Governing Mobility? States Between Securitization and the Demands of Human Rights

When it comes to refugee and migration governance, interests and norms, ideologies and political identities, as well as local, regional, and international contexts intersect (e.g., see Bachleitner, Kathrin and Alexander Betts. 2025. “The EU’s Normative Dissensus on Migration,” Journal of European Integration, 47(3)). Scholars have explored how different regime types use refugees and migrants for political legitimation, repression, or soft power, with growing attention to the links between refugee hosting and populism, democratic backsliding, as well as authoritarian consolidation. Newer works also put emphasis on how migration is managed in the Global South (e.g., see Adamson, Fiona B. and Gerasimos Tsourapas. 2019. “The Migration State in the Global South,” International Migration Review, 54(3)). Comparing diverse governance contexts shows how different states balance commitments to humanitarian ideals with their security imperatives.

One such work presented in this issue, Migration Governance in North America (Banerjee and Smith) offers a trinational perspective on the United States, Canada, and Mexico, highlighting how executive discretion and informal cooperation shape migration control across borders. The volume reveals both surprising contrasts, such as Canada’s restrictive approach to Latin American migration despite its humanitarian reputation, and shared dynamics, including the growing securitization of mobility and the rapid policy swings that can follow from the application of executive authority. As reviewer David Scott FitzGerald emphasizes, this collection not only synthesizes key themes in North American migration studies but also sets the stage for future comparative research on the region as an interconnected border system.

Other works widen the lens beyond North America. In Framing Refugees (reviewed in a Critical Dialogue, this issue), Daniel Drewski and Jürgen Gerhards trace how six countries—Turkey, Germany, Poland, Uganda, Chile, and Singapore—construct the “we” of host societies and the “they” of refugees through six key frames, economic, cultural, moral, legal, security, and international. Such a discursive analysis helps to explain these states’ divergent refugee policies, they contend. As Angela Ju emphasizes in her review, the book moves beyond simplistic cosmopolitan/communitarian binaries to show how national histories and geopolitical contexts produce divergent refugee regimes. Taking up a different piece of the puzzle, Angela Ju’s Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation examines how Japanese and Jewish Brazilians, as third-generation descendants of migrants linked to wealthier heritage countries, navigate Brazil’s pigmentocratic hierarchies. Combining survey analysis and interviews, Ju argues that these groups leverage their outsider status strategically: Japanese Brazilians mobilize politically around racial identity in response to discrimination, while Jewish Brazilians identify as racially “White” but politically activate their Jewish ethnicity. In his Critical Dialogue review, Drewski commends the book for extending migration studies beyond the Global North and for its careful theorization of Brazil’s ethnoracial hierarchies.

When comparing refugee policies, liberal countries are often the targets of both hope and critique, given their emphasis on humanitarian principles and commitment to international obligations. William Plowright’s The War on Rescue takes up this “liberal dilemma” in the context of the European Union “migration crisis” specifically, revealing how EU states criminalized aid workers and obstructed humanitarian assistance. As Drago Zuparic-Iljic observes in his review, the book demonstrates how this obstruction is systematic rather than accidental, though it pays less attention to sites of cooperation between civil society and member states. Equally, Gallya Lahav and Anthony Messina’s Immigration, Security, and the Liberal State challenges the long-standing thesis of a liberal, expansionary immigration system by showing how security concerns, accelerated after September 11 and reinforced during COVID-19, have driven liberal states toward exclusionary bordering practices and an increased dependence on third-party actors to manage and externalize migration while also advancing their concept of the “migration trilemma” between rights, security, and markets. These state attempts, in turn, shape public perception by communicating stigma and exclusion. The edited volume Migration Stigma, by Lawrence H. Yang, Maureen A. Eger, and Bruce G. Link, documents how prejudice and discrimination intersect with policy regimes to deepen migrants’ vulnerabilities. As the reviewer Anna Boucher notes in her double review of both works, these studies demonstrate how securitization and stigma combine to restrict mobility and exacerbate inequality.

Whose Labor Counts? Migration, Capitalism, and Exploitation

A growing strand of scholarship places migrant labor at the heart of neoliberal economics. These emerging works analyze the intersection of migration with global capitalism and labor regimes, showing how temporary migration programs, human trafficking, and labor exploitation underpin neoliberal economies (e.g., see Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy). Reviewed in this issue, Anna Boucher’s Patterns of Exploitation compares the role of migrant labor in Australia, England, California, and Canada, drawing on interviews and nearly a thousand court cases. She documents widespread wage theft, unsafe conditions, and discrimination, showing how migrants often serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for threats to labor rights more generally. As Osman Balkan argues in his review, while the book understands exploitation largely in terms of legal violations, it also provides a rigorous, policy-relevant account of neoliberal capitalism’s systemic abuse and the reforms required to protect migrant workers.

Boucher’s research reminds us that migration is not only about movement across borders but also about incorporation into capitalist labor markets that rely on precarity and differential rights. Cross-border activism and antitrafficking politics underscore this point. Two books, placed in a Critical Dialogue in this issue, examine how interventions designed to “rescue” vulnerable workers often reproduce exploitation. Elena Shih’s Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue provides an ethnographic analysis of U.S.-led antitrafficking initiatives that link ethical consumption to “slave-free” commodities. Centering Christian-run rehabilitation programs in Beijing and Bangkok, she shows how sex work is conflated with trafficking and replaced with “repentant labor” regimes of low-wage production bound up with religious and moral regulation. Based on 15 years of fieldwork, Shih situates these programs within global policies that reinforce racial hierarchies, perpetuate dependency of low-wage women workers, and undermine labor rights while obscuring sex workers’ own forms of resistance. In Lights, Camera, Feminism? Celebrities and Anti-Trafficking Politics, in turn, Samantha Majic turns to the role of celebrity activism, analyzing how stars act as “multilevel political actors” whose political performances both reproduce and sometimes contest dominant gendered and racialized narratives. As Majic emphasizes, celebrity-led campaigns often reinforce market-based and carceral solutions to trafficking, marginalizing the demands of sex worker and labor organizers.

Together, these books expose the contradictions of antitrafficking politics: while mobilized in the name of liberation, they can reinscribe precarity, conceal labor exploitation, and divert attention from collective organizing. For political science, they underscore the importance of studying not only the regulation of migration and labor but also the political economies of “rescue” and humanitarianism that surround it.

Where Are the People? Refugees and Migrants as Political Actors

An essential shift in the scholarship foregrounds asylum seekers, refugees, and irregular migrants as political actors rather than passive victims. Recent work examines refugee agency, mobilization, and political participation in host and home states, as well as the governance and social life of refugee camps and resettlement sites (e.g., see Alexander Betts et al. 2017. Refugee Economies). Several books reviewed in this issue follow this shift and focus on refugees as political subjects: Refugees not only re-act to existing policies, but they recreate them with their actions. Through putting refugees and their experiences into the spotlight, the books highlight contradictions and emergent informal ways of coping for refugees. Among them, Sophia Balakian’s Unsettled Families shows how Somali and Congolese refugees in Kenya creatively navigate resettlement bureaucracies that criminalize kinship networks. As Meghana V. Nayak underlines in her review, the book theorizes kinship as both a survival strategy and a site of contestation within humanitarian regimes. Similarly, Priscilla Solano’s Shelter on the Journey examines migrant shelters in Mexico, portraying them as spaces that both resist and reproduce state power. As Noelle Brigden notes in her review, Solano demonstrates how shelters can serve as sites of dignity and advocacy for migrants, even as they grapple with their own contradictions.

Equally, Tom Scott-Smith’s Fragments of Home and Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing reject the notion of asylum seekers as passive recipients of state power, instead showing how displaced people reconstitute moral worth and political visibility from below. Their critical dialogue reflects a shared commitment to understanding refugee shelter and asylum as both material infrastructures and lived, contested social realities, even as their emphases diverge. Scott-Smith foregrounds the humanitarian imagination and the design of shelters, while Boccagni highlights how they are inhabited. Read together, their projects form a productive exchange: one illuminating the structures that shape refugee life, the other the subtle practices through which life is made meaningful within them—two sides of the same coin that reveal how refugee agency emerges under structural constraint.

Works which foreground the subjective refugee experience also bring to light gendered vulnerability. For instance, Private Violence by Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin documents how Central American and Mexican women survivors of violence face systemic barriers in U.S. asylum processes. Drawing on interviews, court observation, and case analysis, the authors show how survivors are revictimized through legal loopholes, discriminatory judgments, and structural inequalities that criminalize and stigmatize them (see the review by Roberta Villalón, this issue).

An often-overlooked part of the migrant experience is the prospect of dying far from home and from one’s kin. Osman Balkan’s Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (2023) takes up this theme, offering a deeply original exploration of how death and burial practices illuminate the limits of migrant integration in Europe. Through ethnographic research with clerics, families, and officials in Turkish Muslim communities in Berlin, Balkan shows how funerary practices sit at the intersection of culture, law, and politics, raising profound questions about belonging, identity, and the meaning of “home” at life’s end, while reflecting on migrants’ enduring liminality as both “foreign” and “here to stay.” As Anna Boucher notes in her Critical Dialogue with Balkan, the book powerfully demonstrates how the “afterlives” of migration are deeply political.

Together, these books foreground the context-specific, subjective experiences of refugees and migrants as well as their agency as political subjects that reinvent existing policies, rules, and practices through their everyday struggles.

How Do Refugees Reshape States and Empires? Displacement, Colonial Legacies, and Global Hierarchies

Refugees are not simply a human rights issue. Refugee and migrant movements are an integral part of the international system, symbolizing the state-citizen-territory relationship that is assumed to seamlessly ensure international order and justice (e.g., see Haddad, Emma. 2008. The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns). An ever-increasing part of the scholarship interrogates the intersection of migration, racism, and colonial legacies, showing how refugee regimes reproduce global hierarchies rooted in empire, slavery, and racial capitalism (e.g., see El-Enany, Nadine. 2020. Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire).

In this issue, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees takes up a different route, portraying refugees as forces that transform empire. Hamed-Troyansky traces the mass displacement of over one million North Caucasian Muslims who fled Russian persecution and ethnic cleansing to the Ottoman Empire between the 1850s and World War I, reframing this exodus as central to both imperial history and the origins of the modern refugee system. His book highlights the complex interplay of empire, nationalism, and refugee agency, from the violence and hardships of exile to the formation of North Caucasian associations advocating cultural unity and political rights. With his account, Hamed-Troyansky challenges conventional distinctions between forced and voluntary migration and offers a powerful rethinking of refugees as central actors in the making and unmaking of empires.

In parallel, the field is decentering Euro-American perspectives by examining South–South migration across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, where the vast majority of displaced people reside (e.g., see Feldman, Ilana. 2018. Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics). Such work challenges Northern-based theories of migration. For instance, Cold War Refugees: Connected Histories of Displacement and Migration across Postcolonial Asia, edited by Yumi Moon, is a cohesive and groundbreaking new collection that examines refugee movements in Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. By centering Asia, the volume illustrates the violent, enduring consequences of postwar borders and power struggles, and it offers a critical, transnational perspective that links displacement to both Cold War geopolitics and colonial legacies. As reviewer Hamed-Troyansky observes in this issue, the book’s turn to Asia unsettles Euro-American assumptions and demonstrates how decolonization and displacement were mutually constitutive.