But the message feels flawed. Maybe because it contains traces of the neoliberal economic discourse according to which migrants should be welcome because we need them to support our aging population and because they boost our economy, as multiple studies show year after year. This argument is too entrenched to rant about with any originality. To justify the presence and use of foreign people on economic grounds is, of course, a slippery slope to denying citizens benefits because they are not morally worthy, or because their productivity does not justify the expense. In other words, the logic of the economic argument is the same logic that leads, at its most extreme, to the extermination and/or excision of those deemed not useful to the reproduction of the ruling and dominant classes.

Aside from this dangerous utilitarian logic, most disturbing about the ‘with and without us’ message is how it implicitly draws borders between UK citizens and migrants, reinforcing a liberal conception of migration and subjectivity. By affirming who is and who is not a citizen, the message draws ideological borders between workers. What is missing in the ‘with and without us’ tactic is a clear and explicit rejection of how the category and process of migrant subjectivity is separated from that of national workers, putting the spotlight on this separation as a mere appearance that obscures certain labour processes and reinforces national constructions. The processes through which people are constructed as migrant subjects imply a constantly shifting set of social, political and economic conditions. The problem is not only that these conditions are erased or forgotten by the unquestioning acceptance of the categories of national citizen and migrant: their acceptance obscures how the creation and reproduction of these categories legitimates specific entitlements to life and resources that are thereby taken as natural and unchangeable.