Reimagining, repositioning, rebordering : Intersections of the biopolitical and geopolitical in the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime (and why it matters for migration research)

Benson, Michaela and Sigona, Nando (2024) Reimagining, repositioning, rebordering : Intersections of the biopolitical and geopolitical in the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime (and why it matters for migration research). International Migration Review, 58 (4). pp. 2040-2065. ISSN 0197-9183

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Abstract

This article examines the emergence of a new immigration regime in the United Kingdom, following its exit from the European Union, to uncover the entanglements and intersections of biopolitics, geopolitics and ideology in migration and migration governance. It draws a clear line between Brexit as a political and geopolitical rupture, the ideological project of ‘Global Britain’ that sustained it, and the forms of migrant and citizen subjectivity that these paired projects produced as the body politic was re-modelled in this image. It demonstrates this through a critical analysis of recent immigration data and trends that consider who is coming to the UK, through what routes and under what conditions, and of recently introduced changes to the immigration system, including the curtailment of asylum and emergence of new humanitarian routes. Building on scholarship that has shown the impact of migration on the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, our analysis of migration and migration governance after Brexit offers unique insights into how migration continues to play a central role in the ideological reimagining and geopolitical repositioning of the UK on the global stage and develops the concept of rebordering to capture the nexus between ideological and geopolitical transformations and the making – through migration and migration governance – of a new body politic and its ‘others’ that embody and can serve their purposes.