Re Thinking The Political Economy Of Immigration Control

This book offers a systematic exploration of the changing politics around immigration and the impact of resultant policy regimes on immigrant communities. It does so across a uniquely wide range of policy areas: immigration admissions, citizenship, internal immigration controls, labour market regulation, the welfare state and the criminal justice system. Challenging the current state of theoretical literature on the ‘criminalisation’ or ‘marginalisation’ of immigrants, this book examines the ways in which immigrants are treated differently in different national contexts, as well as the institutional factors driving this variation. To this end, it offers data on overall trends across 20 high-income countries, as well as more detailed case studies on the UK, Australia, the USA, Germany, Italy and Sweden. At the same time, it charts an emerging common regime of exploitation, which threatens the depiction of some countries as more inclusionary than others. The politicisation of immigration has intensified the challenge for policy-makers, who today must respond to populist calls for restrictive immigration policy whilst simultaneously heeding business groups’ calls for cheap labour and respecting legal obligations that require more liberal and welcoming policy regimes. The resultant policy regimes often have counterproductive effects, in many cases marginalising immigrant communities and contributing to the growth of underground and criminal economies. Finally, developments on the horizon, driven by technological progress, threaten to intensify distributional challenges. While these will make the politics around immigration even more fraught in coming decades, the real issue is not immigration but the loss of good jobs, which will have serious implications across all Western countries. This book will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, social policy, political economy, political sociology, the sociology of immigration and race, and migration studies.

International migration has been described as one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. While a lot is known about the complex nature of migratory flows, surprisingly little attention has been given to one of the most prominent responses by governments to human mobility: the practice of immigration detention. Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention provides a timely intervention, offering much needed scrutiny of the ideologies, policies and practices that enable the troubling, unparalleled and seemingly unbridled growth of immigration detention around the world. An international collection of scholars provide crucial new insights into immigration detention recounting at close range how detention’s effects ricochet from personal and everyday experiences to broader political-economic, social and cultural spheres. Contributors draw on original research in the US, Australia, Europe, and beyond to scrutinise the increasingly tangled relations associated with detention operation and migration management. With new theoretical and empirical perspectives on detention, the chapters collectively present a toolbox for better understanding the forces behind and broader implications of the seemingly uncontested rise of immigration detention. This book is of great interest to those who study political economy, economic geography and immigration policy, as well as policy makers interested in immigration.

The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general.

Beyond the romanticized image of newcomers arriving as a "huddled mass" at Halifax's Pier 21, understanding the reality and complexity of immigration today requires an expert guide. In the hands of Augie Fleras, this intricate and ever-changing subject gets the attention it deserves with analysis of all aspects, including admission policies, the refugee processing system, the temporary foreign worker program, and the emergence of transnational identities. Given the unprecedented number of federal policy reforms of the past decade, such a roadmap is essential. By thoroughly capturing the politics, patterns, and paradoxes of contemporary migration, Immigration Canada rethinks the thorny issues and reframes the key debates.

This book provides a new point of departure for thinking critically and creatively about international borders and the perceived need to defend them, adopting an innovative ‘preferred future’ methodology. The authors critically examine a range of ‘border domains’ including law, citizenship, governance, morality, security, economy, culture and civil society, which provide the means and justification for contemporary border controls, and identify early signs that the dynamics of sovereignty and borders are being fundamentally transformed under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The goal is to locate potential pathways towards the preferred future of relaxed borders, and provide a foundation for a progressive politics dedicated to moving beyond mere critique of the harm and inequity of border controls and capable of envisaging a differently bordered world. This book will be of considerable interest to students of border studies, migration, criminology, peacemaking, critical security studies and IR in general.

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.