Deterring transnational migration: public information campaigns, affective governmentality, and the family

ABSTRACT

Feminist research has illustrated how ideas of the family have been central to projects of border and immigration enforcement, including practices of detention, separation, resettlement, and reunification. This work considers how discourses of family are used to categorize immigrants and refugees, determining access to or exclusion from national territory. Drawing on a comparative study of government-led public information campaigns (PICs) in the United States and Australia, we expand on this research to explore how the family is framed and mobilized in PICs to produce emotional and affective attachments intended to influence migration-related decisions. We argue that PICs function as a form of affective governmentality, working to tether potential migrants to place and render them immobile through the strategic circulation of family-based narratives and images grounded in grief, guilt, shame, and familial responsibility. In doing so, PICs obscure the geopolitical and geoeconomic complexities undergirding transnational migration by rendering migration-related decisions as individual and familial. In tracing how the family is framed and mobilized in PICs, we contribute to existing research on the family in border and immigration enforcement and theories of emotional and affective governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Family
• border
• enforcement
• public information campaign
• affect

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the work of research assistants Richard Johnson, Elisa Sperandio, and Georgia Weiss-Elliot on this project, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the International Feminist Journal of Politics whose contributions improved the argument tremendously. Thank you as well to our families and childcare providers, who gave us the time and space to think and write amid a global pandemic. We contributed equally to the manuscript and are collectively responsible for any errors or omissions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this article, we refer to both (im)migrants and refugees, as the populations targeted by PICs encompass both people wishing to migrate for economic or political reasons and those who will be able to formally seek asylum. In general, we choose to use the term “(im)migrant” to refer to mobile people and only use the term “refugee” when this legal category is actively relevant to the context under discussion. Through this use of terminology, we reject state-based attempts to fragment the category of refugee (Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Zetter 2007), as the uncritical use of state categories to define people on the move reinforces the methodological nationalism that treats such categories as both definitive and legitimate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant Number 1853652.

Notes on contributors

Jill Williams

Jill M. Williams is an Associate Research Professor in the Southwest Institute for Research on Women and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona, USA. Her work employs a feminist geographic approach to examine the ways in which transnational human rights and state sovereignty are negotiated within the context of contemporary border enforcement efforts. She has published in journals such as Political Geography, Environmental and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Geopolitics.

Kate Coddington

Kate Coddington is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University at Albany, State University of New York, USA. Her work focuses on borders, migration, and postcolonial governance in the Asia-Pacific region. She has published related work in journals such as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and The Professional Geographer, as well as in several edited books.