https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2514-0654
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Abstract
In Europe, increased precarity characterises the lives of many people, making crisis-talk especially appealing as a framing mechanism to naturalise anti-migration policies within the EU. In 2020–2021, the EU and the Spanish government proclaimed a migration crisis and immobilised in dehumanising conditions a few thousand African migrants who had just arrived in the Canary Islands. This action was facilitated by narratives of migrant invasion and the view of Europe as a space of formality. This article asks what kinds of speculation the proclamation of a migration crises creates and who is doing the speculating. We stress that the term ‘speculation’ is based strongly on temporalities involving the creation of value by future predictions in uncertain circumstances. Using the Canary Islands as an example, we use this future-oriented understanding of speculation to emphasise that different actors, and not only financial ones, also imagine and act on the future as a sort of infraspeculation. While not losing sight of how the latter differs from financial speculation, it is important to highlight the diverse forms of agency in relation to migration within a quite complex changing policy and crisis-management environment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.
Notes
1 Pseudonym, interview with the first author, 5 May 2021.
2 All migrants interviewed were men. This represents a limitation of the research, as we could not interview women and children.
3 This is part of the research project ‘Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities’ (CERM), led by Kristín Loftsdóttir https://cerm.hi.is/, which received a positive ethical evaluation from the University of Iceland ethics committee. All participants signed their informed consent.
4 For an overview of the EU’s informal economy, see https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/–europe/–ro-geneva/–sro-budapest/documents/genericdocument/wcms_751319.pdf
6 At the time, 1800 people in vulnerable situations and under international protection were transferred from the Canaries to mainland Spain throughout 2020, although this was not the case for the people shown in this video.
7 According to FRONTEX, there were 421 in 2017, 1323 in 2018, 2718 in 2019, 23,029 in 2020, and 22,504 in 2021. See https://frontex.europa.eu/we-know/migratory-routes/western-african-route/
10 For a detailed map of Spanish funds and actors benefiting from the EU’s migration industry, see the reports from Fundación porCausa: https://porcausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Migration-Control-Industry-1-Who-are-the-paymasters.pdf and https://porcausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Migration-Control-Industry-2-Who-takes-the-money.pdf
13 Pseudonym, interview with the first author, 29 May 2021.
15 Pseudonym, interview with the first author, 29 May 2021.
16 Such as subsidies to EU fisheries or unfair trade, and fisheries partnership agreements (FPAs). Little effort is made to restore species, or to stop illegal fishing from third countries.
17 Pseudonym, interview with the first author, 8 November 2021.
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Notes on contributors
Ignacio Fradejas-García
Ignacio Fradejas-García works as Assistant Professor in the Sociology Departament at the University of Oviedo (Spain). He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. With extensive fieldwork experience in Gambia, Chile, Morocco, Haiti, DR Congo, Turkey, Romania and Spain, his lines of research revolve around six main axes: humanitarianism and borders, (im)mobilities and migrations, informality, networks, sports, and methodology. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Anthropology (2019), Mobilities (2019), Migration Letters (2021), Social Inclusion (2021), Mortality (2022), Politics and Governance (2022) and Globalizations (2023).
Kristín Loftsdóttir
Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. Her research has focused on notions of exceptionalism, the racialisation of mobility, racism, gender, crisis, globalisation, nationalism, migration and postcolonial Europe. She is the author of Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland (Routledge, 2019) and We Are All African Here: Race, Mobilities and West Africans in Europe (2021), and co-author of Exceptionalism (Routledge, 2021). She is also co-editor of Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities (Routledge, 2012), Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond: At the Intersection of Environment, Finance and Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2014), and Messy Europe: Crisis, Race and the Nation State in a Postcolonial World (2018). She is currently Principal Investigator of the CERM (Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities) project.