Seeing Illegal Immigrants: State Monitoring and Political Rationality

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Irregular immigration via Europe's sea borders has attracted substantial political attention recently. But just as striking is the lack of knowledge about, or even strategic ignorance of, unauthorised immigrants already resident in European countries. Few countries regularly estimate the number of illegal residents on their territory, and governments tend to be reticent about collecting and publishing data on the control of illegal residence or employment. This project will examine how states 'see' illegal immigrants, through addressing two sets of questions. (1) Which forms of illegality do states monitor, and which are left unscrutinised? What sorts of techqniues and practices do public authorities use to monitor illegal residents? The project will be the first to systematically map, compare and explain the practices and technologies deployed in different European countries to monitor illegal immigrants.(2) What do monitoring practices tell us about the type of political rationality informing state monitoring practices - what we term state 'logics of monitoring'? Through comparing monitoring practices in three countries, we can gain insight into how public authorities decide which aspects of illegal immigration to scrutinise, and which to overlook. The focus on monitoring provides a lens for reconstructing the logics underpinning political agency.We will compare monitoring practices in three countries: the UK, France and Germany. These countries are similar in many respects. They each experienced a significant rise in immigration in the decades after World War II, driven by colonial commitments (UK), labour requirements (Germany), or a combination of the two (France). And each country introduced measures to close channels for legal immigration in the early 1970s. They are all subject to a range of EU provisions on borders, immigration and asylum (and Schengen rules in the case of France and Germany). Yet these countries differ across three main variables we might expect to produce different monitoring practices: state administrative capacity for monitoring, political dynamics and labour market flexibility.The research will involve comparative and historical case study analysis. Comparison will help us identify and explain variations between the three cases. The historical perspective helps us to trace the evolution of monitoring practices over time, charting how they have been adjusted in response to different domestic and international factors. Historical analysis also helps us identify the ways in which current monitoring practices are constrained by prior choices. The research will involve two main methods: (a) Archival data analysis. We will study public records from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, to examine how policy actors and politicians analysed and deliberated on policy and practices relevant to monitoring illegal immigrants, during a critical juncture in immigration control in each country. (b) 100 interviews with policy actors, to reconstruct how public authorities perceived and responded to a second control crisis in the early 1990s; and to examine recent and current monitoring practices (up until 2015). Through our research, we hope to foster more informed debate on the ethics and politics of immigration control. There is a pronounced gap between public/media debates on illegal immigrants, which focus on the need for robust control; and the practices of public authorities and organisations involved in providing services to illegal immigrants, which are far more ambivalent about such control. Through a series of events and media dissemination, we will stimulate a knowledge-based discussion of the issue, and encourage organisations to reflect on their role in monitoring and supporting illegal immigrants.