Beyond Exceptionalism: Race and the Institutional Drivers of Migration Control

• In Event: Corruption, Crime and Politics in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

“Kinder statt Inder.” “Children not Indians.” In the 2000 German national election campaign, Jürgen Rüttgers, a member of former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union party made waves with this controversial slogan. The far-right German party The Republicans quickly used the slogan for their campaign posters, adding the sentence: “We’ll keep watch Mr. Rüttgers.” This backlash came amidst a push by the then governing coalition of Social Democrats and Greens to introduce so-called ‘blue cards’ to attract highly qualified and much needed foreign IT workers, amongst others. At the end of the 1990s and moving into the 2000s, Germany was trying to play catch-up with other major economic players to join the ranks of those countries leading in tech. Taking place at a time when we see an expansion of restrictive migration laws that continues to take shape until today, this vignette is representative of a key dynamic that I argue shapes the politics of migration controls and their subsequent hardening and softening for different migrant groups: The negotiation between the various functions migration controls play for different institutionalized interests.

In this I am inspired by the American Political Development scholarship on racial institutional orders, which seeks to explain the development of institutions across all facets of political life through the interplay of racial egalitarian and white supremacist institutional orders. Applying this to migration, I argue that we need to pay attention to the changing power dynamics between three major institutional orders and the extent to which they influence political decision-making on migration policies, namely nativist, economic, and humanitarian institutional orders. Nativists, who encompass a broad trajectory from far-right and Neo-Nazi parties to mainstream center-right and conservative politicians, want to prioritize ‘white’ German citizens and ensure that they will not be displaced economically, politically, or socially by migrants. Economic interests are focused on ensuring a steady supply of cheap and easily exploitable labor to satisfy current employment needs and ‘propel’ the German economy to the front. The third institutional order is the humanitarian one, that includes both national and supranational actors such as civil society organizations and international courts of human rights and that, as the literature has shown, is deeply influenced by both cosmopolitan as well as colonial ideologies.

Through a case study of German migration controls in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, I theorize the evolution of migration laws and policies through the lens of these three competing institutional orders and their interactions. I argue that we need to study how the broader political, economic, and social environment shapes the political power and influence these orders can yield as well as their current demands in relation to migrants and that the intensification and focus of border controls and migration laws is driven by this evolving relationship between nativist, economic, and humanitarian institutional orders. For example, when economic orders have less need for foreign labor they will be less inclined to support policies targeted at increasing foreign labor, thus yielding more ground to nativist interests. On the other hand, there are also times when different interests coalesce. Employers of low-skilled migrant workers for example, have a vested interest in keeping migrants in spaces of vulnerability to turn them into more docile labor and nativist interests will push for more legal restrictions to inhibit migrants from settling long-term. This dynamic changes when employers are struggling to attract workers with specific skill-sets and need to extend better opportunities for long-term settlement for example.

By offering an institutional explanation for the evolution of border controls, my paper pushes against the logics of exceptionalism that underpin much of the existing scholarship seeking to explain the hardening of migration controls that has been witnessed since the 1990s. The two dominant explanations have focused on the extent to which migrants have been turned into a security threat since the 1990s - the securitization of migration scholarship - or have looked at the role of the profit interests of corporations and private actors and the political interests of supranational organizations - the migration industry literature. I argue that these two sets of scholarship adopt an exceptionalist logic that sees the developments of the 1990s as diversions from regular state politics, under-theorizes the role of the state, and suggests an artificial division between the state, corporations, and supranational organizations that ignores their entanglements. The theory of the institutional drivers of border controls I propose thus speaks directly to the conference theme by asking how democratic structures shape migration policies.

Author

• Sabrina Diana Axster, Cornell University