Migration Management: The Politics of Securitization
It is increasingly clear that migration is assuming the status of one of the primary political issues of the XXI century. The IOM World Migration Report of 2022 has estimated the presence of 281 million international migrants worldwide, representing 3.6% of the total global population (1). These figures are expected to continue to rise due to the worsening of global warming, famine, wars, and economic global inequalities between the Global North and South.
Migration, as a phenomenon that has accompanied the entirety of human history, is imbued with conceptual and practical complexities that constrain the possibilities of its linear understanding. And this is especially true in the contemporary context. Today, migration management appears dissolving in a set of new networks of government, while being constrained in a securitarian discourse that legitimizes exclusionary practices as the primer modality of governance. Therefore, the question is, how can current migration management be reconceptualized to make sense of its different and dispersed drivers? What are the effects of this modality of government on the lives and experiences of those crossing?
The Politics of Insecurity
It is especially in the context of the new globalization forces liberated in the aftermath of the Cold War that the control of the free movement of people through borders has become one of the security issues par excellence. In fact, in our current political environment, migration is said to have the capacity to threaten international peace and liberal society’s core values and stability. This way of framing is legitimizing a whole range of security practices that have profound impacts on the modulation of free movement while reproducing differential allocations of rights, freedoms, and in some cases life and death, all too often following the lines of historic racial discriminations.
How did migration become a security concern and what kind of consequence did this conceptual shift have in the way migration is practically managed? As Bigo underlines, in the case of immigration and asylum, the security practices employed for terrorism, fight against organized crime, and border control, have been shifted to the free movement of immigrants and asylum seekers (2). This shift is an essentially political phenomenon that is embedded in a broader transformation in the way political life is defined and governed. Jeff Huysmans coined the term ‘politics of insecurity’ to describe a novel political rationality in which insecurity and its management become the primer mode of governance in contemporary liberal states (3). The totality of political life is conceptualized in terms of insecurity and uncertainty to the extent that political unity, identity, rights, and freedom are understood only from the standpoint of the threat that challenges them. What is at stake is the making of security the first and primer ‘technique of government’ of modern liberal states (4).
What this kind of politics entails is the politicization of a whole range of heterogeneous issues, such as environmental degradation and human mobility, within a security framework. Thus, far from objective and static, the definition of human migration as a danger or threat, and the appropriate responses to it, is politically constructed, produced by the modulation of practices in terms of security rationality. This results in a security cycle in which the management of insecurity produces the very reality it is called to secure.
Migration and Conceptual shifts
Our understanding of migration is shaped by sovereignty as a focus of analysis and the different concepts that this entails, such as sovereign borders, citizenship, identity, and order. In fact, migration is primarily conceptualized as a movement of people within states’ borders, with severe consequences on the internal stability, order, and values of the nation-state. The often racialised classifications with which the human migrant is managed, such as the distinction between legal or illegal migrant, legitimate or illegitimate movement, only make sense if we assume the state as their referent object. Though, the multifaceted way in which migration is currently managed sees the progressive blurring of the lines that traditionally describe state sovereignty as a bounded legal-territorial entity (5).
From this uncertainty regarding the focus of analysis derives a need to implement traditional understanding of sovereignty with a new political paradigm, namely what Foucault has termed ‘biopolitical governance’. Biopolitics is a mode of governance that has the population and its well-being as its referent object instead of the traditional sovereign territory. The attempt to “regulate and intervene in the government of populations” becomes in this way the primer task of the state. Therefore biopolitical governance allows us to understand the state and its security as the outcome of heterogeneous practices that work to maintain the general and normal functioning of society, by securing it from possible destabilizing factors that arise within or outside its midst.
We have decided to organize the column accordingly, by classifying these practices into externalization and privatization of the management of migration, the development of new technologies of control and surveillance, and discursive and legal practices of bordering and de-bordering.
Externalization and privatization refers to the process through which the control of migration is outsourced from national governments to third parties, such as private security agencies, security experts, and professionals, preventing the unwanted from entering the country. This process produces important effects on the respect of the rule of law, human rights protection, and the state monopoly on decision-making processes. A particular focus will be given to the development of what has been termed the ‘border industrial complex’, namely the creation of a complex of private companies that is profiting from the securitisation of borders by furnishing security knowledge, technologies, and infrastructures.
Technologies of control include databases, biometrics, AI machine-learning systems, CV cameras, and drones. The development of increasingly sophisticated and pervasive digital technologies of control is progressively shaping the control of movement and the modalities of classification of individuals, making them reliant on automated procedures (9). The cyberspace is now a primer site of political calculations, making the management of migration flows essentially about the collection of data connections into vast databases to detect illegal entrance and trace individual movement. This has profound consequences for the inscription of historic racial and gender discriminations within new codified procedures of control.
Finally, practices of bordering and de-bordering describe the discursive and legal process through which borders are differentially rendered impermeable to certain individuals considered unfitting the socioeconomic standards of the host country. Racism is a primary principle of this practice from the moment that the differential access and experience of the border is still informed by historic power and geographical asymmetries. In fact, the ban of illegality, danger, and illegitimacy systematically targets specific groups of individuals coming from specific geographical locations, namely third country nationals coming from former imperial colonies of the Global South.
The rationality that underlies these technologies is exclusion as the primer mode of governing migration, reproducing the migrant as an image of the ‘social distribution of bad’(10). It is this process of threat definition and government that make the securitization of migration a promise of a never ending security, while producing violence, social unrest, and death. Reconstructing the process through which migration, as a security issue, is produced and the heterogenous practices and actors that participate in its management means returning the phenomenon to its conceptual and political complexities. We believe that this is an unavoidable academic and political responsibility, the first step to propose more informed and sustainable practices to one of the most pressing issues of our times.
References
IOM UN Migration (2022) World Migration Report 2022, International Organization for Migration: Geneva
Bigo, D. (2002) Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease, Alternatives 27, 63-92
Huysmans, J. (2006) The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the EU, Routledge: Oxon
Foucault, M. (2004) Security, Territory, Population, Seuil/Gallimard
Vuaghan-William, R. (2015) Europe’s Border Crisis. Biopolitical Security and Beyond, Oxford University Press: Oxford
Foucault, M.
Kitagawa, S. (2011) ‘Geographies of Migration Across and Beyond Europe: The Camp and the Road of Movements’. In Europe and the World: EU Geopolitics and the Transformation of European Space, edited by Luiza Bialasiewicz, pp. 201–22. Hampshire and Berlington, VT: Ashgate
Bonditti, P. (2004) From Territorial Space to Networks: A Foucauldian Approach to the Implementation of Biometry, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29:4, 465-482
Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli, Giorgio Grappi, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Irene Peano, Lorenzo Pezzani, John Pickles, Federico Rahola, Lisa Riedner, Stephan Scheel & Martina Tazzioli (2015) New Keywords: Migration and Borders, Cultural Studies, 29:1, 55-87
quoted in Bigo, D. (2002) Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease, Alternatives 27, 63-92