Population geography I: Surplus populations

I Introduction

The coordinates of population geography are fairly well established, if not always agreed upon. At a most basic level, population geography is concerned with fertility, mortality, and migration – though certainly not in that order (Bailey, 2005; Gober and Tyner, 2004; James, 1954; White et al., 1989). Two dominant trends, one epistemological and the other topical, are readily observable. On the one hand, population geography has been largely grounded in an empiricist epistemology. Population geography, as Bailey (2005: 73) explains, has been dominated by ‘measures of and depictions of population concentration and dispersion; the relative size and proximity of urban areas within a population; density and overpopulation; [and] the decomposition of population characteristics, including flows of population’. To this end, population geographers continue to make important contributions to the scientific study of demographic events. On the other hand, population geography has a long, productive relationship with the subject of migration (Collyer et al., 2012; Smith and King, 2012), as population geographers continue to make significant strides in the understanding of human spatial mobility at a variety of scales.

Parallel to these two strengths, however, has been the repeated – some might say ‘tired’ – call for a (re)theorized population geography (Findlay and Boyle, 2007; Findlay and Graham, 1991; Graham, 2000, 2004; Graham and Boyle, 2001; Tyner, 2009; White and Jackson, 1995). White and Jackson (1995: 111), for example, argue that population geography has ‘paid insufficient attention to recent philosophical and methodological discussions that make their mark elsewhere in human geography, and in the rest of the social sciences’. Such calls have sparked some flurry of activity – for example, population geography’s engagement with the work of Michel Foucault (Legg, 2005; Philo, 2001, 2005a; Tyner, 2009). Ironically, many of these debates over a (re)theorized population geography often coalesce around renewed interests in the study of migration. Environmental issues, such as climate change (Bailey, 2010) and deforestation (Carr, 2009), for instance, are frequently contextualized within the study of migration. So too are discussions of ‘other’ populations – for example, that of ‘illegal’ migrants (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010), detention (Kahn, 1996; Silverman and Massa, 2012), ‘transit’ migrants (Collyer et al., 2012), domestic workers (Yeoh and Huang, 2010), and migrant sex workers (Tyner, 2004). Indeed, even the recent call to bridge children’s geographies with population geography emphasizes the theme of spatial mobility (Holt and Costello, 2011; see also McKendrick, 2001). Most of these studies highlight that, at a certain level, the field has engaged with many of the pressing issues of our time and demonstrate ever more so the continued salience of population geography both to the field of geography and beyond.

In this and the next two progress reports, I call population geographers to reflect more directly on the spatiality and survivability of ‘vulnerable’ populations (Findlay, 2005; Hogan and Marandola, 2005; Philo, 2001, 2005b) within the context, broadly conceived, of biopolitics and necropolitics (Coleman and Grove, 2009; Esposito, 2008; Foucault, 1990; Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008; Legg, 2005; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Mbembe, 2003; Mitchell, 2009; Nast, 2011; Rose, 2007). Biopolitics, for example, may be understood as the political negotiation of life; how life, its existence and vitality, is linked to the regulation and contestation of who has priority to live and flourish, and who might be left to wither and die. In particular, I am drawn to governmental policies and practices that impinge on fertility, mortality, and mobility, those regulations that impinge on the materiality of life and death from the standpoint of a layered demographic question: within any given place, who lives, who dies, and who decides?

Consider the following trends. Two-thirds of America’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 went to the top 1% of US households; indeed, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1% of households grew more than 10 times faster than the income of the bottom 90% of households. The last time such a disproportionate share of income gain went to the top 1% and such a small proportion went to the bottom 90% was in the 1920s – just prior to the Great Depression. Whereas the bottom 90% of US households ‘increased’ by US$1,206 (adjusted for inflation), the top 1% rose by US$520,127. The increase for the top 0.1% of households was even more spectacular, growing by US$3,455,384 during the same period (Feller and Stone, no date). So remarkable has been this growth among the super-rich that the United States’ income equality gap is 39th in the world (at time of writing). Indeed, the gap between the rich and the poor was less pronounced in many countries of the so-called Third World, including Burundi, Mali, Tunisia, Tanzania, and even strife-torn Pakistan. ¹ As the income chasm continues to widen, poverty is deepening in the United States. In 2008, 39.8 million people lived in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007; the 2008 poverty rate (13.2%) was the highest since 1997; and over 15 million Americans lived in ‘extreme’ poverty, defined as having an income less than half of the poverty line or, in other words, earning less than US$10,000 a year for a family of four. ² Moreover, such income inequalities have come at a steep price. While the United States ranks first in the world both in gross domestic product and in health expenditures, the country is 18th in the world in the percentage of children in poverty, 22nd in the world in low birthweight rates, and 25th in the world in infant mortality. ³ The National Center for Children in Poverty calculated that approximately 21% of all children in the United States lived in poor households – defined as income below 100% of the federal poverty level which, in 2010, was set at US$22,050 for a family of four. Of these children, more than one-third lived in households in which neither parent was employed. ⁴

Poverty translates directly into prospects for life and death. In 2008, an estimated 17 million households – 14.6% of all households – were food insecure; moreover, about one-third of these households exhibited very low food security. Consequently, these households relied extensively on government programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known as the Food Stamps Program), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the National School Lunch Program. ⁵ In fact, for impoverished households, these social programs literally meant the difference between life and death. Income inequality and poverty are themselves unequally distributed throughout the American body-politic. A recent study released by the Pew Research Center found that the median wealth of white households was 20 times that of African-American households, and 18 times that of Hispanic households. In addition, the disparities are increasing for America’s non-white population. From 2005 to 2009, for instance, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among African-American households, compared with just 16% among white households. ⁶ These figures speak directly to life and death; a ‘white’ male infant born in the United States in 2009 has a life-expectancy of 76.2 years, whereas an African-American male infant has a life-expectancy of just 70.9 years. ⁷

Although these data are subject to debate, and limited to the United States, they do, as a whole, point to a rather bleak picture – but a picture that brings into focus the continued importance and relevance of population geography. One’s likelihood to escape premature death is deeply, irrevocably spatial. For example, the work of Danny Dorling and Amy Glasmeier, among others, has empirically demonstrated how ‘social exclusion, geographic isolation, rigid class-based institutions and political cronyism’ contribute to poverty’s persistence and hence, to premature death (Glasmeier et al., 2008: 10; see also Day et al., 2008; Dorling and Thomas, 2004; Glasmeier, 2005). Likewise, the contributions to a recently themed issue of Antipode (guest edited by Heidi Nast, 2011) bring to light the salience of population geography. In an introduction to that issue, McIntyre and Nast (2011) call for:

Such global flux requires that we apply and expand the insights of population geography to consider those ‘unwanted’ populations that occupy the bottom rungs of the inequality pyramid. To achieve this goal, we need to find ways of addressing how certain groups are considered expendable, for today many lives have been rendered disposable, wasted, or precarious. In this initial report, I argue that population geography may benefit by engaging with Marx’s concept of surplus population; Marx’s writings, I maintain, provide a powerful theoretical avenue from which to explore ‘vulnerability’ and, I would add, ‘survivability’ (cf. Heynen, 2006; Mitchell and Heynen, 2009), both of which are inseparable from two of population geography’s long-standing concerns: biological reproduction and mortality. In addressing vulnerability and survivability, we join others in geography and allied fields who are writing about biopolitics, biosecurity, and reproductive politics. In subsequent reports, I consider more closely population geography’s association with these other subject areas; in this report, I provide a framework for a reconfigured (surplus) population geography.

II (Surplus) Populations

It is somewhat curious that population geographers have not engaged in any sustained way with the writings of Karl Marx that deal with population issues (but see Jones, 1986; Rossini, 1984). For, whether one agrees or disagrees with his analysis of capitalism, Marx’s theory of population provides a salient counterpoint to Thomas Malthus – an individual who figures prominently in our research and teaching of population geography (Robbins, 1998). Malthus argued, in part, that, because populations grow exponentially whereas agricultural production increases geometrically, resource scarcity and overpopulation would result. Marx countered by arguing that capitalism reveals its own ‘law of population’; that ‘every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population’ (Marx, 1990: 784; see also Harvey, 1974). ⁸

In Capital, Volume I, Marx argued that:

Marx’s statement has received considerable empirical attention over the years, and these debates need not detain us at this point (cf. McIntyre, 2011; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Nast, 2011). What is most relevant for my present purposes is not the particularities regarding the accumulation of capital, debates over rates of growth, and the growth of a surplus population; rather, it is the concept ‘surplus population’ that is important. For it is through the concept of surplus population that we see (1) that population geographers have written extensively on the subject, but (2) this engagement has been somewhat scattered and unfocused.

So what is meant by the concept ‘surplus population’? A good starting point is Marx’s own definition. Again, turning to Capital, Volume I, Marx (1990: 794) wrote that the ‘relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms’ and that every ‘worker belongs to it during the time when he [sic] is only partially employed or wholly unemployed’. In other words, any population geography study that has addressed unemployment has, indirectly, been writing a (surplus) population geography. But for Marx it is not the fact of surplus populations, but rather the processes by which these populations come into existence (cf. Merrill, 2011).

Marx (1990: 794 passim) classified surplus populations into three categories: floating, latent, and stagnant. The floating population consists of those workers cycling in-and-out of the labor force; the latent population includes those with insecure employment; and the stagnant population is composed of those workers who are only rarely employed. It is the stagnant population, in particular, that forms the massive ranks of the ‘inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labor-power’ (p. 796). To these three categories of surplus populations Marx adds a fourth: the lumpenproletariat. ⁹ Distinguished morally from the working-class proletariat, this ‘lowest sediment’ of society includes vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes (p. 797); those able to work – but do not (e.g. paupers); and those unable to work because of particular incapacities (p. 797). This latter subset was composed of ‘people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, or mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc.’ (p. 797). The point, again, is not necessarily to agree or disagree with Marx’s analysis; rather, the point is that Marx’s work addresses the economic vagaries of life within capitalist society, a project in keeping with many population geographers’ concerns to explain the creation and migration of economically ‘vulnerable populations’.

How do surplus populations come into existence? This is a crucial question – one that has garnered considerable attention – both within and beyond geography – in recent years. Fundamentally, a Marxist perspective begins from the standpoint of ‘primitive accumulation’, itself a term subject to much debate (Glassman, 2006; Hall, 2011; Harvey, 2003; Li, 2009; Neocleous, 2011; McIntyre, 2011). In general, however, following Marx, this entails the historical process of separating workers from the means of production; this primitive accumulation may be accomplished via the usurpation of common property, enclosures of ‘common’ land, and the destruction of domestic, artisanal production. An important and growing body of empirical case studies – within population geography and beyond – is addressing these practices of displacement and dispossession that are part-and-parcel of ongoing processes of primitive accumulation (Hall, 2011; Li, 2009; Rigg, 2007).

McIntyre (2011: 1498–1500) describes such processes in ways that speak to the traditional scholarly strengths of population geography. Imagine, for example, the stalwart assumption of an isomorphic plain in which space is frictionless and labor is perfectly mobile. Presume also (as Marx does initially) that all labor is abstract; in other words, there is no possibility of mismatch between skills because all laborers are substitutable and there are no hierarchies around ‘race’, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. In short, all people are equal and space is rendered inconsequential. In such a world, the unequal distribution between employment and unemployment could be readily resolved. People would migrate from areas of high unemployment to areas of low unemployment. Indeed, such an understanding is embedded both in structural models of migration and neoclassical accounts of supply and demand.

But what happens when such conditions do not obtain? We know that space is not frictionless (McIntyre, 2011: 1499), but is highly variegated and intensely regulated, predicated in part on the continued defense of the sovereign state, as seen in the regulation of immigration (e.g. Bauder, 2006; Merrill, 2011; Tirman, 2004). Moreover, Doty (2011: 599) shows how states have, by imposing ‘restrictions meant to make unauthorised border crossings difficult and dangerous’ attempted to halt migration. Meanwhile, the recent militarization of borders (Dunn, 1996) has contributed to what Joseph Nevins (2008) has described as a ‘shifting geography of migrant fatalities’ (see also Mitchell, 2007). Regulating mobility has, likewise, resulted in the discursive construction of surplus migrant population categories: ‘unauthorized’, ‘undocumented’, ‘irregular’, ‘illegal’ (cf. Khalid, 2010). The work of Anderson and Ruhs (2010), Drever and Blue (2011), Merrill (2011), Mountz (2004), and Salt and Stein (1997) is, here, notable to the degree that it highlights the processes by which surplus ‘populations’ come into existence in the service of the state.

Other population processes and practices, including the operations of various ‘state migratory apparatuses’ (Lindio-McGovern, 2004; Tyner, 2004; see also Rodriguez, 2010) and social networks (Blue and Drever, 2011; Croes and Hooimeijer, 2010) feature prominently in the variegated geographies of dispossession – topics that population geographers continue to address. Lastly, we know that labor is never truly abstract, but rather is segmented into, for example, skilled or unskilled migration – another body of scholarship that is rich within the subfield of population geography (Ho, 2011; Khoo et al., 2011; Riemsdijk, 2012; Scott, 2004). In short, embedded within the concept of ‘surplus population’ are concerns that have, arguably, surprisingly, shaped much of the scholarship within population geography. To round out this report, I consider more closely two concepts that have emerged within the rubric of surplus populations, these being the ideas of ‘abandonment’ and ‘disposability’.

III Abandoned women, disposable women

Throughout history, in a range of geographic settings, the poor and destitute have been marginalized; so too have been prostitutes, the homeless, and runaways (cf. Watts, 2011). In the late 19th century, in the United States, for example, numerous categories – idiots, lunatics, inebriates, paupers, tramps, vagrants, the aged, the sick, the feebleminded, the disabled, orphans, and criminals – were constructed in the service of the state as a means of providing or declining social assistance (Dear and Wolch, 1987). Membership in one or the other often meant the difference between (assisted) life or (accelerated) death. While certain populations in a place were frequently considered to be part of an undifferentiated whole, a moral division tied to economic success persisted and affected (state) policy responses. Those who were able-bodied but out-of-work, for instance, were typically castigated as morally corrupt and undeserving of assistance, while lunatics, widows, orphans, and the sick were deemed unfortunate and worthy only of philanthropic aid.

In many societies, including the United States, the egregious laws and punitive measures of the late 19th century remain in place, albeit in different guises. Those persons deemed outside of ‘respectable’ society – the lumpenproletariat – continue to be marginalized and represented as unworthy of assistance. Indeed, as Wacquant (2009) writes, these:

To address those who have been excluded from society, a number of geographers – including population geographers – have turned to the theoretical insights of Giorgio Agamben and, in particular, his formulation of homo sacer (Doty, 2011; Ek, 2006; Minca, 2006; Mitchell, 2009; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004; Tyner, 2012). For Agamben, homo sacer – an obscure figure of ancient Roman law – is one who can be killed with impunity, one whose death constitutes neither homicide nor sacrifice. Homini sacri, accordingly, are situated outside both human and divine law; they are ‘included’ in society only through their ‘exclusion’. They constitute, in Agamben’s (1998: 73) terminology, ‘bare life’.

In an especially salient article, Geraldine Pratt underscores the exploitation and oppression of migrant workers and prostitutes through the context of bare life (cf. Pratt, 2005; see also Lee and Pratt, 2012). However, of greater significance is Pratt’s reworking of homo sacer from a feminist standpoint. As Pratt (2005) identifies, despite the prominence of ‘public’ and ‘private’ separations in Agamben’s work, he makes little of gender. Yet, through a focus on Filipina migrant domestic workers and murdered female prostitutes in Vancouver, Canada, Pratt (2005: 1058) argues that ‘it is often women who are cast into bare life’. Rather than simply acknowledging these women’s plight, Pratt takes an additional, political step, to explore how violence and abandonment are articulated in democratic practice. Specifically, Pratt (p. 1058) demonstrates that the ineffectiveness of legislative victories for domestic workers suggests the violence of exclusion through non-citizenship while the case of the murdered women tells domestic workers that citizenship, in fact, guarantees no protection. We are not all susceptible to being rendered to bare life; rather, survivability results from the violent intersectionality of gender, ‘race’, and sexual orientation, to name but three.

A similar example is found in Mexico. The streets of Ciudad Juárez represent a particularly grim and tragic geography of human loss. In the early 1990s, an average of three women were murdered each year; however, by 1993 the death toll skyrocketed, with an average of two women being murdered each month. By 2001, there was at least one woman found dead every week; and by 2003 Amnesty International estimated that approximately 400 women – at a minimum – had been murdered during the previous decade. And the killings continue. For over a decade, Melissa Wright (1999, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2011) has written on femicide in Ciudad Juárez. She notes that there is a profound publicness to the femicide: most victims have been young women, many apparently abducted between home and work; and most of the victim’s corpses were found in public places. Wright locates the brutal violence within the ongoing and uneven industrialization of Mexico. Associated in part with Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program, multinational corporations relocated to cities such as Ciudad Juárez to take advantage of reductions in labor costs through the (selective) employment of women. These workers, in short, constituted a highly vulnerable surplus population; and it is the ‘temporariness’ of their employment that, according to Wright, merits some attention. Multinational firms benefit from the hiring of ‘temporary’ workers or, in other words, from the deliberate promotion of high labor turnover. For Wright, women represent ‘workers of declining value since their intrinsic value never appreciates into skill but instead dissipates over time’ (1999: 455). She concludes that women workers of the maquiladoras personify ‘waste in the making’.

Beginning in 1995, in response to the continued death of young women, local community organizers, including the feminist group ‘Ocho de Marzo’, organized marches composed of maquila workers, students, professionals, middle- and upper-class residents, labor activists, and artists. These groups pressured local and federal politicians for action and demanded that the police and the mayor dedicate more resources to murder investigations. They also met with the maquiladora association to discuss changes in employment shifts that might help ensure women’s safety and other security measures (Wright, 2001a: 556). According to Wright (p. 557) it was crucial to establish a connection between the murders and the organization of production within the maquiladoras. She argues that the ‘maquila system, which revolves around the reproduction of disposable women, draws from many of the same discourses that are utilized to exculpate the maquila industry from the violence against women that continues to pervade Ciudad Juárez’ (p. 558); it is this connection, also, that activists have made, arguing that the physical violence was exacerbated by a social and economic violence against women. The work of Wright exemplifies what one possible (surplus) population geography might look like – as well as providing a model for more engaged community-level participation. Crucial to the tragic story of Ciudad Juárez are processes of rural migration, land displacement, labor force participation, gendered divisions of labor, and, bluntly put, mortality. What connects these fundamental processes – so widely studied within population geography – is that of ‘surplus population’ and the ‘accumulation of capital’.

IV Conclusions

In a series of books, Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2002, 2005) expands upon the concept of the ‘state of exception’, a conceptual advancement that provides insight into the spatiality of structural violence and, by extension, an understanding into the calculated valuation and management of life and death within contemporary society (see also McIntyre and Nast, 2011, on ‘spatialities of exception’). This concept calls attention to the paradox of sovereignty, namely that the sovereign is both outside and inside the juridical order. Given that the sovereign has the legal power to suspend the validity of law, the sovereign may also situate itself outside of law. This produces a state of exception whereby law may be suspended in the name of society’s protection from internal or external threats. Increasingly, these threats are embodied by (surplus) populations – whether defined by ‘race’, sex, gender, class, or national origin. As Mitchell (2009: 244) writes, once defined as ‘at-risk’ populations, these lives constitute a biosecurity threat to society and, accordingly, ‘individuals and populations can be forcefully and, more importantly, ‘justifiably’ removed from commonly held spaces and resources in a contemporary liberal form of sovereign dispossession’.

Whether characterized as ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman, 2004; Neocleous, 2011), ‘humans-as-waste’ (Yates, 2011), ‘abandoned lives’ (Pratt, 2005), ‘disposable lives’ (Chang, 2000; Wright, 1999, 2004, 2006), ‘precarious lives’ (Butler, 2004), or any of the other myriad terms currently being introduced, the commonality is that some populations are legally relegated to the realm of surplus and thus rendered expendable. As Evelyn Ruppert (2011: 218) explains, ‘people are not governed in relation to their individuality but as members of populations. The embodied individual is of interest to governments insofar as the individual can be identified, categorised and recognized as a member of a population’. Accordingly, we must critically interrogate those calculated bodies that become the object – the target – of governmental interference: surplus populations.