*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 decide who is deemed deserving of entry and who is 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, Controlling Migrants uncovers an up-to-now hidden history of how we arrived at today’s migration control systems. It departs from existing research, which has predominantly examined the emergence and institutionalization of migration controls through the lens of state-making and  thereby suggests that bordering practices are a natural byproduct 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 not only shows that “migration control” historically produced through the entanglement of local mobility controls, colonial governance, racial politics, and labor policies. It also opens new pathways for theorizing state formation in Europe by revealing how attempts to control mobility shaped the making of core state capacities. Ultimately, this shines light on a so-far undertheorized driver of European state formation and reveals the transnational roots of the European state.

Drawing on 15 months of archival research in nine archives in Germany and the United Kingdom, Controlling Migrants weaves together a first of its kind selection of archival materials including top secret World War I department memos, poor laws in northern Germany, Prussian parliamentary debates on Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, and newspaper articles about migrant workers in the Germany colonies. Together, this rich array of materials allows me to traverse parish-level vagrancy laws, 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 Germany in the 1920s. For each of these cases the book examines what capacities were developed and how, who was targeted and why, and how their targeting was justified.

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. As such, 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.