Controlling Frontiers by Elspeth Guild Didier Bigo

Author:Elspeth Guild, Didier Bigo [Elspeth Guild, Didier Bigo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351948708
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Immigration and Border Control

To question the connection between immigration and borders is not to deny that there is one. Indeed, immigration, as a sub-category of migration in general, has an inherent territorial dimension. Perhaps one might reserve the phrase “migration” for forms of movement in physical space that are set within a broader class of “mobility” which may not involve physical movement at all. With this in mind, the considerations in the following section underline the extent to which social space has dimensions irreducible to physical space, as revealed by such a straightforward notion as “social mobility” (e.g. between classes). Nonetheless, however convenient this kind of lexical clarification might seem, it is, in this case, profoundly misleading. For both legal and social purposes, immigration is not primarily a matter of territorial mobility – not, I might add, for subtle theoretical reasons, but as a fairly crude fact of ordinary usage. Both legal and statistical categories make a clear distinction between visitors and immigrants (who may be further subdivided into “temporary” and “permanent”). The criterion is change of residence – for a period of at least 12 months, for the purposes of the International Passenger Survey – which is not a strictly territorial notion. Of course, residence is a legal qualification of a certain kind of territorial status, but even permanent presence within the territory of a state cannot be equated with residence in it. The point is too familiar to be laboured, but it is worth noting that “illegal residents” are just one instance of a category that also includes, for example, such “legal nonresidents” as diplomats and international civil servants. Furthermore, the law distinguishes for many purposes between kinds of residence, which derive from different kinds of connections between a legal person and a jurisdiction. It follows, again, that no jurisdiction can be exhaustively defined by territoriality. Conflicts of laws with respect to matters such as marriage and inheritance are thus typically resolved with reference to connections which, like “domicile” in English law, are in principle entirely independent from physical presence within a particular territory. To immigrate, in other words, is to attain a certain kind of status with respect both to a society and to a jurisdiction, which are related to a territory but not exhaustively defined by it.

It follows quite logically that the politics of immigration are not mainly about crossing territorial borders. No doubt xenophobia in the strict and literal sense has something to do with hostility to immigration; the “civilisational” bias summarised by the word “Islamophobia” typically expresses itself in suspicion of or even contempt towards Muslim societies – meaning, of course, societies predominantly composed of Muslims and presumed to be characterised primarily by Islam – as well as towards European Muslims. Nonetheless, the wide range of evidence about people’s prejudices and the kinds of demands actually expressed in immigration politics suggests a rather more complicated picture.

Concern seems to focus on the place immigrants occupy within society rather than their mere presence. Of course, even

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.