The Contested Politics of Mobility

Vicki Squire, Vicki Squire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136887321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years.

Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an 'analytic of irregularity'. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging 'borderzones' that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term 'illegal' to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

1
The contested politics of mobility

Politicizing mobility, mobilizing politics¹

Vicki Squire

Irregular migration has become a highly politicized issue over recent years, and has been central to the formation of migration policies and border controls across many regions and countries of the ‘global North’. In the US, for example, immigration reform under the Obama administration includes an emphasis on effective enforcement procedures, improved legal processes for workers and employers and the development of ‘… a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here’ (Napolitano, 2009).² Similarly, the European Commission’s 2010–2014 Stockholm programme emphasizes the importance of addressing the issue of irregular migration through migration policies and border controls, such as in the development of a ‘… flexible immigration policy that is in line with the needs of the job market whilst at the same time support[ing] the integration of immigrants and tackl[ing] illegal immigration’ (Europa, 2009). In Canada, by contrast, irregular migration has been a less prominent issue, although it has punctuated public and political debate over recent years at key moments of ‘crisis’ (see Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard, 2009). The limited focus on irregular migration in this context would seem to reflect the geographical specificity of Canadian border regions, which lie at a significant physical distance from regions of the ‘global South’. Given that the rendering of certain border regions as sites of intensified governmental activity is critical in understanding the growing concern with irregular migration, it is perhaps unsurprising that US and EU policies have been organized around irregular migration more explicitly than has been the case in Canada. After all, border regions of Southern and Eastern Europe, along with the US–Mexican border region, are key sites whereby political struggles over irregularity have been played out over recent years.

While controls have often been located at traditionally-defined border regions (see Nevins, 2002), there has been an increasing proliferation of sites whereby such controls are enacted over recent years. There are two ways in which the proliferation of controls can be conceptualized: first, in relation to the development of physical checks and controls beyond and within territorial borders or boundaries and, second, in relation to the development of digitalized checks and controls prior to travel. The extension of physical controls beyond territorial borders has been a particularly prominent feature in the EU context (see Lavenex, 1999, 2004, 2006). Here, processes of externalization have been implemented through neighbourhood policies, sea and land patrols and foreign policy initiatives. The foreign policy dimension is evident in the European Commission’s Global Approach to Migration, for example, which aims to ‘… manage migration in a coherent way through political dialogue and close practical co-operation with third countries’ (Commission of the European Communities, 2008). Such developments can be seen as reflecting a wider drive to deter or intercept irregular migrants before they reach their ‘destination’, as is evident in the Tampa incident of October 2001 when the Australian government ordered the redirection of a ship that was carrying 187 mainly Iraqi migrants to Indonesia (see Pickering, 2005). Yet the proliferation of physical controls does not simply occur through processes of externalization and practices of interception. As this collection clearly demonstrates, it is more adequate to describe the contemporary context as marked both by an ‘explosion’ and ‘implosion’ of controls. Indeed, controls are ‘diffuse’ both across and beyond state territories (see Côté-Boucher, 2008). This reflects another way in which controls have proliferated through the intensification of practices of surveillance, which are evident in the on-going development of digitalized visa regimes and pre-travel authorization systems (see Salter, 2006) as well as in border checks and a range of measures that operate across the social fabric of a given state (Côté-Boucher, 2008). When it comes to understanding how controls have proliferated in relation to the issue of irregular migration, it is thus important to examine ‘borderzones’ from a multi-dimensional perspective.

While many control initiatives have been developed with the objective of restricting the irregular migration of people from the global South to the global North, they also emerge in a context marked by rising humanitarian concerns regarding irregular migration. In particular, the death of migrants en route has become a particularly pressing issue across various regions (see National Foundation for American Policy, 2010; Spijkerboer, 2007). An awareness of this has been heightened at moments such as that in July 2006, when tourists on a beach in Tenerife found themselves helping boatloads of African migrants to shore. There are numerous cases in which people migrating by less than privileged means to regions such as Europe and North America have lost their lives en route, whether due to ‘accidental’ means (such as death from unsafe means of travel), ‘natural’ means (such as death from health problems provoked by the pressure of migration) or ‘purposive’ means (such as death by vigilante activities or aggressive border policing). Worryingly, the problematic distinction between regular and irregular migration has been further entrenched in attempts to address such tragedies. The distinction between regular and irregular migration that informs neo-liberal ‘managed migration’ policies is now familiar. On the one hand, the ‘legitimate’ movement of people across borders has been approached as a productive force to be harnessed or managed while, on the other hand, the ‘illegitimate’ movement of people across borders has been approached as destructive force to be controlled or restricted. It is where irregular migration is articulated as a destructive force that is linked to the death of migrants en route that a rationalist utilitarian hierarchy of migration is portrayed as a moral humanitarian hierarchy. This moral hierarchy entices migrants to enact their victimhood effectively (see Aradau, 2008) and elevates some migrants as ‘victims of trafficking’ while demoting others as ‘would-be economic migrants’, ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or ‘criminal foreign nationals’ (see Squire, 2009). Such a moral hierarchy is problematic on many counts, not least because it serves to evade broader questions about why it is so many people are willing to risk their lives to migrate from the global South to the global North.

The framing of irregular migration as a political concern across regions of the global North is thus intimately linked to processes of securitization and criminalization, which inscribe exclusionary distinctions between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ or ‘productive’ and ‘threatening’ forms of migration (see Bigo, 2004; Huysmans, 2006). These distinctions are not only problematic in terms of the moral and rational hierarchies that they augment and the questions that they encourage us to avoid. So also are they problematic because they occlude the fact that our knowledge of the issue of irregular migration is both incomplete and contested. In the North American and European regions, which are the primary focus of this book, the numbers of irregular migrants are often unclear. While there are official estimates of a total of 10.8 million irregular migrants resident in the US (Hoefer, Rytina and Baker 2010), figures are not officially collated in Canada. In the latter case, they are currently proposed to lie between 200,000 and 500,000 (see Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard, 2009). Indeed, it is notoriously difficult to measure the population of irregular migrants. In the EU, for example, policy documents have often referred to the possibility that there are up to 8 million irregular migrants. However, this figure has recently been challenged by researchers of the Clandestino project, which estimated there to be between 1.9 and 3.8 million irregular migrants across all 27 EU member states in early 2008.³ The project thus shows how the very question of how many irregular migrants reside in a specific region is a highly politicized issue, around which ‘number games’ are often played. Moreover, the scope of our knowledge regarding irregular migration is limited. There is growing support for research such as that of the Clandestino project, which furthers our knowledge about the numbers and impact of irregular migration. There is also significant governmental interest in researching the origins and routes of irregular migration. However, our understanding of the expectations and experiences of irregular migrants is limited, and often remains reliant on relatively small-scale studies (e.g. Bloch, Sigona and Zetter, 2010). This is indicative of a governmental drive toward managing migration, as well as of an institutionalized lack of concern regarding the migrant strategies, experiences and claims that are critical to our understanding of irregular migration (see Andrijasevic, forthcoming).

It is thus in the context of a fraught politics of irregular migration that this book is located. Rather than engaging directly in number games, The Contested Politics of Mobility aims to shed light on the political struggles which underpin such games and on the ways that such struggles constitute ‘borderzones’ in which irregularity itself is contested. In this capacity, this volume brings together critical theoretical and empirical scholarship into irregularity with the aim of bridging two divides: first, the divide between European and North American research and, second, the divide between a body of research which focuses on the politics of control and a body of research which focuses on the politics of migration or movement. The divide between European and North American research is one which may in part reflect the different histories of migration on each continent, with North America historically being a region of immigration, in contrast to a European history of colonial emigration. However, at the contemporary juncture these regions occupy similar positions in relation to migration from the global South to the global North. A consideration of the ways in which migration is irregularized in each context is thus important in getting a broader perspective on a politics of mobility that is organized around irregularity, as well as in facilitating a consideration of how such politics are implicated in contemporary geometries of spatialized injustice (see Dikec, 2001). The second divide that the book seeks to bridge between those focusing on control and those focusing on migration requires critical conceptual and theoretical work as well as detailed empirical investigation. This is important in order that research actively engages irregular migrants in the analysis of political struggles around mobility, rather than merely approaching them as the objects or subjects of such a politics. Specifically, this facilitates a consideration of what is at stake in a politics of mobility that is organized around irregularity, as well as a consideration of how the agency of migrants (and citizens) can be creatively, yet carefully, addressed as part of this politics.

So what are we referring to when we discuss the issue of irregular migration? In its mainstream definition ‘irregular migration’ refers to those who enter a nation-state without authorization, or to those who reside within a nation-state without authorization. It can also be used to refer to those who breach the terms of their visit or residency within a nation-state, such as those who work without permission. In order to create some critical distance from this mainstream reading of irregularity (or illegality), however, this book refuses the term ‘illegal immigration’ to describe movements of people across borders or the presence of people within any given location. An emphasis on immigration invokes a state-centric perspective on the migratory process, while an emphasis on illegality is problematic because it criminalizes migrants. Indeed, the labelling of migrants as ‘illegal immigrants’ (in the European and North American contexts) or as ‘illegal aliens’ (in the North American context) delegitimizes the strategies and diminishes the agency of migrants because it inscribes migrants as criminal or ‘culpable’ subjects (see De Genova, 2002). As an alternative, The Contested Politics of Mobility invokes irregular migration as an alternative term that potentially opens the possibility for a more nuanced and multi-dimensional perspective on irregularity, while also bringing the agency of migrants to the fore.

Analyses of migrant agency or migration have often been approached in the academic literature in relation to the movement from the national to the transnational level. In the field of economics, for example, analysts have drawn attention to the importance of migrant remittances. Migration here features as a dimension of a global economy, which moves beyond protectionism without necessarily destabilizing the framework through which national economies operate (e.g. see Terry and Wilson, 2005). In the fields of sociology and cultural studies, concomitantly, analysts have drawn attention to the importance of migration in the formation of diasporic networks of belonging. Migration here facilitates a move beyond a sedentary nationalistic frame without necessarily undermining its cultural grounds (e.g see Brah, 1996). Similarly in the field of politics, analysts have drawn attention to the potential for migrants to enact a ‘post-national’ frame of human rights. Migration in this respect invokes an alternative frame of rights provision to that of national citizenship, without necessarily displacing the individual’s relation to the state (e.g. see Soysal, 1994). While post- or trans-national accounts are interesting in that they show how a shift in scale can be important in rendering visible migrant agency, they are perhaps less well placed in terms of their ability to examine the ways in which struggles around irregularity reconstitute politics in terms that unsettle any singular spatial frame. It is here that an emphasis on borderzones and irregularity strives to shift away from scalar-thinking in order to think politics in a more dynamic way (cf. Isin, 2005; Aradau, Huysmans and Squire, forthcoming; McNevin, forthcoming; Squire, forthcoming). Hence the second part of the sub-title of this introductory chapter: mobilizing politics.

The Contested Politics of Mobility diagnoses and critically intervenes in debates around the governing of irregular migration by exploring irregularity through an approach that I call ‘mobilizing politics’. Mobilizing politics is conceived of here in a dual sense. On the one hand, mobilizing politics means to politicize mobility through examining how the movement of people, in particular the ‘irregular’ movement of people, is constituted as an object of and as a subject of politics. In politicizing mobility, this collection explores how struggles around migration and its control interrelate as distinctive dimensions of a politics of mobility that has irregularity as a key stake. On the other hand, mobilizing politics means to render politics mobile through exploring how the irregular movements and activities of people entail a shift in what it means to be political. By considering irregularity as a stake within, as well as a product of, emergent struggles around mobility, this collection demonstrates both the need for a critical re-thinking of politics through irregularity and the need for a critical re-thinking of irregularity through mobility. Mobilizing politics in this regard entails both a diagnosis of, as well as a critical intervention into, the contested politics of mobility – a politics in which irregularity is both produced as an object of security and also enacted as subject of citizenship.

Four key moves are central to the diagnosis and critical intervention that is developed in The Contested Politics of Mobility; each move reflects this key emphasis on mobilizing politics. First, by mobilizing politics this collection challenges the assumption that irregularity is a status of individuals and an objective ‘problem’ to be addressed. Instead, it examines irregularity as a condition that is produced through various processes of (ir)regularization. Second, by mobilizing politics this collection examines irregularity as a stake within a wider politics of mobility. In so doing it shows irregularity to be contested, resisted, appropriated and re-appropriated through a series of political struggles. Third, by mobilizing politics this collection examines irregularity as an ambivalent condition that is enacted ambiguously both through a ‘politics of control’ and through a ‘politics of migration’, each of which is conceived of here as internally fractured but as coalescing in relation to movement, labour and space. Fourth, by mobilizing politics this collection approaches irregularity as an analytical frame for the analysis of borderzones as dispersed, multi-dimensional and contested sites of political struggle. This, I suggest, is important in understanding the overarching analytical, empirical and political intervention that is made by the essays that come together here in order to critically analyse The Contested Politics of Mobility.

Irregularity as a condition

To examine irregularity as a condition that is produced through political struggles is to challenge objectivist accounts that presume irregularity to be a status of individuals and a ‘problem’ to be addressed (see De Genova, 2002). Rather it is to ask a series of questions that allow us to understand more fully irregularity as a condition. How is irregularity produced? By whom and/or by what means is irregularity produced? What are the implications or consequences of irregularization? The essays in The Contested Politics of Mobility show irregularity to be produced through various security and policing practices, with migrants (and increasingly citizens) being irregularized through processes of securitization and criminalization. This collection thus questions objectivist accounts of irregularity as a ‘problematic’ status that individuals hold either due to their illegitimate movement across state borders or due to their illegitimate activities within a state’s territory. Instead, it shows how irregularity is produced across a r...