The emotional governance of immigration controls

Abstract

Emotions produce the borders between the self and other. They are also constitutive of national border practices and politics. This article considers the ‘affective governance’ of the UK’s immigration system, arguing that an emotional register that is both splenetic and indifferent is evident across migration policy, decision-making, and operational practice. It draws on 15-years of research on immigration administration, detention, and judicial spaces to explore the circulation and management of emotion by immigration practitioners. It argues that four emotions (anger, disgust, suspicion, fear) dominate across spaces, scales, and actors. Simultaneously, migrants’ purported emotions and affective lives are met with disinterest and disbelief, their emotional displays are ignored or punished, and immigration practitioners engage in their own emotional detachment. The article argues that by examining the emotional government of immigration systems, we can interrogate the role of affect in techniques of subjectification and the creation of deportable and disposable Others.