Paper short abstract:

Beyond its borders, the EU border regime is implicated within capitalism's tendency to produce a relative surplus population. In the informal economy of Nouakchott, Mauritania, illegalised migrants are subject to state harassment which, in both form and function, resembles EU border violence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper details how the EU border regime's production of illegality (Andersson, 2014) is implicated in capitalism's tendency to produce a population that is surplus relative to its own reproductive needs (Li, 2017). It does so by examining the experiences of those illegalised by the border regime in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Within disenfranchised pockets of its urban informal economy, there lie collective experiences of border violence and economic abandonment spanning the regions of North and West Africa. The paper first details people's experiences of illegalisation and border violence in a range of such locations at and beyond the EU external border, including in Nouakchott itself. This state of illegalisation is, however, a deeply contingent one, which raises the question of who is likely to be illegalised and why. The rest of the paper addresses this question by broadening its concern from exclusive experiences of illegalisation to the multifaceted processes of economic and social marginalisation, neglect, and abandonment in which migrants brutalised by the border regime are also caught up. This is evidenced in life histories and experiences encompassing exploitative formal employment in extractive industries run by multinational conglomerates, as well as precarious and intermittent informal employment as street vendors, car washers, construction workers, and domestic workers. As a consequence of this position of being surplus relative to the needs of capital, migrants are subject to state violence and harassment which, in both form and function, is strikingly similar to the illegalisation of the border regime.