ABSTRACT

The association of human migration with insecurity is not new; this connection is evident throughout history dating back to biblical times. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, fears over the movement of people prompted the erection of town walls and the creation of passports to control migration (Torpey, 2000: 22-23). And in current times, concerns over international migration have contributed to a wide range of initiatives, from international cooperation on migration matters, to the expansion of supra-national organizations like the EU (Rudolph, 2006: 10-11), to the rise of right-wing antiimmigrant parties (Fetzer, 2000). Throughout history and in many states, societies and other forms of political collectivities, migration has often been portrayed and perceived as threatening, producing real political effects. During the Cold War, emigration from the Eastern bloc states was regarded as a matter of national security, and great efforts were expended to prevent it. In the Western states however, for much of the Cold War period, migration was relegated to the realm of low politics and off the security agenda, which was associated primarily with military security (Waever, 1995: 59; Hollifield, 2000). The resurgence of migration back onto the security agenda in the Western

states of Europe and North America coincided with the end of the Cold War. With the end of the political-military divide that had structured international politics since the end of the Second World War, increased focus was placed on identifying and responding to emerging security threats. Consequently, a number of non-military threats began to feature prominently in the study of security, including environmental degradation, health epidemics and pandemics, and migration (Dalby, 2002; M. Levy, 1995; Price-Smith, 2001; Weiner, 1995; Waever et al., 1993). In most cases, the reason for including issues like environmental degradation and international migration on the security agenda has been to provide a prima facie case that the issue does present a threat to national security and to encourage states to devote more resources to control and manage it. Migration has been linked with security in a variety of ways; from contributing to violent conflict and environmental degradation (HomerDixon, 1994), producing a backlash in receiving states (Teitelbaum, 1980), concerns over control of borders and the absorptive capacity of receiving states (Weiner, 1995) to the survival of civilizations (Huntington, 1996). Though

some of these connections have proven less convincing than others, together they highlight the fears of social and political upheaval that migration flows have evoked. The expansion of the concept of security to include non-military security

threats like immigration has faced entrenched opposition from neo-realists who have held a near monopoly on defining security within the English language security studies field. The privileged position of neo-realism and its focus on military security is a product of a Weberian understanding of the state-building process in the West. Making war and protecting citizens and/or subjects from military threats has been the fundamental building block at the core of the nation-state building process (Poggi, 1978; Tilley, 1990). It should come as no surprise therefore that the activities of the state’s security apparatus have been devoted to providing security from military threats. Resistance to the depiction of migration as a security threat has emerged from the neo-realist school of thought that contends that the inclusion of non-military security threats such as migration undermine the conceptual clarity of the concept, and detracts from more important military issues (Mearsheimer, 1994; Walt, 1991; Freedman, 1998). The ongoing debate over the inclusion of migration and other non-traditional

issues in the security agenda, as part of the “broadening” of the field of security studies (Krause and Williams, 1996) is characterized by an objectivist approach to the study of security. This perspective treats threats as objective and existing externally to individual perceptions (Sjostedt, 2008: 9), thus issues do or do not represent a threat, regardless of whether or not individuals perceive and respond to them as such. Consequently, scholars who seek to broaden the concept of security as well as those who resist this broadening, base their arguments on the claim that one can objectively observe and measure the level of threat posed by migration and the costs that states face should they fail to confront these developments. In making these objectivist claims, analysts seek to acquire additional resources to combat the potential threat (Krause and Williams, 1996; Mutimer, 1999). One problem with the objectivist approach to the study of security and the

place of international migration in that field of inquiry is that it reifies the identity of the receiving and sending societies and the motivations and reasons for human migration. This is problematic because the representation of migration as a source of insecurity is not a constant throughout history nor is it held universally across all states or societies. At times, states such as Israel and Germany have used migration as a means of ensuring the continuation and survival of an ethnically based view of their societies (Levy and Weiss, 2002; Joppke and Rosenhek, 2002). Similarly, in settler states such as Australia and Canada, the growth associated with migration has been regarded as essential for the survival of these states. Even today, as populations in Western states age and decline, there is a growing sense that migration will be needed to ensure the existence of these societies (Teitelbaum, 1987; Straubhaar and Zimmerman, 1993). And, as noted earlier, during the Cold War, the

migration of people out of the communist states of Europe was part of larger security agenda associated with the victory of the capitalist “West” (Loescher, 1993; Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, 2007). These cases demonstrate that migration has and can be constructed in various ways, indeed as a source of security rather than insecurity. A similar sort of objectivist reasoning is evident in the literature that has

emerged to explain the formation of migration control policies. The body of work devoted to explaining the implementation of “restrictive” border control policies claims that such policies were implemented in response to observable and identifiable changes in the character of refugee flows in the late 1980s and early 1990s: larger numbers, different source countries and changing motivations of migrants from humanitarian to economic. In its most basic form, the argument proceeds as follows: during the Cold War, there were very few refugees, under three million in 1976. By 1990, the number of refugees had reached 17.2 million, a rapid increase that was interpreted as a growing threat (Weiner, 1995: 3). Prior to this explosion of the refugee population, most Western industrialized states received few asylum claims in any given year, with the exception of a few notable incidents such as Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) (Keely, 2001: 308). It was not until the mid-to-late 1980s that the number of asylum seekers began to climb significantly. The particular problem that larger numbers posed for many Western states was that the existing refugee determination systems had been created with small numbers in mind and whose primary solution was permanent incorporation into the receiving society (Keely, 2001: 304-5; Toft, 2007: 141). The rapid increase in the number of asylum seekers produced large backlogs of claims, and a general sense that the system was incapable of dealing with large flows. The devotion to permanent rather than temporary protection resulted in large numbers of refugees being admitted, which was portrayed as threatening to the social balance in states whose primary historical experience with migration was emigration (Toft, 2007: 143). Even more problematic was another set of objective changes in the char-

acter of refugee flows: source countries had changed and the skill set and assimilability of refugees themselves had declined. During the Cold War, most refugees came from the communist states of Eastern Europe. Beginning in the mid-1980s, this began to change and by the mid-1990s, the majority of individuals seeking protection in the Western states were non-European. Furthermore, refugees from communist Eastern Europe were viewed as “enterprising, skilled, well educated and a potential source of vital intelligence” on the domestic and foreign policy of their home states (Toft, 2007: 143). With the end of the Cold War and as the source countries of refugees changed, most refugees now lacked high levels of formal education and did not possess work skills that were in high demand in receiving states (Weiner and Munz, 1997: 25-26). In other words, they were not regarded as enterprising, skilled, well educated nor a potential source of vital intelligence on their home states.