Governing Migration

Overview of how the state—through its bureaucracies, classification systems, and enforcement agencies—includes, excludes, and controls immigrant populations, thereby governing immigrants’ lives. Students gain understanding of state power not as an unknown or homogeneous entity, but as an active actor whose structures reflect the varied and sometimes conflicting goals of its agencies as well as the contextual economic and political forces and interests. Examination of how, through classification systems, state power creates the populations that the state either rewards or punishes; produces enduring inequalities; and spills over into everyday life, various levels of government, and beyond the physical territory of the country.

Letter grading.