Essential, invisible, discriminated and exchangeable: labour migrants in the EU

This article aims to lay bare the contradictions between on the one hand the technocratic discourse of the EU praising the contribution of migrant workers to the economy of receiving countries and on the other hand the discriminatory impact of law and policy in the fields of free movement and immigration. Drawing from Luca Mavelli’s concept of neoliberal citizenship, it submits that both free movement law and EU immigration law are connected to a broader transformative framework of neoliberal political economy where rationalities of value exclude, dispose or sacrifice those with low economic or emotional value for receiving countries.