Policing Migration and Racial Technologies

• In Event: 4418 - Encompassing Margins: Globalizing Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

The merger between familiar modes of policing with the impetus for migration control has brought with it new and orchestrated ways of profiling and sorting people, that build on pre-existing racialized and gendered practices of policing. In the aim to decipher who is a citizen, who is a foreign national offender and who is eligible for deportation on the grounds of criminality, the role of identity documentation agencies has expanded and partnerships between them, immigration agencies and the police have grown significantly. The overall aim is to make the process of identifying foreign national offenders quicker, smoother and more efficient. In this paper, I discuss the findings from an ongoing research study which examines the policing of migration in the UK. I focus on the process by which histories of offending and foreign nationality checks are requested, made and met, and how technology and race intersect in everyday policing spaces and processes. I argue that the new technologies of border control are imbricated with police work decisions that are influenced by race, thereby deepening the reach of racial technologies and their capacity to monitor, govern, threaten and exclude racial others.

Author

• Alpa Parmar, University of Oxford