Sebastian Cobarrubias

Senior Fellow in the cluster "In/equalities in the context of social transformation processes (focus on Southeast and Central Europe)"

Producing “Race” through Migration Management in Spain

The interrelations between Race and Migration politics are a topic of increasing recognition and concern in Migration and Border Studies. This talk will present a preliminary thread of research exploring the intersections of racialization and migration policy in the case of Spain. The Spanish case is currently an interesting one in which contradictory tendencies seem to coincide: on the one hand an openness toward regularization, and on the other hand a discriminatory citizenship regime based on the notion of “cultural connection” plus longstanding programs of border externalization. In this complex mix, this research seeks to explore if and how current migration policies are producing processes of hierarchization among populations along racial lines. If so, how does this racialization occur when such migration policy is put into practice?  Our preliminary work suggests that the post-colonial trajectory of Spain (and its memory) shapes its current national approach to migration in important and often unexpected ways.  This longer term post-colonial trajectory coincides with processes of European integration and electoral political dynamics. The goal of this work is to explore the specifics of how migration politics and racialization intersect in a concrete case and to contribute to a broadening of racialization theory from its predominantly Black Atlantic base.

Sebastian Cobarrubias is a researcher at ARAID, the Research & Development Foundation of Aragon, in the Geography Department of the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has been steadily contributing to the field of Migration and Border Studies, publishing in journals such as Political Geography, Antipode, and Geopolitics. He is a founding board member of the NGO Border Forensics, and a Section Editor for Oxford Intersections: Borders. He is currently investigating the citizenship regime in Spain as a case of racial preference.