Rethinking migration securitization: bureaucratic militarization and racial capitalism within Brazil’s “Operation Welcome”

Abstract

Over recent decades, we have witnessed the consolidation of securitization as a framework for understanding state-led responses to migratory influxes, in particular focused on border impenetrability and territorial control. However, we have also seen growing tensions and contradictions between migration securitization practices on the ground, migration governance processes, and racialized regimes of capitalist production. This article highlights how the migration securitization literature often homogenizes and universalizes the relationship between security responses and borders, by bringing it into conversation with the literature on racial capitalism. We bridge this theoretical divide via a case study examination of Brazil’s “Operation Welcome” since 2018, which has worked to receive and resettle Venezuelan migrants and refugees away from the border state of Roraima to other parts of the country. We present how the militarization of Operation Welcome was carried out through a “bureaucratization of militarization,” instead of conventional military tactics seeking to contain migration. And we discuss how access to the national territory and legal employment for Venezuelans in Brazil facilitates their insertion into racial capitalist structures of labor exploitation. Employing extensive fieldwork data, interviews, and participant observations to sustain these claims, we present how migration securitization methods, processes, and outcomes are not simply the result of sovereignty anxieties or a need to reaffirm border security, but rather are also shaped by global and local structures of (racialized) exploitation and dispossession.