The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Immigration in the European Union is conceived as a domestic issue: it is an opportunity to maintain and foster economic growth, and it is a problem of security and order. The “absorptive capacity” of the economy and society of the receiving state and the “fight against illegal immigration” guide EU immigration policy, which needs to be “flexible” in order to reconcile both principles. While EU immigration law is becoming more restrictive in the context of Fortress Europe, “exceptions” are increasingly the only door open for undocumented immigrants to have access to rights. Responding to humanitarian or economic concerns, these exceptional measures are an instrument of the capitalist state to adapt itself to particular historical, political, social and economic context, and to (re)produce migrant labor as disposable labor. Instead of “rule of law” equally operating for all, exceptions frame a group as deserving access to rights while further excluding the rest, and they reflect on the oppressive effects that the rule displays daily on the bodies and lives of undocumented immigrants. This paper critically analyses Spain’s 2005 regularization of undocumented workers and its exclusionary politics as an entry point to break the frame of migration as a domestic issue, locating it instead in a neoliberal and transnational context of economic globalization, global inequalities, European integration and continuous reconfiguration of state’s sovereign power.