‘In Our Crowded Little Island’: Policing Cartographies, Order, Place, and Belonging

This final chapter explores the relationship between place, belonging, and order in migration policing. It foregrounds the question of ‘place’ as a category of analysis to understand how immigration and police officers relate to and make sense of their quotidian work and the different publics they interact with. Foregrounding space in policing sheds light on its importance for visualizing, sensing, and constructing order. This spatial and atmospheric dimension of policing forms part of officers’ cognitive maps through which they attach meaning to and make sense of their patches, and the world beyond them. As these officers deal on an everyday basis with people hailing from far away, what are their perceptions of the world outside their patches and how do these ideas and experiences impact on their work? Directing our attention to the geographies of migration policing, its spatial dimensions illuminate how officers apprehend and construct ‘the here and now’ of the local and vernacular in relation to the ‘outside’ and the past. While the intensification of global movements and interconnections—and the attendant economic, social, and political transformations it entailed–has been said to de-border the state and erode a sense of place, their testimonies point to a recasting of it (of the immediate communities and the nation) in a globalizing context. In such context, these sensibilities which articulate experiences of change have become more acute as these officers convey their sense that the world has been turned upside down.