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

by John Torpey

the product of centuries-long labors of slow, painstaking bureaucratic construction – thus signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the international state system as a whole successfully monopolized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions. The point here is obviously not that there is no unauthorized (international) migration, but rather that such movement is specifically “illegal”; that is, we speak of “illegal” (often, indeed, of “undocumented”) migration as a result of states’ monopolization of the legitimate “means of movement”. What we now think of as “internal” movement – a dubious and anachronistic notion before the development of modern states and the state system – has come to mean movement within national or “nation-states.”