Agency within Mobility: Conceptualising the Geopolitics of Migration Management

ABSTRACT

The movement of people across borders, and the varied governmental responses to that movement, is of crucial importance to contemporary geopolitics. Agency and mobility are two central themes in these debates. This Forum makes an intervention into such debates, by contributing to the conceptualisation of agency as a co-constitutive phenomena, and seeking a collaborative response to the question of how to rethink the paradigm of political agency. Within the diverse situations described in the Forum, the contributors trace the different ways in which migrant individuals enact and claim agency within the systems they encounter. While engaging with different case studies (migration to Germany, the UK, the EU and Japan; migration from and within West Africa) and utilising different methodologies (interviews, ethnographic research, policy analysis), the contributions are united by a determination to develop understandings of migrant and refugee agency that do justice to the complexity of the geopolitical situations in which persons find themselves: whether that is the inequalities produced by long-term factors such as colonialism and developmental interventions; or the contemporary cross-border movements driven by conflicts or regional, national and local circumstance. By recognising the various ways in which migrants, as political actors in their own right, engage with multiple forms of governance and management, we engage in a cumulative effort to make conceptual strides on the back of empirical research, in order to generate new avenues for productive research into the geopolitics of migration management.

Introduction to the Forum

Lisa Marie Borrelli and Patrick Pinkerton

The movement of people across borders, and the varied governmental responses to that movement, is of crucial importance to the study of contemporary geopolitics. Agency and mobility are two central themes in these debates. Research on migration governance often focuses on the agency of bureaucrats and ‘security professionals’, in order to explore the policy-making processes behind attempts to manage, direct or block migrant mobility (Bigo 2014). Research on migrant populations, by contrast, often views the agency of mobile persons as a positive resource (Mainwaring 2016; Triandafyllidou 2017), possessed by those who claim their rights of mobility in the face of attempts to limit or constrain it: something that is particularly true of the ‘Autonomy of Migration’ (AoM) approach (which is discussed in detail in Scheel’s contribution to this Forum). Those coming at the issue from a ‘top-down’ perspective, and those favouring a ‘bottom-up’ approach, are united by a conceptualisation of agency as the “action” of unique and distinct agents (Arendt 1998, 177–180), thus conforming “to the morphology of political action as a resistance against or as a ‘deliberate’ agency” (Belcher, Martin, and Tazzioli 2015). In other words, these approaches pit the deliberate power of migrant governance against deliberate acts of migrant resistance.

This Forum makes an intervention into such debates, by contributing to the conceptualisation of agency as a co-constitutive phenomena, where the capacity to be affected by forms of governance is seen as “inextricably enmeshed with our capacity to ‘act’” (Sabsay 2016, 285). In doing so, we seek to offer a collaborative response to the question of how to rethink the paradigm of political agency (Tazzioli and De Genova 2016, 82). We situate this task within understandings of agency as something constituted by the subject’s relationship to the other and towards a political community (Arendt 1998), meaning we do not limit agency to ‘actively’ directed operations that contest policies and socially constructed identities. The contributions examine the multiple and diverse manners in which migration management elicits or produces certain types of agency, and the strategies employed by persons to negotiate, subvert or resist attempts to manage their mobility (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016). In doing so, we explore how migrant agency is performed, co-opted and produced in a range of governmental settings. We examine not only the (contested) agency between bureaucratic settings and migrant individuals, but also seek to go beyond understandings which inscribe agency purely on the individual, by considering how agency and mobility operate at the collective level of ‘the migrant’, or of specific migrant populations. Agency therefore becomes not only a “discourse of domination and subordination” (Naples and Méndez 2015, 130) playing out between various actors – migrant individuals as well as (non)state institutions – but also a “struggle between the self and the norm” (Kelz 2016, 65) and thus a concept which reveals who is acknowledged and recognised as capable of agency.

Within the diverse situations described in the Forum, the contributors trace the different ways in which migrant individuals enact and claim agency within the systems they encounter. Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche, drawing on encounters with asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan in Germany between 2014 and 2017, begin the Forum by proposing a re-articulation of migrant agency as the context-contingent capacity to produce one’s own subjectivity. By highlighting the complex interactions between a social context, characterised by a special power dynamic, and the performance of agency, Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche urge the avoidance of simplistic accounts which read political positionality from migrant agency. Scheel’s contribution picks up on these themes. With a conceptual focus on the concept of appropriation, illustrated through examples from the context of European and Japanese biometric border regimes, Scheel highlights the intricate intertwinement of migrants’ practices of subversion with the technologies of surveillance and control, to demonstrate how migrants repurpose the methods and mechanisms of border management into means allowing for the appropriation of mobility. Similarly to Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche, Scheel presents this conceptualisation as one which places the complexity, and inherently political character, of migrant agency at the centre of analysis. These opening contributions therefore highlight the asymmetric power relations inherent in state-client interactions governed by hierarchisation and categorisation. This focus is particularly important for analysing the reflections and experiences of non-citizens, who are often already excluded by their legal status. It is therefore disturbing to note, as pointed out by Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche, how these persons at times reproduce a Western idea of the ‘deserving migrant’, which chimes with the bureaucratic and state narratives of deservingness, constructed so as to subject certain populations to a management system in which their ability, and thus their agency, is scrutinised and questioned. However, as both these contributions stress, agency is not determined by the immediate context alone, but is embedded in broader fields, including (as Scheel points out) through the appropriation of non-human, technological devices.

The third and fourth contributions carry these themes further, reflecting on the distribution of agency at a meso and macro level, by studying the regional and country-specific relations of migration management, and the influence of colonial history on current regimes of agency and mobility in these settings. Oelgemöller’s piece focuses on the knowledge environment that produces West Africa as a site of developmental interventions targeting migration. By reflecting on her own positionality within a research project funded by institutions based in the Global North, Oelgemöller’s places contemporary interventions in a context stretching from the colonial past to the present of the two ‘Global Compacts’ on migrants and refugees, in order to rethink how ‘the migrant’ is constructed as a political actor simultaneously empowered to become mobile, while facing constraints on that mobility. By focusing on the sculpting of this highly differentiated agency, Oelgemöller’s perspective allows her to grasp, at the same time, the manner in which non-governmental organisations become crucial actors that try to increase agency in so-called ‘developing’ countries, to reduce mobility. Pinkerton then concludes the Forum by examining the agency of what may be considered ‘privileged’ migrants arriving in the UK. Drawing on and developing Foucault’s work on biopolitics and circulation, Pinkerton examines how the potential of privileged migrants to be integrated into host societies is enacted by biopolitical governance alongside the enticement and maintenance of migrant mobility. With an empirical focus on plans for a ‘post-Brexit’ immigration policy, Pinkerton conceptualises migrant mobility in the UK not simply as a positive resource of agency utilised by mobile individuals to escape management or control, but as something that is also enabled by a legal framework which can produce migrants as mobile and movable. By tracing the historical development of narratives around mobility and control, these closing contributions allow us to understand how agency becomes not only diminished or supported by certain developments, but also how actors are influenced by wider historical currents. At the same time, these diverse perspectives force us, as researchers, to reflect on our own role within these highly contested, but also uneven, political processes.

While engaging with different case studies (migration to Germany, the UK, the EU and Japan; migration from and within West Africa) and utilising different methodologies (interviews, ethnographic research, policy analysis), the contributions in this Forum are united by a determination to develop understandings of migrant and refugee agency that do justice to the complexity of the geopolitical situations in which persons find themselves: whether that is the inequalities produced by long-term factors such as colonialism and developmental interventions; or the contemporary cross-border movements driven by conflicts or regional, national and local circumstance. We thus follow Isin and Nielsen’s (2008) call to take social actors and their discourse about society seriously, and to pay attention to their agency and how it manifests itself. By recognising the various ways in which migrants, as political actors in their own right, engage with multiple forms of governance and management, we engage in a cumulative effort to make conceptual strides on the back of empirical research, in a manner which can open up new avenues for empirical study. Taken together, we hope that the diversity of methods and approaches brought together here will generate new ideas for productive research agendas into the geopolitics of migration management.

Forced Migrants’ Tactical Performances of Agency: A Theoretical Perspective

Hamza Safouane, Annette Jünemann and Sandra Göttsche

In discourses on migration, asylum seekers and refugees are often ascribed subjectivities that fluctuate between various pre-established identities: they may be decried as agents of external disorder that threaten the internal integrity of receiving societies (Tazzioli and De Genova 2016); romanticised as political heroes who subvert the global apparatus of mobility control by transcending borders (Behrman 2016); or victimised as passive recipients of humanitarian rescue (De Genova et al. 2018). The terms of these narratives may diverge in the way they recode refugees and asylum seekers, yet they all achieve the same result: the denial of their aspiration to normality defined as the process by which they attempt to reconstruct their lives and identity post-flight in order to adjust to their new social reality.

This piece draws on a micro-level and interpretative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in Germany between 2014 and 2017 with Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers. In that timeframe, the overall mood in Germany towards migrants in general shifted from a warm welcome (Willkommenskultur) to increased scepticism and even hostility, especially after the 2015 New Year’s Eve mass sexual assaults against women and the series of terrorist attacks that shook the country. In this sensitive context, recruiting study participants whose presence was often legally precarious and/or socially contested was complicated by mistrust towards our intentions. Consequently, we used snowball subject recruitment whereby third parties (volunteers and interviewees) could put us in touch with about 40 interviewees. These semi-structured interviews elicited rich narratives on the migratory journey of refugees and asylum seekers, which we then coded inductively. Based on our analysis, we contend that fixed and absolute identities hardly correspond to the way refugees determine themselves in relation to daily interactions with socio-economic, cultural, bureaucratic and legal structures of the receiving society. These identities actually deny the agency of migrants in producing their own subjectivity.

We discuss here forced migrants’ capacity for and practices of everyday agency in receiving societies. From the outset, there are two elements that need to be clarified. First, although the label ‘forced migrant’ implies involuntary displacement, we maintain that there is still a complex decision-making process leading to forced flight, composed of constant choice, aspirations, preparedness, and therefore agency (Safouane 2019, 250). Second, we understand these everyday performances of agency as micro-acts embedded in a social normative order that restricts them. Here, we draw from both Michel Foucault’s (1995, 333) concept of microphysics of power that, by investing the social body, constitutes subjects, as well as from Michel de Certeau’s (2011, 256) notion of minute apparatuses of power against which daily acts of resistance are performed. We therefore understand agency as the ability to navigate not only an overarching and centralised institutional power (the state, the border regime, etc.), but also, and mostly, the daily, meticulous, and dispersed procedures of disciplining social bodies and discursively ascribing subjectivities.

In the case of refugees and asylum seekers struggling to reclaim normalcy in the context of the receiving society, we examine how they engage in everyday tactical performances of agency. The tactical dimension of these performances stems from the fact that they are calculated small-scale actions in relation to the immediate social context while serving the larger strategy of settling in the host country and being able to sustain one’s existence in the longer term. For instance, an asylum seeker may adopt an attitude of victimhood in specific contexts but we argue that this could be construed as an expression that belongs to a wider range of subjective agency whereby agents perform tactical manoeuvres to achieve a specific objective: embracing the subjectivity of a victim during the credibility assessment procedure could be a helpful positioning in the adjudication of their asylum claim.

Our need to re-articulate agency emerged from the recurrence of certain discourses among interviewees that seemingly uncritically aligned themselves with the hierarchisation, essentialisation, and othering of migrants that are generally conveyed by the migration management regime. At times, interviewees reproduced narratives of identity anxiety, suspicion, and hostility vis-à-vis the foreign other to which they are often themselves subjected in host societies. Such paradoxical instances of complicity with discourses that are detrimental to their mobility and presence in the host country triggered a broader reflection on our assumptions about their subjectivities and, therefore, agency. By seemingly acquiescing to the binary language of deserving versus underserving migrants, we wondered whether some of our interviewees exhibited “false consciousness” and so were oblivious to the power dynamics at work through increasingly restrictive migration and asylum policies. Indeed, if our role as critical migration researchers is to uncover a “true consciousness” of (forced) migrants and prevent ideological “confusions”, one could wonder whether such an analytical positioning would not call into question their agency in producing their own subjectivity.

Researchers’ positionality can lead to the projection of their subjectivities, especially political sensibilities, onto that of migrants, such that certain narratives that they produce may be erroneously dismissed as misguided, manipulated and, devoid of agency. Therefore, we do not subscribe to the “false consciousness” hypothesis. As stated above, we frame agency as a set of tactics that refugees and asylum seekers can deploy in relation to their own perception of the host society. In this sense, we argue that migrants’ agency can also emerge from their perception of a difference between the host society’s assumed identity and social norms and their foreignness as non-whites, Muslims, Middle-Eastern, or simply non-citizens. The objective of certain performances of agency, we observed, could be to signal sameness with the host’s supposed norms and identity in order to reduce the perceived normative distance from them. Migrant performances of agency are to be construed within the context of the host society’s norms. Therefore, becoming a subject-agent does not strictly imply resisting dominant norms, but can also mean accepting and reproducing norms, labels, and discourses that are suspicious towards difference. Here, the purpose for our interviewees would be to mitigate the presumed position of an othered foreigner. This difference between the self and the host society may be viewed by migrants as a vector of othering and, consequently, the impossibility to settle and legitimise one’s presence as a (potential) member of the receiving society. It follows that we propose an articulation of agency that is broader than just the expression of an emancipatory agenda and resistance against power. Agency implies a broader set of subjectivities of survival in a new society where one’s new presence remains felt and understood as precarious.

Consider the following excerpt from an interview with a Syrian male refugee who obtained refugee status but denounced his othering as the unfamiliar and barbaric other:

“[W]e’re not backward people. We’re a people that’s educated, we’re a people that’s conscious, we’re a people that’s cultivated. There’s a very large share of educated people from Syria who arrived in Europe. We never rely on others”.¹

In this excerpt, the interviewee is concerned about the risk of being othered in Germany as a result of his forced flight and his status as a refugee. He decried a derogatory representation of Syria and, by association, of his individual identity, that was possibly mirrored to him in Germany. He claimed that outside of the tragedy of the Civil War, Syria is in several aspects quite similar to Germany and, as such, a “normal” country. The use of the inclusive “we” emphasises that the interviewee’s education level is not an exception but a normal trait among the Syrians who came to Germany, which is not reflected in their refugee status.

We situate (forced) migrants’ negotiation of normality in what Michel de Certeau (2011) described as everyday life practices, that is, tactics for negotiating the power relationships that characterise their social setting. Like de Certeau, we do not mean the overarching institutional power of the state, but this multitude of localised and decentralised apparatuses that apply to refugees and asylum seekers. These can consist of a refugee reception centre as an apparatus of governing mobility (or what Pinkerton calls ‘governing through mobility’ in his contribution to this Forum), the legal-administrative categories of residence status, or narratives in media and political spheres that ascribe identities and intentions to migrants. These are the elements that constitute a social context and convey certain normative representations.

We also understand the notion of social context from a Foucauldian perspective, namely, the political, economic, historical, and cultural factors that ground a regime of power/knowledge at a given time within a specific society (Foucault 1980, 270). For instance, the humanitarian and political discourses on refugees and asylum seekers in Europe often refer to an anonymous and undistinguishable multitude of mute bodies who are unable to author their own narratives (Rajaram 2002). On the contrary, agency is defined here as the context-contingent capacity to produce one’s own subjectivity; it is a function of power dynamics characterising a social context. In the case of our interviewees, such a context is partly constituted by the migration management regime, which exerts its discursive power by establishing a whole taxonomy of the displaced centred around voluntariness and that seeks to determine the way migrants (voluntary-economic-undeserving or involuntary-persecuted-deserving) will be intervened upon by state and non-state organisations.

Admittedly, we propose a somewhat broad definition of agency. This is because we are methodologically interested in capturing a large array of subjectivities that can be adopted by migrants during their interactions with the different contexts of their migratory process. Agency is here a heuristic instrument: it accounts for migrants’ own outlook on their migratory journey including, but certainly not limited to, their contestations of the various subject positions conveyed through discourses that frame refugees primarily as victimised involuntary migrants. We utilise the agency approach not to pronounce who has or does not have it. Instead, we wish to encourage a research agenda in which scholars examine the contextual variables that mediate performances of agency to apprehend migratory practices from an immanent perspective.

We seek to emphasise the indeterminacy and complexity of migrant subjectivity against essentialist and decontextualised ascriptions of involuntariness, victimhood, deservingness, and vulnerability. Being a refugee is necessarily performative and, subsequently, an identity that is constantly in the making: it is a becoming. Our interviewees’ actions and discourses do not reveal an internal refugee identity as a stable subject. ‘Becoming’ a refugee (or a migrant) is a process which hinges upon the interplay between the multiple facets of one’s identity (personal biography, socio-economic background, social status, gender, religion, and so on) and the social context through which ascriptions of subjectivity happen. Refugee identity is constantly shifting, from one expression of subjectivity to another, depending on one’s position within a given social context. We do not articulate agency as a necessary expression of liberatory politics against power, but rather as ad hoc tactics of reducing perceived differences with the host society to serve a larger strategy of preserving one’s presence.

In this excerpt, an Iraqi asylum seeker, whose application was denied at the time of the interview, had this to say about other migrants:

So you need to use a ‘sieve’ for the refugees. You give one a chance to build a future, so you need to give to those who deserve. On TV the German Foreign Minister said that we will not deport Syrians and Iraqis. I consider this to be a mistake. Thousands of Syrians and Iraqis came in, many of them, don’t deserve to be here, they didn’t deserve to live in their country to start with … You see a guy who has no problems, give him a chance to live here. People with diplomas, young, give them an opportunity. A person with problems, deport them to the borders.²

Here, the interviewee designated an in-group, to which he implicitly claimed to pertain in opposition to an othered out-group. He expressed a specific subjectivity that articulated the opposition between the two groups around notions of education and hardship to determine deservingness to live in Germany. Such a subjectivity, which echoes the migration management regime’s grammar of hierarchisation and deservingness, reveals the interviewees’ performance of agency that claims the legitimacy of his presence in Germany. The othering of the ‘uneducated’ and ‘lazy’ migrants emphasises his asserted subjective sameness with the host. Rather than performing agency as a resistance against these disenfranchising discourses, he resorted to a tactical projection of an identity in which he is of the German society but not the others. Later in the interview, the speaker adopts a more competitive attitude by implying that ‘undeserving’ asylum claimants have tainted his own application by giving all deserving applicants a bad name.

Although we propose a re-articulation of agency that departs from its usual normative understanding, there remains an element of normativity that we wish to encourage in the field. Specifically, we acknowledge (forced) migrants’ agency in appropriating labels and contesting subject positions that undermine their settlement and the success of their migratory journey despite detrimental discourses they may (re)produce. In scholarship, migrants’ agency should not be limited to resistance and emancipation, but be apprehended in its complexity, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy.

Our proposition of the agency approach enables considering a wide array of migratory practices and migrants’ representations amidst a social context and its dominant norms. As a concept that can contribute to the scholarly agenda of researching migration from an immanent point of view, the agency approach could be used to understand other journeys that are embedded in different spaces, periods, and regimes. We thus posit agency as a normatively open concept that encompasses resistance and emancipation. There are several possible performances of agency in relation to the social context where they are enacted. Agency in the host country may take the form of a resistance against labels that migrants refuse to internalise, but it could also lead to compliance with non-emancipatory subjectivities. Crossing national borders, migrants’ agency can be an expression of defiance against state sovereignty and border security practices. Upon arrival and settlement, migrants may endorse practices of strict border surveillance and restrictive migration policies out of political conviction or perhaps in the hope of protecting a precarious social position. Expressions of subjectivities that do not conform to an emancipatory political agenda must not be readily dismissed as devoid of agency, but may constitute a tactic of compliance with the subject position of the familiar (as opposed to the foreign) in order to safeguard their social position in the host society. Similarly, the expression of defiant subjectivities, such as that of unauthorised migration in order to avoid control and circumvent mobility restrictions, is not necessarily an internalisation of an anti-border pro-migration political agenda. It could reflect the adaptation to a spatial-juridical context that is characterised by a regime of power that aims to manage mobility. Migrants’ performances of agency are neither to be romanticised as liberatory politics nor vilified as justifications of anti-migration rhetoric. Instead, their inherent heterogeneity and contradiction constitutes the strongest evidence, should this still be necessary, of migrants’ unquestionable humanity.

Practices of Appropriation: Theorising the Intertwinement of Migrants’ Practices with the Means and Methods of Control

Stephan Scheel

The question of how to think and theorise the relationship between collective and individual forms of agency and social, political and cultural structures continues to be one of the big, unresolved debates in the social sciences. This observation also holds for migration studies, where discussions about the (political) agency of migrants erupt in regular intervals (Bakewell 2010; Fiedler 2020; Zhang 2018). Since the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015 there has been a renewed interest in migrant agency after more than one million people – mostly refugees from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan – managed to enter Europe via the Mediterranean and the so-called Balkan-route. This interest in migrant agency is often driven by the governmental desire to tame migrants’ capacity to act, a desire which is, in turn, animated by the (geo-)political implications of migration: while net-migration rates can decide the outcome of elections, the fate of governments or the future of the European Union (EU), as illustrated by the United Kingdom (UK) electorate’s vote to leave the EU, the ‘migration question’ has also come to feature prominently on foreign policy agendas, as highlighted by the infamous EU–Turkey deal, and President Erdogan’s threat to unleash a flood of migrants into the EU in Spring 2020.

However, as the summer of migration of 2015 has demonstrated, migrants are not reducible to pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. Nor is migration reducible to a dependent variable of war or poverty, as suggested by influential migration theories. People migrate for a variety of different and at times multiple reasons. Moreover, they do so for variable time-spans, and their movements are often erratic and multi-directional, betraying conventional accounts of migration as linear movements from nation-state A to B. It is precisely this unruliness of migrations, the moments of uncontrollability and excess that they feature, the persistence and stubborn recalcitrance of migrants, the support of their networks and the creativity of their practices – that is, the autonomy of migration – which renders migrant agency an issue of geopolitical concern.

Hence, the summer of migration has also sparked renewed interest in the AoM approach. As suggested by its name, the AoM’s main hypothesis is that migration features autonomous moments of uncontrollability and excess in relation to states’ attempts to regulate and valorise migratory movements (Mezzadra 2011; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Scheel 2019; Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe 2007). Yet, the AoM is not reducible to this provocative hypothesis. It resembles a “heuristic model” (Moulier Boutang 2007) that allows for investigating migrations and border regimes from migrants’ viewpoint, with a particular focus on migrants’ border struggles (Belcher, Martin, and Tazzioli 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). This is, in fact, the most distinctive feature of the AoM: it reverses the state-centred perspective shared by most approaches in border and migration studies by inviting scholars to study border regimes and migratory processes from the standpoint of mobility. Hence, the AoM can be read as an intervention in debates on migrant agency which underscores, first, the political quality of migrants’ practices, and second, migrants’ unbroken capacity to negotiate even the most restrictive border regimes.

However, the AoM is also haunted by the structure-agency debate. In brief, the AoM has been repeatedly criticised for not sufficiently accounting for the exclusionary and violent effects of technologically ever more sophisticated mechanisms of control (Spencer 2009). This would result in an undifferentiated glorification of migrants as heroes of clandestine border crossing. In response to these criticisms, advocates of the AoM have tried to refine and further develop their approach. One direction of these efforts culminated in the notion of appropriation.

Developed through the ‘hard case’ of biometric border regimes, the concept of appropriation seeks to highlight the intricate intertwinement of migrants’ practices with the means and methods of control (Scheel 2019). Accordingly, migrants repurpose – and this is the most important feature of practices of appropriation – the methods, logics and mechanisms of control into means allowing for the appropriation of mobility and other resources, such as access to public services, an income, or a residence title. Yet, to be successful, practices of appropriation usually have to remain undetected. Hence, practices of appropriation tend to operate ‘under the radar’ in the realm of the hidden. In brief, practices of appropriation constitute what James Scott (1985) has called “weapons of the weak”. In the following I will outline and illustrate two sets of practices by which migrants may appropriate mobility in the context of biometric border controls, in order to highlight two features of practices of appropriation.

The first concerns a practice that has become known as ‘bezness’, a neologism fusing the word business with the French word baiser, informally used for ‘to fuck’. The term refers to a migration strategy of aspiring migrants who try to seduce and subsequently marry European tourists as a way to gain entry to and legal residency in Europe. The phenomenon of bezness illustrates that biometric border controls implicate a shift towards migration channels that either evade biometric registration – like clandestine border crossings – or offer the prospect of legal residency, such as marriage migration. While the dominant discourse on bezness establishes a clear-cut distinction between male non-European ‘villains’ and female European ‘victims’ in need of protection, the notion of appropriation allows us to read bezness as the reverse side of female sex tourism, two interrelated phenomena that are both provoked by, besides profound socioeconomic inequalities, the highly restrictive European visa regime (Scheel 2017). In this instance, people from countries with a visa requirement recode the biographical features that render them as a high ‘migration risk’ in the eyes of consular staff – being young, unmarried and without strong social and economic ties to their country of origin – into means for the appropriation of mobility.

Importantly, bezness highlights a crucial feature of practices of appropriation, namely their opportunistic nature and related ambivalence. Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche are, of course, right to caution against the reduction of all articulations of migrant agency as “the expression of an emancipatory agenda and resistance against power” (see their contibution to this Forum). Migrants engaging in practices of appropriation do not seek to make claims in the public sphere. They are only interested in seizing immediate gains offered by fleeting moments of opportunity (Scheel 2019, 94), such as a tourist that might offer a gateway to Europe. Moreover, the phenomenon of bezness also illustrates that migrants cannot repurpose the means and methods of control as they please. Rather, practices of appropriation are ambivalent (Oelgemöller also discusses ambivalence in the context of post-colonial interventions in her contribution to this Forum). They involve painful concessions and compromises that render their outcomes incomplete, precarious and reversible. Hence, practices of appropriation usually result in further border struggles over mobility and other resources, rather than in an unequivocal victory for migrants. In the case of bezness, migrants have to pass a probation period of 3 to 5 years (depending on the EU member state) before they are eligible even to apply for a permanent residence permit. During this period, they depend on the good will of their European partners for the renewal of their temporary residence permits. If migrants only feign love for their partner they will have to stage convincing performances of the script of romantic love on a daily basis throughout this probation period. Not only in the case of feigned love on part of the migrant, but also if the European partner discovers that she does not love her partner as much as during their holiday romance, the bedroom and the breakfast table become sites of struggles over mobility to, and legal residency in, Europe. What the appropriation of mobility through bezness thus highlights is that the European border regime permeates the everyday and intimate lives of both migrants and EU citizens (Scheel 2017).

The biometrification of border and citizenship regimes does, however, also animate the development of new practices of appropriation. The second practice I will consider is that offered by a phenomenon discussed as “biometric obfuscation” (Yoon, Feng, and Jain 2012). In brief, biometric obfuscation refers to the alteration or mutilation of bodily features that are used as markers of identity by biometric recognition systems. In the case of fingerprints, which are predominantly used for identifying migrants, fingerprint dummies made out of glue, latex or silicone (so-called ‘spoofing’) are used to assume the identity of someone else. The alteration or mutilation of fingerprints aims, in turn, at avoiding identification by a biometric recognition system. Since the EU’s build-up of a growing arsenal of biometric databases that increasingly covers all modes of entry, from unauthorised border crossings to asylum and visa applications, it is reasonable to assume that such practices will become important elements of illegalised migration to Europe in the near future. While the self-mutilation of fingerprints has been documented as a widespread practice among asylum seekers for a number of years, a recent report by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (2018, 50) notes that instances of spoofing may have already occurred. Attempts at spoofing have also been reported in the context of the Visa Information System, the EU’s database for short-term visa applicants (European Commission 2016). In general, the figure of ‘the spoofer’ animates intense innovation efforts within the biometric industry because “no one actually knows how often, when or by whom biometric systems might be spoofed” (Grünenberg 2020, 2).

One of the first and best documented cases of biometric obfuscation concerns a Chinese woman who was arrested by the Japanese border police in 2009. After her arrest it came to light that the woman had undergone plastic surgery to return to Japan after she had been deported and subjected to a re-entry ban. Since her fingerprints had been enrolled in a biometric database designed to enact the re-entry ban, the woman had undergone surgery to swap the fingerprints of her left and right hands. This attempt to appropriate mobility through biometric obfuscation was only discovered by the police after the woman was arrested in Japan for faking a marriage with a Japanese man as a way to appropriate a legal residency in Japan (BBC 2009).

What this example illustrates is the intricate intertwinement of practices of appropriation with the means, methods and operational logics of border control. In this instance, a biometric recognition system draws on the bodily features of deported migrants – the minutiae of their fingerprints – as a means of reidentification to enact a re-entry ban and restrict their mobility. The woman repurposed this method of control into a means of appropriating mobility by transplanting a section of the skin of her left hand to the fingertips of her right hand. In this way she made sure that the fingerprint scanner would produce a digital template of the minutiae of her fingerprints which would not match the template that was stored in the biometric database of the Japanese border police when she had been deported. What the example also illustrates is that practices of appropriation require concessions and compromises on the part of migrants: in this instance, expensive and painful surgery. Moreover, the outcomes of practices of appropriation – even if initially successful – remain contested and incomplete, prompting further struggles over mobility and other resources. In the present case, the woman was arrested when she tried to appropriate a legal residence title through a ‘marriage of convenience’ with a Japanese man.

Most importantly, the example highlights the political quality of practices of appropriation. Practices of appropriation render border controls, and the socio-economic inequalities they help to create and sustain, as objects of contestation and dissent. The irreducible political quality of practices of appropriation resides precisely in this moment of self-authorisation. For migrants’ attempts to appropriate mobility efficiently throw into question the claimed prerogative of nation-states to control access to their territories, even if these attempts are not immediately successful, and even if these attempts involve disturbing performances of the script of ‘the deserving migrant’ (as discussed in this Forum by Safouane, Jüenemann and Göttsche). When migrants like the Chinese woman decide to appropriate mobility within and against today’s border and migration regimes, they enact themselves as political subjects, as they self-authorise themselves to take the resources that these governmental regimes are designed to deprive them of, instead of claiming or asking them from someone. Hence, a focus on migrants’ practices of appropriation permits scholars to highlight the political and contestable nature of border controls. It may also inspire more hopeful, head-on antiracist policies that no longer orient their demands towards the mechanisms of an allegedly omnipotent control apparatus, but rather take cue from migrants’ practices of appropriation which demonstrate, on a daily basis, that no border lasts forever!³

Finally, it must be emphasised that focusing on migrants’ practices of appropriation does not constitute a return to methodological individualism in the study of migrant agency. For practices of appropriation have to be studied in migrants’ embodied encounters with the means and methods of control (Scheel 2019). The crucial point is that “encounters between embodied subjects always hesitate between the domain of the particular – the face-to-face of this encounter – and the general – the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism” (Ahmed 2000, 9). Hence, migrants’ encounters with the actors and devices of control, and the practices they use to repurpose the latter into means of appropriation, carry “traces of those broader relationships” (ibid.), including moments of uncontrollability and excess, that is, the autonomy of migration. And while it is true that the autonomy of migration only becomes tangible in the historical course of a multiplicity of migratory movements and practices, and not by referring to the success of individual migration projects, it is nevertheless the creativity, determinacy and diversity of migrants’ practices of appropriation which, taken together, enact the autonomy of migration as an undeniable reality.

Meddling with Decision-Making: International Development Interventions Targeting Migration in West Africa

Christina Oelgemöller

West Africa is busy these days. More and more embassies are opening, more trade and military relationships are being forged, and more traditional development actors see other international organisations enter the field, adding their interventions to the activities that have been ongoing since before independence from colonialism. In this context, one of the reasons why West Africa is busy comes in the wake of the most recent ‘migration crisis’ as so declared by European countries. Apparently, West Africa was identified as source of significant numbers of people arriving on Europe’s shores. While significance is relative, 83.3% of African migrants are in fact located within the African region they are from (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019). The European obsession with migration from Africa (or other places for that matter) seems misplaced.

Somparé (2019) observes that “in the Western media the persistence of clandestine migration continues to be explained by political instability, and especially poverty, which pushes the populations of the South towards the richest nations of the North”.⁴ This is correct, as much of Africa is constituted in racist terms as disempowered and incapable. However, beyond media representations and rising populisms the discourse in the Global North has become more complicated: the humanitarian instincts driving much of the international engagement with the area is added to by re-framings of rights and self-sufficiency. For instance, a recent International Organization for Migration (IOM) report highlights strides made towards “achieving self-reliance through livelihoods and/or employment” and the “increasing focus on self-reliance to promote dignity and reduce aid dependency, with self-reliance also a key objective” (International Organization for Migration 2017, 1). Where, then, does migration fit into this picture?

Against this problematisation, I am proposing a more complicated picture of a knowledge environment co-produced in time and space by interactions between people, national and international organisations, and the humanitarian and migration industries active in West Africa. I am arguing that more attention must be paid to the ambiguities introduced by the way discourses are framed by those involved and how this plays out in the context of interventions. This is important as researchers with grants from the Global North are increasingly part of this environment. I am part of one of those funded research projects, which focuses on regional migration, rather than cross-continental mobility, under the umbrella of MigChoice, the research component of the UK Department for International Development-funded (now absorbed into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and IOM run Safety, Support and Solutions in the Central Mediterranean Route programme. MigChoice more broadly draws on three different methodological approaches: ethnography in five communities each in the countries identified by the wider programme; discourse analysis of the historical and contemporary landscape of policies pertaining to mobility, the labour market and youth within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region; and an agent-based modelling approach that follows an intervention by IOM attempting to support people in their aim to build their own business. At the point of writing data is still being collected. In this context, I seek to shed light on the knowledge environment to allow interrogation of this knowledge performance in relation to development interventions directed at migration. The purpose is to begin to think about how ‘the migrant’ is constructed by different actors who mould knowledge about ‘the migrant’ as an actor. I contend that what needs to be paid more attention to is ambiguity: not to make it go away, but to understand the dynamics of past and present colonial relations, both imposed and self-imposed, and their effects on the capacity for agency. Constructions of the migrant appear to unfold in an environment of two different stories, told and re-told in all the data we collet, however different the methodologies are.

Speaking politely of engagement hides the dynamics that have unfolded across centuries of interactions between Europe and West Africa. Somparé (2019) recounts that the precolonial era was characterised by trade, nomadic breeding and expansionism of local political organisations, all of which generated migratory flows which in turn created a pre-colonial international space. This impression of the past is employed in the emphasis on freedom of movement in ECOWAS policies (Lavenex 2019). The dynamics were also favoured by the colonisers, who expanded migration for their own purposes (Kopytoff 1987). More importantly, the French colonial system, by integrating the economies of the colonised peoples into world trade and developing commercial cash crops to the detriment of food crops (Somparé 2019, 78), meant that the countries remained dependent on being plugged into the international system even after colonisation. “The colonial state that failed in the 1950s”, instructs Cooper (2002, 4–5) “was colonialism at its most intrusively ambitious, and the independent states that took over had to take over the failure of colonial development as well … [because they] had all the trappings recognised around the world as ‘sovereignty’”.

The literature makes clear that colonial states had been used and were now left with the role of negotiating the “‘intersection of the colonial territory and the outside world” (Cooper 2002, 5). Cooper (ibid.) narrates that “Africans tried to build networks that got around the state’s control over access to the outside world … . In the 1940s and 1950s, the formal channels of access to officially recognised economic channels, both inside and outside, seemed to be opening wider to Africans”. Somparé (2019) describes how the Senegalese advocated openness to the Western world through scholarships, the teaching of languages and the crafting of cosmopolitan policies. Guinea, however, promoted sedentarism and integration where especially young people were encouraged to stay and contribute to the country’s development. Those Guinean’s who did not adhere to the nationalist policies being promoted went abroad, notably to Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire (Somparé 2019, 79).

Two narratives form at this point: one story line is that it turned out that the Guinean diaspora was perceived as successful (something which holds true for most West African countries), with the result that young people, growing up with stories of mobility, felt encouraged to formulate their own migration projects – something that should not come as a surprise. Youth mobility had been used in the wake of the Second World War (Scott-Smith 2008) between European countries and the USA as a means of instilling values supportive of the importance of plurality for openness, freedom, learning and innovation. Young people are encouraged to dream and act on going abroad to discover the world – and so African youth have done and still do. The second story line, however, is the pessimistic other of the first. By the time of the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, the interventions by the international community in African countries led to impoverishment and a weakening of social solidarity, adding impetus to the desire for international mobility, as young professionals sought a livelihood that had ceased to exist. Young people do not so much leave to discover the world, but because there is no world to be had where they are. The structural adjustment programmes and their violences have ceased; interventions more generally have not, and those with an explicit focus on migration have multiplied. These are situated in the environment of the two stories, adding a twist to the second story reflective of Europe’s obsession with illegal immigration, but universalised across all geopolitical mobility.

The key question to be asked at this point is what an intervention is and why it is so ambivalent. By definition, an intervention is an activity which is hierarchically directional. Simply put, one entity has the power and capacity to decide that another entity demonstrates a gap, weakness or need that should be targeted for change (Bonacker et al. 2010). Colonialism was, unsurprisingly, the most visible form of intervention, but since the formal independence of countries in West Africa tensions have remained between demands for absolute sovereignty or acceptance of milder forms of intervention, and the continued imposition of intervention by former colonial powers, donor countries or the international community. Intervention is a form of relationship which negotiates power-relations in a particular way: depending on the time, place and situation, it is justified differently as much as it is open to re-appropriation by those who are the object of intervention. Today intervention is often justified in terms of humanitarian development. Yet, the right to development was an organising principle in the resistance against slavery, and at the same time it was understood as a threat to white supremacy (Geiss 1974; Meer 2019, 503). Today, by contrast, development is as often a tool which results in sharper inequalities, even as it is also claimed as a vehicle for resistance (Ziai 2015). In short, whilst in principle the idea of development is emancipatory, it is not self-evidently so. Africa’s present “emerged … from a long, convoluted, and still ongoing process” (Cooper 2002, 6) in which migration has always played an important role in development.

Migration gives life and permanence, and not only to the relationship between Africa and the institutions and donor countries of the Global North: mobility is foundational to these diverse relationships. Agency is an enactment, rather than a property to be had, an effect of the discursive and material relations in particular environments (Butler 1993). In the telling and doing of migration, ambiguity of why and how to go is always present. In Guinea and other countries in the region, young people who happen to be in a privileged position expect, with the help of their families, to migrate for their continued education. Often the justificatory narrative is that with the added skills they will invest in their country.⁵ This is a sentiment that is intelligible for representatives of the Global North, such as international organisations, with their broader logic of development and the responsible self-sufficiency of the modern subject. They seek to instrumentalise this narrative by increasingly channelling young people into entrepreneurship training programmes, that are essentially geared – paradoxically – to fix those young people in place. Others, who are not able to draw on the resources of their families, prepare to migrate too, justifying their will to leave with a profoundly pessimistic sentiment of Africa being a place of desperation where there is no hope for the future: a sentiment that also chimes with narratives that the Global North holds about African people as essentially incapable, deviant, or in need of improvement by empowerment, which also feeds into violences related to bordering (Andersson 2014) and constructions of illegality.⁶ In both cases Africa is constructed as needing the intervention of an international community which assumes to itself a right to care, to support or deter (Carpi 2018).

Both the optimistic and the pessimistic readings enable, within the confines of the narratives, the agency to make decisions on investing resources. The enactment of agency, for both the optimistic and the pessimistic narrative, here lies in the event in which the person begins to interact with the material world of the self-reliance intervention and to use the resources for the type of mobility envisaged. Such connections are ambiguous for all involved, including donors and interveners, because the enactment as such is a performance of development against security, whilst still striving for the promise of durability that securitisation was never able to fulfil. Thus, every African between the ages of 14 and 36 becomes a ‘potential migrant’. The potentiality here is important: potential for staying, potential for migrating in the region and working towards development as partners in development, potential to stay securitised and become illegal, such as to give stability to European racist imaginations at the border. That this leads to different ‘outcomes’ from the perspective of the Global North and the international community should be irrelevant, except insofar as knowledge is performed based on truth-statements by the Global North and the international community. The ‘truth’ that most people in Africa are regarded as at least potential migrants is mixed up in truth-statements about their potential legal status upon arrival in the Global North, and this in turn is mixed up in ambiguous constructions informed by humanitarian development instincts and racist sentiments. None of this is surprising and has been pointed out in much of the above cited literature and elsewhere. It is even acknowledged by the international community in their 2016 New York Declaration, which defines mobility as a characteristic common to all humanity, and states that – normatively grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals – mobility brings development universally. This was operationalised into two Global Compacts on migrants and on refugees, both of which make an effort to re-phrase and re-frame all mobility within a rights-based and development-oriented approach. In other words, they give legitimacy to people’s mobility and make states responsible for keeping people safely on the move. There is a slight transformation then, which has the mixed results of meaning that potential migrants are not only meddled with to contain their mobility, but also enabled in their choices to become mobile, and those potential migrants enact their agency precisely at the point at which they begin to engage with the interventions (the interactions between potential, agency and migration governance are also examined in Pinkerton’s contribution to this Forum).

The role of research in aiding and maintaining the ambiguous (nearly-but-not-quite) binary narratives identified here is not often problematised. In advertising for local researchers to become part of the MigChoice project, and despite specifying that the research to be undertaken would be documentary and historical work on regional mobility, the majority of applications I received were well-versed in the language of the international community. One tells of the applicant’s interest “in the politics of migration governance, particularly on topics such as deportations, voluntary return and reintegration as well as the socio-psychologic push factors”, while another recounts how their “studies allowed [them] to help an association to develop a project of awareness raising activity on irregular migration … in collaboration with the IOM, the German [Corporation for International Development], the Italian [International Volunteer Service for Development], in a coherent and objective way to present satisfactory results to the collaborators”. As I am embarking on research that aims to investigate the conditions of knowledge-making and performance which provide the context within which interventions take place, the key question remains: how to ensure informed critique and transparent working so as to undermine a field of knowledge that is riddled with deeply problematic and unquestioned assumptions. There is no answer to this question. The researchers engage with the same discursive and material environment as those they research and bring their experiences of hope, death, opportunism and pride – things that international interveners seem to be blind to. All the log-framing in the world isn’t going to take this kind of agency away from people who want to move or who argue against moving.

Governing through Potential, Governing through Mobility: Agency and the UK’s ‘Post-Brexit’ Migration Policy

Patrick Pinkerton

With a last minute trade deal agreed on 24^th December 2020, the UK has completed its ‘transition period’ upon leaving the EU, with the new relationship taking effect on 31^st December 2020. As the UK re-constitutes its borders with the EU (and, by extension, with the rest of the world), change will come to the bordering processes that shape the agency and mobility of those that seek to cross these newly constituted boundaries. It is therefore of particular importance to consider the impact that the UK’s new relationship with the EU will have on “the multiple rules and experiences of what a border can be” (Szary and Giraut 2015, 3); not least because of the central role played by immigration in the EU referendum campaign. Leave supporters made repeated references to the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU, and the millions of additional migrants to the UK this would allow, while then UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster featuring a queue of refugees, and the slogans “Breaking Point: The EU has failed us all; We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders”, became one of the defining images of the campaign. In the aftermath of the vote to leave, politicians quickly interpreted the result as a decision to end free movement for EU citizens and reduce levels of inward migration.

By examining two recent UK Government publications – the February 2020 Policy Statement on ‘The UK’s Points-Based Immigration System’, and the July 2020 document ‘The UK’s Points-Based Immigration System: Further Details’ – we can begin to piece together what the ‘post-Brexit’ immigration system will look like. The proposed new regime will treat all non-UK citizens alike, thus ending free movement for EU citizens.⁷ In general, entry to the UK for work will depend upon having a job offer from an approved sponsor, at an appropriate skill level, and an ability to speak English. Applicants will also need to gain ‘tradeable points’, related to salary, education, and their sector of employment.

The decreases in migration numbers this will likely precipitate will be partly mitigated by lowering the current salary threshold from £30,000 to £25,600, with a minimum salary of £20,480 acceptable for certain highly-qualified migrants, or those working in a “shortage occupation” (as designated by the Migration Advisory Committee). The new system also redefines ‘high-skilled’ as those with school leaver qualifications equivalent to UK ‘A Levels’ (rather than those with undergraduate degrees), and suspends the cap on numbers of skilled workers able to come to the UK (HM Government 2020b, 13, 17–18). The expectation is, however, that the “firm and fair” system will allow the Government to “reduce overall levels of migration” by giving “top priority to those with the highest skills and the greatest talents” (HM Government 2020a, 3). As is currently the case for non-EU migrants, visas issued under the new system will be temporary in the first instance, with the right to apply for indefinite leave to remain “usually available after five years of continuous residence” (HM Government 2020b, 10).

I argue that our ability to understand this proposed regime, and its potential impact on migrant agency, requires the employment of a biopolitical lens. Michel Foucault developed the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to analyse the ways in which political power adapted to the growing awareness of human beings as a biological species, making “knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1990, 143) and generating the “interventions and regulatory controls” designed to normalise and maintain populations of living beings (Foucault 1990, 139, emphasis in original). Using the term ‘governmentality’ to explore how these relations of power are rationalised so as to be put into effect, Foucault examined the dual processes through which a population is produced as the subject of biopower, and the individual members of such a population are enticed to self-regulation.

The application of these concepts to migration governance has often proceeded in relation to Foucault’s writings on the development of “security mechanisms” as a response to the “problem of circulation” (Foucault 2007, 13–17). This understanding of biopolitics as a security mechanism targeting circulating bodies has been applied to migration governance, producing important critiques of the practices of exclusion, surveillance and classification that persons arriving in Europe in recent years have been subjected to (Mavelli 2017; Pallister-Wilkins 2015). In my view, two inter-related tendencies can be identified when we instead analyse the governance of ‘successful’ migratory journeys.

Firstly, we can identify a process of ‘governing through potential’ when we move away from a predominant focus on biopolitics as a set of exclusionary or dehumanising practices, and place attention instead on the political practices which act on persons seen as capable of incorporation into a population. This allows an understanding of biopolitical governance as that which seeks to draw out the potential ‘correct use’ of bodies targeted by an inclusionary biopolitics, and suggesting a focus on the privileged migrants or refugees who are legally resident in a new country (Pinkerton 2019a). Secondly, we can identify a process of ‘governing through mobility’ when we view mobility as something that is also produced by the biopolitical governance of migrants, rather than an external factor which is subjected to biopolitical security mechanisms, or an embodied resource of agency utilised by mobile individuals to escape management or control. Instead, this focus allows us to recognise the governmentality which solicits mobility, in order to govern mobile subjects on the very basis of that mobility.

This latter point suggests a complex relationship between agency and mobility, which can be clarified by considering Foucauldian governmentality as a form of ‘governing through freedom’ or ‘governing at a distance’: that is, “the government of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others” (Foucault 1997, 88, emphasis added). The biopolitical regimes which ‘govern through mobility’ thus elicit the mobility of migrants, encouraging them to exercise their agency to be mobile by creating a socio-economic reality in which mobility brings certain benefits (in terms of work, training, and experience). As Friese and Mezzadra (2010, 301–302) argue, migration and mobility are not generated simply by mechanistic ‘push and pull’ factors, but by the multiple and contradictory interplay between “individual decisions, creativity, personal dreams and expectations entailing freedom … political mobilisation, contest and emerging forms of agency and subjectivity”. From this perspective, we can recognise the valorisation of mobility as a governmental strategy which operates through the production of mobile agents, whose mobility must be seen as simultaneously a product and target of biopolitical governmentality (Pinkerton 2019b).

The points-based component of the ‘post-Brexit’ migration regime can be analysed as a form of ‘governing through potential’, in that it generates a variety of characteristics that the typical ‘valuable’ post-Brexit migrant will embody: the ability to gain a highly-skilled job; competence in the English language; and strong educational qualifications. These factors combine to produce an image of an ‘ideal migrant’ that will bring a net economic benefit to the UK economy, and be in possession of the language skills and social capital needed to successfully integrate into UK society. This is what marks out this ‘governing through potential’ as a form of biopolitics: it provides a means of assaying migrant lives, of determining who is capable of contributing to the wider vitality of the UK population, and who is not.

While this image of the ‘valuable’ migrant is formally blind to nationality, and open to all those with the requisite skills, the importance of factors such as annual salary tie this proposed regime into much wider dynamics around class, racial and gender privilege. For example, the plans ignore how access to higher earnings are often influenced by nationality or family background and, by promoting a gender-blind notion of ‘minimum salary’, the policy does not take into account well-documented gender pay gaps. The lens of ‘governing through potential’ can therefore ensure that, as the new migration system takes shape, focus is maintained on the political decisions which define the categories of privileged migrants seen as potential valuable contributors, in a manner which can allow for emphasis on the intersections between gendered, racialised and classed dynamics (Yuval-Davis 2015) behind understandings of ‘life’, that are often absent in the biopolitics of security literature.⁸

The new system can also be seen as an intensification in ‘governing through mobility’, as the vast majority of those granted permission to enter the UK for work will not possess special entitlements to settlement. This multiplication of pathways for temporary migration will produce mobile subjects who are both free to exercise their mobility by travelling to and from the UK, and subjected to controls due to this very mobility. Individuals may choose to exercise their agency through mobility, by travelling to the UK for work, before returning home or to a third country; however, the temporary nature of their immigration status will also operate as a method of control. When immigration status is conditional, and when alterations are at the whim of political decisions, migrants face the possibility of being detained or deported if their legal status changes. That this ‘governing through mobility’ operates most strongly on the intersections of the individual and the population, whereby the agency of migrants is solicited as means of control, marks it out as a form of biopolitical governmentality.

Close examination of the proposed ‘post-Brexit’ system also suggests ways in which ‘governing through potential’ and ‘governing through mobility’ may blur into a form of biopolitics which governs migrant agency through potential and mobility. At the same time as opening up opportunities for more migrants (of a certain desirable type) to exercise their agency to enter the UK, the Government frames the future regime as a way to “fulfil our commitment to the British public” and “take back control of our borders” (Government 2020a, 3, 2020b, 7). The strongest indication of this comes when the Government affirms that the “tougher UK criminality thresholds”, currently in place for non-EU citizens, will apply to EU citizens for “conduct committed after the end of the transition period”, as these are “stricter and more specific” (Government 2020a, 9, 2020b, 16): thus making it easier for more people to be produced as “detainable” or “deportable” (De Genova 2011, 91–94).

The drive to increase incorporation and inclusion thus proceeds alongside the expansion of powers of exclusion, indicating how the potential to migrate, integrate and live a productive life within the UK after Brexit is put forward alongside an increase in the powers of detention and deportation for those who fail to realise their potential to integrate. This increase in coercive powers highlights how the potential to be incorporated is always conditional, existing alongside a potential withdrawal of legal rights of residence, creating pressures to resort to the exercise of agency to move to a third country or back to a country of origin. The post-Brexit migration plans set out by the Government therefore suggest a regime in which migration will be governed through a potential to integrate into the population that is simultaneously a potential to be made to exercise mobility. The potential to integrate must be seen as residing alongside a potential to be produced as mobile and movable, making recourse to the agency of mobility not simply the choice of those who benefit from mobility, but a necessity for those who would otherwise wish to remain.

Acknowledgments

This Forum builds on the discussions that took place during the European International Studies Association ‘European Workshops in International Studies’ (EWIS) section ‘Agency within Mobility: Exploring the Multiple Dimensions of Agency in Migration Governance’, held in Kraków on 26-29 June 2019. Our thanks to the EWIS organisers, and to all those who took part in the conversations in our section.

Additional information

Funding

This work has partly been funded under the Swiss National Science Foundation (51NF40-182897).

Notes

1. Interview with a male Syrian refugee in 2016 who fled Syria with his wife in 2015, and arrived in Germany within a few weeks. They were both granted refugee status in Germany. Before leaving, both were university students.

2. Interview in September 2016 with an asylum seeker from Iraq.

3. This slogan ‘No Border Lasts Forever’ was the title of an antiracist gathering which was held in Frankfurt in December 2010.

4. All translations from French to English, and errors within, are by the author.

5. Interview, Abudja, February 2020.

6. Interview, Conakry, June 2020.

7. With the exception of Irish citizens, who have rights for free movement through the Common Travel Area agreement, which pre-dates the EU, and will continue to function.

8. This point has been forcefully argued by Howell and Richter-Montpetit (2019).