Building State Power through Border Control and Immigration Enforcement

We live in an age of migration, and of migration control. Global mobility and the political responses it has engendered have impelled governments in many countries to strengthen border policing and crack down on unauthorized migrants. These practices offer a vantage point for analyzing the development and operation of state power. In her talk, Kimberly Morgen will discuss the extensive buildup of border policing and immigration enforcement in the United States since the start of the 2000s as an example of state expansion. She will analyze how and why governing power has been mobilized and deployed in this way, and what larger ramifications this has for how we theorize and study states.

Suggested preparatory reading

Kimberly Morgan. 2023. “Hostile Environments: State Infrastructural Power and the Exclusion of Unauthorized Migrants in Western Europe.” American Journal of Sociology 128 (4): 1077–113.

Kimberly Morgan. 2017. "Introduction." In The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, co-edited with Ann Shola Orloff. Cambridge University Press.

Kimberly Morgan. 2020. “Policing Markets: The Role of the Social Partners in Internal Immigration Enforcement.” Journal of European Social Policy 30 (5): 571–86.

Kimberly J. Morgan is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Her work examines the politics shaping public policies, with particular interests in migration and social welfare. She is the author of Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policy in Western Europe and the United States (Stanford University Press) and The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of American Social Policy (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of several volumes, including The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (Cambridge University Press, 2017).