Conditional Inclusion: Experiences of Venezuelan Migrants in Medellín’s Self-Built Neighbourhoods

While much has been written about migrants’ exclusion from host societies and limited access to rights and opportunities, less attention has been paid to how they are included within systems that profit from their vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic data from two self-built neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia, we examine whether and under what conditions Venezuelan migrants are included in the social and economic arrangements of their host communities. Reading these experiences through the theoretical lenses of necropolitics and borderscapes, we argue that migrants experience what we call ‘conditional inclusion’. Migrants gain access to the means of reproducing daily life only provisionally, on terms that rest on their economic utility and compliance with local norms, and can be withdrawn. Moving beyond binary frameworks of inclusion versus exclusion and agency versus victimhood, we demonstrate how conditional inclusion simultaneously perpetuates vulnerability and enables agency and adaptation.