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; Nevins 2002; Johnson et al. 2011) but they also symbolize the material and exclusionary power of national states. In this respect, it is a common assumption that states and their respective legal systems are essentially anti-immigration, 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, asylum, refugee, 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 drawbridges are lowered for some in different times and in different sub-national spaces for quite specific purposes.
