IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v23y2018i5p627-639.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes

Author

Listed:
  • Prem Kumar Rajaram

Abstract

Refugees and migrants are often studied as though they have no relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they reside. They are strangers to be governed by ‘integration’ policy and border management. Refugees and migrants are, however, subjects of contemporary capitalism struggling to render themselves valuable capitalist modes of production. I study the government of refugees and migrants in order to examine capitalist value regimes. Societal values and hierarchies reflected in capitalist modes of production impact on struggles of racialised subaltern groups to translate body power into valued labour. Marx’s account of surplus populations points to the common marginalisations of people called ‘refugees’ and other subaltern groups struggling to translate their body power into valorised labour. The essay includes a study of the gentrification of a district in Budapest, and its transformation into a means for the reproduction of capital, leading to the marginalisation of groups who no longer fit the new value regimes. Studying refugees as surplus populations allows for a sense of the common marginalisations of subaltern and racialised groups before capitalism, and questions the treatment of refugees and migrants as ‘strangers’.

Suggested Citation

  • Prem Kumar Rajaram, 2018. "Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(5), pages 627-639, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:23:y:2018:i:5:p:627-639
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ewa Połońska-Kimunguyi, 2022. "Echoes of Empire: racism and historical amnesia in the British media coverage of migration," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-13, December.
    2. Melanie Griffiths, 2024. "Epilogue: ‘Claiming Time’ Special Issue," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 25(3), pages 1231-1247, September.
    3. Ann‐Christin ZUNTZ & Mackenzie KLEMA & Shaher ABDULLATEEF & Stella MAZERI & Salim Faisal ALNABOLSI & Abdulellah ALFADEL & Joy ABI‐HABIB & Maria AZAR & Clara CALIA & Joseph BURKE & Liz GRANT & Lisa BOD, 2022. "Syrian refugee labour and food insecurity in Middle Eastern agriculture during the early COVID‐19 pandemic," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 161(2), pages 245-266, June.
    4. Emel Akçalı, 2023. "Little Aleppo: The neighbourhood experiences of Syrian refugees in Adana, Turkey, ‘poor to poor, peer to peer’," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 41(2), pages 240-256, March.
    5. R.C. Sudheesh, 2023. "State Life: Land, Welfare and Management of the Landless in Kerala, India," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 54(4), pages 870-891, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:23:y:2018:i:5:p:627-639. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.