Colonial Roots and Continuities in Europe’s Migration System – In Conversation with Janine Silga

When the first treaties that laid the groundwork for today’s European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights were signed after the Second World War, many of today’s member states were still significant colonialpowers—empires. It was only in the years that followed that these European empires eroded, and many countries in the Global South gained independence.However, while colonialism formally ended, many have argued that coloniality has persisted. Although this applies to different areas, one of the most important is migration governance. Here, European countries have been accusedof replacing explicitly racialized mechanisms with a facially race-neutral apparatus that nonetheless constitutes a system of neocolonial racial borders that benefits some and disadvantages others.

In this conversation, Prof. Janine Silga analyzes thecolonial roots of the European migration system, highlights the continuities between the system before and after the formal end of colonialism, and discusses possible ways to overcome coloniality in EU law. The conversation begins with a focus on the nineteenth century, when large-scale migration took place across, for example, the British Empire. Prof. Silga explains that migration from colonized countries to Europe occurred primarily because colonial powers required cheap labor. At the same time, large numbers of Europeans began establishing settlements in the colonized world. These migrants could today be described as economic migrants, since they primarily left Europe to improve their economic circumstances—a reason for migration that Europeanstates now heavily contest when it occurs in the opposite direction. The conversation then shifts to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Western states adopted increasingly hostile stances toward migration and laid the foundations for a system of ostensibly race-neutral borders that nevertheless enabled racialized control over access to the benefits of colonial exploitation. The second part of the discussion examines colonial continuities in Europe’s contemporary migration system. Among other issues, Prof. Silga addresses the problem of “racial aphasia”—a term coined by Prof. Tendayi Achiume to describe the lack of debate about the role of race in migration law.The final part of the discussion explores potential ways to overcome both the colonial past and its ongoing legacies. Prof. Silga describes decoloniality as a broad and non-monolithic concept and movement that recognizes race as the central organizing principle of coloniality—a principle that hierarchizes human beings and sustains not only asymmetrical global power relations but also a singular Eurocentric epistemology. Decoloniality, therefore, is fundamentally concerned with the decolonization of knowledge and ways of knowing.