https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4198-1808
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ABSTRACT
In the past decade, theorising about migration policy has rapidly included more states beyond Western Europe or North America. Expanding the temporal and geographical range of conventional cases destabilises reification of the nation-state and challenges Eurocentric conceptions of sovereignty. By reexamining British settler colonies, alongside the United States, I develop an Imperial Migration State concept to characterise macro-historical shifts as built upon a scaffolding of race and racism. Analysing transitions from imperial to postcolonial polities, furthermore, sheds light on how countries continue to use ostensibly non-racist yet discriminatory restrictions in their exclusionary immigration policies. Efforts to excise racist underpinnings in immigration policies require a more subtle understanding of where and when innovations emerged, and then whether or why such policies diffuse.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the special issue editors, Darshan Vigneswaran, and Sabrina Axster for helpful feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Dauvergne (Citation2016, ch.4) goes further to argue that security concerns have transformed immigration politics in the 21st century. However, she sidelines a long history of securitization, especially based on racism, as discussed below. For a securitization analysis of Islamophobia in the twenty-first century, see Chebel d’Appollonia (Citation2012); on differences between national security and securitization, see Klotz (Citation2018).
2 Galloway (Citation2000, 94–97) stressed international status incentives to bolster its quasi-sovereignty as the driving force.
3 Hence, I question how Sadiq and Tsourapas (Citation2021) treated Egypt and India as most-similar cases.
4 Complexities in who gets labeled Chinese are not unique to South Africa, but its administrative denial contrasts sharply with other Anglosphere countries. For example, exclusion laws in the United States treated ethnic Chinese people as a single category regardless of their diverse nationalities (Lau Citation2006).
5 By the 1970s, New Zealand diverges from Australia, due to the central political and cultural role of the Māori community (Fleras Citation2009, ch.6).