Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Deportation and the State
- 1 A Theory of Socially Coercive State Capacity
- 2 The Legislative Politics of Migration Control
- 3 Deportation and the Executive Politics of Implementation
- 4 Deportation and the Street-Level Politics of Implementation
- 5 Conclusion
- Appendices
- References
- Index
Introduction: Deportation and the State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Deportation and the State
- 1 A Theory of Socially Coercive State Capacity
- 2 The Legislative Politics of Migration Control
- 3 Deportation and the Executive Politics of Implementation
- 4 Deportation and the Street-Level Politics of Implementation
- 5 Conclusion
- Appendices
- References
- Index
Summary
The connection between the state and its population has been particularly complex, if for no other reason … than the modern state in its rules and laws has demanded so much from people. … Of course, coercion and the threat of coercion, by most definitions, lie at the center of the meaning of the state and its demands for compliance by its population. … But it is simply impossible for a state to achieve tractability by relying exclusively on its judges and jailers. No matter how vaunted the bureaucracy … state leaders could easily find their institutions quickly overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of enforcement, even with vast bureaucracies.
(Migdal, 2001, p. 251)The final decades of the twentieth century have been marked by the progressive expansion of the socially coercive state in the advanced industrialized world. Beginning in the 1980s and extending into the new millennium, liberal democracies faced public demands for hard-edged social regulation in areas such as migration control, criminal justice, and homeland security. In response, elected legislatures enacted far-reaching measures of social control across a range of policy fields and funded the rapid growth of coercive bureaucracies.
To illustrate this point, from 1991 to 2001 the budgets of both the German Federal Border Police and the Canadian immigration service more than doubled, whereas the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's budget nearly quadrupled. Even more dramatically, immigration spending in Britain in the same period underwent a more than sixfold increase. Significantly, these law enforcement initiatives have not been limited to the regulation of migration. In the area of drug control, the budget of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration more than tripled between 1985 and 2002. In the field of criminal justice more generally, U.S. government spending on the federal prison system more than quadrupled between 1985 and 2002. Similarly, in Canada, the corrections and rehabilitation services budget doubled from 1989 to 2002.
In North America, governments simultaneously enacted sweeping administrative reforms.
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- Information
- States Against MigrantsDeportation in Germany and the United States, pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009