Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Zürich, 2025
Instrumentalising the borders for migration control is a relatively new phenomenon considering the history of human movement. Following a pattern started with the US Immigration Act in 1875, it was as late as 1905 when the United Kingdom, for the first time in Europe, restricted the entry of Eastern European immigrants to its territory with the Aliens Act (Chetail, 2019: 46- 47). The Act categorising those who did not have the resources to support themselves and their dependents, the ones already suffering from mental illness and likely to burden the public with any disease, individuals who committed a non-political offence in a foreign country or had expulsion order as ‘undesirable migrants’ (Chetail, 2019: 47 citing from Aliens Act 1905). By the turn of the 20th century, even the traditional immigration countries started to adopt a more restrictive and selective immigration governance. With empires’ dissolution and nation-states’ rise, especially after the Great War, migration control became widespread in states’ domestic laws and passport legislation.
Bordering regulations of states lies on the principle of sovereignty in international law. Accordingly, international migration law regulates human movement in two main ways: the departure of individuals from any country and the admission of individuals to the destination country. International law does not restrict the departure of individuals from a state. Besides, some discussion in the human rights literature defends the right to migrate among human rights. Yet, from the other side of the coin, no rule of international law obliges states to admit migrants to their territory. From a legal positivist point of view, states’ rights in this matter are absolute, yet policy choices and legal regulations are not abstract; they have profound consequences on individuals’ lives, families, and societies and even transcend borders. The impact of bordering practices becomes apparent, especially in forced migration cases. Migration governance operates within sharply defined categories, which do not occur in isolation. Migrants' aspirations and potential to integrate into destination countries, especially in Western and Northern Europe, are assessed at the intersections of gender, race, class and (perceived) cultural and religious affiliation, which also reflect how the majority and the neoliberal market perceive the individual in question (Scuzzarello & Moroshanu, 2023: 7).
Borders are not limited to physical borders, and their bordering effects continue within the immigration society with various forms constituted by differentiated admission procedures. Some “deserve” to cross borders and are offered “a place at the table”, while some others are insistingly excluded and labelled as “undeserving”. Consequently, even if those marginalised somehow manage to move, they encounter legal and social barriers. These barriers result in hierarchies and invisible societal boundaries, which serve as agents of territorial borders and border policies. The edited volume addresses the continuous bordering effects of migration policies and their impact on migrant communities from the perspective of different disciplines. Accordingly, it offers an interdisciplinary lens to the bordering phenomenon.
The edited volume contains extended and revised versions of some of the papers presented at the workshop “Understanding the determinants of migrants' access to social services across legal statuses: an international comparison”, held in Paris on 19-20 June 2023 as part of the MIGLEG Project. The workshop gathered critical migration scholars from various disciplines to discuss migrants' access to social services through the analytical lens of 'everyday bordering'. During the two-day event, the participants had the chance to compare policies and practices in different countries and examine how bordering processes are legitimised and implemented. The increasing recognition of borders as a social phenomenon inspired the workshop; borders have permeated our social fabric and are visible in everyday practices, bureaucratic interactions, and policies that regulate the lives of immigrants. Drawing on Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy's concept of 'everyday bordering', discussions focused on how borders are enacted through accessing social services, becoming tools for inclusion, exclusion and governance. With an emphasis on comparative and transnational perspectives, the event highlighted how bordering processes are legitimised and resisted in different contexts.
With this background, the edited volume examines cases from different countries to provide insights into how borders are enacted and contested in everyday life. It highlights the role of intersectional factors—such as legal status, nationality, gender, and class—in shaping migrants’ access to services and their position in society more broadly. The study highlights how immigrants, social actors, and institutions navigate, negotiate, and resist these bordering processes. Aside from the content, the collaboration itself has been a cross-border and interdisciplinary knowledge co-creation, which we hope, as editors, to provide a multidimensional source for anyone interested in the ever-expansive discipline of migration.