The Complex Sources of Immigration Control

Abstract

All governments enforce immigration laws, but we have a limited understanding of the factors that determine how much they do so. Immigration policymakers can empower or compel officials and non-state actors to enforce immigration laws. This study suggests that non-immigration policymakers may play an equally important role -albeit in complex ways. Policies designed to control human mobility in other ways (transportation, crime control, segregation, etc.) can determine the amount of resources a given country devotes to immigration enforcement and the effectiveness of enforcement efforts. When officials ban old -or invent new -forms of movement control, they can determine how much resources are available to enforce immigration laws, whether these resources are used for immigration enforcement, and how effective they are. The study demonstrates this potential power of non-immigration policy through an in-depth analysis of South Africa's unexpected capacity to control migration. South Africa is one of the world's most prolific deporters of foreign nationals but not a very strong state. The study shows how decisions to ban segregation and invent new policing methods impacted the South African state's capacity to deport foreign nationals. Using these findings, the article calls for more detailed research into the complex relationships between immigration enforcement and other movement control policies and for greater attention to heretofore neglected cases in the developing world.

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal

“… 2015 ; Garelli and Tazzioli 2018 ; Mountz 2003 ; Scheel 2019 ), I argue that the representation of smugglers and traffickers as irregular mobility facilitators plays out differently in migrant sending versus receiving countries. In the receiving countries, irregular mobility is understood as a threat to the immigration state which uses the figure of traffickers and smugglers to justify restrictive, often violent, immigration policies (O’Connell Davidson 2015 ; Vigneswaran 2020 ). Whereas, in the sending countries, irregular mobility is considered a threat to the citizens whose welfare and protection in the foreign labour markets is/should be the prime concern for the sending state (Hwang 2018 ; Lee 2017 ).…”

Carceral economies of migration control

“…Heller, 2019). In South Africa migrants are detained in a privately owned and operated detention centre, and policed in ways that draw on longer histories of racialized foreignness (Vigneswaran, 2019), while the International Organization for Migration manages borders, detention and repatriation in other underresourced countries (Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010;Ashutosh and Mountz, 2010). Containing migrants through economic management, contemporary migration control practices have produced new ways of commodifying migrant life.…”

The Politics of Pain in Immigration Detention

“…Promises of tough border control have played a prominent role in all these political campaigns (Vigneswaran, 2020). Over the same period, we have seen in the international Black Lives Matter movement, how deep anguish over the failed promises of equality in the law can bring people together to reaffirm a belief in the importance of these values and their relevance for us all.…”