Manufacturing a Migrant Crisis: Migrantization and the Continuum of Transit Conditions in New York City

New York City’s 2022–2024 “migration crisis” was not a spontaneous event but a bureaucratically produced form of governance. Institutionalization in the shelter system migrantized thousands of new arrivals, generating dependency, uncertainty, and precarity that reproduced transit-like conditions within the space of arrival or destination. This work reconceptualizes crisis as a form of governance rather than an exceptional event, extends migrantization to urban bureaucratic regimes, and shows how destination contexts sustain a continuum of transit conditions.

For any questions, email Louise Geddes at LGeddes@adelphi.edu or call at 516-877-3796.