"They Steal Our ____": Rethinking the Idea of the Migration Crisis

• In Event: Migration "Crises": Determinants and Consequences of Politicization

Abstract

“The Migrant Crisis at the Border.” These words are regularly found across newspaper headlines and TV news screens. The idea of the crisis of migration has given rise to an ever expanding migration control apparatus and increasingly restrictive immigration laws. Yet, closer analysis reveals that these concerns about the migrant crisis do not automatically correspond with an increase in migration. Against this backdrop, this paper explores when migration becomes a crisis. In other words, it asks under what conditions migrants are turned into a threat to society that engenders a crisis response. To answer this question, I examine the targeting of Jewish migrants in 1920s Germany. Based on a rich set of archival materials collected from October 2021 to August 2022 in the Prussian Privy State Archives, the Bavarian War Archives, the Bavarian State Archives and the Munich State Archives, I show that Jewish migrants were blamed for the multiple political, economic, and social crises Germany was facing, which threatened the racial hegemony of the German state. In this scapegoating the state relied on racialized and antisemitic tropes of idleness, criminal behavior, and casting people as a threat to the regular functioning of society. The German government then used restrictive immigration policies and various instruments of border controls, including immigration detention or deportation, to target those blamed for the crisis. As such, I demonstrate that restrictive immigration policies provide a pressure valve during social, political, and economic crises. This allows me to argue that during moments of crises, the state scapegoats migrants to retain its legitimacy. The arguments I make therefore contribute to critical border studies and provide a historical lens to our understanding of the securitization of migration. They also offer a novel avenue of analysis into how German migration policies were shaped by pre-World War II antisemitism, a dynamic largely sidelined in the study of European migration control and only recognized in the context of the United Kingdom.

Author

• Sabrina Diana Axster, Cornell University