Controlling Migrants:

Vagrancy Laws, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany

How and why do states control people as migrants? How do they differentiate between those deemed deserving of entry or needed and those rendered undesirable and unwanted? What capacities do they use and how were those developed? The extent to which debates around enhanced migration and border controls continue to permeate political discussions across the world once more underscores the continued salience of these questions and the need to understand how border controls function and the logics that drive their expansion. Heeding that call, this book departs from existing research, which has predominantly examined the emergence and institutionalization of migration controls through the lens of state-building and which thus suggests that bordering practices are a natural outcome of state-formation processes. Rather than starting with the premise that the formation of states had to automatically lead to the emergence of national border and migration controls, it transcends an analysis focused only on the local, national, or international level and captures the entangled subnational-local and global-colonial histories of migration controls. It thereby, first, reveals their colonial and racial logic. It, secondly, develops a new multi-scalar methodology that captures the transnational roots of contemporary border controls and other security practices. Thirdly, the book illuminates how, in their efforts to control people as migrants, states rely on a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities that emerged from attempts to police the racialized boundaries of belonging and control people as workers at these multiple levels. Doing so provides a comprehensive framework through which to understand how migration controls function that goes beyond the often seen emphasis on the most violent aspects of bordering practices such as pushbacks, deportations, and detention.  

To make these contributions, my book examines the development of migration control in the world’s second largest immigrant receiving country, Germany. Drawing on one year of archival research in Germany and the UK, it reveals how over time states developed a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities to define who can be considered a migrant, to track and surveil those on the move, and to detain and deport those cast as unwanted. With a multi-scalar analysis at its center, the book illustrates how these capacities are rooted in the interlinked histories of mobility controls at the local, national, and global levels.

Focusing on the era of the German Empire into the Weimar Republic from 1871 to 1921 – which is often considered the foremost period of German state-building, the book begins with tracing how internal mobility controls, including pass laws, border controls, deportations, and imprisonment hardened to police vagrants and Roma people at the parish level. From the local level, the book shifts to the identification and policing mechanisms developed to manage Polish seasonal workers in Prussia and Chinese indentured laborers in the German colonies in the Pacific from the 1890s to 1914, which were the precursors to the post-World War II German guestworker system. Next, it situates the drafting of Germany’s first citizenship law in 1913 – which is still partially applicable today – within the context of German colonial expansion and antisemitism. The book then turns to World War I and reveals how fortified mobility controls under martial law and prisoner of war camps were used by the German war government to render foreign workers exploitable and fill its acute need for labor. Finally, the book examines the construction of the figure of the illegal migrant in the 1920s when the German state began to target Jewish migrants fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 1920s. It shows how this period saw the opening of Germany’s first immigration detention sites and the cementing of characteristics that cast certain foreigners as illegal into law.

For each of the cases I mobilize a rich set of archival materials including laws, policy documents, court and police records, internal departmental memos, letters, newspaper articles, and appeals from those affected. Among other documents, I studied poor laws in northern Germany, secret reports on the use of prisoner of war labor in Germany during World War I, and Prussian parliamentary debates on Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. I also conducted site visits at a former workhouse for vagrants in England and the first immigration detention site in Germany – Fort Prinz Karl in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, about an hour from Munich. Usually closed off to the public, I was able to access the cells in which immigrant detainees were housed in the 1920s and get a sense of the inhumane living conditions people had to endure.

The central question this book thus seeks to answer is how and why states developed the capacities to control migrants. Focusing on the why, the book illuminates the colonial, racial, and capitalist drivers. Focusing on the how, it develops a comprehensive framework that examines how legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities developed in different settings interact in the governance of migration, arguing that states rely equally on all three components to be able to categorize people as outsiders and police their movement. I further sought to understand what the various motivations behind introducing the tools were by reading policy debates, internal departmental memos, the official laws and their justifications, and newspaper articles. Here I was able to see how economic and nativist considerations took center stage and operated either in tandem or in contrast. What I found is that various interest groups intersected, that pushed for changes in mobility controls to fulfill acute labor needs, out of demands to exclude those racialized as undeserving, or driven by humanitarian interests. I was particularly interested in learning how outsiders were rendered excludable. Therefore, I examined how the exclusion of some groups was legitimized by using racial stereotypes to turn them into a threat or scapegoating them for larger economic, social, or political crises.