Constructive (in)visibility and the trafficking industrial complex: Leveraging borders for exploitation

Abstract This paper explores the heterogeneity of migrant visibility across space and time, analysing where and how Eritrean forced migrants travelling along the Central Mediterranean Route are made visible or disappeared at various scales and how their (in)visibility is mobilised by other actors for profit. We point to three heterogeneous forms of (in)visibility—hypervisibility, invisibilisation and selective visibility—that frame, justify and help perpetuate a system of migrant exploitation, extortion and human trafficking. Drawing from three tranches of interviews with human trafficking survivors and migrants from Eritrea, government officials, suprastate actors, CSO employees and other stakeholders in Sudan, Libya and Ethiopia conducted between March 2021 and April 2022, we explore the dynamic interplay between representation and policy in the experiences of vulnerable migrants. We develop the term constructive (in)visibility to describe the ways in which migration governance visibilises Eritrean migrants in aggregate as threats, commodities and victims, while simultaneously invisibilising them as individuals and rights bearers. Policy responses to the hypervisibility of the ‘crime’ and ‘magnitude’ of irregular migration leave migrants vulnerable to a chain of predatory actors who see and know irregular migratory routes. Selectively deployed and leveraged borders allow profiteers to benefit from the restrictions on mobility and limitations on protections of irregular migrants, while international investments in restrictionist, externalised migration policies finance actors involved or complicit in migrant smuggling and human trafficking. The mutually reinforcing cycle of constructive (in)visibilisation and repressive policy thus facilitates the establishment of what we define as a trafficking industrial complex—a necrocapitalist market in migrants—that profits from their abandonment, exposing them to abduction, extortion and death.