Irregular migration, borders, and the moral geographies of migration management

Abstract

<jats:p> Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world’s ideal biopolitical and geopolitical organization. This article presents an analysis of an anti-irregular migration campaign funded by Australia and administered by the International Organization for Migration to deter “potential people smugglers” in Indonesia. The article demonstrates that the campaign attempted to normalize the idea that transporting irregular migrants was immoral and a sin. The Indonesia–Australia border and the Westphalian nation-state system were structured as moral geographies. The campaign framed immigration law as the ultimate determinant of moral and immoral migration, proclaiming a righteousness in immobilizing irregular migrants, regardless of circumstance. Per the campaign, moral migration is to be managed, and borders to be guarded, by unaccountable consultants for hire like the International Organization for Migration—states’ deputized migration managers. The article analyzes how irregular migration was structured as subverting and exploiting territorialized nations, how the campaign associated emplacement and boundedness with safety and irregular migration with a threatening, foreign, immorality. Finally, the article investigates how everyday spaces were infiltrated by bordering practices designed to normalize the campaign’s purported “truths” about morality and migration, showing the varying temporalities and scales of border-making and migration management. </jats:p>