Citizenship, exclusion and vulnerability in transnational contexts

Abstract

Migrants have become vulnerable to abuse and violations of their human rights by authorities and organizations specializing in clandestine border crossing. The concept of “poverty” born in most of the work of international migration is understood as lacking and refers to a state of disrepair, a situation of impairment, which indicates both a lack of essential elements for the subsistence and personal development, as a lack of the necessary tools to abandon that position. Under these conditions, there is talk of structural poverty, pauperization, poor by income; these distinctions describe some characteristics of those in that condition and show that, beyond income at the time of measurement, people have historically had difficulty reaching minimum levels of family accumulation, hence the necessity of crossing physical, social and imaginary borders by immigrants. However, exclusion reading is partial to leave out the concept of “vulnerability”: fear does not end at the border crossing, but continues in the receiver countries when becoming an “immigrant”. The measures imposed in the receiving countries have failed to curb migration, and rather have helped instill fear in the thousands of immigrants and their families, making them vulnerable subjects.