Book review: David Moffette, Governing Irregular Migration: Bordering Culture, Labour, and Security in Spain

AuthorIoana Vrăbiescu
Published date01 February 2020
Date01 February 2020
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619878891
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-18h5vgJjoX50n4/input Book reviews
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scholars in search of different ways of thinking about how coercive power is manifested
between the metropole and its peripheries.
References
Andreas P and Nadelmann E (2006) Policing the Globe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowling B and Sheptycki B (2012) Global Policing. London: SAGE.
David Moffette, Governing Irregular Migration: Bordering Culture, Labour, and Security in Spain, UBC
Press: Vancouver, 2018; 236 pp.: 9780774836135, $32.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Ioana Vrăbiescu, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
A few scholars have written on the securitization and criminalization of migration and
deportation regimes. Moffette’s book contributes to this literature by developing a theory
of the ‘regime for governing migration through probation’ (p. 21). Focusing on Spain, it
highlights the local nuances of how migrants are kept in legal liminality, a space of
simultaneous promise of inclusion and threat of exclusion (p. 156). It does this through
a thoughtful analysis of decades of policies and parliamentary debates on ‘irregular’
migration, by exploring practices of ‘labour inspection raids’ and analysing Spanish his-
tory of ‘cultural diversity’, supplemented by interviews with state agents who stop and
search migrants in Madrid and Ceuta. Built on the vast literature of migration studies and
on the Spanish legal and political system, Moffette’s book brings together ‘culturaliza-
tion’, ‘labourization’ and ‘securitization’, explaining how these constitute the multi-sca-
lar migration governance of the Spanish state. This type of governance, he argues,
reinforces the conception of irregular migration as a social problem and an object of
knowledge production in Spain.
This compelling book investigates and explains a ‘regime for governing migration
through probation’ (p. 3) in a state-system of increasing rejection and refusal to recog-
nize, accept and integrate immigrants in Spain. Moffette’s book uncovers a restrictive
and...

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