Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times

TLDR

Immigration governance has become a central contemporary issue, with globalization intensifying restrictions on human mobility and leading to border policing and racialized boundary production, a phenomenon mainly examined in North American and Western European social sciences. Anthropological research shows the nation-state has reasserted control through frontier surveillance, detention and deportation regimes, and a sharp erosion of asylum rights, sometimes supplanted by discretionary humanitarian practices.

Abstract

The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.