Walk out, walk free? Migrants’ excarceration at the borders of Europe

Migration scholars have extensively analysed the growth of the population deprived of their liberty in the name of border control. Focusing on Malta, where migration detention has surged in the wake of the sea crossings of the last decades, the paper shifts attention to the transformations of state-sponsored coercion once migrants get ‘free’. It shows that the gradual release of former detainees has resulted not in their emancipation but in their proletarianization, as the loss of means of subsistence through eviction from state facilities compels them to enter the local labour force. State violence is thus not subsumed merely in the act of incarceration. Analyzing the power relations that emerge in the reverse move of excarceration, I suggest investigating a type of constraint that arises not against the freedom of an unwanted population but through its very extension, when the granting of liberty of movement is coupled with the imperative to serve as productive workers.