The Racial Carcerality of Migration Governance

Abstract

Bringing migration governance literature into conversation with carceral studies, this article offers a conceptual framework to account for the interconnectedness between migration governance in the global North and the racial logics of carcerality. It argues that criminalization, incarceration, detention, and deportation, converging as a carceral industrial complex, should be viewed in historically specific contexts as modes of racist exclusion that fulfill racial projects. The article first considers critical race scholarship on nation-state formation to trace the historical and contemporary manifestations of racial exclusion within immigration legislation. Next, the article traces the carceral nature of migration and border governance, focussing particular attention to its expansion into the orbit of families and communities, to suggest that carceral migration governance crystalizes a set of power relations implicated in the reproduction of global racial ordering. To illustrate this argument, the final section engages the carceral migration racial governance framework through the empirical vantage point of ‘the family’ to advance an understanding of the work that carceral migration does for racial ordering and the production of disposable (family) life to those ends.