Governing the Migration Control Predicament: Reconfiguring Sovereignty-Discipline-Government

This paper explores the contemporary government of migration and integration and is based on an analysis of the ‘strategic case’ of the Netherlands. By analogy to what David Garland has called the ‘crime control predicament’, it describes the  “migration control predicament”: a problematization of the rates of migration combined with a realist position on the problems of integration and an acknowledgement of the limitation of the national state and its previous policies to deal with these issues. This predicament of control poses a challenge to three forms of power discerned by Foucault: sovereignty, discipline and government. As a response all three forms of power are mobilized in the government of migration and integration in new ways. To restore sovereignty the tactics of detection, detention, deportation and deterrence are deployed. The disciplinary techniques under the migration control predicament involve the production of the good citizen (e.g. citizenship tests) and the effective state. Finally, in terms of government, there is the introduction of a market order government, a numbers game of performance and the selection of skilled- and exclusion of risk migration. The Netherlands serves as a strategic case because an extension of the argument is possible for a variety of Western-European countries (e.g. the UK, France and Germany) as well as for developments in Australia and the US. In addition to arguments that claim divergence of state responses, it can be argued that there is a convergence in the problematization and government of migration and integration as a control predicament.