Theorising the ‘migration fix’: workerisation and exclusion in the European border regime

The contemporary European border regime is shaped by an apparently paradoxical set of developments: while the securitisation of borders and the violent exclusion of displaced people intensifies, the demand for foreign workers is rapidly growing, driven by severe labour shortages across European economies. In this article, we develop the concept of the migration fix to study how different economic and political logics interact at the heart of European bordering and generate a range of new policies and practices. We theorise this concept drawing from the critical literature on racial capitalism, border studies and the political economy of migration, to understand how border regimes operate within broader logics of capitalist development and function as temporary and unstable fixes between different interests and tendencies, sustaining nativist political projects while creating opportunities for the exploitation of migrant labour. We develop this concept in relation to contemporary EU and member state policies in Germany, Italy and Greece, showing how a set of migration and border policies seek to reconcile business pressures for greater labour migration with the further securitisation of bordering, through the negotiation of partnerships with neighbouring countries and the drive towards what we term the workerisation of asylum seekers and refugees.