Rethinking migration securitization

Bureaucratic militarization and racial capitalism within Brazil’s “Operation Welcome”

Bibliographic Data

ID8244151
AuthorsJosé Oviedo Pérez (0000-0002-9302-4591, Texas A&M University – San Antonio, corresponding author), Tarsis Brito (0000-0001-9474-1050, SOAS University of London)
Year2026
Publication date2026-03-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of International Relations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1354-0661 • E-ISSN: 1460-3713
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/13540661261431277
OpenAlexW7140316521
LanguageEN
References cited55

Over recent decades, we have witnessed the consolidation of securitization as a framework for understanding state-led responses to migratory influxes, in particular focused on border impenetrability and territorial control. However, we have also seen growing tensions and contradictions between migration securitization practices on the ground, migration governance processes, and racialized regimes of capitalist production. This article highlights how the migration securitization literature often homogenizes and universalizes the relationship between security responses and borders, by bringing it into conversation with the literature on racial capitalism. We bridge this theoretical divide via a case study examination of Brazil’s “Operation Welcome” since 2018, which has worked to receive and resettle Venezuelan migrants and refugees away from the border state of Roraima to other parts of the country. We present how the militarization of Operation Welcome was carried out through a “bureaucratization of militarization,” instead of conventional military tactics seeking to contain migration. And we discuss how access to the national territory and legal employment for Venezuelans in Brazil facilitates their insertion into racial capitalist structures of labor exploitation. Employing extensive fieldwork data, interviews, and participant observations to sustain these claims, we present how migration securitization methods, processes, and outcomes are not simply the result of sovereignty anxieties or a need to reaffirm border security, but rather are also shaped by global and local structures of (racialized) exploitation and dispossession

Bureaucracy · Capitalism · Consolidation (business · Corporate governance · Militarization · Refugee · Securitization · Sovereignty · Transnationalism · Global Security and Public Health · Migration, Racism, and Human Rights · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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