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How Does Race Structure Experiences of Migration, and Shape Understandings of Who is Considered A ‘Migrant’? Illustrate Drawing on Relevant Scholarship and Empirical Examples.

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Word Count: 1965

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework. 3

Race and the Differential Experiences of Migration. 5

Who is Considered a Migrant under Racialised Boundaries?. 7

Implications and Contemporary Debates. 8

Conclusion. 9

References. 10

Introduction

Migration is a key characteristic of modern global dynamics, defining population redistribution, labour markets, and cross-border social relations (Charles-Edwards et al., 2023). Migration occurs in various forms, including labour migration, racial disparities, forced displacement, and expatriate mobility. Central to this inequality lies race, defined as a socially constructed hierarchy of difference that structures power and opportunity (Sharpe, 2024). The racialisation process provides meaning to perceived racial categories, making a difference in how migrants are ruled, represented, and treated in host societies (Bautista-Chavez et al., 2024). A migrant is defined generally as someone crossing boundaries, but white professionals are usually referred to as expatriates, whereas Global South workers are classified as migrants, following racialised double standards (De Carvalho, 2023). Likewise, refugees from areas like the Middle East are regularly constructed as threats to security, in opposition to the greater sympathy with which culturally proximate groups are received, as European recent refugee crises attest (Osiewicz, 2017). This essay contends that race not only organises migrants’ everyday lives, like discrimination, labour market segmentation, and rights access, but also organises conceptions of who counts as a migrant. Utilising Critical Race Theory, postcolonial insights and empirical examples from the Gulf, North America, and Europe, the essay initially describes theoretical agendas, then discusses racialised migration experiences, before exploring how race organises the classification of migrants.

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

Examining how race shapes migration demands theoretical frameworks that can bring into view the mechanisms through which racial hierarchies and global power differentials condition both experience and categories of mobility. Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers a key point of departure because it suggests that racism is not an exception but rather a normalised aspect of law, policy, and institutional arrangement (Baylor, 2023). Transposed to the context of migration, CRT assists in revealing how race-neutral immigration laws perpetuate racialised exclusions, be it through restrictive asylum processes, monitoring of particular migrant communities, or differentiated access to entitlements (Bautista-Chavez et al., 2024). Because of this, CRT is crucial in ascertaining why Black, Brown, and Muslim migrants are increasingly being constructed as illegal or undeserving compared to white migrants.

Postcolonial interpretations take this further by showing how contemporary migration regimes are intensely forged by colonial histories. Said’s Orientalism shows how the West has consistently positioned the East as backwards, threatening, or exotic and how such orientalist discourses also come to define migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (Ranjan, 2015). Postcolonial theory is also able to clarify how colonial patterns of labour extraction and South–North unevenness underpin current South–North migratory flows, yet simultaneously subject non-Western migrants to enhanced securitisation and exploitation (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2024). These findings address the reasons why some groups are being racialised as undesirable migrants and others as desirable contributors. The distinction between migrant and expatriate illustrates how class and race come together to construct the social meaning of mobility. White professionals from the Global North are typically referred to as expats, and the term is imbued with meanings of privilege, option, and cosmopolitanism. In contrast, African, Asian, or Latin American migrants in those same places are stigmatised by the label of migrant, usually with residues of marginality or burden (De Carvalho, 2023). This illustrates how race is at the core of determining who is considered a migrant. Lastly, intersectionality enriches this by acknowledging that race intersects with gender, class, and legality. Women migrant domestic and care workers, for instance, are not just racialised as foreigners but gendered through stereotypes of servitude and docility (Topali, 2024). Likewise, research indicates that migrant belonging is constructed both by racialised states and through the processual struggles of negotiating class, gender, and ethnicity simultaneously (Scuzzarello and Moroşanu, 2023). Thus, these frameworks demonstrate that migration is raced at various levels, including institutionally through governance and law, historically through legacies of colonialism, discursively through categorical divisions, and experientially through intersecting identities.

Race and the Differential Experiences of Migration

Labour migration is extremely shaped by racial hierarchies that accord varying values to workers based on their place of origin. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Gulf States, where South Asian migrants fill low-skilled sectors like construction and domestic work but continue to be denied rights, citizenship, and social inclusion. Their work is made disposable, regulated under securitarian sponsorship regimes, and heavily racialised as cheap and interchangeable (Mustaqeem, 2025). In contrast, Western professionals in the Gulf are typically expatriates and receive better remuneration, mobility, and status even when doing work comparable to that of  South Asian or African labourers (De Carvalho, 2023). This contrast shows how race and class intersect to create profoundly different migration experiences. Racialised hierarchies are also deeply embedded within care and domestic work, in which women migrant workers from the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations are frequently subjected to exploitation and infantilisation. These women’s identities are racialised along with gendered stereotypes of docility, servitude, and maternal sacrifice, which employers deploy to rationalise lower pay and greater control over workers’ autonomy (Topali, 2024). These examples highlight the ways race not only distinguishes access to work but also configures how migrants are imagined and disciplined in daily life.

In addition to labour, migrants are also racially discriminated against and excluded in host countries. In Europe, African and Middle Eastern migrants are traditionally portrayed as cultural strangers and security menaces, subjected to Islamophobic narratives and exclusionary integration policies (Nawwar, 2021). These processes universalise Said’s Orientalist logics, under which Global South migrants are envisioned as incompatible with European modernity (Ranjan, 2015). In contrast, intra-EU migrants like Poles or Romanians are less restricted in their movement and settlement, although still treated to class-based wage discrimination, as witnessed in the UK case of Eastern European workers versus Somali migrants, who encounter racialised exclusion and distrust (Felbo-Kolding and Leschke, 2021). This contrast clarifies how Europeanness functions as a racialised marker of belonging. Racialisation also influences documentation and legal precarity. Along the U.S.–Mexico border, immigration enforcement overwhelmingly stops Latinx migrants through racial profiling, but white migrants are frequently able to avoid scrutiny (Bautista-Chavez et al., 2024). In the UK, the Windrush scandal exacerbated how racialised migrants, being legally recognised as Commonwealth citizens, were victimised by hostile environment policies that required evidence of citizenship many could not readily offer. The scandal demonstrates how Black Caribbean migrants were deprived of rights through a system that linked race to illegitimacy (Slaven, 2021). Together, these examples demonstrate that race is not on the periphery but at the centre of organising migration. It determines who becomes an expatriate and not a migrant, whose work is valued or diminished, and whose presence is criminalised or securitised.

Who is Considered a Migrant under Racialised Boundaries?

The usage of the term migrant is not uniform; rather, its application is a reflection of racialised hierarchies that determine who is considered rightfully in place and who is eternally other. The expatriate versus migrant dichotomy provides one of the most obvious examples. White professionals in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East are frequently termed expats, a term that signifies privilege, agency, and movement, while African or Asian employees in Europe are always labelled as migrants, a designation that entails suffering, precariousness, and marginalisation (De Carvalho, 2023). This contrast illustrates how whiteness possesses a kind of mobility capital that releases some from the migrant label. These distinctions carry on over generations. In Europe, citizens of African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian background, even those born and brought up there, remain stigmatised as migrants, whereas white mobility, like British pensioners in Spain, is seldom accorded the same typification (Sharpe, 2024). The continuing presence of these double standards indicates how race, rather than law, determines who is regarded as a migrant.

Media and political rhetoric entrench these racialised boundaries. The construction of the 2015 European refugee crisis branded Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees as dangerous, frequently depicted in Islamophobic terms of cultural incompatibility and threat (Osiewicz, 2017). Compared to this, Ukrainian refugees in 2022 were received with compassion, solidarity, and a swift policy response to enable protection and resettlement. This brutal contrast is indicative of a racialised double standard in humanitarianism: white refugees are accepted, while racialised refugees are criminalised and securitised (Nawwar, 2021). Likewise, when Europeans travel, policymakers and the press tend to speak of an expat community, whereas they use the term migrant crisis when racialised populations travel, perpetuating discursive hierarchies normalising white mobility and pathologising non-white mobility (Bautista-Chavez et al., 2024).

Racialised belonging is also expressed at the level of everyday relations. Coloured citizens in Europe are regularly asked where they are from as a means of placing them in a state of permanent outsiders despite citizenship or generational connection (Scuzzarello and Moroşanu, 2023). These exclusions are reflective of structural processes through which Indigenous and diasporic groups are recategorised or erased, again illustrating how categorisations of migrants are invested in racialised logics (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2024). Together, they reveal that to be counted as a migrant is not merely a function of border crossing but an effect of racialised power. Whiteness tends to protect people from the category of migrant, while racialised groups are continually framed as foreign, temporary, and misplaced, even when they have legal belonging.

Implications and Contemporary Debates

Contemporary migration is structurally arranged by racial hierarchies, which organise border regimes, deportation regimes, and protection regimes. The deployment of migration law by states tends to be selective, where they target racialised groups disproportionately. For example, deportation regimes hugely impact Global South migrants, mirroring historical exclusion and subordination (Fennelly and Murphy, 2021). Such practices indicate that race is not on the periphery of migration rule but at the heart of how states justify belonging and exclusion. These dynamics also apply to global inequalities of mobility rights. Passport and visa policies create a global order of movement, wherein Western citizens enjoy expansive mobility while Global South citizens experience restriction, bureaucratic delays, and suspicion. This asymmetry recapitulates colonial continuities and perpetuates dependency and immobility for poorer states (Tsegay, 2023). Migration then depends not only on economic resources but on racialised citizenship categories that mark some bodies as “risky” and others as safe (Hajro, 2021).

The effects of these hierarchies are seen in integration, citizenship, and identity. Racialised migrants within Europe tend to be subject to securitisation and surveillance that view them as outsiders even after naturalisation, undermining belonging and generating intergenerational exclusion (Killen, Elenbaas and Ruck, 2022). Integration policies, instead of erasing inequalities, often reiterate them by requiring assimilation but not full recognition (Hamza, 2015). Such obstacles have generated appeals to decolonise migration studies and call for scholars to ask questions of how descriptors such as “migrant,” “refugee,” or “expatriate” are racialised categories steeped in imperial histories (Fennelly and Murphy, 2021). Through the prioritising of race and coloniality, critical research reveals the illusory neutrality of migration politics and calls for rethinking mobility in non-Eurocentric terms. In conclusion, migration is not merely border crossing but a racialised phenomenon that reproduces global inequalities, shapes citizenship, and signals unresolved colonial heritages.

Conclusion

This essay has demonstrated that race fundamentally organises not only the experience of migration but also the limits of who counts as a migrant. Through Critical Race Theory, we can observe how ostensibly neutral policy perpetuates racial exclusions, and postcolonial analysis brings out the continuity of imperial hierarchies to shape mobility. Empirical evidence from the Gulf, North America, and Europe continues to demonstrate how racialised migrants are discriminated against, exploited, and securitised, while whiteness often exempts them from the label of migrant, as in the case of expatriate distinction. Finally, migration is not just movement between places but the racialised structuring of mobility, rights, and belonging. Thus, migration involves putting race at the centre as an important analytical tool to uncover and explore how global inequalities and legacies of colonialism continue to be inscribed in migration regimes today.

References

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