Migration and the racialised politics of desire

Abstract

This article interrogates the reservations in the Left in Europe towards claims for freedom of movement and stay. The piece argues that an unequal right to desire – conceived as an aspiration move, to stay and to seek for a better life – underpins those criticisms and suggests that for developing counter-politics of migration, it is key to challenge such racialised predicament. The first section shows how expansive claims for equal access to mobility and the right to stay are discredited as utopian and non-realistic. The second section unsettles the politics of number that sustains public discourses on migration showing that this can be turned to the advantage of arguments in support of border controls. It moves on contending that a critique of racialising borders needs to unpack the unequal right to desire. The fourth section draws attention to the nexus between the disruption of futurity and the unequal right to desire and argues that this enables tracing connections between migrants and (some) citizens through the lens of dispossessed future. It suggests that the allegedly utopian character of claims for freedom of movement does not the depend on the failure of past struggles but on the unquestioned racialised right to desire