Immigration Control and the Many Hands of the State

Have states lost control over immigration? Have they ever really had authority over who enters their borders? These questions have been much debated in academic research, but also figure in current European policy debates. The recent refugee crisis in Europe, coupled with the seeming ease with which terrorist attackers have been able to move across state boundaries, have intensified fears about the demise of state power over borders but also spurred tougher policies in response. Theorizing these developments requires us to take stock of the complexity of state responses to immigration – their rather fearsome capacities for surveillance and detention, for instance, yet also the limits and failures of campaigns to crack down on irregular immigration. This paper analyzes this complexity by drawing upon a framework from the recent volume, The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (Cambridge 2017). The framework has four dimensions: the embeddedness of states in the global system; the complexity and multiplicity of actors and institutions operating within the state; the varied modes of governance used by policy-makers to achieve their goals; and the attempt by state officials to monopolize material and symbolic power. Applying this framework to immigration control shifts the focus away from questions of state strength versus weakness to concrete investigations of how immigration control actually works.