Visible yet invisible: the disciplinary mechanism of self-surveillance among undocumented South Asian male migrants in rural Greece

ABSTRACT

This article relates the Foucauldian theorisation of self-surveillance to the contradictory (non)presence of racialized labouring bodies of South Asian men in rural Greece. The disciplinary mechanism of temporary labour and migration regimes, exercised through migrant illegality and threat of deportations, works efficiently to make the men conform to a certain set of societal behaviours, erase their presence from Greek public spaces, and extract productive labour efficiently from them. By drawing on interviews of undocumented Indian and Pakistani male migrants in Greece, the article shows how ‘illegality’ and potential deportability shapes their strategies of staying in the country. The men self-surveil and regulate their movements by ‘containing’ themselves in their dormitories after work. This self-imposed isolation, through spatial segregation, deflects attention away from Greece’s restrictive immigration and labour regimes, based on differential exclusion based on class, skills, and professional education. It prevents local Greeks from building solidarity with them and, in doing so, avoid dismantling deep-rooted and widely prevalent discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia.

KEYWORDS:

• Greece
• undocumented South Asian migrants
• Greek agriculture
• self-surveillance
• illegality
• deportation regime

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kim Rygiel, Eleanor Macdonald, Paritosh Kumar, Angela Pietrobon, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank all the migrant men who took valuable time out of their work to share their life stories with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A guesstimate by South Asian community groups such as the World Sikh Council of Greece and Pakistani Community of Greece, based on contacts made with these groups by newly arrived undocumented South Asian men.

2 According to Papadopoulos and Fratsea (2017), housing conditions for South Asian migrant workers are worse than those of Albanian temporary agricultural workers. The difference might be due to the fact that Albanian migration is cyclical – knowledge of bad living conditions at a farm might make them choose another in the next cycle of migration.

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by the Fund for Scholarly Research and Creative Work and Professional Development (Adjuncts), Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.