State power and migration control

My work on humanitarianism is a discomfort I have felt for a number of years in relation to the literature on criminalization and criminology and, more generally, about seeing state power as an oppressive, as a controlling, as a punitive power. My work, both in terms of tracing humanitarianism within law and policy, but also within practices, is retrieving a different rationale or a different affective economy that underpins state power.

We can trace those perhaps contradictory logics and economies in the work of Michel Foucault, his work in relation to discipline and the prison but also on pastoral power and governmentality. He traces the religious pastoral power that was very much the foundation of European societies and how the modern state has absorbed those pastoral mandates through, for instance, the creation of a range of welfare institutions.

It is very difficult not to go back to history in terms of the very foundations of migration control in the early 20th century, both in the UK and in white settler colonial societies such as Australia, South Africa and Canada, whereby migration controls and passport controls very much functioned and were established to prevent black and brown colonial people from migrating to these places.

With that colonial foundation of migration controls, the question of race is obviously quite important. I think the most important implication of that intersection between migration and decolonisation and the demise of the British Empire is the range of laws that, without being racially explicit, have systematically prevented or set limits on black and brown people migrating to Britain – and how race has been entangled with questions of migration. We can see that entanglement in the everyday exercise of migration control in the contemporary context.

The increased impetus of states, particularly in the north, to control migration has had an impact on the status of citizenship as a privilege – not as a right but as a privilege and duty of those potential citizens. Citizenship regimes have become increasingly more restrictive, with conditions such as language and civic tests, which have implications in the bordering of citizenship. The idea of who is a citizen and who is not is something that, in countries such as the UK, other European countries, former colonial countries, has further resonance and links back to questions of race, questions of belonging. When we think about citizenship and foreignness, we think about this clear line separating those concepts.

What we forget is that citizenship is not just a formal status. It is not just a legal status. It also has a social aspect. In many ways, the increase of restrictions on migration and the increased impetus to police migration interrogate that clear line, that clear boundary of citizenship.

Because citizenship is a way of enforcing an exclusionary order, a border order, and because in the context of increased human mobility and increased polarization of wealth, it is a tool of control, of subordination, I think there is significant work happening on the ground to question these ideas of citizenship as the only mechanism to access rights. We are seeing formal and informal ways of inclusion that do not rely on formal citizenship status to provide basic services and basic rights for people without documents.

We have been talking a lot about Europe. It is important to think a bit beyond Europe and North America, to think about how societies can live otherwise in relation to questions of migration. Latin America, for instance, is a continent that has been quite reluctant to build detention centers for immigration.