*Winner of the Oxford University Press Early Career Research First Book Award and under contract with OUP

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, Controlling Migrants 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. Doing so, it shows that “migrant illegality” is historically produced through the entanglement of local mobility controls, colonial governance, racial politics, and labor policies.

Drawing on 15 months of archival research in Germany and the United Kingdom, Controlling Migrants reveals how the attempts to categorize, control, and police people at the subnational-local and transnational-colonial levels led to the formation of contemporary migration control regimes. It further helps us understand how the construction of the figure of the illegal migrant operates through laws, administrative categories, and enforcement action. It weaves together a first of its kind selection of archival materials that allows me to traverse parish-level vagrancy laws from the 1600s onwards, the control of foreign workers across the German Empire in the 1890s, Germany’s 1913 citizenship law, World War I prisoner of war camps, and the emergence of the figure of the illegal migrant in the 1920s. By making the connections between these seemingly distinct cases, the book not only uncovers an up-to-now hidden history of how we arrived at today’s migration control systems. It also develops a multi-scalar methodology that theorizes state formation through a transnational lens.

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 Controlling Migrants thus seeks to answer is why and how states developed the capacities to categorize some people as undesirable and to target and exclude them. Focusing on the why, it shows how the changing power dynamics of economic, nativist, and pro-migrant institutional orders and the political influence they yield shapes the contours of the migration control regime. Doing so, the book pushes beyond the logics of exceptionalism found in much of the existing analyses of the expansion of migration control. 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. It further shows how those seeking to target people as ‘illegal migrants,’ mobilize existing social, economic, political, and cultural crises to cast those deemed undeserving as threats to citizens, the economy, and the state, thus developing a framework through which to more effectively theorize how migrants are constructed as a security threat.

The book makes three central contributions. First, it pushes beyond existing analyses of migration control that have primarily focused on the most spectacular forms of violence such as detention and deportation. Instead, the book highlights that in their attempts to control migration, states rely on the interactions of core legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities. Secondly, through its multi-scalar methodology, Controlling Migrants reveals the multi-directional links between the colony and the metropole and develops new pathways for theorizing the transnational roots of state capacity. Thirdly, by analyzing why Germany chose to expand its migration control capacities at certain moments, the book advances an institutional explanation of migration control focused on the evolving political power dynamics between the institutional orders pushing for more or less control. In doing so, it provides a nuanced alternative to the oft-found emphasis on backlash to liberal migration policies or the impact of private profit-interests on migration control systems.