Migration Management and Its Discontent: Human Rights, Informality and Smuggling

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Since recent increases in international migration, and especially irregular migrations, wealthy states have stepped up policies to close borders and control migration. While access to destinations in the Global North is increasingly harder, the demand for migration from the Global South has remained steady. As a result, an informal smuggling economy arose to circumvent the border closures. In response, states criminalize the act of smuggling. For example, the European Union has increasingly tied development aid to the requirement that the states receiving the aid also use a security approach to migration and criminalize smuggling. This panel explores this interplay between state policies and social responses, such as the smuggling industry, and how these affect migrant rights, state – society relations, and relations between states. The first paper from Micinski et al. outlines recent developments in migration management and how states in the Global North are increasingly leveraging development aid as a means of migration control in the Global South. Yet, this kind of migration management aid, they note, creates unintended negative consequences and perverse incentives that strengthen authoritarian institutions without interdicting migration. The second paper, Chwalisz’s contribution, makes the case that human smuggling is increasingly at the crossroads in political science questions of state-to-state, and state-to-society relations. She explores the political importance both domestically and internationally of how states are responding to the illicit industry of human smuggling. Yet, political scientists have often ceded the study of illicit economies in general and human smuggling to criminologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Chwalisz showcases how human smuggling can illuminate some of the current political science debates and how political scientists in turn are uniquely positioned to contribute to the study of human smuggling, both on the theoretical and methodological front. The third paper, Frowd’s contribution, exemplifies how the tension between state policies and human smuggling is changing state-society relations. He examines the interplay between migration management and human smuggling in one major transit country, Niger. Under EU pressure, the Nigerian government criminalized smuggling in a country, where 'smuggling' practices predate colonization as a means of livelihood and identity. The result is a blurring of the licit and the illicit economy, a process Frowd describes as ‘quasi-legality.’ Finally, Paul’s paper contributes to our understanding of how the pandemic is affecting migration management. She outlines how COVID-19 policies and politics have influenced smuggling and anti-smuggling efforts in the European Union. Paul explores the discourse formation around migration debates, and how politicians at the national and supranational (EU) level have framed debates regarding the mobility and situation of European citizens. She shows us how the kind of actor dominating the discourse affects migrant rights and migrant agency. Together, these four papers outline the interplay between states, migration management, and social responses. They showcase who sets the agenda in conversation and policy making on migration, and the unintended consequences of these policies. The panel shows how human smuggling is a response to restrictive migration management policies that are disconnected from our theoretical understanding of migration and from the lived experiences of migrants. The papers put human smuggling in conversation with the policies that foster it and highlight the unintended externalities of the securitization of migration.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Individual Presentations

• Development Aid as Migration Control: A Comparison of Central America & Africa - Nicholas R. Micinski, University of Maine; Kelsey P. Norman, Rice University; Ana Martín Gil, Rice University

• Human Smuggling and Frontiers in Political Science - Natalie Chwalisz, Middlebury College

Chair

• Noora Anwar Lori Boston University

Discussants

• Nicholas Barnes University of st Andrews

• Angie Maritza Bautista-Chavez Arizona State University