This book discusses the politics of justice in relation to migration addressing both the controversies of governance and the active role of migrants’ struggles in shaping the materiality of justice. Considering justice and migration as globally contested fields, the book questions received wisdoms of European migration politics, including images of a migratory ‘crises’, the reconfiguration of the borders of justice, and the spurious pretensions of controlling and governing mobility. Gathering global scholars from migration studies, international relations and critical theory, as well as social activists, it advances an extended concept of contestation that goes beyond the simple clash of interests between national and international political actors. As such the book expands the discourse to a wider politics of justice and advances different angles and methodological perspectives from which to question purely normative conceptions of justice. Looking beyond the simple transformations in laws and regulations, the book updates the debate on migration adopting a global perspective. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, European studies, global justice, and labour, gender and EU studies.

This volume demonstrates that migration- and diversity-related concepts are always contested, and provides a reflexive critical awareness and better comprehension of the complex questions driving migration studies. The main purpose of this volume is to enhance conceptual thinking on migration studies. Examining interaction between concepts in the public domain, the academic disciplines, and the policy field, this book helps to avoid simplification or even trivialization of complex issues. Recent political events question established ways of looking at issues of migration and diversity and require a clarification or reinvention of political concepts to match the changing world. Applying five basic dimensions, each expert chapter contribution reflects on the role concepts play and demonstrates that concepts are ideology dependent, policy/politics dependent, context dependent, discipline dependent, and language dependent, and are influenced by how research is done, how policies are formulated, and how political debates extend and distort them. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in migration studies/politics, migrant integration, citizenship studies, racism studies, and more broadly of key interest to sociology, political science, and political theory.

Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years. Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an ‘analytic of irregularity’. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging ‘borderzones’ that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term ‘illegal’ to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. “This book is a major achievement. A remarkable and insightful study that through close analysis of the practices of migration control in 8 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland) provides powerful new insight into the power of the state at its margins and over those that are marginalised.” - Andrew Geddes, Director, Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute “Migrants Before the Law provides a much-needed account of the dizzying legal labyrinth that migrants navigate as they seek to survive in Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnography in detention centres, migration offices, police stations, and non-governmental organizations as well as on interviews with key government actors, advocates, and migrants themselves, this book explores the systems of control and forms of migrant precarity that operate along Europe’s internal borders, in multiple national and transnational contexts. Readers will come away with a deepened understanding of the perverse workings of power, the ways that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law foster both despair and hope, the degree to which the immigration “crisis” is both manufactured and experienced as real, and the ingenuity of migrants themselves in the face of Kafkaesque state practices.” - Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Migrants Before the Law is an excellent exposition of the dispersed sites of the law and the hinges and junctions through which this apparatus is actualized in the lives of migrants facing deportation, contesting their status as illegal migrants or seeking to regularize their precarious position. Written with great sensitivity and an eye to minute details this book is also an achievement in furthering the method of collaborative ethnography and new ways of staging comparisons.” - Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficult to ignore the deaths of thousands of migrants at sea or in deserts, the xenophobic treatment of foreign-born populations, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the persistence of racist violence and ethnic exclusions on our front doorstep. This, in turn, is connected to other kinds of uneven mobility: relations between people, access to transport, urban infrastructures and global resources such as food, water, and energy. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of mobility. She shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, connecting these scales of the body, street, city, nation, and planet into one overarching theory of mobility justice. This can be seen on a local level in the differential circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and 'the right to the city'. On the planetary scale, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other kinetic elites are able to roam freely, the military origins of global infrastructure, and the contested politics of migration and restricted borders. Mobility Justice offers a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility of a world in which the mobility commons has been enclosed.

Political controversy about migration is becoming more frequent, more heated, and for certain groups, decidedly more urgent. This raises pressing questions not only in the realms of policy-making and public discourse, but also for philosophical accounts of migration. Do liberal states have the right to exclude unwanted outsiders, or should all borders be open? How should we begin to theorize the morality of refugee and asylum policy? If states can exclude unwanted outsiders, what ethical principles govern the determination of who gets in? Justice, Migration, and Mercy offers a way in which these questions might be answered by providing a vision of how we can understand the political morality of migration. Michael Blake offers a novel, and plausible, account of the right to exclude on which that right is grounded on a more fundamental right to avoid unwanted forms of political relationship. Far from simply justifying exclusion, however, Blake examines the best justifications for exclusion in an effort to determine its limits. In doing so, he challenges the current global realities of migration which ensure open borders for a select few and closed borders for the majority, most often the most marginalized in society. His account sheds light on more specific questions of justice in migration, such as the permissibility of travel bans and carrier sanctions. He also offers a particular vision about how to go beyond questions of right and liberal justice, towards a declaration of the sort of community we wish to be. Blake then identifies the moral notion of mercy as a central one for the moral analysis of migration, a move which leads to the conclusion that we ought to show mercy and justice in constructing migration policy as well as in public debate.

This timely Handbook brings together leading international scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geopolitical perspectives to interrogate the intersections between migration and global justice. It explores how cross-border mobility and migration have been affected by rapid economic, cultural and technological globalisation, addressing the pressing questions of global justice that arise as governments respond to unprecedented levels of global migration.