The biopolitics government of survival migrant

a critical reading of the logic of human capital in the neoliberal era

Abstract

In this article I follow the meaning of the verb “to govern” as the right disposition of men in their relation with things. This definition is proposed by Michel Foucault in Security, territory, population through his reading of the renaissance thinker Guillaume de La Perrière. I unfold and spread this meaning by analyzing the way of government that characterizes contemporary neoliberal biopolitics in its relation with the so called migrants of survival according to the definition of Alexander Betts. On the neoliberal biopolitical governmentality, the regulation of survival migrants is structured by its dependence on the circulation of things; in this case, the transnational flow of economic capital. I consider that the normative criterion that distinguishes good and bad circulation of migrants nowadays isn’t based on classical political ground. It’s made by the neoliberal axis of biopolitics, especially by the unfoldings of human capital concept. From this concept comes the idea that not only the productive work, but also the entire life of individuals is evaluated in terms of investments and risk to the acquisition of competences, on the development of performance and permanent mobility. On The Birth of Biopolitics, in 1979, Foucault considers that migration is one of the riskiest ways to earn human capital. Nevertheless he considers migration in an homogenous way, as if any migrant could subjective himself as a self-entrepreneur. I consider that the negative objectivation of survival migrants as unproductive and undesirables has as its possible cause their undifferentiated identification with any economical immigrant that searches to qualify his human capital. In presenting this argument, I point the mechanisms of economization of life which crosses neoliberal subjectivation and the reductionisms that results from it, as the reduction of life to homo economicus and its designation as human capital. I propose that a manner to avoid those reductionisms consists in the conversion of the look pointed to the survival migrants, starting by showing the rationality which feeds the biopolitical production of their existences.