A ‘distributive regime’: Rethinking global migration control

The transnational state and migration: Reach, flows and Policies

“…Alan Gamlen argues that the multiplication of emigration states in recent years is an outcome of the consolidation of a global governance framework (Gamlen 2019, see also Betts 2014): international organisations support the establishment of formal offices in sending states. And this is also true for immigration states: the convergence of immigration policies in the main destination countries has led to the emergence of a global mobility regime, within which a fraction of the world population enjoys a relatively unconstrained freedom of movement while the majority faces growing barriers to emigration and settlement (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013;Punter et al, 2019). This regime is sustained by a global mobility infrastructure made of physical buildings, services, surveillance systems and laws, enabling some people to move across the world while preventing others from doing so (Spijkerboer, 2018).…”

“…And some researchers question the state as the relevant level of analysis. Authors point to the sheer intertwining of legal and institutional arrangements weaving together a global regime of human mobility encompassing emigration and immigration countries (Betts, 2011;Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013;Punter et al, 2019;Spijkerboer, 2018). By contrast, the local turn of integration (Caponio & Borkert, 2010) and of migration policies (Alpes & Spire, 2014) point to the local as the new strategic level of implementation.…”

Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities…

“…In order to elevate and interrogate these distinctions, I build simultaneously on two strands of Political Geography. On the one hand, there is a literature on migration politics at the global scale which looks beyond the territorial confines of individual nation-states, to discern the underlying principles guiding movement control policies and practices (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008;Punter et al, 2019;Van Houtum, 2010). This literature has demonstrated that we need to see sites within the Global North and South as caught up within a singular framework of power and exclusion.…”

Disjointed knowledges, obfuscated visibility. Border controls at the French-Italian Alpine border

“…Scholars ream have questioned "how migration is governed in absence of a global regime" (Robinson, 2018: 419;see also Geiger, Pecoud, 2013;Punter et al 2019), starting from the assumption that border management has become more and more an object of shared knowledge and of a common regime of truth among "the professionals of the management of the unease" (Bigo, 2006: 14). The standardisation of security practices and border controls (Leese, 2018) goes together with a generalised streamlining of the lexicon and knowledge generated at and about the border.…”