Thomas Nail
the figure of the migrant
THE FIGUR E OF THE MIGR ANT
Thomas Nail
s u p
s, c
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All
rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nail, Thomas, author.
The figure of the migrant / Thomas Nail.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-8717-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8047-9658-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Marginality, Social—Political aspects. 2. Political science—Philosophy.
I. Title.
HM1136.N35 2015
320.01—dc23
2015007378
ISBN 978-0-8047-9668-2 (electronic)
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
part i
1
political theory of the migr ant
The Figure of the Migrant
part ii
11
expansion by expulsion
2
Kinopolitics
21
3
Centripetal Force
39
4
Centrifugal Force
48
5
Tensional Force
59
6
Elastic Force I
81
7
Elastic Force II
100
part iii
figures of the migr ant
8
Pedetic Force
125
9
The Nomad
130
10
The Barbarian
135
11
The Vagabond
145
12
The Proletariat
156
Contents
part iv
contempor ary migr ation: mexico–united states
13
Centripetal Force and Land Grabbing
179
14
Centrifugal Force and Federal Enforcement
189
15
Tensional Force and Illegal People
201
16
Elastic Force and Neoliberalism
214
17
Pedetic Force and Migrant Power
223
Conclusion
235
Notes
239
Index
283
Introduction
The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant. At the
turn of the century, there were more regional and international migrants
than ever before in recorded history.1 Today, there are over 1 billion
migrants.2 Each decade, the percentage of migrants as a share of the total
population continues to rise, and in the next twenty-five years, the rate of
migration is predicted to be higher than during the last twenty-five years.3
It has become more necessary for people to migrate because of environmental, economic, and political instability. Climate change, in particular,
may cause international migration to double over the next forty years.4
The percentage of total migrants who are non-status or undocumented
is increasing, which poses a serious challenge to democracy and political
representation.5
In other ways, we are all becoming migrants.6 People today relocate
to greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history.
While many people may not move across a regional or international border, they tend to change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to
work,7 change their residence repeatedly, and tour internationally more
often.8 Some of these phenomena are directly related to recent events,
such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries
after the financial crisis of 2008, subsequent austerity cuts to social welfare
programs, and rising unemployment. The subprime mortgage crisis led to
the expulsion of millions of people from their homes worldwide (9 million in the United States alone). Foreign investors and governments have
Introduction
acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions
of small farmers in poor countries, and mining practices have become
increasingly destructive around the world—including hydraulic fracturing and tar sands. This general increase in human mobility and expulsion
is now widely recognized as a defining feature of the twenty-first century.9
“A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.”10
However, not all migrants are alike in their movement.11 For some,
movement offers opportunity, recreation, and profit with only a temporary expulsion. For others, movement is dangerous and constrained, and
their social expulsions are much more severe and permanent. Today, most
people fall somewhere on this migratory spectrum between the two poles
of “inconvenience” and “incapacitation.” But what all migrants on this
spectrum share, at some point, is the experience that their movement results
in a certain degree of expulsion from their territorial, political, juridical, or
economic status. Even if the end result of migration is a relative increase
in money, power, or enjoyment, the process of migration itself almost always
involves an insecurity of some kind and duration: the removal of territorial ownership or access, the loss of the political right to vote or to receive
social welfare, the loss of legal status to work or drive, or the financial loss
associated with transportation or change in residence.
The gains of migration are always a risk, while the process itself is
always some kind of loss. This is precisely the sense in which Zygmunt Bauman writes that “tourism and vagrancy are two faces of the same coin” of
global migration. Both the “tourist” (the traveling academic, business professional, or vacationer) and the “vagabond,” (migrant worker or refugee), as
Bauman calls them, are “bound to move” by the same social conditions but
result in different kinds and degrees of expulsion from the social order. Businesspeople are compelled to travel around the world in the “global chase
of profit,” “consumers must never be allowed to rest” in the chase of new
commodities and desires, and the global poor must move from job to job
wherever capital calls. For the tourist this social “compulsion, [this] ‘must,’
[this] internalized pressure, [this] impossibility of living one’s life in any
other way,” according to Bauman, “reveals itself . . . in the disguise of a free
exercise of will.”12 The vagabond sees it more clearly. The social compulsion
to move produces certain expulsions for all migrants. Some migrants may
decide to move, but they do not get to decide the social conditions of their
Introduction
movement or the degree to which they may be expelled from certain social
orders as a consequence. Migration in this sense is neither entirely free nor
forced—the two are part of the same regime of social motion. The concept of
expulsion simply means the degree to which a migrant is deprived or dispossessed of a certain status in this regime.
The tourist and vagabond are always crossing over into one another,
as Bauman writes. “None of the insurance policies of the tourists’ life-style
protects against slipping into vagabondage . . . . [M]ost jobs are temporary, shares may go down as well as up, skills, the assets one is proud of
and cherishes now become obsolete in no time.”13 Migration is the spectrum between these two poles, and the figure of the migrant is the one
who moves on this spectrum. In this way, migratory figures function as
mobile social positions and not fixed identities. One is not born a migrant
but becomes one. This book is a philosophical history of the political
subject we have become today: the migrant. However, there are two central
problems to overcome in order to develop such a theory.
Two Problems
The first problem is that the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis and perceived as a secondary or derivative figure with respect to place-bound social membership. Place-bound
membership in a society is assumed as primary; secondary is the movement back and forth between social points. The “emigrant” is the name
given to the migrant as the former member or citizen, and the “immigrant” as the would-be member or citizen. In both cases, a static place and
membership are theorized first, and the migrant is the one who lacks both.
Thus, more than any other political figure (citizen, foreigner, sovereign,
etc.), the migrant is the one least defined by its being and place and more
by its becoming and displacement: by its movement.
[some revision]If we want to develop a political theory of the migrant
itself and not the migrant as a failed citizen, we need to reinterpret the
migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement. Thus, this book develops a theoretical framework that begins with
movement instead of stasis.14 However, beginning from the theoretical primacy of movement does not mean that one should uncritically celebrate it.
Introduction
Movement is not always good, nor is movement always the same. Movement is always distributed in different concrete social formations or types
of circulation.15 It is not a metaphor. Thus, this book is neither a valorization of movement, or an ontology of movement in general. It is a kinetic
and philosophical history of the subject of our time: the migrant. It seeks
to understand the material, social, and historical conditions under which
something like the migrant has come to exist for us today. It is a philosophical history of the present.
In this way, it is not only a theory of the migrant but also a theory
of the social motions by which migration takes place. Society is always in
motion. From border security and city traffic controls to personal technologies and work schedules, human movement is socially directed. Societies are not static places with fixed characteristics and persons.16 Societies
are dynamic processes engaged in continuously directing and circulating
social life. In a movement-oriented philosophy there is no social stasis,
only regimes of social circulation. Thus, if we want to understand the
figure of the migrant, whose defining social feature is its movement, we
must also understand society itself according to movement. This, therefore,
is the guiding interpretive framework of this book.17
The second problem is that the migrant has been predominantly
understood from the perspective of states.18 Since the state has all too often
written history, the migrant has been understood as a figure without its own
history and social force. “In world history,” as Hegel says, “we are concerned
only with those peoples that have formed states [because] all the value that
human beings possess, all of their spiritual reality, they have through the
State alone.”19 This is not to say that migrants are always stateless but that
the history of migrant social organizations has tended to be subsumed or
eradicated by state histories. Often, the most dispossessed migrants have
created some of the most interesting non-state social organizations.
In response to this problem, this book offers a counter-history of several important migrant social organizations that have been marginalized by
states. The migrant is not only a figure whose movement results in a certain
degree of social expulsion. The migrant also has its own type of movement
that is quite different from the types that define its expulsion. Accordingly,
migrants have created very different forms of social organization that can
clearly be seen in the “minor history” of the raids, revolts, rebellions, and
Introduction
resistances of some of the most socially marginalized migrants. This is a
challenging history to write because many of these social organizations
produced no written documents, or if they did, they were systematically
destroyed by those in power. It is not a natural fact that the history of
migrants has become ahistorical, as Hegel argues—it is the violence of states
that has rendered the migrant ahistorical. This book does not try to render a
complete account of this (a)history but rather to provide a social kinetic interpretation of several important migrant social formations in Western history
that have been buried by the history of states and citizens.
The Consequences
There are three important consequences of developing a political
theory of the migrant in this way. First, it allows us to conceptualize the
emergence of the historical conditions that gave rise to the types of social
expulsion that define the migrant. The major forms of kinetic social expulsion that define the twenty-first century did not emerge out of nowhere.
They emerged historically. At different points in history, migratory movement was the result of different types and degrees of social expulsion:
territorial, political, juridical, and economic. New forms of social organization rose to dominance through history. As states triumphed over villages, and markets triumphed over feudalism, we begin to see an explosion
in new techniques for expelling migrants from their previous status. Once
these new techniques emerge historically, they tend to persist. Today, we
find the contemporary migrant at the intersection of all four major forms
of historical social expulsion. However, this book is not a universal history
of the migrant that shows the vast intertwining of all the previous forms
of social expulsion at every historical point and to every degree for every
social figure.20 This is too large a task. It is also not able to be sensitive to
all of the changes that certain key terms like “territory” have undergone
over thousands of years of history.21
The aim of this book is more modest: to provide an analysis of four
major techniques for expelling migrants during their period of historical dominance and to provide a conceptual, movement-based definition
of the migratory figures associated with these expulsions.22 The present
study does not provide a history of the relative deprivations of tourists,
Introduction
diplomats, business travelers, explorers, and state functionaries, although
such a history would also be interesting. Instead, it focuses on the more
marginalized figures of historical migration (nomads, barbarians, vagabonds, and the proletariat) for three reasons. First, because it is primarily
their history that has been decimated and is in the most need of recovery
and reinterpretation. Second, because it is in their history that the emergence of each new form of social expulsion (of which the tourist experiences only the smallest degree) is most sharply visible. Third, and most
important, because it is their history that more closely resembles the situation of most of the people we call migrants today.
The second consequence is that developing a theory of the migrant will
allow us to analyze contemporary migration because the history of migration
is not a linear or progressive history of distinct “ages.” Rather, it is a history
of coexisting and overlapping social forces of expulsion. The same techniques
of territorial, political, juridical, and economic expulsion of the migrants that
have emerged and repeated themselves in history are still at work today. For
example, territorial expulsion, the dispossession of land,23 does not occur only
once against the nomadic peoples in the Neolithic period but gets taken up
again and mobilized in various ways throughout history—up to the present.
The invention of territorial social expulsion created historical nomadic peoples,
but it also invented a social type of migrant subjectivity characterized by territorial expulsion that also continues to define other territorially displaced
peoples. This is the sense in which migrants may be “nomadic” without being
exactly the same as historical nomads.
As an example, in the ancient world, migrants were expelled from
their territories by war and kidnapping; in the medieval world, they were
expelled by enclosure and the removal of customary laws that bound them
to the land; and in the modern world, they have been expelled by the capitalist accumulation of private property. Although each dispossession of land
is historically unique, each shares a common social kinetic function. Contemporary migration is part of this legacy.24 Today, migrant farmworkers
are expelled by industrial agriculture; indigenous peoples are expelled from
their native lands by war and forced into the mountains, forests, or “waste
lands”; and island peoples are expelled from their territory by the rising
tides of climate change. There is a certain truth in the fact that the popular press often refers to all these people as “nomads,” even though they are
Introduction
not literally the same as early historical nomads. However, what all these
migrants share is a specific social kinetic form of territorial expulsion that
first rose to prominence in early historical nomadism.25
The analysis of contemporary migration presented here is not one of
total causal explanation: of push-pull factors, psychological volunteerism,
neoclassical or structural economism, and so on. Instead, it offers a unique
kinetic analysis. The aim of this book is not to explain the causes of all
migration but to offer better descriptions of the conditions, forces, and
trajectories of its historical emergence and contemporary hybridity.
The third consequence of developing a theory of the migrant is that
it allows us to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative
to social expulsion. The figure of the migrant is not merely an effect of
different regimes of social expulsion. It also has its own forms of social
motion in riots, revolts, rebellions, and resistances. Just as the analysis of
the historical techniques for the expulsion of the migrant can be used to
understand contemporary migration, so too can the historical techniques
of migrant social organizations be used to diagnose the capacity of contemporary migrants to pose an alternative to the present social logic of
expulsion that continues to dominate our world.
Today, the figure of the migrant exposes an important truth: Social
expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants.
The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant not only because
of the record number of migrants today but also because this is the century
in which all the previous forms of social expulsion and migratory resistance
have reemerged and become more active than ever before. This contemporary situation allows us to render apparent what had previously been
obscured: that the figure of the migrant has always been the true motive
force of social history. Only now are we in a position to recognize this.
The argument of this book is developed in four parts. Part 1 defines
and lays out the logical structure of social motion. Part 2 argues that the
migrant is defined not only by movement in general but by several specific historical conditions and techniques of social expulsion. Part 3 shows
how several major migrant figures propose an alternative to this logic,
and Part 4 shows how the concepts developed in Parts 2 and 3 help us to
better understand the complex dynamics of contemporary migration in
US-Mexico politics.
Conclusion
The migrant is the political figure of our time. Most people today
increasingly fall somewhere, and at some point, on the spectrum of migration, from global tourist to undocumented labor. As a result, they experience (among other things) a certain degree of deprivation or expulsion
from their social status. In this sense, the figure of the migrant is not a
“type of person” or fixed identity but a mobile social position or spectrum
that people move into and out of under certain social conditions of mobility. The figure of the migrant is a political concept that defines the conditions and agencies by which various figures are socially expelled as a result
of, or as the cause of, their mobility.
Rather than view human migration as the exception to the rule of
political fixity and citizenship, this book reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant.
This book begins not from normative or philosophical principles but from
the social and historical conditions that define the subjective figures we
have become: migrants. From this new starting point, it reinterprets political theory as a politics of movement: a kinopolitics.
This new starting point of political philosophy allows us to overcome two important problems set out at the beginning of this book.
First, the figure of the migrant has been almost exclusively considered
from the perspective of social stasis—and thus as derivative. However,
Chapters 1 and 2 provide a new conceptual framework that privileges the
primacy of the movement and flow that define the migrant. Stasis is then
Conclusion
reinterpreted as a secondary “junction” of motion. The consequence of
beginning from this movement-oriented philosophy of flows is that we are
able to reinterpret several of the major historical conditions that produced
migration according to their different regimes of social motion. We thus
discover, in Part 2, that one of the conditions of expanding social motion
is the expulsion of the migrant from various territorial, political, juridical,
and economic orders.
The second problem we have overcome is that the migrant has been
previously considered primarily from the perspective of the history of
the state—and thus as ahistorical. But Part 3 develops a kinetic history
of several major social formations created and autonomously organized
by migrants against the dominant forms of social expulsion. The consequence of this conceptual history is that it gives us a concrete sense of what
alternatives have been and can be created to oppose the dominant forms
of kinopolitical expulsion.
The final payoff, and consequence, of the conceptual (Part 1), historical (Part 2), and counterpower (Part 3) analyses of migration and social
motion is that they provide us with the tools to analyze contemporary
migration in a new way: from the perspective of the primacy of migration
and motion (Part 4). This is possible because the migrant is not only a historical figure but also a contemporary one, produced under certain social
conditions that have persisted throughout history in different ways, to
varying degrees, and in different combinations. Contemporary migration
is a hybrid mix of all of them.
Analyzing contemporary migration according to the primacy of
movement thus makes three important contributions. First, it allows us
to see that contemporary migration is not a secondary phenomenon that
simply occurs between states. Rather, migration is the primary condition by which something like societies and states is established in the first
place. Migration is an essential part of how societies move. In particular,
the expulsion of the migrant is a condition for social expansion and reproduction: it is constitutive. Second, it allows us to see that contemporary
migration is poorly understood according to a single axis of social expulsion. Rather, the social conditions of migration are always a mixture of territorial, political, juridical, and economic types of expulsion. All four are
operative at the same time to different degrees. Thus, migrants are always
Conclusion
a mixture of different subjective tendencies toward nomadism, barbarism,
vagabondage, and proletarian migrancy. Finally, this movement-oriented
analysis allows us to see that there are alternatives to the contemporary
conditions of migration being developed by migrants today.
However, there is still much work to be done in three major areas.
The first area is historical. This book has limited its historical scope for
the sake of clarity and brevity to analyzing only four major types of kinopower (centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic) during their general period of social dominance. Once these types of kinopower emerge
historically, they tend to persist and mix with one another, creating
various hybrid combinations. For example, the technology of enclosure
creates a territorial expulsion from the land, a political expulsion of the
peasants from the decision-making process, a juridical expulsion from the
customary law, and an economic expulsion from employment. Expulsion
is always multiple. It is always a question of type and degree. Thus, what
remains to be done in the future is to analyze the kinopolitical technologies presented here (and elsewhere) according to their full historical and
kinetic mixture or hybridization—which this book has presented only in
their relative isolation.
The second area is contemporary. This book has used its conceptual
and historical framework to analyze only one major area of contemporary
migration: Mexico-US migration. Many other major and interesting areas
of contemporary migration remain to be analyzed within this framework,
such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, the recent home foreclosure process happening around the world, the recent land grabs and
expulsions in Cambodia, and the sans-papiers (without papers) struggle
in France. So many migrant social expulsions are happening today that
much remains to be done to reinterpret them according to the primacy
of motion and the figures of the migrant that can pose an alternative to
them.
The third area is subjective. In addition to limiting its historical and
contemporary scope, this book has limited its subjective scope to focus
solely on four major migrant subjects because it is their histories that were
in most need of recovery, showed the sharpest visibility of social expulsion, and remain more relevant for most migrants today. But in doing so,
it has left out the rich history and contemporary analysis of many other
Conclusion
migratory figures much less intensely or dramatically expelled from their
social status. Thus, future work also remains to be done to show how
such figures as tourists, commuters, diplomats, business travelers, explorers, messengers, and state functionaries are affected by certain degrees
of social expulsion with respect to their movement. These figures of the
migrant also produce their own dominant and hybrid types (historically
and recently) according to the four kinopolitical conditions. Work in
this area is already under way in various ways in the journal Mobilities—
although it is not clear that such work always adopts a movement-oriented
philosophy in the way that this book has.
There is much more to be done in the kinopolitical analysis of migration. The aim of this book has been to prepare the way for further analysis by creating a general conceptual and historical framework proper to
the migrant (based on social motion) that can be used to perform further
historical and contemporary analysis of migration elsewhere. No doubt
the coming century of the migrant will require many new hybrid analyses.
Notes
1. In total number (1 billion: one in seven) and as percentage of total population (about 14 percent) according to the International Organization on
Migration, “The Future of Migration: Building Capacities for Change,” World
Migration Report 2010, presentation at Migration Policy Institute, Washington,
DC, http://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/Newsrelease/docs/WM2010_
FINAL_23_11_2010.pdf.; and The World Health Organization, “Migrant
Health,” 2015, http://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/health_of_migrants/en/.
2. As of 2010, there were 215 million international migrants and 740 million internal migrants according to the United Nations Human Development
Report, Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, 2009, http://
oppenheimer.mcgill.ca/IMG/pdf/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.pdf, 21.
3. Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision (United
Nations database, POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2008), http://esa.un.org/migration;
and The US National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2030: Alternative
Worlds,” December 2012, http://globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/
global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf, 24. On the theoretical implications of
this phenomenon for liberalism, see Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000).
4. Future forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants
by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders on a permanent
or temporary basis, with 200 million the most widely cited estimate. This figure
equals the current estimate of international migrants worldwide. See International Organization for Migration, “Migration, Climate Change and the Environment,” accessed April 9, 2015, http://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/
what-we-do/migration-and-climate-change/a-complex-nexus.html.
5. International Council on Human Rights Policy, “Irregular Migration,
Migrant Smuggling and Human Rights: Towards Coherence,” 2010, http://
www.ichrp.org/files/summaries/41/122_pb_en.pdf, estimates that the approximate number of global irregular migrants has grown to 30–40 million persons.
Notes
6. With the rise of home foreclosure and unemployment people today are
beginning to have much more in common with migrants than with certain
notions of citizenship (grounded in certain social, legal, and political rights). “All
people may now be wanderers”: Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human
Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 87. “Migration must
be understood in a broad sense”: Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2000), 2.
7. World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2005: Section 3 Environment, Table 3.11, http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=141.
8. International annual tourist arrivals exceeded 1 billion globally for the first
time in history in 2012. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), “World Tourism Barometer,” vol. 11, 2013, http://dtxtq4w60xqpw.cloudfront.net/sites/all/files/
pdf/unwto_barom13_01_jan_excerpt_0.pdf.
9. I use the word “expulsion” here in the same sense in which Saskia Sassen uses it to indicate a general dispossession or deprivation of social status. See
Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–2. Many scholars have noted
a similar trend. For an excellent review of the “mobilities” literature on migration, see Alison Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora,” Progress in Human Geography 31 (2007): 684–94.
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 213.
11. Bauman, Globalization.
12. Ibid., 96, 85, 78, 83, 84.
13. Ibid., 97.
14. For an excellent introduction to the tradition of thinkers who have granted
theoretical primacy to movement and flow, see Peter Merriman, Mobility, Space,
and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012). See also Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Henri Bergson, Matter and
Memory, trans. Nancy Paul and William S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books,
1988); Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press,
2000); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2008); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in
the Modern Western World (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2012).
15. See Merriman, Mobility, Space, and Culture, 1–20, for a review of the criticisms against the philosophy of movement.
Notes
16. John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000).
17. In this sense, this book can also be placed in the context of what is
now being called the “new mobilities paradigm” or “mobility turn” in the
social sciences. See Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–22; Cresswell, On the Move; Vincent Kaufmann, Re-thinking Mobility: Contemporary
Sociology (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2002); John Urry, Mobilities
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007); Tanu Uteng and Tim Cresswell, Gendered
Mobilities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Jørgen Bærenholdt and Kirsten
Simonsen, Space Odysseys: Spatiality and Social Relations in the 21st Century
(Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004); Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London: Sage, 1996).
18. This argument, and the idea of a “sedentarist metaphysics,” is well supported by Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural
Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 24–44; and Cresswell, On the Move.
19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History,
trans. Leo Rauch (New York: Hackett, 1988), 41–42.
20. This is not a strictly empirical study. For an empirical world history of
migration, see Patrick Manning and Tiffany Trimmer, Migration in World History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).
21. For an example of this sort of historical work on the concept of territory,
see Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013).
22. Stephen Castles has also argued that the figure of the migrant needs to be
defined in relation to its other overlapping historical figures, such as indentured
laborer, refugee, and exile. See Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise
of Nationalism in Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1992).
23. Here I am using the word “territory” simply to mean “delimited land” (following the OED) and not in a strictly historical way since, as Stuart Elden argues
in The Birth of Territory, 322–30, the usage of the word “territory” varies significantly throughout history and cannot be used in a univocal way.
24. According to Tim Cresswell, “We cannot understand new mobilities,
without understanding old mobilities.” “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D, Society & Space, 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31.
25. To be clear, I am not arguing that contemporary migrants are exactly the
same as the first historical nomads. For a good example of a philosophical concept
of “nomadism” derived from history, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351–423.