The Power of the Gaze: Suspicion, Race and Migration Policing

This chapter delves deeper into the ubiquity of race in migration policing, its camouflage, and disavowal, and its legitimation and power for making sense of a complex and fluid social geography. It explores how racial knowledge and taxonomies are deployed and redefined through migration policing. As the ‘fine-grained cognitive maps’ with which the police operate are rendered insufficient and inefficient, immigration enforcement has been increasingly brought on board. Immigration enforcement works with and through race as a sorting technique in insidious, oblique, and paradoxical ways, giving meaning to and redefining the contours of police suspicion. Its presence is ubiquitous and legally sanctioned, yet selective, continuously disavowed, and often left unarticulated and nebulous. In immigration enforcement, the chapter argues, race makes state power operate in particularly mysterious, hazy, and magic-like ways, hinging on some bodies and not others, building on irretrievable vocabulary, associations, visual registers, smells and other sensory clues, and lingering colonial imageries and knowledge. In this context, racial sorting and profiling is not a deviation or aberration, but a constitutive part without which its exercise is futile. As a racial technology, immigration control practices illustrate the power and resilience of race, as well as its fragility. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, race is a shaky and fragile basis for policing which lays bare its contradictions, paradoxes, and limits.