Migration

This chapter deals with the “political geography of migration.” It explains how “migration” is being circumscribed. The focus here is on international migration. The analysis focuses on the control and facilitation of migration rather than policies of immigration. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between migration, “space,” and state practices. The chapter assumes three aspects of spatial metaphors: that privileging a particular metaphor over another is not necessarily fruitful; that “territory,” for example, is constructed through discourses and imaginations as well as practices; and that the invocation of spatial metaphors is intimately related to the political strategies of research. Given geographers’ apparent predilection for “spatial correctness,” political geographers have not interrogated spatial metaphors with the necessary energy, whether this concerns the problematic references to “scale” or to “transnationalism”; unreflexively referring to national state power and rationality when it suits an author’s particular political standpoint; or specifying exactly what “local” means.