Migrants are here to stay, and their number is bound to increase in the coming years: their practices and their struggles will play a key role in any attempt to imagine and build a “positive notion of European Citizenship”. Europa: In many European countries the policy towards immigration is getting tougher, and the financial crisis is already being used as a powerful justification for these policies. European legislation is also getting tougher, especially with regards to extra-European immigration. How do you see these developments? Mezzadra: Although I am not at all excluding the importance of other factors (political, cultural, etc) I do think that the current crisis plays a key role in the toughening of European migration policies and in the increasing hostility towards extra-European migrants. Even one of the most “progressive” European governments, the Zapatero government in Spain, proposed repatriation programs for migrants as soon as the first signs of the crisis became apparent in the construction sector, which had employed thousands of migrants in recent years. The point is that the current crisis is not a mere “financial” crisis, it is a deep, global crisis of the whole economic system. And in such cases, the consequences for migrants tend to be negative: just think of the early 1930s in the US, when the start of the “New Deal” was accompanied by the deportation of half a million Mexican immigrants, together with many of their US-born sons and daughters. Or think of the Anwerbestopp (the end of recruitment of foreign “guestworkers”) and of the attempt to repatriate many immigrants in Western Germany after the crisis of 1973… On the other hand, the economic system and the labour market work in contemporary Europe in a fundamentally different way than in the heyday of the so-called “Fordism”. “Labour shortages” and in general the demand of migrant labour are much more flexible, punctual and elusive than they used to be. It is therefore reasonable to think that each attempt to seal the borders will be accompanied by a series of exceptions (for careworkers, seasonal workers in agriculture and other sectors, etc.). And that the migration regime in Europe will evolve toward the adoption of ever more sophisticated and complicated systems of filtering and selection. Current developments and discussions in the UK on the new points-based system are symptomatic in this sense. Europa: Do you think that the increasingly cosmopolitan composition of many European towns and cities (particularly in the west of Europe) lends itself to the construction of a new form of emancipatory politics, one that goes beyond issue-specific concerns and has a transnational dimension? Mezzadra: No European metropolis could exist, produce, or even be “competitive” on the world market without the “hybrid” and cosmopolitan composition of its population, of its culture, of its styles of life, and of course of its labour market. This is a crucial point in my opinion, and everybody is aware of this in Europe: even current configurations of racism do not aim at assigning different populations to different territories, they rather aim to regulate, to “manage” as European rhetoric would have it, the intersection of their bodies within a single territory. To put it in a rather schematic way: the heterogeneity of European population corresponds to the proliferation of heterogeneous devices of control, domination and exploitation, which are continuously disarticulating and re-assembling the very shape of citizenship in Europe. It is a question of political agency to transform European citizenship into a space of heterogeneous practices of freedom and equality. Europa: Etienne Balibar, with whom you have entered into considerable dialogue, has repeatedly stressed the importance of developing variable geometries for the European Union. How do you assess European neighbourhood policy in this regard, and in particular the use of offering a road to membership of the EU as bait? Does the recent relaunch of the idea of a Mediterranean Union present any new paradigms for Europe’s soft-power approach? Mezzadra: I do agree with Etienne Balibar about the importance of developing variable geometries for the European process. But I think that these variable geometries must be first of all variable geometries of struggle, of active involvement of heterogeneous subjects, actors and movements. Migration has been key to the whole process of the Eastward Enlargement of the European Union. Candidates had to adapt their legislation and their migratory politics to the “European standards”, what did not mean in the first place “human rights” but the building of detention facilities and the cooperation in the European regime of border control and deportation. And you cannot talk about the project of a Mediterranean Union without taking into account and closely analyzing the whole process of “externalization” of the European border and migration regime. As for instance Ali Bensaâd has recently written, the attempt to involve ever more neighbouring and even distant countries in the management of migration towards Europe corresponds to an attempt to “delocalize” Europe’s tensions outside its borders. All this said, I remain convinced that these processes (European enlargement, neighbourhood policies, Mediterranean Union) open up fields of potential political experimentation well beyond the actual shape they take. But the condition for a positive and productive experimentation is the deepening of networking and exchange processes between movements and struggles. Europa: In your article The Right to Escape, published in 2004, you write that the subjectivity of a migrant must be placed at the centre of attention. In your opinion has this become more common practice since you wrote the article? Mezzadra: It is difficult to generalize on such a point, but I would tend to say that common characteristics have emerged within what we can very roughly call “European public discourse” in the last years. The increasing securitization of the public discourse has been for instance one of these characteristics, along with the rise of a certain “Anti-Islamism”. But at the same time, even in a country like Italy, there have been, paradoxically as it can seem, contrasting developments, pointing in the direction of an increasing acknowledgement of the legitimacy and structural character of migrants’ presence: attention is given to forms and practices of “vernacular multiculturalism”, as well as to the subjectivity of the “second generation”, which is a relatively new phenomenon in this country. After all, the “public discourse” is itself a battlefield, and one must not to be exclusively pessimistic when looking at recent developments in the field: but the battle has to be fought everyday. And it is worth doing it!