ABSTRACT
Even the casual observer at any international airport, bus terminal, or border crossing cannot help but notice the fortress-like quality of nationstates. National borders are porous, ever-changing and complex spaces (for example Anzaldúa, 1987) but they also display the symbolic and material power of national states. In this respect, it is a common assumption that states and their respective legal systems are essentially antiimmigration, uniformly racist, xenophobic, and exclusionary. Publics too might be expected to be univocally racist, culturalist, and xenophobic and essentially against immigration, wary of being ‘swamped’ (the term used by the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s) and paranoid of ‘hordes’ and ‘invasions’ of certain kinds of migrants. There is no doubt much truth in these assumptions about states and publics, except for the adverbs ‘uniformly’ and ‘univocally’. Actual migration and immigration politics are far messier both in a social and spatial sense. If wealthy states are fortresses or ‘gated communities’ (van Houtum and Pijpers, 2007), then their draw-bridges are lowered for some in different times and in different sub-national spaces for quite specific purposes. For example, Hollifield (2004) speaks of ‘the emerging migration state’ in contrast to the nineteenth-century ‘garrison state’. For
Hollifield, ‘the migration state’ is caught in a ‘liberal paradox’ whereby it must reconcile openness to trade, investment, and people, with security. The migration state must ensure economic well-being, but also provide for the security of its citizens.
