Belonging

This chapter discusses the issue of belonging. It first focuses on citizenship, which is often described as formal belonging. While citizenship is regularly framed as ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’, it is argued that it is never fully stable or secure. This is shown in practice through the example of the United Kingdom and Ireland, specifically, how the Brexit vote has had knock-on consequences for how citizenship and belonging is being re-imagined in both places. This is contrasted with the practice of citizenship in the United States, where, despite effusive expressions of unity, articulations of belonging have a deep history of division and exclusion. It considers both the barriers to formal belonging experienced by undocumented residents of the United States and the ways in which citizens themselves struggle to achieve inclusion and equality in the face of increasingly explicit intolerance.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book addresses three key issues that are central to the current politicisation of migration and citizenship, but that take particular forms in the United Kingdom and the United States. These three issues, each of which is discussed in a separate chapter, are borders and walls, mobility, and belonging. Borders and walls are the material articulation of state boundaries and state sovereignty. The role of borders is increasingly seen as the regulation of the movement of people: facilitating easy movement across borders for some, but making that movement more difficult for most. In contrast, the mobility of capital, through the actions of transnational corporations in particular, receives little attention.

Mobility

This chapter considers the mobility of people and shows how this has been politicised by both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote and its aftermath. The chapter focuses on two different types of mobility: short-term travel and longer-term migration. First, it discusses the travel ban that was signed by President Trump on 27 January 2017, the same day he welcomed the UK prime minister to the White House. Second, it discusses the way in which migration was framed as a problem by advocates of Brexit. It argues that both the travel ban and the migration problem operate in similar ways by creating hierarchies of acceptability based on nationality, race, religion, or other social characteristics. This practice has historical antecedents in its articulation and enforcement of the biopolitics of mobility.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes. This book has shown that migration and citizenship rights are again coming under sustained attack. States have long used their control over migration and citizenship to demonstrate their power, while, at the same time, espousing liberal-democratic values that run contrary to these acts of control. The responses to the perceived threat posed by migration take three key forms: the reinforcement of borders, efforts to regulate mobility, and limiting the ability of people to develop a sense of formal belonging in their place of residence. These disruptions have opened a space for heightened forms of nationalism and exclusionary policies, and enabled the creation of new forms of political activism and subjectivity that seek to expand and recast what it means to move and to belong.

Borders and walls

This chapter considers how the dominant performance of borders and bordering is being reworked through Brexit and the Trump presidency. The impact of Brexit has brought renewed attention and anxiety to the 310-mile land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while also unsettling the norms around the EU's external borders. In the United States, President Trump campaigned on the promise to ‘build a wall’ between Mexico and the United States and, not incidentally, to ‘make Mexico pay for it’. Since his election, the US–Mexico border has been intensely politicised and racialised. In contrast, there is a relative lack of anxiety regarding the US–Canada border. The chapter considers the ways in which borders are discursively invoked and materially reconfigured such that particular types of migrants are constructed as a threat and specific borders in need of securitisation.