The 21st century is the century of displacement. An unprecedented 117.3 million individuals are currently displaced globally, with over 50 million of them crossing international borders. Close to 70% gravitate toward urban areas in search of asylum and protection; some aim for and succeed in migrating to cities in the global northwest. With over 100,000 in Berlin and more than 210,000 in New York City in recent years, both cities are major urban destinations for internationally displaced migrants in Europe and North America respectively. While both cities are self-proclaimed “migrant-friendly” cities, are historic centers of migrant arrivals, and frequently stylized as “role models” for urban migration policymaking, internationally displaced migrants encounter formidable challenges arising from increasingly restrictive, violent, and market-driven migration regimes and an intensifying housing crisis, forcing them to navigate “urban spaces marked by growing levels of internal displacement (evictions and homelessness).” Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024 in Berlin and New York, I analyze the cities’ responses to governing increasing migrant arrivals. I argue that their strategies are characterized by an interplay of problematizing internationally displaced migrants as a financial burden as well as through racialized value-making processes related to housing and labor exploitation. Contributing to recent urban and migration literature on racial capitalism, I show how current reception contexts multiply displacement and dispossession processes and produce new spaces and structures of urban marginality.
Governing internationally displaced migrants in New York City and Berlin
Berlin and New York City are positioned in distinct national contexts and immigration policy frameworks. In Germany, the internationally displaced arrive in and must navigate a tight welfare regime including a strict ban to work and mandatory shelter accommodation for the duration of their asylum process. Yet they are entitled to basic social benefits. In the US, asylum-seeking migrants do not receive federal assistance (let alone housing), may experience detention as part of their asylum process, and largely depend on their networks, communities, NGOs, and/or their self-reliance. However, they can receive a work permit 180 days after filing an asylum claim. Both cities exploit some leeway resulting from the “contradictions, vagueness, and gaps in the laws governing the multi-scale system of asylum and immigration politics” (Kreichauf and Mayer 2021, p. 985) and their unique positions within these systems. For example, Berlin allows access to language education, integration programs, and housing outside of refugee shelters sooner than dictated by federal law. The city has also developed a refugee housing program, building permanent and long-term—instead of emergency—shelters. In New York, the city has abstained from cooperating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and directed substantial resources toward community outreach (e.g. “Know your Rights” campaigns), access (IDNYC program), and legal support (ActionNYC), aiming to uphold its autonomy over immigration policymaking (see Editor’s Postscript, however). The city’s unique “right to shelter,” which is based on the landmark Callahan v. Carey case in the New York County Supreme Court in 1979, obligates the city to provide shelter to anyone in need and regardless of immigration status.
Negotiations between different levels of governance (especially related to funding and legal/political responsibility) and municipal characteristics (e.g. number of arrivals, municipal resources and policymaking, migration and integration understandings) produce locally specific arrangements and responses to “managing” internationally displaced migrants. On the one hand, New York and Berlin have developed some similar approaches and structures in the past few years. They include the establishment of city offices responsible for overseeing and coordinating all services for asylum seekers, such as distribution and access to shelter, food, and necessities; central reception facilities; and an expansion of sheltering spaces. In New York, around 64,000 internationally displaced individuals stay in the city’s shelter system, which they share with some 60,000 other unhoused people. In Berlin, close to 40,000 individuals are accommodated in the city’s refugee accommodation system as part of asylum procedures and homelessness prevention. On the other hand, both cities have drawn policies and practices embedded in varying scopes of austerity, state welfare/workfare and value-making logics.
New York City: pushing migrants out of shelter and into precarious labor
In New York, as the load on the shelter system increased, Mayor Adams has tried to suspend the right to shelter, arguing that it would “not apply to a migrant crisis.” Reducing the “generous care of the past,” city officials introduced a 30‑day limit (60 days for families) to shelter provision in October 2023, despite immense protests from homelessness and migrant organizations. This effectively evicts migrants in asylum procedures from a sheltering space after that period. Because Adams does not “have deportation power” but “the power […] to balance the budget every two years”, he uses fiscal and shelter policy for migration governance (and deterrence), forcing migrants out of shelters and the city’s care altogether. City Hall has also been working on several rounds of wide-sweeping budget cuts, slashing budgets specifically for the education department, social programs, public libraries, and schools (Fitzsimmons 2023). This affects migrants seeking asylum as much as low-income residents, racialized minorities, and those reliant on public services—“the preferred political targets of austerity programs” and “austerity urbanism”. Under New York’s neoliberal regimes of urban management and austerity, sheltering may exhaust the city’s budget, but it also provides profit for the manifold industries that have emerged as part of reception practices and the privatization of services. For example, the city hands out prepaid Mastercards instead of food boxes. The company Mobility Capital Finance generates $1.8 million by taking a fee from the funds loaded onto each Mastercard.
Against the backdrop of these austerity measures, the city promotes migrants’ “self-sufficiency” and aims to push displaced migrants into jobs as quickly as possible to “address labor shortages and bolster [the] city’s post-pandemic economic recovery.” In December 2023, the New York State Department of Labor “identified 39,456 jobs open to migrants and asylum seekers in New York State,” the vast majority of them in New York City. The industries identified as “suitable” for “migrants and asylum seekers” include accommodation and food services, care, construction, social assistance, warehousing, manufacturing, and waste management—overall low-skilled, low-wage, and manual labor. Evicted from sheltering spaces and the city’s care while being under the often year-long asylum regime and precarious residency, they are made vulnerable (and then valuable) as cheap and disposable labor being forced into hyper-exploitative and often informal “working conditions which are below the common conditions of acceptability.” While city officials argue that quick economic integration would solve the shelter crisis, and have asked the federal administration to expedite work permits, they ignore not only “the fact that 40% of the city’s homeless population is employed” (Bellafante 2023), but also that employment programs for migrants seeking asylum do not result in economic success and social mobility (Frazier and Van Riemsdijk 2021). Consequently, the latest arrivals of newcomers manage to find (precarious) employment but continually struggle to obtain affordable and long-term housing. They are constantly kept on the move and “mobile” in regard to spaces of housing and labor—quite literally, as they are repeatedly changing accommodation in the city (shelter, staying with friends, rough sleeping, temporary housing in overcrowded apartments) and as food and other delivery services have become the most relevant employers for and profiters of recent internationally displaced populations in New York (Silverstein 2023).
Berlin: migrants kept in shelter for profitmaking
In comparison, in Berlin, the displaced are being kept in shelters. Since 2016, the city has developed housing-like refugee accommodations, so-called MUFs (Modulare Unterkunft für Flüchtlinge, or modular housing for refugees). So far, 37 have been realized, housing around 15,000 internationally displaced people in total. MUFs are planned to be strategically opened to house populations that fall out of Berlin’s regular (and unaffordable) housing market, thereby developing refugee accommodation as a new form of substandard urban housing. This takes place through, first, the urban government’s intensive use of loopholes in the federal Refugee Building Law, which allows exemptions from regular planning, zoning, and building procedures and requirements for the development of refugee accommodation, and enables the possibility to develop land and to construct buildings in areas that were previously politically and legally not accessible and deemed unsuitable for residential use. Second, the city invented the Berlin-specific category of “status-changed refugee” for those who have been given protection and residency status but are forced to stay in accommodation because of the lack of housing. Currently, over 60% of people in MUFs hold this status: they are allowed to move out but fail to find housing and are thus kept in the shelter (and asylum) regime.
I argue that MUFs regulate and spatially fix displaced people as racialized surplus populations, while creating conditions for accumulation and value-making in three ways: first, through their racialization and recategorization as “refugees”—what Martin terms “status value”—they are assigned a specific position in relation to the capitalist circuits of value production. Like asylum-seeking migrants in New York City’s shelter system, they are secondarily exploited in relation to the sheltering space, industries, and services provided, which they are forced to rely on. Here, the displaced are made valuable by their excludability, confinement, and disciplined mobility. Second, “status-changed refugees” are allowed to work, often in the low-wage sector, and tend to become subject to primary hyper-exploitation. Considering that working “status-changed refugees” have to contribute to the costs of accommodation of up to 344 euros per person per month (regardless of income), their labor is expropriated for the financializing and expansion of Berlin’s accommodation market; the surplus value produced by refugees helps maintain a system of value that perpetually marginalizes them. Finally, the urban place they are forced to inhabit generates surplus value because, through the development of MUFs as a public–private investment, the access to and the production and restructuring of urban land and the built environment are made possible. Thus, what ultimately makes the provision of MUFs profitable is the future promise of a rent gap through development as well as the tax-financed builders’ and operators’ profits in the present (Smith 1979).
Racialized accumulation through multiplied displacement
In both cases, the governance of the displaced, including the combination of the precarious legal status created through the “racialized refugee regime and reception contexts,” neoliberal and place-specific urban migration and housing policies, as well as financialized and inaccessible housing markets, produce what can be termed multiplied displacement under racial capitalism. This points to three interrelated aspects. First, it illustrates that internationally displaced migrants experience a material and emotional sense of “repeated loss and lack of home” (Belloni and Massa 2021, p. 929), which continues to “rupture […] the connection between people and place.” In the urban realm, those experiences as much as displacement processes perpetuate and proliferate exponentially: One displacement (experience/process) is the basis for and may heighten the risk for (further) displacement to occur. Second, it explains that international and urban processes of displacement overlap in the urban realm: Internationally displaced migrants do not only face urban forms and processes of displacement (such as homelessness, evictions, informal settlements, and precarious housing in shelters). As we can see in New York’s and Berlin’s shelter systems, they often share space with, and are increasingly governed in relation to, internally/urban displaced people and those that fall off competitive housing markets in diverse spaces of displacement conflated through the logics and processes of racialized dispossession, violence, and governance. And third, it demonstrates that the repeated ruptures produced by multiplied displacement facilitate the uninterrupted process of accumulation of capital by dispossession and exploitation and through which “value is being derived from both people and places.” Therefore, multiplied displacement (as much as the “migrant crisis” in both cities) is related to “accumulation through dispossession by calling forth the specter of race,” which in both cases is necessary to enable and legitimize displacement and to translate the displaced “as differently valuable, as a form of surplus that can be capitalized on.”
In Berlin and New York City, multiplied displacement under racial capitalism unfolds against the backdrop of multi-scalar migration policy and legal systems and local variations of racialized accumulation processes, regulating surplus and exploitable populations through migration law, shelter and housing, and expropriative or exploitative forms labor. Because not only in these cities but around Europe and North America, the “migrant crisis” is frequently used as pretext to justify wide-sweeping austerity measures and to scapegoat migrants for the structural pitfalls of racialized and financialized housing and competitive labor markets, studying multiplied displacement is relevant for urban and migration scholars to capture the complexities of novel urban processes and the conditions, profit-making logics, and practices of the current restructuring of housing and labor markets. This includes a critical engagement with notions and frames of “migrant-friendly” sanctuary and solidarity cities and policies, which often extend neoliberal visions of the multiculturalist city (Houston and Lawrence-Weilmann 2016), overshadow the everyday brutalities of racial capitalism experienced by migrants and other urbanites, and soft-wash resistance, political struggle, and new coalitions that take place and emerge in both cities in manifold and relevant ways.
Bibliography
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- Belloni, M. and Massa, A. 2022. “Accumulated homelessness: Analysing protracted displacement along Eritreans’ life histories”, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 929–947.
- Fitzsimmons, E. G. 2023. “Eric Adams Slashes Budgets for Police, Libraries and Schools”, The New York Times, 16 November. Available online at the following URL: www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/nyregion/nyc-budget-cuts-schools-police-trash.html.
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Author’s Postscript
In the United States, Donald Trump has kicked off his second presidency with a slew of executive actions focused on border security and immigration, including efforts to further militarize the southern border, suspend asylum and the refugee resettlement program, eliminate birthright citizenship, restrict funding for sanctuary cities, and implement mass deportations of undocumented individuals. While many of these actions are likely to face legal challenges, Trump’s continued “war on asylum and immigration”—and against migrants and their advocates—will inevitably lead to more dangerous migration routes, heightened border violence and fatalities, the criminalization of those supporting migration and sanctuary efforts, and the further marginalization of asylum-seeking and other migrants, exacerbating their vulnerability to housing exclusion, labor exploitation, over-policing, and incarceration.
Meanwhile, private prison and detention corporations, along with companies providing security, deportation, and surveillance infrastructure and technology, anticipate lucrative contracts and stand to profit substantially. Trump’s war is expected to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars—money that will be cut from education and social services departments and funneled into the coffers of state agencies and private corporations that thrive on anti-immigration agendas.
However, Trump’s first presidency taught us, first, that violent immigration law enforcement and border securitization increase the risks and dangers of migration, but they will not deter individuals from seeking entry to the United States. Nor will such measures eliminate the presence of undocumented and other migrants. It taught us, second, that in the face of state repression, racism, and anti-migrant sentiment, solidarity networks, grassroots organizations, and pro-migrant movements can grow stronger or newly emerge. During Trump’s first presidency, these efforts often succeeded in protecting migrant and other marginalized communities. As Trump embarks on his second term, with intensified attacks on migrants and other vulnerable groups, these movements must become even more powerful and, importantly, intersectional to confront the challenges ahead.
Editors’ Postscript — Laura Wolf-Powers
A particularly disturbing aspect of the revanchism of Donald Trump’s second presidential term is the exuberance with which New York City mayor Eric Adams has pitched himself into the intensified atmosphere of anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence. Since Trump’s election, Adams has echoed his talking points about deporting “criminal aliens”; since the inauguration, his police department has eagerly collaborated in raids targeting the undocumented. For the past several months, moreover, law enforcement personnel have been busily converting economically desperate migrants into deportable criminals by issuing criminal summonses to sex workers, street vendors, and deliveristas. There is a simple political explanation for the mayor’s unctuous cruelty: under indictment for corruption and facing trial in April, he clearly hopes his pandering will yield him a pardon from the new Executive. As Trump unleashes a federal immigration policy regime bent on inflaming divisions and instilling fear, New York City’s once functional (if deeply flawed) municipal infrastructure for the incorporation and care of internationally displaced people is now in danger of being completely dismantled.