Description
This paper will examine the proliferation of the private visa application company as a novel form of state-private hybrid mechanism of bordering and migration control. It will assess the operations and evolution of the first such company VFS Global in the 22 years since its inception, and the challenges to studying the implications of this privatisation in migration control. New companies have since joined this growing and novel industry – TLS Contact, ArkeBLS, etc. These hybrid visa regimes work on the three-way model involving the migrant, the visa application company and the state consulate/embassy. The clients for these companies are the states who contract out visa application functions to them, but the migrants pay the additional service charge as a result of his hybrid form of visa application processing. The empirical focus of this paper will be the operations of this hybrid regime in migration control between India and the UK. The research is based on analysis of contracts, interviews and some archival documents. This paper is part of a research project that asks how these hybrid regimes affect the migrants’ access to international space and what these regimes mean for citizenship, sovereignty and security.
