US population and territorial management: A case for integrating immigration and empire studies

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 8. Rethinking nation-state/borders/migration

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for bringing together sociological literature on US immigration and empire to better understand how the state manages populations and territory. Drawing from both subfields, I analyze how the state privileges and problematizes different groups (i.e., racialization), how the state manages problematized people (i.e., policing, surveillance), and how the state manages territory (i.e., border management, land policy). While both sociologies of immigration and empire develop these three analytic domains, I find that they do so unevenly. On one hand, immigration literature largely focuses on how the state manages problematized groups, namely the “migrant.” This gives us a rich understanding of how US law, policy, and culture selectively include privileged groups and exclude marginalized others. Yet, existing immigration literature tends to assume certain groups as problematized and the nation-state as a stable entity. Hence, it risks over-investing in Western-centric modernization and development narratives (Mayblin and Turner 2020). On the other hand, empire literature examines how imperial and colonial projects problematize groups, manage people, and govern territory through complex and multilayered processes. Yet much of this literature is historicized with little 21st-century evidence. Hence, empire studies tend to overlook certain social phenomena that are salient today, including migration. I propose that research on “crimmigration” and settler colonialism offer exceptional frameworks for considering immigration and empire literature together. Both areas begin to flesh out the historical processes behind how groups are problematized and the co-constitutive evolutions of population and territorial management. Further research may build integrated frameworks to consider immigration and empire literature together.

Author

• Nalani Saito, Northwestern University