Racial borderscapes and the ungrounding of migrant life: thinking with space, gender and labour

This article intervenes in debates on contemporary border politics by advancing the analytic of racial borderscapes and foregrounding the political economy that structures contemporary bordering regimes. Building on scholarship that understands borders as core to the production of unequal socio-spatial relations, we argue that borderscapes produce racialised differentiation that regulates and diminishes life chances through the combined operations of state and market. We introduce ‘ungrounding’ as a key concept to capture the systematic erosion of the material, legal and affective ‘ground’ on which migrants are able to build a life. Drawing on empirical and conceptual insights from South Africa and the UK, we demonstrate how racial borderscapes heighten intersecting exclusions of spatial isolation, gendered forms of extraction and labour precaritisation. In engaging with the intensification of border controls since the Covid-19 pandemic, this article shows how ungrounding exacerbates inequality, violence and dispossession.