ABSTRACT

A grand irony of neoliberal democracy is that the minimal state, its hallmark, gains legitimacy by becoming an almost pervasive presence in people’s lives. Its omnipresence is due in part to the overregulation of people it categorizes as a risk, and in part due to surveillance, which the State facilitates and which private firms manage and control. Another irony is that although market ideology suggests the market is society’s most efficient regulator, the market draws immigrants into the country and is much less effective at excluding them once they have arrived. Even in economic downturns, the post-industrial economy demands cheap labor. Neoliberalism has no shortage of boxes it paints itself into. The argument for a self-regulating market, therefore, deregulates migrant flows (removing walls and border patrols), and goes so far as to deregulate the border-open borders. The ebbs and flows of unrestricted migration, however, rub up against the neoliberal demands of consumer capitalism, which, in order to police threats to the consumer market, oppresses and excludes the same immigrants the market actively pulls into the country through the push-pull dynamic of migration flow.