The migration-mobilities continuum: rethinking migration as political demography

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 8. Rethinking nation-state/borders/migration

Abstract

The Global Mobilities Project (GMP) at the EUI, Florence has just split the migration atom with its publication of the Global Transnational Mobility Database 2.0 (Feb 2026). Despite repeated calls for "demigranticisation" and "methodological denationalism", international migration studies remains fixated on the "figure of the migrant", reproducing nation-state-centred conceptions of population. "Migrants" are reified as the "anomalous" population which reveal the artificial border (in social, economic, cultural and political terms) between "nationals" and "foreigners". Yet, as we show with the GMP (the core of the ERC AdG Project MIGMOBS - The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism), in the era of neoliberalism since 1970, migration (conventionally understood as movement + 1 year settlement) has never constituted more than 1% of border crossings globally. During this era border crossings -- excepting during the hiatus of COVID -- exploded exponentially, reaching a peak of 10 billion movers in 2019 (versus at most 6 million migrants). These are recorded as "tourists" and "visitors", but in fact contain all kinds of ambiguous categories of cross-border movement: an ongoing transnationalism essential to the interconnected economies and social orders of even a re-bordering nationalist world. Our paper, which lays out the theoretical and conceptual backdrop to our quantitative study, discusses how the simultaneous invisibilisation of "foreigners" alongside the manufacture of symbolic conflict over very small proportions of "immigrants", has worked to propel liberal democracies into the post-liberal world, while continuing to enable a global racial capitalism ever more selective, extractive, and stratified by global inequality. New migration-mobilities systems in Asia have decentred the North Atlantic West. And Latin America provides another model of evolving free movement. We trace this genealogy, as well as demonstrating the empirical means of charting these transformations in population governance worldwide, which underpin contemporary political economy.

Authors

• Adrian Favell, University College Cork

• Ettore Recchi, Universita'Di Chieti-Pescara, Italy

• Tobias Grohmann, European University Institute

• Emanuel Deutschmann, Europa-Universität Flensburg