Disciplining the human rights of immigrants: market veridiction and the echoes of eugenics in contemporary EU immigration policies

Abstract

This paper investigates the technologies of controlling migration and how the human rights of third-country nationals are disciplined and limited in many European Union member states. It discusses the rationalities of allowing entry as they are inscribed in the Schengen visa regulations and in the regulations relating to resident permits and family reunification rights in various European countries. Specifically the paper sheds light on how market veridiction results in the disciplining of human rights in these policies. The analysis is conducted through a Foucauldian governmentality framework entailing an analysis of the problematisations of immigration through market veridiction and how these are applied today to limit immigrants’ human rights. The paper then compares these rationalities to eugenic justifications for problematising immigration in the USA from 1860s onwards. This historical comparison shows how social Darwinist notions of human worth continue to function at the level of rationalities and technologies of disciplining immigrants’ human rights. The paper concludes that market veridiction makes human rights function inside a framework of (e)quality in which human worth is calculated as ‘quality’ and not as ‘equality’, and shows how migrants’ human rights are made to function as something to be earned rather than something inherent or inalienable.

Keywords:

• human rights
• immigration
• class
• social Darwinism
• governmentality
• market veridiction

Acknowledgements

The research underpinning this article would not have been possible without the support of PHIR at Loughborough University and CEREN at the Swedish School of Social Sciences, Helsinki University. Particularly, I would like to thank Prof Moya Lloyd for her support at various stages of producing the underlying research and Dr Louiza Odysseos for the helpful and generous guidance she gave me during the writing of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, which aided me in clarifying the article.

Notes

1. For example, Bigo, “Security and Immigration”; and Lippert and O’Connor; “Security Assemblages.”

2. Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 138–139. See also Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

3. Golder, “Foucault’s Critical (yet Ambivalent) Affirmation.”

4. For example, Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; and Barry et al., Foucault and Political Reason.

5. In the case of Finland, for example, see Rajas, “State Racist Governmentality.” This type of Foucauldian analysis essentially differs from, say, historical institutionalism, as employed by King and Hansen, “Eugenic Ideas,” since Foucauldian approaches focus on discourse through its conditions of possibility, i.e. the possibilities of saying so, which in this case is the socio-evolutionary framework and the employment of social Darwinist conceptualisations of fitness.

6. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 61.

7. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.

8. Wyndham, “Striving for National Fitness.”

9. McLaren, Our Own Master Race; and Wiebe, “Producing Bodies and Borders.”

10. King, Making Americans.

11. Ibid.

12. Mottier, “Eugenics and the State,” 134.

13. For example, Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook.

14. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives; Rosen, Preaching Eugenics; Selden, “Biological Determinism”; and Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State.

15. For example, Freeden, “Eugenics and Ideology”; Broberg and Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State; Leonard, “Retrospectives”; and Turda, Modernism and Eugenics.

16. Rajas, “State Racist Governmentality.” More generally, see Dean, The Constitution of Poverty.

17. McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 46.

18. Prescott F. Hall, a co-founder of the Immigration Restriction League, in 1906, quoted in Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society, 68.

19. Bashford, “Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Eugenics,” 159, 158.

20. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 149–150; and Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256–257.

21. Ramsden, “Social Demography and Eugenics.”

22. For example, Dean, Governmentality; and Rose, Powers of Freedom.

23. Odysseos, “Human Rights, Liberal Ontogenesis,” 760–761.

24. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

25. For example, Morris, “Governing at a Distance”; Salter, “When the Exception becomes the Rule”; Kasli and Parla, “Broken Lines of Il/Legality”; and Inda, Targeting Immigrants.

26. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 318. See also Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect; Donzelot, “Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence”; and Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets.

27. Andrijasevic and Walters, “The International Organization for Migration.”

28. Gerken, “Immigrant Anxieties.”

29. The GNI per capita data are from the UNData, ‘GNI per capita, PPP (current international $)’ online databases for 2008 and the latest available in 2010. Where data did not exist at the UN (i.e. for North Korea, Kosovo and Taiwan), the information is based on CIA, World Fact Book information. See www.data.un.org; and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/, accessed December 14, 2010.

30. This intersectionality of race and class is another rationality functioning in the visa regime, but it is not studied here. Also, as any student of Foucault knows, statistics can be manipulated. The same is the case here: categorising countries based on equal increments of GNI ($10) would reduce the coefficient to moderately significant (R² = 0.49), meaning that the relationship between wealth and entry is not as linear as the categorisation presented leads us to believe. However, this difference does not speak of a difference between poverty and required visas (where 95% of the lowest category still require visas) but of the impact of ‘race’ on the requirement for visas for the wealthier countries, as all such countries are ‘non-white’, population-wise, and/or culturally Islamic. See Rajas, “State Racist Governmentality,” Appendix 2.

31. Bale, European Politics, 230.

32. Source of data: EuroStat “Third Country Nationals refused Entry.”

33. European Migration Network, “Ad-hoc Query.”

34. International Organization for Migration, Laws for Legal Immigration.

35. Triebl and Klindworth, Family Reunification – German Country Report.

36. Sibley et al., Family Reunification – United Kingdom Country Report.

37. Pascouau with Labaye, Conditions for Family Reunification.

38. De Hart et al., Family Reunification – Dutch Country Report.

39. McNay, “Self as Enterprise,” 65.

40. Venn, “Neoliberal Political Economy,” 229.

41. For example, Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; King, Making Americans; and Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society.

42. Ryan, “Blaming the Victim.”

43. Government of the United States, Dillingham Commission Report, 107.

44. Hahn Rafter, White Trash.

45. Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency,” 319.

46. Immigration Restriction League, The Present Aspect, 11–12.

47. Government of the United States, Dillingham Commission Report, 103.

48. Fairchild, Immigration, 204.

49. Stern. “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood.”

50. Fairchild, Immigration, 191–273.

51. Ibid., 158. See also Silber, “Eugenics, Family and Immigration Law.”

52. Fairchild, Immigration, 49.