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In this essay, the author takes up William Walters ' (2006) incitement to theorize transmigration through the Deleuzian concept of control. The importance of mechanisms, or technologies, that modulate population flows are explored by paying close attention to novel strategies of migration policing and securitization in the United States, the European Union, Australia, and North Africa. These technologies no longer take the border as their "proper" site, but instead rely on processes of internalization, externalization, and excision to produce conditions of generalized precariousness. The author argues that these technologies of control resist simple categorization as biopolitics, and instead are more fruitfully considered through the lens of control societies and precarity. Ultimately, the inclusion/exclusion dialectic is put under erasure.

In this essay, we trace the relations among the early years of the US-Mexico borderlands after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the role of racialist discourse in shaping the border and US immigration policy, and contemporary bordering and security environments. Our ultimate aim is to show how contemporary security knowledge and practices form an assemblage with racialist discourses and practices in the post-9/11 era. Current security thinking is in itself racialized and follows the contours of what Étienne Balibar has described as 'neo-racism' (1991), which has offered vigilante groups more credibility in matters of security and immigration than they previously enjoyed. In short, we will show how the racial-territorial nexus of 'classical' racism has come together with the security-economy nexus of securitization theory and practice to form a neo-racist assemblage that we identify at the heart of US-Mexico border security and migration debates.

Postcolonial theory undermines the distinctions of inside and outside, of inclusion and exclusion, that form the basis of the very notion of immigration and its taken‐for‐granted assumptions: that a group belongs in a place and to move to a new place requires permission from the proper authorities. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the fact that “immigration” is, at its most basic level, a political technology of division that allows for the existence and replication of intense inequality, a system of global apartheid.

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