Iker Suarez, a cultural anthropologist who studies European neocolonialism and organises in anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements, insists on the second reading. He is coming to the Migrant Shelter on Friday, 23 January, with a book whose title is not designed for comfort: The Genocide of Migrants. His argument is blunt. Contemporary border policy is not a tragic malfunction of the system. It is a solution produced by the system.

Death as policy, not accident

Suarez starts from political economy rather than morality. Capitalism, he says, continually produces people who must move, because it continually destroys the conditions for staying.

The global development of capital displaces masses in Africa and West Asia, stripping people of property and livelihoods, while underdevelopment offers little paid work. Migration, in that sense, is not a ‘crisis’ that erupts out of nowhere. It is a structural outcome.

On the other side of the equation sits Europe, wealthier, more technologically advanced, and politically capable of choosing what kind of mobility it will tolerate. But the rich states of the global north, he argues, have neither the willingness nor the capacity to absorb everyone who is forced to move into stable employment and full social membership. Faced with those contradictions, the states with power ‘solve’ the problem through abandonment: by letting people die on the way.

This is what Suarez means when he uses the phrase ‘genocide of migrants’. He is not describing a single massacre with a signature. He is describing a regime that makes mass death predictable, repeatable, and administratively manageable, then calls it misfortune.

He points to events that Spain and Greece have lived through in recent years, and he speaks from research carried out in and around Melilla, the Moroccan enclave where Europe’s border violence is concentrated and normalised. If you want to understand the Aegean, he suggests, you should also look at the other side of the Mediterranean. Different geography, same function.

Where is colonialism now?

The interview moves from border deaths to the question beneath them: what is neocolonialism, and where does it operate today?

Suarez describes a mode of extraction that runs through the global economy, a systematic leakage of wealth from south to north. Some mechanisms are familiar: unequal exchange, the basic fact that the same amount of labour costs far less in the south than in the north, and that southern economies are routinely paid less on global markets. Wage gaps become a structural map of whose labour is valued, and whose life is treated as disposable.

But Suarez also places Southern Europe in a complicated middle position. Countries like Greece and Spain are not the ‘centre’ in the same way as the EU’s strongest states, but they are also not the ‘periphery’ in the way that Morocco, Libya, Egypt or parts of sub-Saharan Africa are forced to be. They reproduce the same accumulation logic while also experiencing dependency and pressure from stronger EU states.

The result is a hierarchy inside the hierarchy, with the border doing double work. It polices the movement of those from the global south, and it disciplines societies like Greece and Spain through permanent ‘frontline’ status, coercing them into acting as Europe’s violent buffer.

Racism is not a leftover.
It is infrastructure.

If the economic story explains why people move and why borders harden, it still leaves another question. How does a project that produces so much death manage to keep public consent, or at least public fatigue?

Suarez’s answer is that colonialism was never only about territory. It was also, from the beginning, about producing a racial Other.

He describes colonisation as a racist project from its earliest modern forms, and he points to the long intellectual work showing that since 1492 Europe has built itself through this act of racial constitution. Even earlier expansions, such as early Portuguese violence in Africa and racial hierarchies inside the Iberian Peninsula, fit the same pattern.

Official colonial administration may have ended, he argues, but the racist project remains. The vocabulary shifts. Where Europe once spoke openly of ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples, it now speaks of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations. The frame is updated, the hierarchy remains.

In the modern world, Suarez says, racism is woven into the global division of labour. It justifies why certain bodies are exploited more cheaply, moved more violently, detained more casually, and mourned less publicly. It also makes border death politically sustainable: if the dead are framed as lesser, the deaths become tolerable.

‘The people stealing from us are the people in power’

When the conversation turns to resistance, Suarez is careful not to offer sentimental answers. He does not argue that solidarity should be built on moral purity. He argues that it should be built on shared material interest and shared vulnerability.

‘We need to realise that the people who are really stealing from us are the people in power,’ he says in effect. The money missing from daily life is not taken by those with nothing. It is concentrated upward by those who already have plenty.

Then comes the warning that gives his argument a harder edge: the repressive technologies tested on migrants do not stay on migrants. Border militarisation, surveillance, detention regimes, deportation machinery, the routine suspension of rights, all of it can be normalised first against people made racially disposable. As crisis deepens, Suarez argues, the same state mechanisms will be used against the wider population, regardless of skin colour.

That is why he insists on class unity: building bonds between people whose lives are shaped by work, precarity, and shrinking purchasing power. Often, he says, the differences are language, citizenship, and the colour of skin. The shared condition is that both groups must sell their labour and both are being pushed further into insecurity.

The central political task, in his reading, is preventing the working class from being split into competing categories of worth.

Why the far right rises, and what the left must understand

Suarez does not treat far-right growth as a mystery. He sees it as a predictable political formation in conditions of impoverishment, where people are told there is no money, no housing, no welfare, no safety, and then offered a scapegoat who can be punished in public.

He notes that far-right movements have often used populist language, sometimes borrowing ‘social’ aesthetics at the beginning, before turning that energy into an explicitly violent, hierarchical programme. The key function, he argues, is to defend or strengthen privilege for sections of the western working class by dividing the global working class, isolating movements, and redirecting anger away from power.

His counter-argument remains economic and historical at the same time. If people understand that the violence inflicted on migrants is part of the same violence inflicted on them, through rent, food prices, wages, and precarious work, then the right’s economic story stops making sense. A programme that promises to ‘fix’ life by killing migrants at sea is not a solution to poverty. It is a redistribution of suffering downward.

To underline the point, Suarez reaches for an example that European memory often sanitises: Spain in the 1930s. Franco’s violence, he reminds us, was prepared in North Africa, tested on people whom racism made ungrievable, then imported back to ‘cleanse’ Spain. Colonial methods, rehearsed on the periphery, came home.

His implication is not rhetorical. If crises deepen, Europe should not assume it is immune to its own border logic. The border is not only a line that excludes others. It is also a laboratory for what states learn they can get away with.

A different starting point

Suarez is not asking people to adopt a new slogan. He is asking them to recognise a structure: capitalism displaces, Europe refuses to absorb, and border death becomes policy. Racism makes this policy survivable. The far right exploits scarcity by turning the migrant into the enemy, and the state perfects its tools of repression on the most disposable bodies first.

If that is the diagnosis, the response he proposes is not charity. It is alignment. Not because everyone is the same, but because the machinery that crushes migrants is part of the machinery that will eventually be used against everyone who cannot buy protection.

The title of his book is confrontational. That is the point. Europe does not need more euphemisms. It needs to answer a simpler question: when thousands keep dying, year after year, under policies designed to deter through danger, what exactly should we call that if not a crime with intent.

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