Guest Editor Introduction: Contesting and Undoing Discriminatory Borders

Abstract

People migrate for a range of reasons: to work, to join family members, to study, or to seek international protection. While goods, services and capital can move relatively freely between countries, the same cannot be said for the movement of people. A ‘global mobility divide’ separates the nationals of comparatively wealthy states in the ‘global north’, who enjoy a wide range of legal migration options, from those of poorer states in the ‘global south’. David Owen characterises this distribution of migration opportunities as a ‘racialized pattern of transnational positional difference’, one in which migration controls maintain income inequality between states. E. Tendayi Achiume’s forensic analysis of race and migration law reveals how such controls also produce, and reproduce, inequalities between people: