‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as protection in the regime of immigration controls

Authors

  • Nandita Sharma

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.20121793

Keywords:

coolieism, slave labour relations, human mobility, immigration controls

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss two 1835 ordinances passed by the local council of the British colony of Mauritius. Passed shortly after Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, these restrictions initiated the regulation and restriction of immigration within the British Empire. Seen as quite novel in their day, these ordinances employed the rhetoric of ‘protecting emigrants’ to legitimise the new constraints they imposed on free human mobility. Today, when the national ‘logic of constraint’ on human mobility is almost uncontested, the idea that immigration controls protect migrants remains central to the discursive practices concerning human trafficking. Nation-state constraints on human mobility are normalised while the exploitation and abuse of people on the move is ideologically redirected to ‘modern-day slavers’ or ‘evil traffickers’, thus absolving both the state and globally operative capital of their culpability.

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Author Biography

Nandita Sharma

Nandita Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu) and the Director of its International Cultural Studies Program. Her research interests address themes of human migration, migrant labour, national state power, ideologies of racism and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. She has numerous publications in journals and edited volumes and is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the making of ‘migrant workers’ in Canada.

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Published

21-09-2017

How to Cite

Sharma, N. (2017). ‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as protection in the regime of immigration controls. Anti-Trafficking Review, (9), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.20121793