Governing Irregular Migration

by David Moffette (Author)

This thorough analysis of immigration governance in Spain explores the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at play at one of Europe's southern borders. Drawing on interviews with policymakers and from parliamentary debates, laws, and policy documents, David Moffette reveals the complicated legal obstacles facing migrants with precarious immigration status. He shows how issues of culture, labour, and security intersect to create a regime of migration governance that is at once progressive and repressive. This book contributes to debates in socio-legal, border, and citizenship studies.

Review
Scholars of migration and border governance have not always appreciated the significance of the Spanish case. Exceptional in its empirical acuity, conceptual richness, and political insight, Governing Irregular Migration corrects this oversight. It does not just add one more case to the debate; it shows convincingly that migration governance looks quite different when viewed through a Spanish lens. (William Walters, professor, Department of Political Science and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University)

This book is an intellectual tour de force that will become a must-read for critical border and migration scholars. Moffette combines ethnography, archival research, and interviews with officials to analyze the multi-actor and multiscalar governing of irregular migration in Spain. His analysis vividly captures how irregular migrants are not only criminalized but also selectively and contingently incorporated through complex logics and bordering practices that occur in various sites and timelines. (Luin Goldring, professor, Department of Sociology, York University)

David Moffette has written a compelling analysis of the processes aimed at governing migration and human mobility. His book’s salience and academic impact go far beyond the geographical scope of his study. Governing Irregular Migration makes a crucial contribution to the socio-legal analyses of migration governance and to related criminological, sociological, and legal debates. (José Ángel Brandariz, associate professor, Faculty of Law, University of A Coruña, Spain)

Governing Irregular Migration makes an exciting and original contribution to how we conceptualize, and contend with, the messiness of migration governance in a global, multiscalar world. The book puts socio-legal studies and migration research into elegant conversation using the concepts of probation, discretion, and borderwork to show how Spain turned irregular migration into a policy problem in need of management. (Patricia Landolt, associate professor and chair, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Scarborough)



Feel Free to contact me for book requests, informations or feedbacks.