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Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of Migrations pp 73–92Cite as

Human Mobility and Borders: The Limits of Global Justice

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Part of the book series: Studies in Global Justice ((JUST,volume 18))

Abstract

Theories of justice in general, and theories of global justice in particular, are characterized by their high degree of abstraction and their normative character. Their obvious affinities to specific options in political philosophy and social theory are often taken for granted and rarely explicitly addressed. This entails the risk of naturalizing certain social formations (for example, liberal-capitalist formations) without questioning their economic and social assumptions. The contribution of these theories only amounts to moral and political recommendations, which face insurmountable difficulties in how they are currently applied. This is counterproductive when these theories of global justice seek to address the challenges of migratory flows. Firstly, this chapter aims to relate the theory of global justice to a critical social theory that challenges the assumptions of advanced social capitalist formations. Normativity cannot be externally applied to a social reality that constitutively denies, subordinates and neutralizes any normative dimension. Secondly, the chapter situates the concept of territorial borders and their control of migratory flows within a broader framework that accounts for the significance of frontiers in the formation of the capitalist world-system. Thirdly, it analyses the concept of “migratory regime” as a key element in this formation. It also studies the specific migratory regime of neoliberalism and its crisis, interpreting them within the general structures and dynamics of the neoliberal mode of regulation. Finally, it tests some proposals for a global justice theory regarding migrations within the current crisis of capitalism.

This equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal […] is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society

Marx (2014: 85)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is made apparent, for example, when assessing the so-called “cordon sanitaire” built outside the European Union borders through agreements or treaties with third countries, which helps to externalize and move border controls beyond territorial limits (Buckel 2015). In a different sense, one can also consider the production processes in huge slums in certain areas of those countries to which the low-added value chains of production move. Internal migrations, within state borders, are associated with violent spatial distributions of asymmetries that are indispensable to mobilize the labour force under specific conditions. Finally, another phenomenon that is beyond the concept of the state border is the apparatus of “prolonged threat” whereby undocumented immigrants might be deported at any time by means of controls and detention centres (De Genova and Peutz 2010). These could be referred to as “inner” borders, but mainly serve to intimidate undocumented immigrants, with the same effect of producing specific conditions for fixing the workforce.

  2. 2.

    An interesting distinction between “borders” and “frontiers ” was introduced by Anthony Giddens (1985: 52f.), among others, to distinguish between the boundaries between modern nation states and other settlement areas on the edges of traditional States in uninhabited areas. This distinction is certainly interesting, but since it is not directly relevant to the purpose here, it will not be elaborated any further. New concepts such as borderscapes (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007) and borderzones (Squire 2011) have been coined to describe these areas.

  3. 3.

    China’s National Bureau of Statistics estimates that nearly 269 million internal migrant workers are moving from rural areas to the country’s growing cities (Huiyao 2015).

  4. 4.

    For the Spanish case, for example, see Pueblos Unidos (2015).

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Acknowledgements

This contribution is part of a R&D Project entitled “Social suffering and victim status: epistemic, social, political and aesthetic dimensions” (FFI2015-69733-P), funded by the Spanish Programme for the Promotion of Scientific and Technical Research for Excellence.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    José A. Zamora

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  1. José A. Zamora
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Correspondence to José A. Zamora .

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Juan Carlos Velasco

  2. Faculty of Social Sciences, Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain

    MariaCaterina La Barbera

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Zamora, J.A. (2019). Human Mobility and Borders: The Limits of Global Justice. In: Velasco, J., La Barbera, M. (eds) Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of Migrations. Studies in Global Justice, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05590-5_5

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