ABSTRACT
Let us turn West then and begin with desire defined not as lack or phantasy or pleasure but, as a force that haunts modern societies producing constructions of order, identity, and determinacy. For it is in the West that the project of creating order and taming chaos in its many forms has ostensibly been the most successful and where the priests who both revel in this achievement and express anxiety over threats to it are the most vocal. Let us also begin with one particular global phenomenon that has resulted in a multitude of highly dispersed and varied battles to reconstruct order; human beings moving across sovereign territorial space and the practices these movements have given rise to. Of course, we could begin elsewhere, in another place, with another issue. There are many issues today in many parts of the world that are understood to threaten order and security, that
evoke desires for a center that holds, a foundation that does not fall apart, a rationality beyond desire. Terrorism, the international drug trade, the global transmission of infectious diseases would name just a few of these issues.2 While we could begin with any one of these, immigration seems a particularly appropriate place to begin evoking as it does such intensities of feeling, such concerns over identity and belonging, eliciting widespread interest from high-level government officials to academics, to the popular press, and the general public. So, let us begin with this locus of desire, this “new global reality” created by post Second World War migrations of people from poor countries of the “Third World” to rich industrialized countries of the West, which has coincided with and been an integral part of the much discussed and variously defined phenomenon called globalization.3
Human migration has given rise to some of the same fears expressed regarding the unfettered movement of goods, services, and capital across global space. These concerns revolve around the issue of sovereignty and the continued viability of “the state” and the community it ostensibly represents in the face of unprecedented openness and fluidity that characterizes much of contemporary global life. People, however, are very different from money, bananas, cigarettes, and automobiles, and the consequences of their movements have more profound effects on societies.
