What is it about?
The undocumented migrant is a specific border subject in several senses: a drawer of borders, a dweller in the borderlands, and a border person. This paper tackles the question of how to best describe the undocumented migrant in his or her relationship to the political order, one that either includes or excludes that person. Core to the argument is the idea that the undocumented migrant must be depicted as a border subject in a multi-layered dimension.
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Why is it important?
Studies on migration often use Hannah Arendt’s analysis on stateless refugees to emphasize the close parallels between the stateless refugee and the undocumented migrant, but there is a distinction for political and analytical reasons. The term border subject will clarify the difference between the stateless refugees depicted by Hannah Arendt and the undocumented migrant of today.
Perspectives
Thinking about refugees as political subjects resists every binary approach. Boundary-settings, including those that involve borders, are “continuously both remade and challenged” (Michel Agier) . Borders around and within democratic states lead to more “physical and symbolic violence” as well as the possibility of challenging and transforming these borders due to the openness of borders. Every boundary-setting continuously needs to be reconstituted and renewed, especially in situations when borders are questioned and challenged. The undocumented migrant can make this ambivalence visible.
Julia Schulze Wessel
Universitat Leipzig
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On Border Subjects: Rethinking the Figure of the Refugee and the Undocumented Migrant, Constellations, October 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12182.
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