Migration and Legality - Week 3 Day 2

Border preoccupations

Wall fetishism (Khosravi, 2019)

Walls can symbolize…

- territorial sovereignty

-national identity

-control

-separation between “us” and “them”

3 ways walls act as structures

Physical control

-attempts to prevent or redirect movement

Political symbol

-signals that a state is “taking control”

Social boundary

-reinforces ideas about who belongs inside and who belongs outside

Border = geographical line

Bordering = wider social and political process through which that line is created, enforced, and reproduced

What’s missing from mainstream discussion of walls

Colonial/historical context

-how did the political and economic inequalities underlying migration develop?

Production of irregularity

-do resitrctions eliminate mobility, or redirect people into unauthorized routes

Human costs

-what happens when safer routes are blocked?

Nexus and Frontex surveillance

Nexus:

Surveillance and pre-screening can make travel:

-faster

-easier

-more convenient

Irregular border enforcement/Frontex

Surveillance can instead be used to:

-identify

-monitor

-intercept

-restrict

Surveillance can facilitate mobility for some while obstructing mobility for others (Aas 2011).

How lines are drawn between “us” and “them”

Border technologies go further than answering if one person can enter, and classifies people into categories like:

trusted/suspicious

citizen/outsider

legitimate traveller/ risky migrant

bona fide traveller/ crimmigrant other

Effectively, this is a form of social sorting.

Us vs. Them

Border helps produce an imagined:

Us: People understood as belonging to the legitimate community.

vs.

Them: People viewed as outsiders whose presence or mobility requires greater scrutiny.

Who is treated as naturally belonging, and who must continually prove their legitimacy?

This is achieved through border surveillance.

Departheid (Kalir 2019)

Departheid definition: highlighting how state policies divide, segregate, and control human mobility.

Racialized control: draws parallels to historical apartheid and colonial systems that governed “subject races” through racialization, forced exclusion, and legal marginalization.

Persistence of failure: Kalir uses the concept to explain why Western governments stubbornly continue harsh anti-immigration and deportation measures even when evidence shows they do not stop immigration flows, and they instead cause widespread human suffering.

Mechanisms of Departheid

Spatial and legal exclusion: Relegating undocumented or "illegalized" migrants to the margins of society through detention, restricted access to basic services, and constant threat of removal.

Moral superiority: rooted in a political ideology that views restriction of movement as a defense of a privileged, white-dominated global order.

Criminalization of solidarity: extending punitive measures to punish humanitarian efforts, civil society groups, and individuals who assist migrants.

Departheid is a governing ideology because it operates with the same logic, systemic persistence, and racialized structure as historical Apartheid, which is driven and sustained by specific ideological and political forces.

Departheid applied to real life - Israel

Kalir has extensively documented Israel's approach toward African asylum seekers (primarily from Eritrea and Sudan).

Real-life manifestation: state utilizises a combination of open-ended detention centers, geographic bans preventing migrants from living or working in major cities like Tel Aviv, and financial coercion (such as withholding a portion of migrants' salaries until they leave the country).