“Europe” in “Latin America”

This chapter bridges research on migrant illegality and inequality at the colonial crossroads of Europe and Latin America—specifically, in the borderland shared by the Brazilian state of Amapá and the French overseas department of Guyane (French Guiana). The chapter opens with a terminological and spatial (re)orientation, followed by a historical contextualization that challenges the naturalization of the border and its assumed need for control against illegalized migrants. In the case of the French-Brazilian borderland, unequal mobilities must be understood within the history of colonial conquest, racialization, enslavement, and forced migration that shaped this borderland as part of the Atlantic world. By reconnecting nationally separated and often neglected histories of mobility in the longue durée, multiple exclusions become evident—from exclusion from rights to physical exclusion through deportation. The chapter further argues that recent migration flows, along with measures intended to restrict them, highlight Guyane as a laboratory of legal exceptionalisms that facilitate the illegality, deportability, and deterrence of migrants. Examples of anti-immigration measures in recent years include fast-track asylum processing and deportations, racial profiling, and deliberate shortages of accommodation and financial support for asylum seekers. The pinnacle of this infrastructural facilitation of illegality is the Oyapock River Bridge: opened in 2017, the first bridge linking Brazil and France has ultimately become a one-way street reinforcing unequal mobilities in a borderland that defies the neat geopolitical categories to which many social scientists have grown accustomed.