Migration Law as a State (Re)producing Mechanism

This chapter addresses the recent overspill of migration law into other areas of law, in particular criminal law¹ and citizenship law.² With reference to a Deleuzoguattarian ontology of machinic production,³ it claims that the overspill enables the state to both reproduce and reinvent itself through positing migration at its center. In particular, the chapter challenges the views pronouncing the weakening of state sovereignty or decoupling sovereignty from the nation-state in globalized world, and instead argues that migration law by itself, as well as through its colonization of the other areas of law, constitutes a crucial element of a strengthened state and a state sovereignty. Migration and mobility as a primary social force⁴ both challenge the stasis of statehood and allow for its reproduction through creating and perpetuating distinctions between citizens and migrants and developing the mechanisms of their management. Therefore, the processes of bordering strengthen state sovereignty and function as state (re)producing mechanisms.⁵ Essentially, because political sovereignty only rules over what it is able to appropriate, it requires the existence of borders that delimit the internal space to be governed in particular way.⁶ This means that mobility, or in Thomas Nail’s words, the phenomenon of “social pedesis” defined as the “irregular movement of a collective body,” predates the stasis of geographically delimited statehood.⁷ State is therefore not a reason for, but rather a result of, the processes of bordering, of controlling and arranging mobility into particular form.