Description
The politics of movement and migration have become significant flashpoints across in a number of countries as we have witnessed renewed investments—both material and affective—in securing the border. A common feature of such reinvestments is the racialisation of both the border and the order that it supposedly secures. That processes of racialisation shape the politics of migration is not new. However, as I argue in this paper, the control of movement is one of the primary means through which White sovereignty—as the domination, rule, and sovereignty of Whiteness over non-Whiteness—is upheld and secured at both the national and the global level. Through an analysis of migration law and the discourses surrounding it, drawing on original archival research in the United Kingdom and Germany, I explore how migration governance functions to re-enact the proprietorial, exploitative, and regulatory claims of Whiteness over non-White bodies, territory, and resources, not only inside individual states but globally as well. I thus suggest that although the governance of migration occurs primarily at the national level, it works in part to shore up and resecure a racialised and hierarchically structured global order.
