ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the regulation of migration policy in the European Union (EU) has followed a genealogical pattern, moving from a focus on labour, to security and then to rights–and back to labour and securitization. It explores counter-conducts in migration. The chapter focuses on the object of migration policies–on how the migrant might claim a rights-bearing status both at the border and once within the home by examining what counter-conducts are happening. The migrant becomes an ethical actor who is giving voice to a struggle; the migrant is a resisting, unruly, irregular but rights-bearing governmentable “object” of rights. The chapter examines practices of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency and its response to heightened calls by the EU institutions to manage migration through new strategies and initiatives, its thematic areas of work in Asylum, Immigration and Borders and the Roma, and its response to the United Nations’ monitoring of EU migration.
