Mooring “super-diversity” to a brutal migration milieu

ABSTRACT

The migration milieu in which “super-diversity” locates is not a crisis of human mobility, but a crisis of political imagination to engage with mobility as integral to twenty-first-century citizenship. Western capitalism requires and refutes the migrant, making a volatile life-world of migration in public discourse, policy and everyday life and I engage with whether super-diversity has explanatory cogency for this brutal migration milieu. Vertovec's original outline of super-diversity points to accelerated migrations in which the elaboration of borders have become more multiple and stratified. While migration processes have discernible scale, breadth and pace, I focus on the formative conditions of history, atmosphere and ideology. My aim is to relate processes of diversity-making to the punitive effects of the European border complex. I expand on the politics of contradiction and the fear generated by the migration “crisis”, connected to the discriminatory sorting of migrants sustained by an historic ethos of subordination.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration milieu
• super-diversity
• politics of contradiction
• ethos of subordination
• borders
• multi-culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.