The biopolitics of the migration-development nexus: Governing migration in the UK

Abstract

While politicians in the United Kingdom (UK) have engaged in fractious debate over the appropriate way of responding to the myriad issues arising from the so-called migration or refugee crisis in recent years, there is an apparent cross-party consensus regarding the ability of overseas aid and development spending to reduce levels of global economic migration. This suggests that the central tenets of what is known in the policy literature as the ‘migration-development nexus’ have been accepted by the political establishment in the UK, demonstrating a belief that development spending can be used to ameliorate the global economic inequalities seen as giving rise to mass migration. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectification, this article argues that the migration-development nexus represents a technology for enacting a strategy of governance that operates through a dual process of enticing and maintaining mobile subjects. It is then suggested that in the UK context, this operates through the temporary nature of the time-limited visa regime, which allows migrants from outside the European Union to be ‘governed through mobility’. The article therefore illustrates how mobility can be central to governing logics, as well as something that can exceed them.

Keywords

biopolitics Foucault governance migration-development nexus mobility

Introduction

While politicians in the United Kingdom (UK) have engaged in fractious debate over the appropriate way of responding to the myriad issues arising from the so-called migration or refugee crisis in and around the Mediterranean Sea in recent years, there is an apparent cross-party consensus regarding the ability of overseas aid and development spending to reduce levels of global economic migration. Both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition have signalled their support for the continuation of the statutory requirement to spend 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance (ODA), in part due to a belief that such spending can tackle the root causes of mass migration to Europe (HM Government, 2017b; Jamieson, 2016; Osamor, 2017). This suggests that the central tenets of what is known in the policy literature as the ‘migration-development nexus’ have been accepted by the political establishment in the UK, with senior ministers and shadow ministers seemingly united in their belief that UK ODA can be used to ameliorate the global economic inequalities seen as giving rise to mass migration.

While engaging with the policy-orientated literature on the migration-development nexus, this article will not provide a direct intervention into the technical or empirical sides of this debate. Instead, the work of migration scholars to debunk this hypothesis, by highlighting how economic development triggers rather than stems migration, will provide the point of departure for a critical investigation into policies of migration governance that flow from the acceptance of this nexus, such as the facilitation of remittance transfers, diasporic networks, and temporary visa schemes. The article will develop Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectification to construct an argument that the migration-development nexus represents a biopolitical technology for enacting a wider strategy of governance that operates through a dual process of enticing and maintaining mobile subjects. Specifically, it will be argued that, in the UK context, this operates through the temporary nature of the time-limited visa regime, which allows non-European Union (EU) migrants to be ‘governed through mobility’, in the sense of being produced as mobile and movable. This argument will provide both an advance in Foucauldian scholarship, in the sense of clarifying the role of mobility in governance strategies, and a practical demonstration of the continuing relevance of Foucault’s key ideas in relation to the contemporary management of migration. Furthermore, the article will be of interest to scholars working on migration and mobility studies more generally, by producing new knowledge that can allow for the recognition of governmental practices that entice and maintain mobility, and by illustrating how mobility can be central to governing logics as well as something that can exceed them.

This argument will proceed across the three sections of the article. The first section discusses the main features of the migration-development nexus discourse, and considers its impact on migration policy in the UK. The second section situates the valorisation of mobility by the migration-development nexus within Foucault’s analysis of the centrality of circulation to biopolitical governance, before going beyond this to develop my novel understanding of the migration-development nexus as operating to ‘govern through mobility’. The final section illustrates how this form of governance functions through the UK visa regime. The conclusion considers the future research agendas that are opened up by this conceptualisation, particularly in the context of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

The migration-development nexus

In the early 2000s, policy-makers and academics working on migration and development began exploring the productive links that could be forged between the two areas, resulting in a great ‘international buzz’ (Vammen and Brønden, 2012) around the notion of a ‘migration-development nexus’. This term captures the optimistic belief that the twin problems of growing levels of migration and the failures of development strategies could be best tackled together, by harnessing the economic benefits brought about by migration to the service of international development (Ruhs, 2005). This migration-development orthodoxy views migrants as potential transnational agents of development (Brønden, 2012: 2), due both to the massive increase in recent years of the value of remittance transfers from high-income to lower- and middle-income countries (De Haas, 2012: 9), and the possibility of migrants returning home with additional skills and capital to invest in their local economies (Datta, 2009: 112). International groups such as the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) and the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) have been set up to investigate the best ways to facilitate, encourage, and manage these trends, hoping to produce ‘triple wins’ for migrant-sending countries, migrant-receiving countries, and migrants themselves (Lavenex and Kunz, 2008: 447) by facilitating remittance transfers, replacing the ‘brain drain’ from developing to developed countries with a ‘brain gain’ and incorporating migrant diasporas into development strategies, with the ultimate goal of bringing about eventual reductions in global levels of migration. As Geiger and Pécoud (2013: 369) emphasise, highlighting the connections between migration and development has produced some very specific policy prescriptions. When ‘the potential impact on world development of even a small liberalisation of labour mobility’ is foregrounded, ‘temporary and circulatory labour migration schemes’ emerge as the paragons ‘of “sound”, “balanced”, or “well-managed” immigration policies’. The creation of regularised channels for legal, cross-border temporary or circular migration¹ to allow persons to circulate between a ‘home’ and destination’ country is therefore seen by proponents of the nexus as the best way to unleash the developmental potential of migration (De Haas, 2012: 22; Lavenex and Kunz, 2008: 448–449; Vammen and Brønden, 2012: 29).

It is crucial to note, however, that this emphasis on creating legal routes for certain types of migration operates alongside a concerted effort to tighten and close off other channels for forms of migration considered ‘illegal’ or irregular. The discourses of the migration-development nexus must therefore be seen as complementing the wider logics of the securitisation of migration. The provision of (limited) channels for regularised migration can work to legitimise efforts to clamp down on the movement of people outside these channels, while development aid and more favourable immigration quotas are key bargaining chip in the outsourcing of border controls, as enacted by the EU’s ‘mobility partnerships’ with third-country governments (Feldman, 2012: 73). The policies of the migration-development nexus can therefore not be separated from the securitisation of migration through practices such as the discursive linkage of migrants with transnational criminal and terror networks (Huysmans, 2006: 63–84), or the policies of surveillance, detention, and deportation that follow from this securitisation. Furthermore, this securitisation cannot be separated from the irregular movement of people that it produces.

In this article I will enact an apparent conceptual division, in order to focus my analysis on regularised and legal forms of migration. This is justified for two reasons. First, there is an extensive and persuasive literature on the securitisation of migration, including many analyses of the biopolitics of practices of exclusion, confinement, and marginalisation that irregular migrants are subjected to (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2016; Tazzioli, 2016; Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 45–68). Second, and more importantly, I wish to investigate the forms of governance that operate upon those seemingly more ‘privileged’ persons who are able to utilise regular channels of migration to the UK: those whose experience of migration is seemingly ‘smooth’. As I will highlight in the final section, even apparently ‘privileged’ or ‘elite’ migrants in the UK are subject to being ‘governed through mobility’, to seeing their previously ‘smooth’ experience turn bumpy and uneven – especially when immigration controls are conflated with national security concerns. However, before I begin to examine how such persons are ‘governed through mobility’, I must consider the impact of the migration-development nexus on UK migration policy.

The migration-development nexus and UK migration policy

In the UK, the acceptance of the migration-development discourse can be seen not only in the commitment to ODA but in the policies which seek to promote and facilitate temporary or circular migration. This is quite limited in terms of explicit circular migration schemes, despite Gordon Brown’s government stating in a 2009 consultation on citizenship testing that they ‘would welcome views on whether we should facilitate circular migration in order to reduce the negative impact of brain drain on developing countries’ (UK Border Agency, 2009: 10). Some ad hoc circular migration programmes were put in place, such as the Medical Training Initiative (Royal College of Physicians, 2016), but a plan to create a ‘pause button’ for migrants on the temporary Tier 1 or Tier 2 visas, to allow them to return home without jeopardising their path to citizenship status, was not acted upon. The same fate befell the planned Tier 3 visa, designed to provide a route for lower skilled workers to come to the UK to fill temporary shortages in the labour market, which has been indefinitely suspended.

There has been more active policy in terms of promoting diasporic networks and remittance transfers, however. The Department for International Development (DFID) provides financial support for diaspora groups engaged in development activities, in order to facilitate the maintenance of productive links between migrants living in the UK and their countries of origin. In 2014, for example, DFID invested £12 million into the ‘Common Ground Initiative’, providing 5 years of funding to small UK-based diaspora-led organisations involved in development work across Africa (HM Government, 2017a). In 2013 the government set up an Action Group on Cross Border Remittances, bringing together financial groups such as the Association of UK Payment Institutions, the British Bankers Association, and the World Bank with organs of government, including the Treasury, DFID, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the National Crime Agency, with the goal of identifying ‘market-led solutions for ensuring the continued flow of remittances’ (HM Government, 2015a).² The government also tasked DFID with taking forward a pilot project to help develop secure remittance channels to Somalia (HM Government, 2012, 2015b), and in May 2017 the issues of diaspora networks and remittance transfers were discussed at the London Conference on Somalia, attended by delegates from the governments of the UK and the Federal Republic of Somalia as well as from the United Nations and the African Union (HM Government, 2017b). The impetus to strengthen these transnational networks does not just come from government: the House of Commons International Development Committee’s 2016 report on DFID’s programmes in Nigeria bemoans the lack of mention ‘of the Nigerian diaspora in DFID’s latest Nigeria Operational Plan’, and urges DFID to ‘conduct a review into its engagement with British Nigerian diaspora groups … with the objective of ensuring that the substantial financial flows in the form of remittances and foreign direct investment (FDI) complement … [ODA] to the benefit of the poorest Nigerians’ (House of Commons, 2016: 60). The focus of these activities on countries bound up with the UK’s imperial past highlights the connections between contemporary migration and development policy and European colonialism, which will be returned to below.

Such policies can be seen as fitting the positive narrative put forward by proponents of the migration-development nexus regarding the potential of circulation (of migrant finance and migrants themselves) for addressing the twin policy problems of migration and development. However, this vision has not been uncritically accepted in the literature on migration and development. Some scholars view the migration-development nexus as a neoliberal mechanism operating to solicit the self-regulation of those produced as its subjects. Wise et al. (2013: 439), for instance, argue that the migration-development nexus operates to constitute migrants as subjects who are simultaneously valorised as ‘heroes of development’ capable of improving their own lives and the lives of those in their community through hard work and application, and rendered as ‘subjects of new rules, expectations and burdens’. This fashioning of ‘ideal migrant subjects’ (Rodriguez and Schwenken, 2013: 381) involves the promotion of neoliberal tenets of responsibility, motivation, and self-care, whereby migrants are encouraged to take on ‘increasingly individualised responsibilities for the development of their countries and communities of origin, in the context of … a shrinking state and privatisation of social services following the implementation of structural adjustment programmes in much of the developing world’ (Bastia, 2013: 466). Aspects of the critical literature on the migration-development nexus therefore view it as part of a neoliberal agenda aimed at enacting subjects who are both willing and able to further their own aims while simultaneously being subject to the wider dictates of neoliberal agendas.

Even if setting aside the impact of policies inspired by the nexus on migrants, the effects it could have on reducing levels of migration are also seriously questioned in the literature. Hein de Haas (2007: 832) challenges this key assumption of the migration-development nexus by arguing that ‘the process of social and economic development in its broadest sense tends to be associated with generally higher levels of mobility and more migration, at least in the short to medium term’. Many contemporary migrants are not those fleeing absolute poverty but those with the human, financial, and social resources to aspire to improve their lives, plan their journey, and pay transit costs. This idea, known as the ‘migration hump’, suggests that as people are lifted out of absolute poverty by economic development, levels of migration will increase rather than decrease.

If the policies put forward by proponents of the migration-development nexus are unlikely to achieve their stated goals of tackling high levels of migration and low levels of development, why has the language of these proponents been adopted by the UK political establishment? I do not seek to give further credence to the empirical arguments that seek to highlight the likely failure of these policies: rather, following Foucault,³ I seek to investigate the effects that the likely failure of the promotion of circular and temporary migration schemes have on UK migration policy. By situating the migration-development nexus within Foucault’s understanding of the centrality of circulation to contemporary governance, the following section will present the valorisation of circulation by the migration-development nexus as a biopolitical technology. This will provide the framework for the analysis in the final section of UK migration policy as governing through the enticement and maintenance of mobile subjects.

Foucault, biopolitics, mobility

As well as promoting circular and temporary migration schemes, the discourses of the migration-development nexus are built around a presupposition of the general value of human mobility. This valorisation of mobility is so strong that groups such as the GCIM celebrate ‘mobility … as a fundamental attribute of human nature’ (Feldman, 2012: 179). As I will now explore, this ‘celebration of circulation’ (Faist, 2008: 26–27) by states, development agencies, and international organisations appears comprehensible as an example of what Foucault calls an apparatus or dispositif of security.

Security and circulation

In the lecture series published under the title Security, Territory, Population, Foucault contrasts a legal-juridical model of power, associated with the exercise of sovereignty, with both disciplinary power and the operation of technologies of security. While he stresses that these modalities of power are not predominant in successive ages with clean breaks between them, but are rather overlapping and at times reinforcing, Foucault analyses the growing importance of security mechanisms in an age characterised by the emergence of what he called, in now well-known terms, ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’. Foucault (1990: 143) gave the name ‘biopower’ to the discourses which ‘brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’, and used the term ‘biopolitics’ to describe the ‘series of interventions and regulatory controls’ designed to normalise and maintain the population of living beings constructed as the object and subject of biopower (Foucault, 1990: 39, emphasis in original). ‘Biopolitical governance’ therefore operates by embedding regulatory measures such as health and welfare provision, informed by biological and statistical sciences, into its strategies, with the aim of safeguarding and securing the vitality of a population.

With the movement away from a sovereign power exercised over a demarcated territory to a biopower exercised over a population of living beings, security therefore becomes an ever-more prevalent form of governing the living: and it does so not by confining bodies in enclosures where they may be punished or worked upon by disciplinary power,⁴ but by opening up spaces to circulation (Elden, 2007: 30). In the opening lecture of Security, Territory, Population Foucault (2007: 13, 16, 17) talks repeatedly of the attempts to solve or mitigate the ‘problem of circulation’ through town planning in the 18th century. A major issue of this time, he argues, was ‘resituating the town in a space of circulation’ (Foucault, 2007: 13), with innovations in architectural design aimed at organising the circulation of people and goods in such a way as to ‘eliminat[ate] its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximising the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (Foucault, 2007: 18). In this understanding, circulation is seen as a phenomenon that security mechanisms seek to manage. While these security mechanisms shape and alter this circulation, they do not create it: rather, circulation is a ‘problem’ to be tackled, one of the ‘givens’, alongside ‘the flows of water, islands, air, and so forth’, that security relies on (Foucault, 2007: 19), something which brings benefits (such as goods and wealth) while also containing risks (of disease or theft, for instance). Security seeks to generate and maintain a healthy and productive population by producing ‘the best possible circulation, and of minimizing what is risky and inconvenient … while knowing that they will never be completely suppressed’. In particular, for Foucault (2007: 65, emphasis added), security mechanisms seek to maintain mobility:

we see the emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out.

This point highlights for me the key difference between sovereign or disciplinary power and the security mechanisms linked to biopower, and a point I think is under-emphasised in the literature applying Foucault to migration governance. Rather than achieving their most intensive interventions on bodies that are confined or held in-situ (which is a characteristic of disciplinary power), biopower is at its strongest when it is channelling and guiding mobile bodies in such a way as to prevent stasis and keep bodies in motion.

There is a further implication of this observation, which can be drawn out by briefly examining the Foucauldian concept of subjectification. For Foucault (2007: 87–114) the linkages between the ‘art of government’ and the biopolitical problem of the population led to the emergence of what he calls ‘governmentality’: the mechanisms through which relations of power are rationalised in order to develop the best strategies and techniques to put into effect the government of living beings (rather than the administration of legal subjects). This governmentality is not simply directed towards making the instruments and mechanisms of government appear legitimate and natural, however: it is also intimately connected for Foucault with the production of the subjects of government. For Foucault (1982: 777–778), subjects are produced by power, whether that is through systems of thought and knowledge production (such as linguistics or economics) which objectivise the subject, through ‘dividing practices’ which differentiate between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ subjects (e.g. sane and insane, law-abiding and criminal), or through power relations which encourage persons to recognise themselves as subjects. In his studies of governmentality, which attempt to connect these different practices to the government of living beings, the term ‘subject’ is used by Foucault (1982: 781) to capture a double-meaning, in the sense of being ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to [one’s] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’: a dual process often called ‘subjectification’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 168–184). The subjects of governmentality are thus ‘free’ subjects, to the extent that ‘[p]ower is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free’ (Foucault, 1982: 790).

Biopolitical governance must therefore not be seen as simply channelling, guiding, or disrupting already-mobile bodies, but also as producing mobile subjects, through what I configure as a dual process of enticing mobility from those not already mobile, and maintaining the mobility of already mobile subjects. This recognition requires adapting, modifying, and going beyond several strands of the critical literature on migration and mobility. The neoliberal critiques of the migration-development nexus noted above can be situated within an approach that views governmentality as a mechanism of governing through freedom and action ‘at a distance’ (Dean, 2010: 23–24; Miller and Rose, 1990). While making pertinent observations about the impact of the policies that flow from the nexus on migrants, this literature examines the subjectifications that produce migrant labour susceptible to the economic demands of governments and employers, and capable of taking on a self-conscious role as agents of development. In other words, this is a critique of how migrants are subjectivised in ways that serve the purposes of global neoliberal capitalism. What I am interested in, however, is how migrants in the UK are made governable, not simply to further the ends of global capitalism, but also as an end in itself, as something internal to the logics of biopower. Furthermore, this critique does not provide an account of how the governance of migrants operate through the maintenance of their mobility.

The same can be said of the literatures that apply a Foucauldian analytic of the securing of circulation to contemporary migration governance. In much of this literature, the governance of migration is seen as a biopolitical problem of managing prior mobility, encountered at specific sites such as borders crossings, to allow the ‘good’ circulation of ‘safe’ persons (those travelling for business, tourism or education, for example) to occur, while limiting or constraining ‘bad’ movements of people (unskilled or unwanted workers, refugees, traffickers, criminals, and terrorists; Aradau and Blanke, 2010; Schwenken and Russ-Sattar, 2014). At major UK airports such as Heathrow, this can be seen in the way those holding machine-readable UK or EU passports are able to pass through automated gates, while other passport holders are required to undergo checks by border officials. In both processes, those considered ‘safe’ are waved through, while those considered ‘risky’ (whether for intelligence reasons, or due to profiling based on physical appearance or digital records) may be taken aside for further questioning, and denied entry if the threat is judged to be real. In examples such as this, migration management and border controls can be understood to operate as sieves, filters, or membranes, allowing certain bodies to pass through freely, while others are disrupted, delayed, or prevented from entering (Weber and Bowling, 2008: 360–361). Such a conception of migration management, however, presupposes that bodies are already in motion, with border controls and other devices operating to secure certain types of desirable mobility from the threats posed by undesirable mobility. This conceptualisation has no account of how governance operates as a strategy to entice migrant mobility.

There are also alternative accounts of migrant mobility which view it as an ‘important resource employed by migrants’ and migrant activist groups (Rygiel, 2014: 143). One version of this conception can be found within the ‘Autonomy of Migration’ literature. The main argument of this approach, as summarised by Scheel (2013), is that migrant agency and subjectivity must be placed at the centre of all analyses of population movements, with mobility seen as an ‘immanently political’ (Mezzadra, 2004: 275) choice and not the ‘objective’ outcome of independent processes such as capital outflows or social crises. A more specific argument about the positive potential of migrant mobility is made by scholars who suggest that ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008) can be deployed to (re)claim citizenship rights for otherwise abject subjects, including the right to unfettered mobility. By highlighting ‘the critical potential of an agency-oriented approach, whereby migrants become viewed as actors generating change’ (Squire, 2017: 258), this literature provides a vision of mobility as something that can ‘function as a political democratic practice’ to ‘claim rights against national and transnational structures of power’ (Aradau and Huysmans, 2009: 593).

What the ‘Autonomy of Migration’ and ‘acts of citizenship’ literatures have in common,⁵ therefore, is a vision of migrant mobility as representative of the agency of populations whose movement is prior to the governance strategies put in place to control or limit them. However, in my view, this cannot provide a convincing alternative to the dominant Foucauldian accounts which focus on security mechanisms as sieves or filters, as mobility retains a ‘positive’ dimension in both conceptions. In the Foucauldian accounts, mobility is the domain of the privileged, whose right to free circulation is secured at the same time as those judged risky or threatening are immobilised (Mountz, 2011: 394). This privileged mobility is a product of security mechanisms, but a clear hierarchy is evident in that mobilities judged as ‘good’ are allowed while those judged as ‘bad’ are disallowed. In the alternative, migrant-centred accounts, on the other hand, it is the mobility of the underprivileged that is viewed in a positive light: as something that pre-exists the attempts to limit or constrain it, or as something that can be utilised to challenge or disrupt governance. As I will now discuss, I seek to break this dichotomous thinking through my conception of biopolitics as ‘governing through mobility’.

Governing through mobility

Rather than viewing mobility as something external that is subjected to security mechanisms, or as something that can, in certain specific contexts, challenge or disrupt governing logics, I conceive of mobility as also internal to governing logics, as something that biopower seeks to entice and maintain. As indicated above, for Foucault biopolitical security mechanisms operate to generate and maintain a healthy and productive population by ensuring ‘that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another’ (Foucault, 2007: 65). This means that, while biopolitical security makes calculations about what types of mobility are to be sanctioned and what are to be proscribed, what is not in question under these rationalities of government is the value of mobility itself. As Tim Creswell (2010: 22) has noted, ‘mobility is one of the major resources of 21st-century life’, meaning that the valued subject is that which is willing and able to be mobile: to move to look for and take work; to move while in work to generate productive links with others; and to engage in wider circuits of mobility around the transfer of goods and services.⁶ The promotion of circular and temporary migration by the migration-development nexus operates to construct migrants as similarly mobile subjects. The ‘ideal migrants’ from the perspective of the migration-development nexus are not those who move to a new country with the intention of settling permanently, integrating fully, and gaining citizenship rights: rather they are those who maintain links with their home communities, transfer regular remittance payments, and ultimately circulate back to their country of origin, bringing with them the skills and capital they have generated during their (temporary) period of migration. The channels open to regular migration are therefore designed in such a way as to encourage migrants to maintain links with their country of origin (through the facilitation of diasporic networks and remittance transfers), and to consider the benefits that return migration could bring to their home community (through deploying their improved entrepreneurial skills and increased social and financial capacity upon return); and, at the same time, discourages permanent settlement, full integration, and the cutting of all ties with their home country. In this way, the policies that flow from the migration-development nexus seek to both entice and maintain migrant mobility, by demonstrating the desirability of temporary or circular migration.

We must therefore recognise that governing logics produce mobility. Mobility is not simply a positive resource immanent to mobile populations, or a prior phenomenon that security mechanisms seek to guide and mange: rather, it is something elicited and maintained by governance mechanisms that seek to govern those who are made mobile on the very basis of that mobility. The valorisation of mobility through the discourses of the migration-development nexus therefore mark it out as a form of biopolitical governance based around the enticement and maintenance of mobile subjects, as a form of governance that encourages migrants to view themselves as mobile, and to link their life choices and self-assessments of success to their ability to be and remain mobile. It does this by enacting a reality in which migration and development are inextricably linked, through the production of various types of knowledge: figures for the value of remittance transfers as opposed to direct foreign investment; projections of the economic benefits of labour liberalisation for developed countries; and estimates about the contributions that return migrants, loaded with social and financial capital, could make to their countries of origin.⁷ The production of this regime of truth around migration and development obscures long-standing research into the ‘migration hump’ and the extent of the net disparities in terms of economic gain generated between the developed and developing world through migration, which challenge and dispute the optimistic pronouncements of the migration-development proselytisers. It also masks the legacies of colonial rule that continue to influence patterns of both migration and development policy (Danewid, 2017: 1679–1681). In this sense, the migration-development nexus is a re-enactment of colonial-era, racialised governing logics. One pertinent example from British colonial history is the so-called ‘Natal formula’, through which various British colonies enacted immigration policies that excluded non-Whites despite being formally non-discriminatory towards British subjects, while also making life difficult for those non-White ‘indentured labourers’ who did migrate, in order to encourage them to return to their own colony (Huttenback, 1966). This can be seen as the forerunner to the ever-more restrictive immigration framework that has been created in the UK from the 1960s, which has limited non-White immigration without ever being explicitly racist (Weber and Bowling, 2008: 365), and to the recent attempt to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal migrants (Travis, 2013).

The discourses of the migration-development nexus therefore constitute a series of active interventions that seek to both entice mobility, by encouraging limited and regular migration, while maintaining the mobility of already-mobile subjects, by discouraging permanent settlement and valorising migrant circulation or return. This production of mobile subjects may exceed the limits of control, generating the situations of resistance and subversion analysed by the ‘Autonomy of Migration’ and ‘acts of citizenship’ literatures, but this must not be seen as somehow ‘outside’ or separate from the governance strategies such action seeks to disrupt. Mobility must be seen as a product of this biopolitical governmentality, and the means through which it governs mobile subjects. The migration-development nexus therefore operates to ‘govern through mobility’ by attempting to elicit migrant mobility, and through maintaining migrant mobility, in order to produce migrants as mobile and movable. I will now consider how this ‘governing through mobility’ operates in the context of current UK migration policy.

Governing through mobility in the UK

As discussed above, ‘governing through mobility’ has not found concrete expression in the UK through formal processes for facilitating circular migration, diasporic networks, and remittance transfers. However, if we look at the benefits to migration governance that accrue from the policies of the migration-development nexus, and examine the work permit and visa regime operated by the Home Office, we can identify the maintenance of a legal framework which acts to encourage non-EU migrants in the UK to remain mobile through its temporary nature. According to recent data released by the Home Office (2018), in 2016 the most popular categories in the ‘points-based system’ that applies to most non-EU migrants were the Tier 2 and Tier 5 visas.⁸ In all, 24,300 people were granted a Tier 2 ‘General’ visa in 2016, for which the total length of stay is capped at 6 years. The Tier 2 (Intra-company Transfer) visa, open to overseas employees offered a role in a UK branch, was granted to 25,300 people in 2016. For long-term staff earning less than £120,000 a year, the maximum length of stay on this visa is 5 years, 1 month, though this rises to 9 years for those earning more than £120,000 a year. The Tier 5 (Temporary Workers – Creative and Sporting) visa, only valid for a maximum period of 12 months, was granted to 29,000 people in 2016, while 16,500 people aged 18–30 were granted the Tier 5 (Youth Mobility Scheme) visa, which allows residence in the UK for up to 24 months.

This represents just a snapshot of the UK visa regime, but one that illustrates its variable nature, and how the length of stay granted depends on factors such as age, wealth, and the type of work undertaken. The explicit references to factors such as salary and savings also tie this visa regime into much wider class, racial, and gender dynamics by, for example, ignoring how access to high earnings or cash reserves are often influenced by nationality or family background, or by promoting a gender-blind notion of ‘minimum salary’ that does not take into account well-documented gender pay gaps (see Andrijasevic, 2009; McDowell, 2008; Tyler, 2010). What is crucial to my analysis, however, is the fact that all these visas are temporary in nature. Once the designated time limit has expired, migrants have the opportunity to apply for permanent residence status, if they can meet the stringent conditions such as earning at least £35,000 annually. For many migrants such a salary is out of reach, meaning that at the end of their visa period they will be legally obliged to migrate to a third country or return home. Failure to leave will mean crossing over from a legitimate residence status to an irregular one.

The temporary nature of the UK visa regime has a major impact on migrant integration. As Sumption (2017: 50–51) notes, temporary schemes ‘discourage social and economic integration’ by denying migrants the time needed to ‘improve their language skills or develop social connections and local knowledge’. The imposition of barriers to integration through the temporary nature of the UK visa regime contributes further to the production of mobile subjects. Those on the borders of illegality and subjected to an atmosphere of generalised suspicion by the statutory requirements on landlords, universities, banks, the health service, and employers to check immigration status may be unable or unwilling to develop deep connections with their communities, making return a more attractive option. The migration system may therefore produce migrants who choose to exercise their mobility by travelling back to their country of origin. This is borne out in the official figures on voluntary return, which show a marked increase from 3,566 in 2004 to a high-water mark of 32,178 in 2013, before tailing off slightly, but remaining at a level of over 27,500 voluntary returns per year in the period 2014–2016 (Home Office, 2017). The growing numbers of voluntary returns has been attributed by Myriam Cherti (2017) to both an intensification in ‘the “hostile environment” for irregular migrants’ and the ‘strengthening [of] the incentives to return’. The enforcement of this ‘hostile environment’ has been impacted by the outcry over the treatment of persons from the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ who, despite possessing indefinite leave to remain, have been denied access to public services such as healthcare and threatened with deportation – or in up to 63 cases, actually been deported (Grierson, 2018a) – because they lacked the paperwork to comply with the higher burden of proof that has been required since the 2014 Immigration Act. The political fallout from this scandal has led to the temporary suspension of some requirements upon banks and the health service to check immigration status (Grierson, 2018b).

Furthermore, this legal framework simultaneously operates as a method of control. When immigration status is conditional, and when alterations are at the whims of political decisions, migrants can be produced as ‘detainable’ or ‘deportable’ (De Genova, 2011: 91–94), as they face the possibility of being detained or deported if their legal status changes. The temporary nature of the UK visa regime thus produces its subjects as inherently mobile and movable, if permanent residence status is not forthcoming. Furthermore, this fate can befall even the most privileged of non-EU migrants, particularly when suspicions over immigration status are folded into national security concerns. As The Guardian reported in June 2018, at least 19 highly skilled migrants have been deported from the UK under a section of the 2016 Immigration Rules designed to tackle terrorists and those judged to be a threat to national security, while up to 1,000 others seeking indefinite leave to remain have faced expulsion under the same rules (Hill, 2018). As this case highlight, maintaining migrant mobility through the denial of permanent residence makes it easier to take the decision to exclude, to revoke immigration status, and threaten with deportation. The Guardian also reports, however, that the government has suspended and placed under review the use of this specific paragraph in immigration cases: illustrating how migrants possess the agency to mobilise against their governance through mobility.

Conclusion

The acceptance of the efficacy of the migration-development nexus by successive UK governments has not led to the creation of clear channels for circulatory migration in order to harness the ‘developmental potential’ of migrants. Instead, operating within a biopolitical framework which views the management of circulation as central to generating and securing a healthy, vital, and productive population, the discourses of the migration-development nexus, and their valorisation of circulation and mobility, have been utilised to enact the biopolitical governance of migrants in the UK. Administrated largely through the Home Office, this biopolitical governance produces migrants as mobile subjects who are both free to exercise their mobility and subjected to controls due to this very mobility. Just as freedom and security have long been recognised not as opposites but as correlatives (Foucault, 2007: 48), this article has argued that mobility does not represent a flight from governing technologies, but in certain circumstances is produced by governmental rationalities. To this end, I have highlighted how the policies which flow from the migration-development nexus seek to both entice mobility, by generating (limited) legal channels for migration to take place, and maintain migrant mobility, by implementing a bar on integration and permanent settlement. When migration is governed by a logic of temporariness or circulation, mobility is not outside this governance, but is internal to its operation, in the sense that the production of mobile subjects (through a dual process of enticement and maintenance) is necessary for the functioning of this biopolitical governance. The operation of this ‘governing through mobility’ therefore depends upon the production of mobile and movable migrants, who can then be governed on the basis of that mobility. Understanding how mobility is tied to biopolitical governmentality through the migration-development nexus can therefore allow us to recognise other situations when such governance occurs, to understand what effects this has on migrants, and to offer critiques of and challenges to the operation of such governmental rationalities.

As the negotiations and debates over the UK’s future relationship with the EU move towards their conclusion, and the details of the UK’s future migration policy emerge, the political focus on the inter-related issues of migration, mobility, and circulation will likely intensify. This is therefore a crucial time to develop the conceptual tools capable of understanding and analysing attempts to govern through the production of mobility. It will be particularly interesting to see if circular or temporary migration schemes are put forward as a means of settling what Feldman (2012) frames as a ‘neo-nationalist’/‘neo-liberal’ debate, by reconciling contradictory demands for immigration controls in order to protect societal cohesion and access to migrant labour in order to safeguard economic interests. Indeed, a Home Office document leaked in September 2017 indicates that the government is considering introducing schemes to allow EU nationals to undertake temporary or seasonal work on a sector-by-sector basis, in order to fill the likely shortfalls in low-skilled workers created by withdrawal from the free movement of labour within the EU (The Guardian, 2017: 46). The extent to which withdrawal prefigures further alterations to what the Home Office are now calling the ‘compliant environment’ for migrants (BBC News, 2018), particularly if the reverberations from the ‘Windrush scandal’ die down, also demands strict attention. These potential transformations of UK migration policy must be tracked closely, and the conceptual framing of ‘governing through mobility’ developed here can provide the tools needed to identify the governmental consequences of any movement towards greater use of temporary visas or circular migration programmes.

My identification of the biopolitics of the migration-development nexus with a process of ‘governing through mobility’ is thus far limited in one crucial manner. The analysis put forward here relies on a top-down examination of UK migration policy, considering how an environment of temporariness and precarity is created by visa regimes and other migration regulations. What is missing is therefore a strong engagement with the perception of, and reaction to, this production of mobility from the point of view of migrants themselves. By this, I mean not only the perspectives of non-EU migrants in the UK who have long been subject to such an insecure environment, but increasingly those of resident EU citizens who face a situation of uncertainty due to the ongoing negotiations on exiting the EU, and indeed of those currently applying to enter the UK, or considering doing so in the future. Such research on the lived experiences of migrants, both in the UK and elsewhere, will be necessary to gain a fuller understanding of how this biopolitics impacts on their lives and to discern the political strategies and forms of agency that are put in place to negotiate their governance through mobility.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ‘International Relations and Migration’ EISA workshop in Cardiff, 7–9 June 2017, at the ‘Negotiating Governance: Agency, Mobility and the Global Movement of People’ BISA workshop in Brighton, 13 June 2017, and at the TheoryLab research seminar at Queen Mary University of London, 4 October 2017. I would like to thank all the participants at those workshops and seminars for their helpful and constructive comments. I would also like to thank Engin Isin and the anonymous reviewers at Politics for their detailed and insightful suggestions.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Patrick Pinkerton is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He has published work on the post-conflict situations in Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

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