Beyond Autonomy and Control: How do State and Gender Matter in the Analysis of Contemporary Migratory Movements?

The high number of undocumented migrants in almost all immigration countries adumbrates the limited success of states to channel migration in primarily legal tracks. Only recently political scientists acknowledged this reality and dealt with undocumented migration, both on national level as well as an issue of intergovernmental and multinational governance. Wayne Cornelius and colleagues were engaged in pathbreaking reseach on the question of migration control. They diagnosed policy gaps, i.e. the failure of migration control policies due to a variety of factors, in almost all immigration countries (Cornelius et al. 2004). The gap hypothesis can be considered as the status quo in scholarship on migration control and the state. A point where authors differ, is more of a moral question: Some advocate for human rights of all migrants, including those without legal status, others prioritize state souvereignity and surveillance of migratory movements, which may end up in combatting undocumented migration.In the paper, I am going to contrast this mainstream political science perspective with another strand of discussion, currently developed in some European countries, i.e. Italy, France, or Germany. There, anti-racist theorists and political scientists also question the nation state’s capability of controling its borders, but they stress the productive power of the migrants themselves. It is assumed that undocumented migrants are counteractors to the state, their unauthorized movements take an existence â€" and legitimacy â€" beyond the state (“autonomy of migration”). The contribution to the panel on “Gender, migration, and the state”, however, argues against simplifications on various levels: While the first strand of scholarship focuses on state policies only, the second one tends to praise a (masculinized?) autonomous subject and opposes ‘migrants’ and ‘the state’. By relating to feminist IR scholarship on global restructuring (e.g. Chang/Ling, Marchand/Sisson Runyan), I am going to argue for a more differentiated concept of ‘migration as wilful practice’ (Eigensinn). This concept takes into account the social embeddednes and the agency of migrating subjects. The limits, both of a state centred perspective as well as of a migration centered perspective, lie in the missing link of a gendered subject. These gendered subjects are neither autonomous nor bound to state regulations or patriarchal family ties. Hence, the paper aims at contributing to an engendered and critically reformulated political science and IR scholarship on migration control. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]