The Complex Sources of Immigration Control

All governments enforce immigration laws, but we have a limited understanding of the factors that determine how much they do so. Immigration policymakers can empower or compel officials and non-state actors to enforce immigration laws. This study suggests that non-immigration policymakers may play an equally important role — albeit in complex ways. Policies designed to control human mobility in other ways (transportation, crime control, segregation, etc.) can determine the amount of resources a given country devotes to immigration enforcement and the effectiveness of enforcement efforts. When officials ban old — or invent new — forms of movement control, they can determine how much resources are available to enforce immigration laws, whether these resources are used for immigration enforcement, and how effective they are. The study demonstrates this potential power of non-immigration policy through an in-depth analysis of South Africa’s unexpected capacity to control migration. South Africa is one of the world’s most prolific deporters of foreign nationals but not a very strong state. The study shows how decisions to ban segregation and invent new policing methods impacted the South African state’s capacity to deport foreign nationals. Using these findings, the article calls for more detailed research into the complex relationships between immigration enforcement and other movement control policies and for greater attention to heretofore neglected cases in the developing world.