The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

by John Torpey

Meanwhile, analyses of migration and migration policies have tended to take the existence of states largely for granted, typically attributing migration to a variety of socioeconomic processes (“push-pull” processes, “chain migration,” “transnational communities,” etc.) without paying adequate attention to territorial states’ need to distinguish “on the ground” among different populations or to the ways in which the activities of states – especially war-making and state-building – result in population movements. The chief exception to this generalization is found in the writings of Aristide Zolberg, who has urged for decades that the state-building (and state-destroying) activities of states should occupy a central role in studies of human movement or its absence, alongside the more routine examination of states’ immigration policies.3 Rather than ignoring the role of states, studies of immigration policies take them as given and thus fail to see the ways in which regulation of movement contributes to constituting the very “state-ness” of states.

Aristide Zolberg