Migration Management can be understood as the construction of social practices and relationships; it is a partially fixed relational system, which makes sense of the way we perceive reality. I understand Migration Management to be such a construction, a discourse expressing a particular perception of reality. Migration Management is a distinctive treatment of human mobility in that it is largely an expression of European sovereign power which determines access, allocates or denies place, and determines who counts as subject and who does not. This is new insofar as, until the 1970s, the juridical status of an immigrant was epiphenomenal (Castles and Miller, 2009) to the social order. Most migrants entering Western European countries were factually illegal by today’s standards in that they were without documents. The focus was on either getting manual workers or providing refugees from the communist Other with a new home. The situation of those without legal documentation was remedied once in the country and not considered noteworthy. Migrants were functional in the first place, not legal, and they were integrated into the order once they had arrived. This particular perception of reality that I am focusing on here is that of government or quasi-government officials in international organizations of the Global North. These authorities build on the knowledge constructions as expressed in the documents of the Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees (IGC) in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Today, another set of voices needs to be added, that of academics who research international migration. Migration Studies is often the study of transnational relations:
Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong.
(Levitt and Jaworski, 2007: 129)
Yet much research located in Migration Studies has in common a degree of intimate proximity to migration policy making (cf. Boswell, 2009; Favell, 2003; Fuchs, 1992; Portes and DeWind, 2004). Both civil servants and academics thus shape our understanding of Migration Management and co-author its knowledge; sometimes they are close in their assumptions about the state, sovereignty and borders and at other times they differ more markedly. What is in common, though, is an acceptance of a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004). Set against this approach to making sense of international migration by describing and analysing the dynamic relationships, flows and routes migrants practise and by innovating new approaches to study migration to improve its governance (Levitt and Jaworski, 2007) is a growing literature critical in character. This literature is not so much interested in ‘problem solving’ but in engaging this co-production of knowledge in critique by focusing on problematic state–person relationships, asking questions about sovereignty and border-drawing and by asking questions about how the state and prominent conceptual categories exert domination. Migration Management is articulated in this field of contestation.
Migration Management, more practically, is an ordering tool that categorizes international migrants who aim to gain access to the Global North as welcome, as manageable risks or as threat. The benchmarking standard against which the international migrant is placed in juridico-political access categories is measured based on an assumed capacity for productivity. Migration Management legalizes and instrumentalizes: it imposes a seemingly coherent and inclusive system. In order to achieve this it establishes itself as international in focus and operation. This regime of visibility is posed against the ultimate norm of citizenship at the same time as it produces suspension, the radical exclusion of some who are not intelligible as incorporable – not even as threat. In other words, Migration Management sets out a typology on the basis of which policy initiatives sort people into norm and deviance. However, by formulating access categories, the discourse creates a surplus or excess, the un-incorporable. Those not incorporable constitute a group of people that are not captured by the particular imaginary of place to which access is granted or denied and regimes of visibility through politico-juridical status. Migration Management creates suspension from politico-juridical status.
Logical inheritance and its radical exclusions
In Violent Geographies (2007) Hyndman and Mountz begin their chapter by observing that ‘[w]here the threat of persecution or violence exists, the exclusion of people from spaces that are safe is a dangerous political act’ (2007: 77). The threat to physical well-being need not only rest in war and conflict; impoverishment and structural conditions that make a stable livelihood difficult to achieve are equally threatening. One way of addressing this lack of stability is to move in order to find a place of more security. From the early 2000s, scholarly contributions to thinking about international migration have picked up on the phenomenon of ‘mixed flows’ (Loescher and Milner, 2003; Weil, 2002; Yakoob, 1998), with a greater quantity of peer-reviewed publications appearing from around 2005. In these publications the assumption underlying the notion of ‘mixed flows’ is that the abstract movement of bodies into the European Union is composed of those who come for economic reasons, those who come for humanitarian reasons and those who come to abuse the system (cf. Bakewell, 2007). Since the legitimacy of an individual is not easily identifiable, ‘mixed flows’ pose a problem for managers of migration. Hyndman and Mountz (2007) critically discuss the notion of ‘mixed flows’ by contextualizing the blurring of categories between those who voluntarily or involuntarily move within the context of changing practices of sovereign power; Hyndman and Mountz show that underlying the logic of ‘mixed flows’ is an agenda of exclusion which is legitimized by arguments of protecting people close to home (2007: 78), that is, outside the territorial boundaries of destination countries. Regional protection (and offshore processing) is attractive to governments, but the many attempts made to establish this as a regular policy since the late 1980s have consistently been unsuccessful, not only because it is contested, but also because it is unlawful, as the European Union had to accept (again) in March 2016, when it engaged with Turkey over the Syrian refugee crisis.1 Hyndman and Mountz observe that ‘these spatial tactics of exclusion correspond to a discursive war on refugees in public discourse’ (2007: 78).
It is a war that was first formulated in the language of problematizing ‘mixed flows’ by the IGC, as a device to bring order to a perceived situation of utter loss of control. This context has nothing to do with conspiracy theory: civil servants participating in policy making in the 1980s or today are not evil-spirited. Rather, radical exclusion happens within a discourse of ‘truth’ in which the person becomes invisible, nonexistent and irredeemable. The following consensus among participating governments in the IGC is formulated:
The strategy discussions held within the consultations have had the need to review the mixed flow situation as a primary starting point. The need to develop more comprehensive global refugee policies, and the need to adjust global development policies so that they do not result in large-scale migration, have initially been of secondary importance in the informal consultations. However, there are obvious links between these … policy areas. The instruments for influencing the flows of asylum-seekers … aim at promoting better conditions in countries of origin.
(IGC, Swiss Chairmanship, Bern/Geneva, End of July 1990, Report on the first meeting of the working group on long-term perspectives and policies, held at Nyon on 12 and 13 March 1990: 5, emphasis in original)
The document states further:
All initiatives underline the need for more efficient and targeted selection mechanisms, whereby genuine refugees should be given priority vis-à-vis non-refugees. … Furthermore, most initiatives underline the necessity of measures against the organized abuse of the asylum procedure, and the link between such measures and general measures aimed at combating illegal immigration and irregular practices in this regard.
(IGC, Swiss Chairmanship, Bern/Geneva, End of July 1990, Report on the first meeting of the working group on long-term perspectives and policies, held at Nyon on 12 and 13 March 1990: 6, emphasis in original)
The policies are thus about formulating access; or rather denial of access. These statements are clearly normative in that they indicate that those who comply, those who show potential, are to be supported, whereas those who are deemed (without definition) not to be genuine have to be combated. The asylum seeker seems to animate the imagination of authorities to ‘problem-solve’ the perceived loss of control over international mobility – or in Rancière’s words the distribution of the sensible:
The way in which the abstract and arbitrary forms of symbolization of hierarchy are embodied as perceptive givens, in which a social destination is anticipated by the evidence of a perceptive universe, of a way of being, saying and seeing.
(Rancière, 2011: 7)
According to the IGC’s Working Group on Un-Documented Asylum-Seekers ‘it was agreed that a distinction needs to be made between un-documented asylum seekers who were of good faith, on the one hand, and asylum-seekers who were un-co-operative or of bad faith on the other’ (CA/NB/cc, Report on the Consultative Meeting held within the framework of informal consultations on 14 December 1990, Annex 8: 4). It is in this sense that the IGC juggles a twofold ambivalence. On the one hand there is ambivalence about who is a ‘good’ asylum seeker, who is a ‘bad’ asylum seeker and how to approach that distinction practically. This ambivalence leads, on the other hand, to the second ambivalence which is introduced by the surplus that these knowledges create. The radically excluded are both abstract and imagined as well as effectively present as a material physicality, which is excised from Migration Management: the radically excluded are suspended fro...
