Institutional Marxism, Infrastructural Power, and Unauthorized Migration: Toward a New Theory of Migration Control

• In Event: Law and Political Economy

Abstract

This paper seeks to lay the foundations for a new theory of migration control. I do this by placing in conversation two rather distinct frameworks that have been largely ignored by scholars of migration: Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno’s Institutional Marxism (IM) and Michael Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power.” I argue that illegalization emerged as an informal but systematic means of incorporating “unskilled” immigrant workers into the bottom rung of the US labor market in the late twentieth century because the state lacked the capacity to assume a more formal and direct role in the regulation of noncitizen labor. I then evaluate the US state’s efforts to control undocumented (or unauthorized) migration over the past half century. I contend that we appear to be on the cusp of a transition to a new regime of militarized migration management in which the state plays a very active role in regulating migration with the aid of temporary legal statuses and heavily fortified borders, as well as digital surveillance, electronic monitoring, and biometric identification technologies.

Author

• David Feldman, DePauw University