Nicholas De Genova on the production of illegality and the revolving doors of asylum, feat. Soledad Álvarez Velasco

Drawing on a lifetime shaped by activism, art, and encounters with migration, leading migration scholar Nicholas De Genova reflects on the ideas and political commitments behind his influential work on the production of migrant “illegality” and the cyclical nature of asylum.

He is joined by Soledad Álvarez Velasco, whose research follows migrants across Latin America and draws on her own experiences migrating from Ecuador. Together, they explore how asylum systems reproduce illegality, how race and colonial legacies shape migration control, and where hope and solidarity emerge amid exclusion and enforcement.

Guests: Nicholas De Genova, Professor, Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston; Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Illinois Chicago.

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Transcript

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research, new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field. Then we dig deeper to uncover the past that brought them here, the turning points, lived experiences, and insights that shape the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire. In the chat, established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present, and future of migration studies. From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next.

Today, our discussion focuses on Nicholas De Genova, a professor in the Department of comparative cultural studies at the University of Houston. He's a pivotal figure in anthropology and migration studies, recognized for his groundbreaking research on the production of illegality and the cyclical nature of asylum. But before we delve into the concepts, let's step back and trace the steps that brought him here. Nicholas de Genova grew up in Chicago, where issues of race and class permeated everyday life.

Nicholas De Genova  

I was born and raised in Chicago and grew up on the southwest side of the city, in a working-class neighborhood. It was a predominantly white working-class area and was deeply racist. This is a part of the city where, where I grew up, was literally one mile away from a racial boundary line, where one crosses a single street, and on the other side was an all-black neighborhood, and on the side that I lived was basically an all-white neighborhood. You know, those, those facts were very formative for me, because it meant that I had been acutely attuned to questions of race and racism from a very young age. Racism, in the context where I grew up was absolutely normative and totally normal. There was a kind of deep hostility and aggressive kind of distrust and resentment that was expressed among whites, particularly toward African Americans, but that really sort of pervaded the outlook of white people toward anybody who was deemed to not be white. Where I grew up in Chicago, was not very far from a place where neo-Nazis had an office with a swastika flag on display. So, I have a childhood memory of seeing people in Nazi uniforms standing on street corners handing out flyers. My early childhood environment was one where neo-Nazi flyers were posted to street posts, and using a racist epithet basically communicated that black people should beware and were not welcomed in that neighborhood. So those kinds of things are very palpable and poignant memories, but they're but they were pervasive.

Maggie Perzyna  

In addition to navigating the stark racism of his neighborhood, Nicholas also grappled with challenges at home. With a brother and sister who are significantly older, he was thrust into the tumult of teenage life from a tender age, sharpening his awareness of the world around him.

Nicholas De Genova  

I had a brother and sister who were 11 and 10 years older than me, so from a very young age, I was exposed to the world of my teenaged brother and sister. I think it contributed to making me precocious, because I was attuned to things that were part of their world and, you know, and their interests that may not have been true for other kids my age. My parents separated when I was also rather young, and I, as I say, was much younger. So, it means that I also grew up differently than my my older brother and sister did. My mother separated from my father, and I lived with her from those years forward, but also was left to my own devices, and so it was pretty fiercely independent, as well.

Maggie Perzyna  

As Nicholas's family dynamic evolved, his experience of the city expanded. He witnessed the neighborhoods around him transforming and their residents responding to the changes they saw around them. These converging forces struck a chord and piqued his curiosity.

Nicholas De Genova  

I would sort of have you know the experience of growing up with both the influences of my father on the one side, who I saw on weekends, and my stepfather with whom I lived. And I mentioned that in part because my stepfather was born and raised in the neighborhood that, over time, became one of the most sort of important Mexican migrant neighborhoods in Chicago. Was kind of synonymous with as the sort of center of political and cultural organizing in the Mexican community. It had originally been a bohemian neighborhood that then became a Polish neighborhood, and my Polish American stepfather was born and raised there and continued to work there during my childhood. So, it meant that I was recurrently connected to that neighborhood from a young age, and it meant that then I became curious about Mexican migration and, you know, and that ended up having an impact on shaping my interests later.

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas describes himself as an artistic person. He's obsessed with photography and loves music. Growing up at the dawn of the rap era, it's perhaps not so surprising that Nicholas's master's thesis focused on rap music, a genre that holds a special place in his heart.

Nicholas De Genova  

I was partly drawn to rap music because of the explicit politics at stake in what the more politicized versions of rap music were articulating. What I discovered in the course of that was that there was also a complex racial politics being articulated in forms that didn't necessarily look political or appear political. You had more radical political perspectives being articulated in some hip hop but you also had a complex politics of race being articulated in things that otherwise on the surface might not have been recognized or thought of as political.

Maggie Perzyna  

Just as rap music was the creative response to adversity, the poverty and gang violence that marked American inner cities in the 70s and 80s, the inequality that Nicholas witnessed found a natural outlet in activism geared to driving real change.

Nicholas De Genova  

In my early academic life, I had become a political activist as a teenager, and so questions of race and class were at the center of things that I was interested in when I began my career as an academic. In my activism, I was deeply involved with various kinds of political activities, and that led me to be in contact with a group of Mexican migrant factory workers with whom I did a lot of political work and was active, as I say, rather intensively. It means that I rather than an "aha moment", per se, it means that their experience was very formative for me and really shaped my ability to try to think seriously about my own politics. So, thinking about the things that I cared about at that stage in my life, my encounter through my activism, with people who had migrated from Mexico, you know, really kind of opened my eyes to thinking about various questions in new ways.

Maggie Perzyna  

But Nicholas soon found out that it can be tricky to balance the lives of an activist and an academic researcher.

Nicholas De Genova  

I thought of my real profession in life and my real vocation in life to be as a political activist committed to social and political change, and that informed the choices I made at that juncture in my life about pursuing a particular career of one sort or another. That is to say, I was interested in studying things that I thought were relevant, but I also was already at that young age, inclined to think that I would pursue an academic career. And part of the reason was rather naive. I imagined that becoming an academic would leave me free to do a lot of activism, which is to say I, you know, sort of saw the benefits and the advantages of having more flexibility with my time that I perceived to be true of an academic as kind of giving me more freedom to commit myself to the thing that I thought was much more important and urgent, which was being an activist. And of course, what one learns in the course of making an academic career is, in fact, that's not true. That being an academic you affect. Actively have two jobs, not one, because in addition to the day to day, everyday life of being an academic professional, teaching and mentoring and doing university service and so forth, you also have this other job, which is to produce scholarship and you know, and to write and publish.

Maggie Perzyna  

As we know, Nicholas has a knack for adapting to his environment. During the Covid 19 lockdown, he leaned on his love for creating art and hosted the first four episodes of a podcast called, Metropolis Rising. While the world around him was isolated and socially distanced. Nicholas found a way to find connection by leveraging his knowledge and passion to highlight stories of injustice.

Nicholas De Genova  

It was an interest in experimenting with a new format that could, sort of, you know, pursue some of the kinds of things that one does as an ethnographer, terms of eliciting people's life histories and perspectives and experiences through an interview format, but it was a interest in then, in sort of using some of that history in order to connect with people who I knew or had connections to in one way or another, related to various kinds of social and political struggles.

Maggie Perzyna  

Like with all our guests, we asked Nicholas what he wants to be remembered for as a professional.

Nicholas De Genova  

I suppose I would say that I want to be remembered for an uncompromising commitment to my ideals and beliefs and an integrity about the pursuit of a critical truth associated with those ideals and beliefs. If one knows my full biography, one already understands that I've undergone some extraordinary things in my life, and all of it really revolves around the fact that I have been committed to certain ideals and beliefs that have been sort of there to define and shape my career, both as a scholar and as a person.

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas's influence on the migration field is far reaching and undeniable. But even with his list of accomplishments, he's most proud of the community he's built.

Nicholas De Genova  

I guess I would say that I have cultivated a series of collegial relationships, but also networks of collaboration over the years with a variety of people who share many of the, you know share many of the basic ethical and political motives that I do, without that implying any kind of rigid or rigorous or comprehensive, dogmatic sort of agreement. I nonetheless feel like I've been able to build around me and participate in building with other networks and communities of scholarship that are informed by shared sensibilities and shared perspectives.

Maggie Perzyna

Now that we've heard Nicholas De Genova's journey, we're bringing him back. This time joined by another leading migration scholar. Dr Soledad Álvarez Velasco is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research follows migrants as they move through Latin America, across Ecuador, Colombia, and Central America, in search of safety and opportunity. They're both here to help us understand how asylum systems can trap people in limbo, and what it means to rethink borders from the ground up. Nicholas, Soledad, welcome to the show. 

Nicholas De Genova  

Thank you, Maggie.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

Thank you, Maggie, nice to be here.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, Nicholas, you've argued that illegality isn't something migrants do, but something that governments create. Can you walk us through what you mean by the production of illegality and where that process begins?

Nicholas De Genova  

Yeah, I guess in the most pared down and simple sense, we are conditioned to imagine that a migrant is quote, unquote "illegal" because a migrant has somehow violated the law. So, it lends itself to the idea of illegality as something that is the effect of what migrants do. What I try to do in my work is show that historically, the law is a field of active intervention that produces illegality. So, the law becomes the kind of tool, or weapon, if you like, that is able to define certain kinds of legality and illegality into existence, and that means that illegality is produced very far from the border. But we're constantly conditioned to imagine that illegality is first and foremost about some humble migrant transgressing a border. Border violating a border.

Maggie Perzyna  

Soledad, your connection to this topic is personal. You were a child when you and your family moved from Ecuador to Brazil and back again. How did that experience shape your research?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco

Yes, my experience migrating took place at a very young age when my mom and I migrated to Brazil. I was four years old when I left Ecuador and we went there because she was preceding her studies, and it was my first experience of being uprooted from my country, my language, my culture, customs, and I would say, my deepest affections. And at the same time of becoming rooted in a new place that was completely strange for me. That was Rio de Janeiro, where I had to, with my mom, rebuild a home, learn Portuguese and embrace a Carioca way of life. But I think that what marked my experience that was already a huge thing, was that I had to go back to Ecuador and return after years later and confront a place that supposedly was my place, but it wasn't. And this is something I've been reflecting upon later then. At a very young age, I was already dealing with this complex quality of uprooting and rerouting, and now I understand that that's the main imprint of migrating, of traversing this geography of uncertainty, not knowing how to fit. And this is something that has accompanied me, because later on, I continue to migrate, due to study and work reasons, to various other places, including the UK, where I met Nicholas. But I would say that that first migration, and also the fact that I was born in a country that as many countries in Latin America is a transnational country. Is a country that has been built by its diaspora. Every single economic and political crisis of Ecuador since the 1960s has been contested by massive migrations, and that explains why Ecuadorians are amongst the largest South American and Latin American communities in the US, but also in Europe. So, that was the way in which, not only I embodied migration myself, but also, I was already part of a migrant community, because I am from Ecuador. So, I do think that that Maggie, our biographies undoubtedly shape what we study, what we write and what we commit with.

Nicholas De Genova  

if I could just add something. Soledad, you live in Chicago, which is currently a city occupied by Donald Trump's anti-immigrant police state. You know that too is a very pertinent kind of example of your experience being a Latina and being a Spanish speaker in a context where that is targeted very explicitly for immigration enforcement.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

Yeah, absolutely. Nicholas and one of the things that for me, has been very difficult to deal with. It's not only being a migrant myself here in Chicago, but also being engaged with my own community, my compatriots, Indigenous people from Ecuador that are now are being targeted, chased, imprisoned and being able to witness and be with them in the forefront, how they are dealing with the brutalities of this radical anti-migrant turn.

Maggie Perzyna  

Yeah, it's something we're watching from a distance, and it's horrible to see, but it's encouraging to see the solidarity that you find within your community. You both argue that asylum systems often reproduce illegality instead of resolving it. So, why do you think that happens, and what would it take to break that cycle?

Nicholas De Genova  

Nicholas, the simple fact is that asylum systems are predicated on suspicion. The working assumption and premise of every asylum system is not that people are deserving of asylum, but rather that people are suspect and that their petitions for asylum have to be adjudicated by governmental authorities who presume to determine whether they are bona fide and legitimate and deserving or not. The great majority of people who apply for asylum are rejected, and so many times people then, you know, kind of evaporate, so to speak, into illegality, because that's the only option left.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

To talk about the South American case, which is where. I have studied in depth, I would say, and agreeing with what Nicholas said, there is a central paradox, because on paper, what we have are asylum systems that supposedly are open and right space. For example, if we think about the 1984 Cartagena declaration that expanded the regional understanding of asylum. We might think such a thing what happens in the US or in Europe or Australia wouldn't fit there. However, and this is something that I've learned from working with asylum seekers from many parts of the Global South, the so-called Global South, that they reach from Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, but also South Americans seeking protection within South America, and they are also legally produced as illegalized subjects. Why? Because even though there's this incredible framework, there's a mismatch between the legality and its practice confining migrants to live in a legal limbo. So, although the law guarantees the right to asylum, they are de facto irregular because they lack formal immigration status, and that prolonged waiting socially produces illegality, so migrants are being irregularized, exploited and in many cases, also detained and deported.

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas, you've described us, Mexico border enforcement as a kind of revolving door where people are admitted and rejected in cycles that never really end. What does that image tell us about how migration control actually works?

Nicholas De Genova  

First and foremost, that processes of deportation are always accompanied and always exist alongside a more permanent fact of importation, if we think of the border, and this could be true of many different borders around the world, but the US-Mexico border in particular. If we think of the border as a revolving door, then we understand that there's a simultaneity to the fact that while some people are deported, others are being attracted and in fact, enthusiastically imported and enlisted, recruited for their labour. And this has always been true of the US-Mexico border. I developed this argument in particular relation to Mexican migration to the United States, but it certainly applies more widely. The particular way in which the great majority of people crossing the US-Mexico border are recruited as labour for many decades now, has been as illegalized migrant labour. This is a process that produces them as illegalized migrant workers, who then are more vulnerable to the recriminations of the law, who are more susceptible to deportation, who are then conditioned to accept labour conditions in the migrant context that tend to make them more tractable, more available for extraordinary forms of exploitation. So, all of these things contribute to actually producing a labour force of choice, a labour, you know, a labour force that employers are actually very eager to employ, precisely because they're vulnerable, precisely because they're precarious. So, there's a kind of continuous process whereby people are being effectively recruited and listed as migrant labour, but under the worst possible circumstances for them as workers, and alongside of that, they're susceptible to deportation, and it means that some people are deported, but most remain undeported as illegalized migrants.

Nicholas De Genova  

Soledad, you've said that Nicholas' work shows how illegality isn't just a legal issue, but a social one, linked to race, class and gender. How did that help you make sense of what you're seeing in Ecuador and across Latin America?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

On the one hand, we need to understand that South America and in this discrepancy between the law and its practice, there's a gray area, gray zone in which illegality expands, and in great reason it has to do because there is a colonial legacy of racism that has been imprinted in the first migration loss in Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil and many others where racial selectivity has been predominant. The first laws openly stated that European and something like white migration was privileged in an effort to improve the race. And although this state policy of whitening has been explicitly eliminated, in practice, racism has persisted as a key way of generating suspicion and as a form of illegalizing migrants, especially migrants that come from African, Middle Eastern, and the black Caribbean. In a way, I would say that this has a clear anti-blackness trait that prevails in South America. And you can tell that when talking with migrants, when conducting my research, my ethnographical work with people coming from Nigeria, Haiti, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Syria, Iraq, they were telling me that this suspicious gaze, this racialized, suspicious gaze, was imprinted on them, even though they had all their papers on rule, and that suspicious look would take place when they landed, when they crossed border checkpoints at airports, and this is the case In Ecuador, in Brazil, when migrants come in from African countries or the Middle Eastern countries, they are taken to secondary inspections, to filters, and sometimes they are refused their entry.

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas, you call for imagining a world without borders and Soledad, you've also written about putting migrant voices and knowledge at the center. How do these two visions speak to each other, and what would a more humane system look like? Nicholas, perhaps we can start with you.

Nicholas De Genova  

When we look at people migrating, particularly people migrating without authorization, without permission, people who come to be illegalized, they're putting their human needs and their aspirations and desires above and against the law, the state, the border police. They're actually in practice, in action, objectively engaging in a kind of diminutive version of border abolitionism. Masses of people all over the world are actually engaged in making changes in the world by deserting certain conditions that are intolerable and crossing borders in the pursuit of the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their loved ones. They're actually putting into practice the desire for a different world. In the processes of migration and the perspective of migrants, one can begin to formulate and conceptualize a larger understanding of how a world crisscrossed by barbed wire borders is not the only world that's possible, that another world is possible. That we can begin to ask radically open-ended questions about how to reconceive of the world and remake the world. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Soledad?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

First and foremost, we need to understand that mobility is not an anomaly, but a central part of life. A central part of the way in which for centuries and centuries human beings we have been rebuilding our world geographies. And that's what migrants are teaching us all the time. So, if we want to rethink about migration, the first step needs to recenter what migrants name as 'ell saber migrante'. This is migrant knowledge as a source of struggle. ‘El saber migrante’ as a source of struggle that understands how power structures have been operating, and at the same time how these structures are being contested. I would also say that the way in which people, migrants are telling their stories about struggles allows us to see them, not as numbers, but seeing them as human beings in struggle, and that their struggles are connected with other struggles of people that have been historically oppressed, and in this intersection, I would say that we can definitely rethink and recreate a more humane system to understand mobility. And I think that this is something that is happening, that is happening in many parts of the world, and the need to go and listen carefully and radically is a critical way to reconstruct a demonic narrative of the state, of the media and, in a way, reproduce other counter narratives that now are needed more than ever.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, I mean, I feel like we've already touched on this in the last few minutes. But despite everything, you've both seen the violence, the exclusion, you both are still talking about hope and solidarity. Where do you see that hope today?

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas?

Nicholas De Genova  

Yeah, it's a difficult question, particularly in a difficult moment, because certainly in the United States today, things look quite grim. On the other hand, what is hopeful is that even in the face of these Gestapo-like tactics and police state militarization that has been escalated by the Trump administration, what's remarkable and provides an enduring basis for hope is that people are refusing and resisting these things in a variety of ways. In many cases, you know, bystanders have mobilized immediately, spontaneously, sporadically, to confront the enforcement agents. You know, we've seen this right from the very beginning when immigration raids escalated in California. But one of the sort of forms of organizing that has been particularly potent is that people are mobilized in very local ways to alert each other, so that you have a rapid response whenever immigration enforcement agents are visible whenever they appear, you have people mobilizing locally to garner some form of resistance to their presence, to alert their neighbors of the dangers that are imminent. So, you know that, for me, is a great source of hope and a great inspiration. A deeper and more general sense of hope is that ordinary people who migrate all over the world, who put at risk their own lives, ultimately, people who uproot themselves and disrupt everything about the life that they know In favor of aspiring to create something better for themselves are, in an active sense, putting their human needs first and objectively. Through their actions, they're putting into place a demand for a different way of life in which human needs would prevail over and against these kinds of repressive laws and the borders that define our world today.

Maggie Perzyna  

Soledad, last thoughts?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

I would say that being here in Chicago has been a hope in itself, because I think that the strategy now is going local and going local in order to direct communities that are able to multiply ways of resistance, from building kids with whistles and pamphlets with know your rights, to demonstrations, suddenly, a sense of solidarity, that we are all together in the same fight because the city is being attacked has been an incredible source of hope that, in a way, you know, it has connected me back with my home country. Why? Because Ecuador is a country that has been shaped by the Indigenous struggle, and when I see what's happening here in terms of protecting migrant lives, I do think this resonates. Conversely, it resonates because we are connected. It connects other struggles, feminist movements, the demands of Afro descendants and indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+, all of us, we are traversed by borders. So, seeing that, you know, in a city in which I've been living for the past almost three years, and in this brutal moment, has gave me hope in terms that it is possible to go local and connect. The second thing is that I increasingly see a connection with other places across the region in which many other forms of resistance are also taking place. I think that the digital space is an incredible tool of connection, of resistance, but also to be able to see what we are doing. And I would end by saying something that I've learned from the people of my country from people that are part of the Indigenous movement. The peoples of the Abya Yala were moving across that territory that became the Americas after the European invasion, and they have been resisting for the past 500 years. And when they see the brutalities that are happening in Ecuador now, but that are also happening with migrants in this country, they say this is one more resistance of the many others that we have been doing for the past centuries. And we are here. We won't go and we will resist back and again. So, I do think that our connections with the many struggles going local are the ways in which hope can multiply.

Maggie Perzyna  

I think that's a great note to end on. Before I let you go, we are doing something a little new this season. We're going to end off with a quick little lightning round. I'm just going to throw out some questions, and you just give me the first thing that comes to mind. Okay?

Nicholas De Genova  

Okay?

Maggie Perzyna  

All right. So, what is your favorite book? Nicholas?

Nicholas De Genova 

The Trial by Franz Kafka.

Maggie Perzyna  

Soledad?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

Rayuela, by Julio Cortazar.

Maggie Perzyna  

The favourite place that you've done field work or research. Soledad?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

I have two favourite places: one the Mexico Guatemala border, and particularly Tapachula. And Golfo De Uraba, particularly Necoclí.

Nicholas De Genova  

And really my ethnographic research was entirely in Chicago, which is also my hometown. So, I would have to say that.

Maggie Perzyna  

Okay and for the last one, what is one thing about you that we can't learn from your CV? Soledad?

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

That I love plants. I love gardening, and I think that connecting with your question of hope, they give me hope. You know, seeing how they grow, and how they change and how they flourish, that's what gives me hope. I'm a gardener.

Maggie Perzyna  

Nicholas?

Nicholas De Genova  

I do the kind of work that I feel motivated to do for reasons of beliefs and ideals and principles, but it means that I try to only do the kind of work that brings me joy, so when it comes to the kinds of work that make me feel alienated and oppressed, I'm very lazy.

Maggie Perzyna  

All right, we made it through. Thank you both so much. You were wonderful. And, yeah, it was a great conversation.

Nicholas De Genova  

Thanks Maggie and thanks Soledad.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco  

And thank you Nicholas, thank you, Maggie.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks so much to Nicholas De Genova and Soledad Álvarez Velasco for joining me today and thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student Kristian Cuarezma alongside executive producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you're enjoying Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.