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Contribution short abstract:

Germany’s private security industry has grown rapidly, peaking in 2015-16 after the arrival of over a million refugees. This paper examines the peculiar role of refugees in this growth, many of whom found themselves working as guards in a system profiting from fear of criminality and informality.

Contribution long abstract:

Germany’s private security industry has experienced dramatic economic growth over the past two decades, peaking in 2015-16, in the aftermath of the arrival of over a million refugees. The leasing out of security contracts to private entities in the protection of reception centers and refugee camps was one cause of this growth. The moral panics regarding the presence of unknown, unvetted strangers from the Global South, was another. Yet, the immense popularity of these jobs among my refugee interlocutors in Berlin poses a particularly troubling paradox. Even as images of young, African and Arab men were used to stoke spectacular fears about insecurity, those same bodies now increasingly occupy the working force of the companies that emerged to tackle the supposed crisis of migrant criminality. This paper examines how these bodies, caught between spectacle and labor are put to work in the production of both demand for, and supply of (in)security. I show how labour practices of organised informality, combined with a mediatized politics of criminality, fear and insecurity to sharpen the symbolic and socio-legal boundaries between newcomers. Indeed, as guards in a private security industry looking to maximize profits through subcontractors, those young refugee and migrant men that found themselves doing the labour of security found themselves pushed increasingly into the shadows of the formal economy. With such marginalization comes the increasing threat of exclusion from the commons, as legal status for asylum seekers and refugees is made increasingly dependent on participation in the formal economy.