critical litature review

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CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW OPTION

In a 20 paper (double spaced, 12pt Times New Roman), review a selection of the literature covered in class while making an argument about the various approaches to race/racism/ethnicity that will help you identify and address a range of potential research questions (and possible research objects) related to your specific area of interest.

Do an in-depth analysis of a topic. This is a critical literature review (i.e. not merely a summary) so you are using literature to make an argument. The journal Annual Review of Sociology or the journal Sociology Compass provides many excellent examples of literature reviews, as do the readings in this class. Annual Reviews are far more thorough than what is required here, but its’ an example of how to critically synthesize work. The paper must include at least 20 sources.

Purpose of the Literature Review

To provide background information about a research topic.
To establish the importance of a topic.
To demonstrate familiarity with a topic/problem.
To “carve out a space” for further work and allow you to position yourself in a scholarly conversation.

Characteristics of an effective literature review
In addition to fulfilling the purposes outlined above, an effective literature review provides a critical overview of existing research by

Outlining important research trends.
Assessing strengths and weaknesses (of individual studies as well the existing research as a whole).
Identifying potential gaps in knowledge.
Establishing a need for current and/or future research projects.
STEPS OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW PROCESS

1) Planning: identify the focus, type, scope and discipline of the review you intend to write.
2) Reading and Research: collect and read current research on your topic. Select only those sources that are most relevant to your project.
3) Analyzing: summarize, synthesize, critique, and compare your sources in order to assess the field of research as a whole.
4) Drafting: develop a thesis or claim to make about the existing research and decide how to organize your material.
5) Revising: revise and finalize the structural, stylistic, and grammatical issues of your paper.

This process is not always a linear process; depending on the size and scope of your literature review, you may find yourself returning to some of these steps repeatedly as you continue to focus your project.

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Received: 22 May 2018
Revised: 13 June 2019
Accepted: 5 July 2019
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12729
ARTICLE
Racialized im/migration and autonomy of
migration perspectives: New directions and
opportunities
Daniel Olmos
Department of Sociology, California State
University, Northridge
Abstract
Given the surge of nativist politics in the United States
Correspondence
Daniel Olmos, Department of Sociology,
California State University, Northridge, 18111
Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8318.
Email: [email protected]
today, scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance
of the intersections of race and im/migration. Moving
beyond the colorblind assimilation and neo-assimilation theories that dominated the social sciences, critical sociologists
have opened up new lines of inquiry that highlight the
underlying racialized power and inequalities that structure
im/migration incorporation. This article provides an overview of the growing body of literature on racialized im/
migration and explores the importance of understanding
the racial order through relational racialization and racialized
illegality. The article then introduces newly developed
autonomy of migration (AoM) theories and their contributions to the materialist study of im/migration and racialized
subordination. The article concludes by suggesting that
future research attempt to bridge racialized im/migration
and autonomy of migration perspectives.
1 | I N T RO D UC T I O N
During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump proposed a number of restrictive immigrationrelated policies such as expanding border wall construction on the United States–Mexico frontier, banning entry to
foreign-born Muslims, increasing the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to beef-up interior enforcement, and defunding “sanctuary cities” that provide protection to undocumented im/migrant1 residents.
Through one of Trump’s first executive actions as president, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded
Obama-era policies that prioritized unauthorized im/migrants with serious criminal records for deportation, mandating instead that ICE “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement”
Sociology Compass. 2019;e12729.
https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12729
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/soc4
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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(Kelly, 2017, p. 2). The inevitable consequence of this policy expanded “noncriminal” arrests by more than 200% and
total deportations or removals by 37% compared to 2016 under Obama (Capps, Muzaffar, Gelatt, Bolter, & Ruiz Soto,
2018; Miroff & Sacchetti, 2018; Spagat & Colvin, 2017). Characterizing Mexican nationals as “criminals and rapists,”
Central American im/migrants as MS-13 gang members, Haitian refugees as HIV/AIDS infested, and African im/
migrant-sending countries as “s—holes” while flippantly preferring immigration from European countries like Norway
(Yee, 2018), the Trump administration legitimated its nativism by ideologically constructing an im/migrant menace
emerging from non-White populations in the Global South and demonstrated what Harvard sociologist Lawrence D.
Bobo (2017) recently referred to as a “renewal of white supremacy” and “the fall of the postracial narrative” (p. 2).
The punishing articulations of race and im/migration over the last several decades that culminated in Trump’s
rhetoric and policies have also renewed scholarly attention and brought racial and im/migration studies into more
proximate and productive grounds (Ayers, Hofstetter, Schnakenberg, & Kolody, 2009; Garcia, 2017a; Hughey, 2017;
Romero, 2008; Saenz & Dougas, 2015; Sampaio, 2015; Sanchez & Romero, 2010). A growing body of literature in
this area has traced the historical formations of race and im/migration in relationship to citizenship (Molina, 2014;
Motomura, 2006; Ngai, 2004), modern politics and the welfare state (Fox, 2012; Tichenor, 2002), political economy
and labor (Gonzalez, 2006; Mize & Swords, 2011), and social movement activism (Buff, 2017; Zepeda-Millan, 2017).
Complementary research has uncovered the racial and legal processes of differential incorporation and uneven life
chances for Latina/o im/migrants in various arenas of contemporary social life such as youth and family (Abrego,
2014; Gonzales, 2015), health access and outcomes (Potochnick & Perreira, 2010; Viruell-Fuentes, Miranda, &
Abdulrahim, 2012), and economy, labor, and legality (De Genova, 2005; Gomberg-Muñoz, 2011) to name a few.
These generative scholarly contributions compellingly illustrate the limits of ethnic-based assimilation theories that
were initially developed alongside the particular histories of European immigrants as well as reorient immigration
research beyond prevailing economic frameworks. In these ways and more, the subfield of racialized im/migration
has supplied theoretically innovative and empirically rich scholarship to ongoing urgent conversations about the
impasse on immigration reform, the salience of structural racism, the disparate impacts of legality and citizenship,
and the agency of marginalized non-White immigrant populations in an epoch of rapidly changing US racial demographics and rise of nativist politics.
Yet the complex processes of racialization at a moment in which the “turbulence of migration” has unsettled
established patterns and understandings of society reveal the perpetually contingent nature of such scholarly explanation (Papastergiadis, 2000). In particular, the dynamics of mobility within neoliberal capitalism and their subsequent disruption of racialized im/migration have produced a range of unique sociopolitical moments ripe for new
sociological conceptualization. While ample scholarship has attended to the various ideological, institutional, and
legalistic formations of racialized im/migration, an emergent body of literature loosely identified as autonomy of
migration (AoM) has identified the ways in which im/migrant struggles contest borders and their corresponding neoliberal regimes of capitalist control (Glenn, 2002; Golash-Boza, 2015; Lowe, 1996; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013).
Rather than consolidating the vast literature on racialized im/migration and autonomy of migration, this review (a)
synthesizes a selection of scholarly inquiries into racialized im/migration, (b) introduces the emerging field of critical
migration/border studies through a summary of the “autonomy of migration” approach, and (c) proposes studying
racialized im/migration through the lens of “autonomy of migration” in order to account for how neoliberal borders
produce new dialectics of struggle over im/migrant mobility and control.
2 | FROM ASSIMILATION TO RACIALIZED IM/MIGRATION
In recent decades, orthodox approaches to the sociological study of im/migration have been critically appraised for
their distortions of reality, in particular the racial evasions of assimilation theories. Generally defined as a process by
which im/migrants are absorbed into the host society, early 20th century sociological ideas of assimilation accepted
that all im/migrants inevitably assimilate in levels determined by generational status and that the premium for
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assimilation is based on successively adopting the dominant culture of upper-middle class Anglo-Saxons (Gordon,
1964; Park, 1952; Park, Burgess, McKenzie, & Wirth, 1925). However, the methodological basis of assimilation
approaches was made possible by erroneously extrapolating the particular assimilation experiences of European-origin ethnic groups, which comprised an overwhelming majority of im/migrants during the late 19th and early 20th
century, into a universal or generalizable model of assimilation (Romero, 2008; Saenz & Dougas, 2015). The outcome
of this conceptual move was a normalization of White ethnic immigrant incorporation patterns as well as a disavowal
of the sociohistorical project of whiteness from the sociological abstractions of assimilation studies (Roediger, 2006).
From the end of the civil war to the beginning of the post-WWII era, European ethnic immigrants such as Irish, Polish,
and Italians were incorporated into the fulcrum of US citizenship and its associated forms of collective belonging by
virtue of their conscription into whiteness, either through impositions of White racial categorization by the state, science, and other dominant institutions or through their collective participation in race riots, racial ridicule (blackface),
and racially exclusive labor unions and residential subdivisions (Garcia, 2017a; Guglielmo, 2003; Lipsitz, 2006;
Roediger, 1991 & Roediger, 2006). According to critical race scholars, “Anglo-conformist” straight-line assimilationist
theories that ignore such historical racial realities are thinly veiled propositions of White racial hegemony masquerading as objective social science (cf. Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Moreover, when confronted with evidence of racial
subordination, assimilation scholars often relied on racial retorts that characterized nondominant groups such as African-Americans as unfit for assimilation because of their presumed severe cultural deficiency, poverty, and inferiority
(McKee, 1995). The obfuscation of whiteness and reification of anti-blackness by early assimilation theories were further reinforced by the contemporaneous denial of W.E.B. Du Bois’ scholarly exigencies concerning the centrality of
racism (Morris, 2015).
Following the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act’s repeal of national origin quotas that preserved European-dominated immigration and the post-1970s restructuring of the US economy, a new generation of assimilation
scholars recognized the ethnic and socioeconomic barriers that produced variable outcomes of immigrant incorporation (Alba & Nee, 2003; Gans, 1992; Perlmann & Waldinger, 1997). According to Rumbaut and Portes (2001) and
Portes and Zhou (1993) assimilation into the mainstream is unevenly characterized by varying degrees of human,
social, and financial capital, family structure, community resources, pace of acculturation, and the perceived ethnicity
of immigrants. Scholars subsequently developed a segmented assimilation approach that explained three main pathways to assimilation into the mainstream: (a) an optimistic upward assimilation pathway and social mobility into affluent suburbs, (b) a pessimistic downward assimilation pathway and confinement into impoverished inner-city ghettos,
and (c) a strategic selective assimilation pathway whereby immigrants conform to the host society’s definitions of success while retaining attachments to traditional ethnic values (Zhou, 1997). In this context, ethnicity is treated as a cultural corollary, primarily conceptualized as self-identification, and thus secondary to larger immigrant pathways, with
symbolic ethnicity associated with high status positionality through upward assimilation and reactive ethnicity associated with low status positionality through downward assimilation (Bean & Stevens, 2003; Greely, 1976; Waters,
1990). While some research on ethnic identity formations has gone beyond viewing ethnicity as either a gesture of
cultural affirmation or a coping mechanism for disadvantaged status by accounting for the effects of ethnic solidarity,
intra-ethnic boundary work, immigrant replenishment, nativist backlash, and strategic passing (Garcia, 2014; Jimenez,
2008; Waters, 2014; Zhou & Bankston, 1998), neo-assimilation approaches continue to operate under an ethnic paradigm that epistemologically bolsters nationalist promises of inclusion based on a common culture and bootstrap
meritocracy that regard “racial status as more voluntary and consequently less imposed, less ‘ascribed’” (Omi &
Winant, 2015, p. 22). As Golash-Boza (2006) explains, “segmented assimilation does not fully account for the role of
racialization in forging immigrants’ paths of adaptation. This is because these scholars do not address the extent to
which whiteness is a prerequisite for assimilation into dominant culture, nor do they fully interrogate the meanings of
the ethnic identities they discuss” (p. 31). The explicitly colorblind ethnic-based theories of upward and downward
assimilation, however, are implicitly racialized and reflect an hegemonic racial ordering whereby upper-class Whites
with open arms await the arrival of successful im/migrants at the top and under-class African-Americans enroll precarious im/migrants with a corrupting “culture of poverty” at the bottom (Jung, 2009). Despite attending to the
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importance of difference in the process of im/migrant absorption, the underlying research program of neo-assimilationism functions as an academic surrogate for the cultural and political efforts of American nation-building
(Waldinger, 2007), and, most nefariously, in the era of colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2010), obfuscates the structural
processes of racial inequality and racial domination.
In response to the resurgence of colorblind (neo)assimilation approaches, a growing body of critical scholarship
insists on accounting for race, racism, and racial domination as significant determinants of non-White im/migrant
incorporation. Drawing on internal colonial theories of racism and racial formation approaches to racialization
(Blauner, 2001; Omi & Winant, 2015), Telles and Ortiz’s (2008) important longitudinal study of four successive generations of Mexican im/migrants and Mexican Americans revealed how Mexican-origin populations did not fit into the
traditional models of assimilation as a result of processes of racialization that produced institutional barriers to cultural, educational, political, and social inclusion across multiple generations. Specifically, they defined racialization as
“the societal practice of assigning others to a ‘race,’ which is generally ranked by characteristics such as intelligence
and worth, or placing them in a racial hierarchy even if they are not referred to as a race” (p. 284). Subsequently,
scholars have expanded the racialization thesis in im/migration studies through different perspectives and in varying
contexts. Conceptualizing race as “a fundamental organizing principle of inequality and difference,” Omi and Winant
(2015) have argue that a racial formation is “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived
out, transformed, and destroyed” (pp. 2, 109). Taking this approach, scholars have examined how hyphenated Latina/
o-American self-identification processes by those not perceived as White are formed through “racialized assimilation”
(Golash-Boza, 2006; Vargas, Winston, Garcia, & Sanchez, 2016; Vasquez, 2010), others have uncovered the institutional mechanisms of racial profiling that inform immigration law enforcement practices and racialized criminal justice
regimes that police the boundaries of belonging (Armenta, 2017; Bowling & Westenra, 2018; Goldsmith, Romero,
Rubio-Goldsmith, Escobedo, & Khoury, 2009; Romero, 2006), while many have interrogated the ideological and discursive forces of White supremacist nativism that exclude non-White im/migrants from US civil and political life
(Bloch, 2014; Cacho, 2000; Chavez, 2008; Feagin & Cobas, 2014; Jacobson, 2008; Rodriguez, 2018).
A growing body of scholarship has innovated the racialized im/migration approach to account for complex dynamism of race-making and citizenship. Examining how US policy makers during the early 20th century racialized Mexican im/migrants as non-White and were made ineligible for citizenship by comparing them to Whites and AfricanAmericans, Molina (2014) coined the term “racial scripts” to highlight “the ways in which different racialized groups
are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths” (p. 6).
This unique conceptual approach supports ongoing research that seeks to link im/migration scholarship to comparative racial studies. Jacobson (2008) historically situates the new nativism surrounding California’s anti-immigrant
Proposition 187 as a state-sanctioned process of racializing Mexican-origin im/migrants as undocumented and criminal “invasive threats” through popular legal idioms of “fairness” that were discursively composed by bridging colorblind conservatism and racial realism. Cacho (2012) critically elaborates on racial im/migration scholarship by noting
how the criminalization of non-White im/migration is fatally linked to rightlessness, the differential recognition of
human value and the codification of “social death” that legitimates state-sanctioned racialized violence. By centering
race and racialization as categories of analysis in immigration studies, these and other related scholarly efforts have
provided an alternative paradigm for understanding how the categorization of “delayed” or “downward” integration
of non-White im/migrant generations are expressions of a dominant “white racial frame” (Feagin, 2013; Romero,
2008; Saenz & Dougas, 2015) and how pertinent racialized power dynamics structure and unevenly incorporate im/
migration into the social, political, and economic configurations of the US nation-state.
In non-North American contexts, a similar process of racialized exclusion via new patterns of migration has been
observed. In the United Kingdom, Rzepnikowska (2019) recorded the recent surge of racist xenophobia against Polish migrants generated in the media and political discourse following the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent
2016 EU referendum or Brexit vote while Erel, Murji, and Nahaboo (2016) historically traced the UK “race-migration
nexus” through the explicitly racial postcolonial/postwar formation to the current post-racial migration system that
purportedly eschews race by relying on biometric-based surveillance technologies. As Middle Eastern and African
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refugees travel westward through Eastern Europe, Austria’s political landscape has been fundamentally transformed
by debates around migration that have inaugurated a “new racism” that exploits xenophobia through covert racial
terms around protecting union jobs, preventing welfare abuse, and preserving national culture (Krzyanowski &
Wodak, 2008). In Australia, public declarations of diversity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism contradict the various forms of racialized marginalization faced by Asian and African migrants and thus expose the underlying whiteness of the nation-state (Boese & Marotta, 2017; Jayasuriya, 2012). In response to gendered xenophobic racism,
second generation African and Arab young women in Italy have articulated counter-aesthetics by valorizing Islamic
fashion and natural Afro-textured hair within the context of emergent struggles for socio-legal recognition (Frisina &
Hawthorne, 2018). This scholarship on racialized im/migration reveals what Silverstein (2005) aptly identified a
decade earlier as the “shifting racialized landscapes in the new Europe” that would generate a unique contested
political and scholarly terrain over issues of migration, race, and nation.
3 | R EL A T I O N A L RA C I A L I Z A T I O N A N D I M / M I G R A N T I L L E G A L I T Y
In the United States, scholarship on racialized im/migration has uniquely highlighted the social and cultural citizenship modalities of racial stratification. Extrapolating on racial formation theories, Clair Jean Kim (1999) theorizes the
US racial order as a relational “field of racial positions” by examining the racial triangulation between Asian Americans, African-Americans, and Whites. The field of racial positions run along two axes (superior/inferior and insider/
foreigner) and is fueled by two social processes (relative valorization and civic ostracism). Whereas relative valorization determines the comparable sociocultural legitimacy of racial groups into varying positions of superiority and
inferiority, civic ostracism determines the comparable political inclusion of racial groups into varying positions of
insider and foreigner. In this way, while Asian Americans and im/migrants might be valorized as “superior” compared
to “inferior” African-Americans and equal in this regard to “superior” whites, they are politically relegated to “foreigners” when compared to first-class White and even second-class African-American “insiders.” According to the
model of racial triangulation, the racialization (and valuation) of im/migrant groups is always relational to other racialized groups within a corresponding field of racial positions that are ultimately organized by a wide range White dominated social institutions. For example, using this model, scholars observe how Mexican im/migrant low-wage
workers are constructed as “inferior foreigners,” Puerto Ricans as “inferior foreigners” (Valle, 2019), and Indian im/
migrant engineers are positioned as “superior foreigners.” Maldonado (2006) offers a poignant analysis of the racialized division of labor in the agricultural fruit tree industry of the Northwest by uncovering how employers racially triangulate newly arrived undocumented Latina/o workers with White and settled (often documented) Latina/o
workers. As the valorization of undocumented “hard-working” Latina/o im/migrants by employers is a relational
racial position anchored by the simultaneous devaluing of White and settled Latina/o labor as “too lazy” or “complacent” for entry-level low wage manual work, Whites eventually occupy a racial position in which they are socially valued and perceived as better skilled for “respectable,” well-paid managerial positions. This racialization process helps
agricultural employers justify, through nonracial language that essentialize culture, their preferred employment of
undocumented Latina/o im/migrants as ideal workers who befittingly toil at the bottom rungs of the industry while
normalizing the exclusive recruitment of well-primed Whites into upper management. According to Cruz (2016), the
racial triangulation framework has gained traction among scholars of US racialized labor systems who interrogate
how a racial order dominated by White supremacy structures inter-minority and inter-im/migrant relations seemingly
without Whites as principal agents in the observable scene of race-making.
Similarly, relational conceptualizations of racialized im/migration have attended to various legal modalities of
racial ordering, specifically im/migrant illegality. Historian Mae Ngai’s (2004) magnum opus on the sociopolitical history of modern US immigration law illuminated how the Immigration Act of 1924 legally produced the “illegal alien,”
“a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal
impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and rights” (p. 4). Taking stock of the varying relational racial
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constructions of “illegal alien” as Mexican border crossers, “alien citizen” as disloyal Asians in wartime, and “colonial
subject” as Filipino imported labor, the complex of early immigration law not only deemed non-White im/migrants as
differentially undesirable and “unassimilable” populations but also helped constitute the notion of whiteness and
reinforce the White racial foundations and logic of the modern nation-state. Extending this dictum into the contemporary anti-immigrant context, De Genova (2002) notes that one key aspect of the racialization of Latina/os, particularly Mexicans, is the continual discursive and legal power of illegality. Incorporating racial triangulation theory to
explain how Mexican im/migrants dealing with conditions of “illegality” in Los Angeles view themselves as differentially subordinate to both Whites and African-Americans in the context of “American-ness,” Zamora (2018) argues
that “relationality” allows us to link different racial projects together, such that understanding the connection
between White supremacy, Black subordination, and the structural forces that shape “illegality” can be the basis for
multiracial solidarity (p. 3).
Following this important line of inquiry, critical scholars of im/migration have developed the notion of racialized
illegality to explain how undocumented im/migrants experience illegality differently based on their particular
racialization in the United States. In general, this body of literature notes that the racialized hypervisibility of Latina/
o illegality produces a disproportionate danger of deportability and stigmatization yet simultaneously summons
countervailing publics and counter-institutional practices wherein undocumented Latina/os receive disproportionately more symbolic support and material resources than their undocumented counterparts. Patler (2014) revealed
that undocumented Latina/o youth created stronger co-ethnic peer networks that supported them through their
everyday illegality than undocumented African-American and Asian youth who rarely disclosed their illegality and
were more likely to fall into social isolation. Enriquez, Vera, and Ramakrishnan (2017) argue that undocumented
Latina/os in comparison to undocumented Asians significantly benefit from the California Safe and Responsible
Driver’s Act that provides undocumented im/migrants with drivers licenses because (a) Latino advocacy organizations had the existing institutional capacity to disseminate information and raise awareness about the new law and
(b) the identification documents provided by Mexican consulates to Mexican nationals applying for drivers licenses
required less review and supplemental documentation since the Mexican government previously consulted with the
DMV to incorporate the requisite safety and security features. Herrera (2016) further develops the concept of racialized illegality by demonstrating how the differential experiences of illegality between nonindigenous and indigenous
Latino day laborers are produced by racialization techniques in their home countries and reproduced a competitive
hierarchical secondary labor market in the United States. This scholarship has also aptly articulated intersectional
approaches to structural oppression by accounting for the ways in which Mexican-origin women navigate the stigmas of illegality through intersections of race, gender, class, and generation status across various institutional settings such as the workplace, criminal justice system, education, and health care (Garcia, 2017b).
4 | AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION PERSPECTIVE
While the sociological subfield of racialized im/migration developed, critical migration/border scholarship was
emerging from a loosely configured network of scholars, advocates, and migrants attempting to exceed traditional
approaches to im/migration in order to articulate new relationships with migrant struggles and create critical interpretations of border logics and processes traversing the globe (De Genova, Mezzadra, & Pickles, 2015). Inspired by
radical movements in Europe, United States, and Mexico, critical migration/border scholars argue that transnational
migration is an autonomous and often extra-institutional process generated by the self-activity of working class communities and that “bordering” techniques (maintaining and/or proliferating borders) are responses by capitalist sovereign states designed to regulate and control this human mobility (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, & Pickles, 2015; De
Genova, 2010; Mezzadra, 2010; Papastergiadis, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008). In contrast to conceptions of migration as an outcome of so-called objective factors of migrants as economic rational choice actors, the autonomous
perspective privileges the initiative of migrant subjectivities and practices as independent forces at the heart of the
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global contradiction between migrant mobility and migration control. This emphasis on autonomy draws from a tradition of radical Marxism that advanced the independence of workers’ struggles and their often-spontaneous insurrectionary collective agency, such as factory occupations and wildcat strikes, beyond the constraints and co-optation of
political parties, compromised trade unions, elitist philanthropic/advocacy organizations, and bureaucratic state entities (cf. Cleaver, 2001; Rawick, 2010; Wright, 2008). Similarly, autonomist scholars view the struggles of migrants as
autonomous—as the ability of migrants to define their own interests and practices independent from migration management systems such as the domination of sovereign borders, the “leadership” of migration-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the extra-legal force of capitalist market projects.
The phrase “autonomy of migration” (AoM) describes both a research program with unique conceptual tools and
a political project intended to advance social movements for migrant rights. According to Nestor Rodriguez, an early
proponent of the AoM approach,
Viewing autonomous migration as a source of human agency contradicts the perception of undocumented
migrants as a docile, job-happy, helpless population. Instead, from the perspective of human agency,
undocumented migrants take on the role of historical actors restructuring sociospatial contours across
global regions. (Rodriguez, 1996, p. 27)
By analytically prioritizing the free movement of people around the globe and articulating migrant struggles as
independent variables, AoM inverts the perspective of transborder migration control to view migration as a set of
dynamic and “creative forces that constantly push institutional arrangements” to change management strategies such
as unique bordering mechanisms, cutting-edge social controls, and interstate coordination in reaction to new and
emerging migratory movements (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 898). Most crucially, the AoM approach charts a new
“political epistemology of migration” that embraces the instabilities of migrant conditions and practices while critically engaging the uneven power relationships that produce migrants into objects or subjects of knowledge production (De Genova et al., 2015, p. 9). In this way, the AoM approach attempts to dethrone the long-established
assumption that migrants are objects completely determined by structural forces through overwhelming “push and
pull” dynamics and thus are simply victims whose interests require the mediation of advocates, social workers, clergy,
and/or intellectuals to speak in their name (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, & Pickles, 2011).
Peter Nyers (2015) outlines five major tenants of the AoM framework. (a) Migration is a subjective practice that
mobilizes a wide spectrum human creativity and agency that enable social, political, economic, and cultural transformations and is not entirely determined by structural push-pull factors such as poverty, war, and environmental catastrophes. (b) The increasingly restrictive im/migration controls and sophisticated border techniques, which make
migration more difficult and dangerous, are reaction formations that obtain their dynamics from the creatively inventive mobility of migrants. (c) Borders are not simply repressive walls of exclusion at the territorial edges of sovereign
nations but are productive forces forging differential access and “rights” within and beyond national states that are
also susceptible to complex negotiations, contestations, and refusals by migrants themselves. (d) The emphasis on
the agentive processes of mobility and border contestation refuse to frame migration within the victim-based discourses of humanitarianism (powerless migrants to help), the militaristic discourses of securitization (dangerous
migrants to keep out), or the economic discourses of the labor market (reserve army of migrant labor to be managed), and instead privilege the various subjective claims-making and rights-talking of migrants against restrictions,
discriminations, indignities, detentions, and deportations. (e) Insofar as such privileging of migrant struggles challenge
the centrality of visibility in traditional conceptions of the political, the AoM approach examines the dynamic and
inventive social worlds emerging from clandestine and off-the-radar migrant mobility strategies that are imperceptible to sovereign powers and have become the basis for new political theorizations of exodus, lines of flight, and
escape (Sharma, 2009).
The autonomist consideration of migration is contextualized within the totality of historical capitalism and its
structural tension between the subjective forces of labor expressed through mobility and the attempt by capital to
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impose despotic control over that mobility through mechanisms of repressive state power (i.e., borders). From this
perspective, Italian autonomist th