C.IAS Lecture - Fabio Santos

Abstract:

This talk examines migrant illegality and inequality at the colonial crossroads of Europe and Latin America, focusing on the borderland between the Brazilian state of Amapá and the French overseas department of Guyane. It begins with a terminological and spatial (re)orientation, followed by a historical contextualization that challenges the naturalization of the border and its assumed need for control against illegalized migrants. In the case of the French-Brazilian borderland, unequal mobilities must be understood within the history of colonial conquest, racialization, enslavement, and forced migration that shaped this borderland as part of the Atlantic world. By reconnecting nationally separated and often neglected histories of mobility in the longue durée, multiple exclusions become evident – from exclusion from rights to physical exclusion through deportation. The chapter further argues that recent migration flows, along with measures intended to restrict them, highlight Guyane as a laboratory of legal exceptionalisms that facilitate the illegality, deportability, and deterrence of migrants. Examples of anti-immigration measures in recent years include fast-track asylum processing and deportations, racial profiling, and deliberate shortages of accommodation and financial support for asylum seekers. The pinnacle of this infrastructural facilitation of illegality is the Oyapock River Bridge: inaugurated in 2017, the first bridge linking Brazil and France has ultimately become a one-way street reinforcing unequal mobilities in a borderland that defies the neat geopolitical categories to which many social scientists have grown accustomed.

Bio:

Fabio Santos is a tenure-track assistant professor in Histories of Migration at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. He interweaves the intimate and local with the global and structural, revealing how people’s everyday lives are shaped by broader entanglements – an approach at the heart of his book Bridging Fluid Borders: Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland (Routledge, 2022). The recurring themes of his teaching and writing – migration, inequality, and colonialism – are explored through ethnographic and historical methods.