Abstract
Drawing upon a multi-site ethnography conducted in Ecuador between 2015 and 2017, this article analyses how, in the context of major constitutional progressiveness in migration matters, in the country of “universal citizenship”, various legal and social mechanisms were adopted which ended up confining regional and extra-continental migrants and refugees to embody situations of illegality, possible deportation and disposability. Four sections make up this article. The starting point is a theoretical review on neoliberal global border regime and how the legal production of migrant illegality is nodal for its functioning. Then, it analyses why Caribbean, African, and Middle Eastern immigrants chose Ecuador as their destination; what were the main setbacks and incongruities in migration policy; and how these impacted on the daily lives of immigrants to the point of multiplying their subsequent departures. The article concludes by stating that Ecuador’s progressive turn was not exempt from mechanisms analogous to the global neoliberal border control regime, a fact that helps to understand the role the Andean country plays in the geopolitics of contemporary migration: being a space for the production of illegalized migrants, or cheap labour force en route to the United States, a role that confirms its functionality as a connecting node within a much broader and more complex system of neoliberal control of mobility.
Keywords
migrant illegality; control; mobility; universal citizenship; post-neoliberalism