Making Europe from Below: Intra EU-Migration and Mobilities Connecting the Margins

This chapter critically analyses the effects that emergent horizontal and peripheral intra-EU migratory mobilities have in the making of Europe from below at its internal margins. The case study draws on the migrant labourers of the so-called ‘farm of Europe,’ a vast agro-industrial district in the South of Spain. This marginal area exhibits the unequal and racialized contradictions of the EU regimes of mobility that separate insiders from outsiders. African migrants in irregular situations are exploited, segregated and menaced by deportation while targeted by racist discourses. This contrasts with the situation of Romanian migrants – White, Christian, EU citizens – who have come to occupy specific economic and labour niches and have created a demographic enclave in the area that is connected with their place of origin in Romania through a migration corridor and transnational social fields. The results show that everyday social relations connect and territorialize European margins, previously unrelated, and reveal how Europe is practised by those marginal European citizens that, far from the European centres and EU institutions, are benefiting from the political and economic advantages of the European integration from which they have traditionally been excluded.