Abstract

Much critical scholarship insists on the exclusionary and punitive tendencies adopted by contemporary migration control. Accounts examine how the criminalization of migration has become a bonanza for the public and private security actors whose job it is to regulate migrant mobility and behavior, and who obtain significant budgets to do so. These scholars pay attention to how these actors employ a language of unease and moral panic towards migration. By sustaining the formation of restricted social bonds and exclusive cultural identities based on fear and a sense of insecurity in the face of global migratory flows, contemporary projects of migration control would prevent an approach to mobility that promotes hospitality and mutual aid. Exclusionary bordering strategies would as a result intersect with the domestic criminalization of migration and produce irregularity and migrant vulnerability.