The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning - Hardcover

Joost De Bloois; Robin Celikates; Yolande Jansen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783481692 ISBN 13: 9781783481699

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014

Synopsis

Working from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on the social sciences, legal studies and the humanities, this book investigates the causes and effects of the extremities experienced by migrants. Firstly, the volume analyses the development and political-cultural conditions of current practices and discourses of bordering , illegality and irregularization . Secondly, it focuses on the varieties of irregularization and on the diversity of the fields, techniques and effects involved in this variegation. Thirdly, the book examines examples of resistance that migrants and migratory cultures have developed in order to deal with the predicaments they face. The book uses the European Union as its case study, exploring practices and discourses of bordering, border control and migration regulation. But the significance of this field extends well beyond the European context as the monitoring of Europe s borders increasingly takes place on a global scale and reflects an internationally increasing trend.

About this title

About the Author

Joost de Bloois is Assistant Professor in the departments of Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the nexus between contemporary culture and politics. He has co-authored two introductions in Cultural Studies (2009, 2010) as well as a volume on the thought of Alain Badiou (with Ernst van den Hemel, 2012). Robin Celikates is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Kritik als soziale Praxis (Campus, 2009), the co-author of Einführung in die politische Philosophie (Reclam, 2013) and the co-editor of Socialité et reconnaissance (L Harmattan, 2007), Philosophie der Mo-ral (Suhrkamp, 2009) and of Transformations of Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014). Yolande Jansen is a senior researcher at the department of philosophy and the ACGS (Amsterdam Center for Globalisation Studies) of the University of Amsterdam. She is also a special professor for the Dutch Socrates Foundation, holding the chair of humanism in relation to religion and secularity at the VU University Amsterdam. She is the author of several journal articles and of Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: French Modernist Legacies (AUP, 2013).

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The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe

Detention, Deportation, Drowning

By Yolande Jansen, Robin Celikates, Joost de Bloois

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Yolande Jansen, Robin Celikates, Joost de Bloois and contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-169-9

CHAPTER 1

Extremities and Regularities

Nicholas De Genova

Regulatory Regimes and the Spectacle of Immigration Enforcement

BORDERED IDENTITIES

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants — only mobility (De Genova 2013c). To make the point somewhat differently, it is instructive to comprehend the category migrant (or immigrant) as perhaps the premier instance of what we might call a bordered identity. A 'migrant' identity is literally triggered, or activated, through the enactment of a border across which an act of 'migration' is said to take place. As in the well-known slogan of the Chicano liberation movement, it is not that the people in motion cross a border so much as it is the border that crosses them and thereby constitutes them as 'migrants' (Acuña 1996, 109; cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2012b, 197). It is not the act of mobility in and of itself that constitutes migration so much as the specific construal of that mobility as an act of border crossing, and such a construction of human mobility as 'migration' happens only by means of one or another technique of bordering. The border must be enacted somehow or other upon the more humble fact of human mobility and hence upon the body and identity of the newly anointed 'migrant'. The juridical status and social condition that we conventionally designate '(im-)migrant' in fact signifies what is always a rather variegated and heterogeneous spectrum of juridical distinctions and social inequalities and differences: there are many types of migrants, and it is precisely the work of immigration regimes and citizenship law to hierarchically sort and rank them. Nevertheless, it is the bordered definition of state territoriality that constitutes particular forms and expressions of human mobility as 'migration' and classifies specific kinds of people who move as 'migrants'. Borders make migrants.

If this is true, however, then it is imperative to recognize that citizenship, too, is fundamentally a category of bordered identity. In this regard, William Walters has characterized the deportation of noncitizens as precisely a 'technology of citizenship' (2010b, 107). Similarly, Bridget Anderson, Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti discuss the deportation of 'foreigners' as 'a membership-defining act' dedicated to asserting the value and significance of citizenship and reinforcing the distinction between citizens and noncitizens in terms of the citizenry's (unconditional) right to residence in the state' (2013, 2). Thus, what is ultimately the defining condition of migrants' noncitizenship — their deportability, their susceptibility to deportation (De Genova 2002, 2010a) — turns out likewise to be a decisive and defining predicate, in the negative, of citizenship itself. However, this working definition of citizenship still implies a liberal leap of faith that seems to disregard the fullest (illiberal) extent of acts of sovereignty within the toolkit of liberal statecraft that have variously served to constitute and regulate citizenship. We need only be reminded of various historical examples of statutes for the denaturalization (and exclusion) of 'undesirable' (or 'enemy') citizens, which range from the disqualification of women from their birthright citizenship for marrying 'alien' men (Bredbenner 1998) through

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783481692
• ISBN 13: 9781783481699
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240