhere, has largely supported Card’s conclusions (…). The consensus is that negative impacts of migration for native workers in developed countries are, if they exist at all, relatively small and short-lived.

Our concern here is not with the specific dynamics of controversy in migration economics but with the conceptual composition of the problem. Assent to any fact about migration’s costs must be made by offsetting measurable effects against the non-occurrence of migration. So even if much calculative work on the economic effects of migration tends to find migration a net benefit, these conclusions must at the same time find that migrants’ availability as workers, consumers, taxpayers and funds of care, culture and innovation outweigh the very fact of that presence. That is, migration’s costs are only calculable against a horizon of migration’s non-occurrence. It is only because we can imagine migration to have never taken place, to imagine that migrants can be made to disappear, that the very concept of an economically rational and calculable viewpoint on the financial price of border crossings is conceivable. This imaginative capacity is infrastructurally performed and maintained through the accounting of migration.

There is, however, another discourse that surfaces in the economics of migration. Posner and Weyl for instance propose that poorer citizens of wealthy countries ‘rent’ migrants, so as to assure these citizens’ consent to a global project of alleviating poverty, and in the process provide them with benefits in the form of a new system of indentured labor (they speak of a ‘caste’ system) (Posner and Weyl 2018). In this scheme, migrants’ rights would be curtailed so as to continue to signify white superiority in this system of what is framed, in humanitarian rhetoric, as ‘patronage’. Implied in Posner and Weyl is that this is also a way to quell potential white rage over migration by turning the presence of migrants into directly commodifiable availability, and by adding direct economic benefits to the ‘public and psychological wage’ (Du Bois 1935, 700) of white patronage that can observe itself as humanitarian compassion.

The work of former World Bank chief economist Branko Milanovic, discussed in detail by Gurminder Bhambra (2022), similarly entails the actual settling of accounts by way of proposals for differential wages between ‘natives’ and ‘migrants’. In excess of existing programs of a ‘hostile environment’ and a ‘sober reception regime’, Milanovic envisages the actual setting of asymmetric rights and wages. Moreover, his main concern is with the poorest people in the richest countries, whom he considers the real ‘losers of globalization’ since migrants have relatively speaking a much higher income increase to win. Thus, curtailing the rights and wages of migrants would ‘assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries’ (quoted in Bhambra 2022, 89).

In practice, the moral economy and the money economy of migration are entangled, as they are in the administrative modality of power that is oikonomia. Milanovic, for instance, recognizes the slim effect of migration on wages but then continues to balance, in one and the same accounting maneuver, economic factors and the preservation of ‘cultural norms’ (Bhambra 2022, 89). One option Milanovic offers is to make immigrants pay higher taxes. As Gurminder Bhambra aptly concludes: ‘Notice that the world’s poorest are asked to pay taxation to support those within the 75th to 90th percentile’ (Bhambra 2022, 89). From the perspective, we outlined here, however, this is entirely consistent with the logic of debt organizing migration as an economy. Migration is this way of settling accounts and this way of ordering relationality.

As a final example of the way the moral economy flows effortlessly, and explicitly, into the money economy, and vice versa, we discuss political sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s take on immigration policy, which indeed deals with the question ‘How are facts construed to fit, justify and make appear possible moral or economic practices, or economic practices defended as moral ones (…)?’ (Streeck 2018, 3). Cultural fragmentation, segregation, and conflicts between ‘altruists and egoists’ all add up on the credit side of the moral account in Streeck’s analysis, balanced on the debit side only by the ‘opportunity, in an age of economism and technocracy, to demonstrate unconditional compassion’ (Streeck 2018, 11). As Streeck says, even economists underscore the importance of morality in these matters:

 … even economists given to cost–benefit analysis warn against completely ending resettlement as this might allow voters to forget about far-away misery, making it politically more difficult for governments to support victims of war and starvation abroad. They therefore recommend admitting a limited number of families, for a heart-breaking and mind-softening illustration of distress and for a direct experience of gratefulness. (Streeck 2018, 10)

This gratefulness, which we discussed above, can thus be considered as intricately bound up with conventionally economic ‘cost–benefit analyses’. Immediately preceding this is, indeed, the accounting done in the realm of the money economy. Here, Streeck argues:

Costs do matter even and precisely in rich countries, and they easily turn into a political issue. Under optimistic assumptions, the fiscal costs of ‘integration’ may be recovered at a later time once immigrants have jobs and pay taxes. The question is over how long this takes. Upfront the ‘investment’ must in any case be significant, and certainly higher than the fiscal costs per capita of unemployed citizens. This can give rise to popular resentment, especially if integration takes longer than promised and balanced budget policies cause competition for scarce resources between immigrants and the local population, for example in housing. That providing for refugees in their regions of origin costs much less than providing for them in rich countries might point to a way out. However, this misses the problem that it would have to be accompanied by deportation of those trying to get in nonetheless. (Streeck 2018, 10)

We point this out specifically, not only because it illustrates the naturalized way in which migrants will ‘try to get in nonetheless’, rendering one particular way of dealing with the cost of migration impractical (Streeck doesn’t say it but this would come down to a form of reparations). We also highlight his argument here because it is a common trope in liberal discourse as such: too much migration will cause native resentment animated by a presumed mixture of racism and anxiety over competition concerning housing or, more frequently mentioned, labor. In this line of argument, white rage is mobilized as a cost of migration, and the amount of migrants admitted is to be calibrated to keep this rage in check. This quelling of white rage is a key element of the economy of migration. Liberalism builds on the racial violence of whiteness in arguments for slightly more border violence or a somewhat harsher regime, in order to stave off the truly violent reaction, the one which can no longer be plausibly presented as universalizable and liberal, i.e. the fascist reaction to migration. In mobilizing this fascist reaction as a cost of migration, liberalism shows itself to be intricately entangled with the fascist possibility. Streeck himself can prophylactically frame his account as self-consciously risky, yet he opts for ‘disregarding whatever restrictions on public speech may be demanded by concerned citizens in order not to play into the hands of “the Right”’ (Streeck 2018, 4). The analyst drawing up the account can thus repeat the gesture enabling liberalism to violate universality in the very name of universality, and in order to save it: not drawing up the account would be infinitely more costly, as it would unleash white rage. In this trope, the cost of migration is quite literally translated into white resentment, conveniently attributed to the ‘white working class’ in what Gurminder Bhambra (2017b; see also Shilliam 2018) has aptly termed ‘methodological whiteness’ – as if the ‘forgotten’ classes are white. The direct equivocation of migration with the cost of white rage over labor competition is liberalism’s most subtle mixture of morality and money in the economy of migration.

The most rudimentary fact enacted in all of these accounts of migration as debt is the knowledge that ‘migrants’ are people who might not have been here. Any data point entered into the administrative infrastructures of migration’s accounting begins to, at the very least, configure national demography in which migration didn’t happen. As such the postwar migration towards the metropoles of colonial rule and scientific knowledge production can begin to be envisioned – and remembered – not as ongoing episodes of colonial history, but as the arrival of people ‘we, the natives’ need not have taken into account if they hadn’t emerged in ‘our’ midst. In principally becoming an additive event – ‘one more person is now among us’ –, migration accounts for the loss of a world in which that person didn’t have to be taken into account.

This is why migrants can be said to have a ‘duty to integrate’, why one can speak of ‘the costs of migration for society’, and why there need to be restrictions on migration because society can only ‘bear’ so much migration. As a thing to bear, then, migration is a modality of debt. This debt is paid with every displacement by gentrification, every fall into poverty by job discrimination, every demand to ‘integrate’, every racialized asymmetry in education systems – all of these are reparations without repair, reparations for the thing that is registered as ‘migration’, for the account and interpellation ‘hey you, migrant!’ This becomes most visible in the case of those called ‘economic migrants’, where this debt appears as a crime, no longer as the moralized dues of being on other people’s soil, but as the debt of indebtedness itself. But the genealogy of migration we have sketched here means that coding of some migrants as ‘economic’ should not blind us to the logic of the oikonomia of migration as such: the governing logic of debt.

Inverting oikonomia: logics of reparations

Our genealogy of migration is crucially postcolonial in that it attains reality precisely once a colonial asymmetry between citizen and subject can appear to be lost. Migration’s accounting at once helps to remember this loss as the demographic difference between natives and migrants, between those whose lives constitute the very biopolitical substance of the nation-state’s account of ‘the people’ and those whose lives pose, at least, a question of potential gains and losses. Will the addition of migration to native life turn out to compensate for its imposition on society?

Part of our aim is to tease out how the racist and necropolitical attitudes so carefully documented in the political sociology of migration cannot merely or even primarily be understood as the ideo-affective responses of societal subgroups – ‘the white working class’, ‘the petite bourgeoisie’, ‘losers of globalization’, etc. – to migrants and migration policies. These attitudes seem to us not primarily responses particular to people’s societal positionalities as they are more or less sophisticated explications of the basic ontopolitical circumstances in which the liberal democracies of the West require their participants to live. Anti-immigrant attitudes thus merely repeat, in overtly moral and accusatory terms and with the affective honesty of rage as a genuine sign of concern, the racial and colonial relation of debt that is immanent to migration’s accounting. Voters are, it seems to us, restating what was promised to them, and what the officiated facts of migration require to be true: there will be a wall between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

An initial step in another direction is to notice how migration accounting inverts the colonial relation of imposition and decolonial demands for reparations. The outstanding debts of colonial history are then seen to become obfuscated by migration’s accounting and are replaced by migrants’ indebtedness, its public controversies and governmental management. Recently, this crucial argument has been elaborated along legal lines in Tendaye Achiume’s work (2019). Migration, she argues, must be seen as an extension of already existing economic relations. Rights to exclude lack legal ground as the citizenships that supposedly secure such rights emerged out of those relations of coloniality. She interrupts migration’s immanent politics of debt by reminding us of the histories through which we came to encounter each other as ‘citizen’ and ‘migrant’. At the same time, this inversion of the economy of debt never fully escapes conceiving of coexistence in terms of an economy of debt. Achiume ultimately sees migration itself as reparation, but in this setup, the debt of migration is balanced by migration-as-reparation, and migration, so to speak, appears on both the debit and the credit side of the account. This, however, does not even out the result, as we are still asked to live in a world where ‘migration’ continues to be a way in which coexistence is troubled by violence, and by registration, visualization, contestation and accounting. In other words: this still assumes the accounting apparatus of migration, even if it is at the same time able to work against any negative outcome, cancelling every debt the moment it enters the books. Yet obviously, there are other ways of coexisting, ways that do not necessarily assume the economy of migration.

The same goes for a specific argument for reparations, such as that made by Bhambra (2022). Over against the economic arguments for ‘open borders’ by Milanovic and others, Bhambra calls for reparations in the form of a global, universal social democracy. Here, the debt of migration is countered by actual, redistributive payments. Bhambra reverses the relation between the moral economy of migration and its money economy and thereby inverts the flow of money, the debt, which now emerges as reparations. While this crucially disturbs the current economy of migration, it doesn’t, ultimately, move away from an economy of migration, from an oikonomia in which it is first of all possible for Euro-white colonizing ‘movement’ to become a historicized equivalent of contemporary migration. For Bhambra, both are part of a historicized global inequality: ‘Europe is the wealthiest continent on the planet. Its wealth is an ‘inheritance’ derived from the very same historical processes that have left other places in poverty. Migration is an inadequate solution to the problem of global inequality’ (Bhambra 2022, 94). The logic of Bhambra’s reasoning here implies that this generalized, no longer national but global social democracy would be a way to preclude migration. The economy of migration is basically inverted: so long as reparations in the form of a social democratic project are paid, migrants will stay at home. Bhambra thus historicizes migration, displaces the dominant account and pulls into another account, one in which it appears as both response to and equivalent of conquest (as both are modalities of ‘movement’). Quite apart from the question whether ‘social democracy’ should be the be all and end all of global coexistence, what is reproduced in this account is the standard account of migration as the movement of people across the globe. What is not yet addressed are the ways in which precisely this conception of migration, as we have discussed, requires the coloniality of migration as the accounting of ‘net flows’.

This logic of reparations thus tends to produce a little bit more than it intends to. It redirects the economy of migration yet it never fully leaves the sphere of accounting. Obviously, that is because there are real historical injustices to be mended, yet doing so within a framework of ‘migration’ – squaring (only) previous colonial, European ‘movements’ with current ‘migration’ – ends up reproducing what da Silva has called the analytics of racially underpinning any ‘logic of exclusion’ (Da Silva 2007). Global inclusivity, as da Silva shows, repeats rather than disturbs the racial, precisely by treating it as something that gets in the way of universality and by not analyzing how it produces universality itself. Or, applied to the case at hand: no redirection of the money economy can get us beyond a money economy. To assume that there will be ‘migrants’ in the absence of reparations is to never fully leave the economy of migration, and, in this way, the racial reappears as a subtle supplement of reparations.

Conclusion: from debt to bad debt

As we have argued, the oikonomic accounting of and for the migration configuration codes ‘migrants’ as people who might not have been here. In conclusion, we seek to bring to light the ultimate political consequences this has, and we point out what we believe our epistemic commitments should be in response to these political consequences. Again, we suspend claims to the universal applicability of our perspective by centering the economy of migration on Euro-white settings, but we nonetheless need to recognize the expansive effects of the colonial birth and genealogical itinerary of the migration configuration. Being coded as someone who might have been absent relegates the migrant to a necropolitical sphere of (im)potentiality that is both the inverse and the consequence of the native scenario of ‘no migration’. The economy of migration is a racial economy of debt in which certain lives are continually marked by the possibility of their absence. In other words, and in contrast to the subject position from which migration accounting is performed, the migrant is a figure who appears at what Da Silva (2007) calls the ‘horizon of death’.

To be a migrant in Euro-white contexts is not only to have to make good on a debt that cannot be redeemed, it is also to embody the necropolitical option of obliteration. It is to be at risk of default, of death, as is made clear in the spectacle of the Mediterranean or in the American borderlands of the South. To be a migrant is to have survived, so far. It is to be a marker of the possibility of what Judith Butler (2006) has called ‘radical effacement’. To have survived or circumvented death is to be in debt, and to carry default/death as an ever-plausible alternative option. We have noted how, in the oikonomia of migration, every migrant is an ‘economic migrant’. But we can at the same time conclude that every migrant is structured as a refugee: as someone who has, for now, survived, and whose survival, while fortunate, unfortunately implies an imposition that must be paid for. Migrants are asked to pay for not having perished. Having made the journey across the deadly borderzones of Europe means being a survivor, a migrant, indebted for being here, against all intents embodied by the deadliness of the borderzones. The racial economy of migration thus ensures the availability of bodies by marking their disposability. From the governing perspective of the Euro-white self, the migrant is (a) mine.

What does this entail for social scientific research and knowledge production? A scientific refusal to repeat the colonial divisions of migration must start from the recognition that research methods must interrupt rather than repeat, must render experimental what often stubbornly appears to be natural. Such interruptions are not at all limited to the critique and deconstruction of state categories through which so much of our knowledge of migration becomes repeated and naturalized. What we advocate are those epistemological commitments that enable us to see how no amount of ‘inclusion’, ‘integration’ or ‘border management’ can compensate for the enactment of migration-as-debt, for the originary imposition on the nation that migration must be. Migration politics therefore never actually becomes a public settlement of debts and, instead, acts to indefinitely postpone a decolonial reckoning. Our politics of method should not be limited to an inversion of debts but include a refusal of the translatability of sociality in debt. Sociality, rather, entails what Harney and Moten (2013) have named bad debt, a debt that cannot be repaid, will never be redeemed, keeps adding up, because the incompleteness of common life means there is no alternative nor end to entanglement, to being together. It also means that reparations appear under the sign of the incalculable, as forever unsettled (Harney and Schinkel 2021).

Bad debt is not a critique of debt relations, not a methodological questioning of its reasoning, so much as it is an invitation to live together without knowing and having to know what we owe each other, at least not insofar as that can be expressed in what we might own. It seems to us that what is called ‘migration’ today is at once a crucial apparatus of maintaining and managing the racial relationality of debt under post- or neocolonial conditions, as well as the vast array of sites and events that violently demonstrate the impossibility of living together in that way. This apparatus and impossibility constitute a proper object of scientific study, of a knowledge production that can interrupt rather than repeat the facts of migration. So when, as scholars, we are invested in the migration configuration, it is important to account for the ways in which that investment is a necropolitical imposition that hampers the composition of a common world. The task is, rather, to invent other compositions. In other words (and what’s new here?): the economy must be destroyed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 June 14 1994, NRC Handelsblad, italics added.