Postmodern Identity and the Structure of Immigration Control

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Politics in Britain has seemed to be on the edge of some dramatic, unforeseen and fundamental changes for quite some time now. It has seen over a decade and a half of unbroken Conservative rule, the coming of New Labour, and the increasingly desperate rearguard maintenance of a lot of cherished national fictions at a time when all kinds of dramatic changes and political earthquakes have been happening in the rest of Europe and further afield. All of these factors seem finally to be breaking into and breaking up some of Britain’s most determined peculiarities: the Union, the monarchy, the idiosyncratic institutions of liberal democracy, law and constitution. That is, they appear to be, at least: the durability of these idiosyncrasies is surely one of the eternal political ‘mysteries’ of the ‘Great’ British way. In its own way, the dominant doctrine of immigration control, race relations and multiculturalism is a paradigmatic example of a classic British political method. It too would seem highly susceptible to the changes just around the corner. In this new set of circumstances in the late 1990s, it must be asked: is the compromise and trade-off of this particular institutional solution also reaching the end of its rails?

The combination of such factors in the policies adopted by many other countries towards the question of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was compounded by yet another which tended to reinforce certain basic inhibitions when it came to the question of liberalising immigration laws. The manner in which the German-Jewish refugee question worked out during the year of peace between 1933 and 1939 depended, then, on the interaction of three main conditions: the nature and fundamental bases of Nazi Germany’s society; the inclination and ability of Germany’s Jews to leave their homeland; and the relationship between the legal and administrative structure of the immigration controls of other countries on the one hand and domestic and international politics. The outbreak of European war in September 1939 changed everything for everybody. At a single stroke it meant that any semblance of a ‘normal’ refugee question, for Gentiles as well as for the Jews, was a thing of the past.

As national borders are being transformed into technologized zones of securitization and national power, the surveillance of particular individuals and groups has become routine. Aided by a public culture of suspicion and belief in the neutrality of technology, national borders work to ferret out the digital tracks of those predetermined to be of risk or threat. Fortifying discriminatory structures of immigration control, the reworked digital frontier filters gendered bodies of risk and drafts their visual records for scrutiny. Engaging with the objections raised by Muslim American women wearing head cover to the unwarranted search of mobile phones at the border, this article addresses the entangled connections between nationalism, digital archives and transparency. The objections which center around the veil and data visibility serve as an embodied point of departure to rethink and render visible assumptions regarding national belonging in terms of the new itinerancy of data and marked bodies.