‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as protection in the regime of immigration controls

Nandita Sharma

doi:10.14197/atr.20121793

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss two 1835 ordinances passed by the local council of the British colony of Mauritius. Passed shortly after Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, these restrictions initiated the regulation and restriction of immigration within the British Empire. Seen as quite novel in their day, these ordinances employed the rhetoric of ‘protecting emigrants’ to legitimise the new constraints they imposed on free human mobility. Today, when the national ‘logic of constraint’ on human mobility is almost uncontested, the idea that immigration controls protect migrants remains central to the discursive practices concerning human trafficking. Nation-state constraints on human mobility are normalised while the exploitation and abuse of people on the move is ideologically redirected to ‘modern-day slavers’ or ‘evil traffickers’, thus absolving both the state and globally operative capital of their culpability.

Highlights

To better understand and historically situate efforts to end ‘human trafficking’ or ‘modern-day slavery’, I examine the period in which regulations and restrictions on free human mobility into state territories—immigration controls—were first enacted
Immigration controls are intimately connected to the replacement of the slave trade with the pejoratively termed ‘coolie’ labour trade in indentured, contract labour, mostly from British-colonised Asia.[1]
The imposition of immigration restrictions on ‘coolie’ labourers emerged as a key part of the British imperial state’s response to the threats to both its power and imperial trade posed by the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slave labour relations in 1833

Summary

Introduction

To better understand and historically situate efforts to end ‘human trafficking’ or ‘modern-day slavery’, I examine the period in which regulations and restrictions on free human mobility into state territories—immigration controls—were first enacted. Immigration controls are intimately connected to the replacement of the slave trade with the pejoratively termed ‘coolie’ labour trade in indentured, contract labour, mostly from British-colonised Asia.[1] The ‘coolie’ labour system rested on a legal requirement for workers to labour for a contracted period of time (usually five years but sometimes shorter or longer) During this period, they were tied to the contracting employer and were not free to change either their employer or place of work.[2] The ‘coolie’ system of labour recruitment acted as a bridge between what Radhika Mongia terms the imperial-state ‘logic of facilitation’ of human movement and the national-state ‘logic of constraint’.3. The imposition of immigration restrictions on ‘coolie’ labourers emerged as a key part of the British imperial state’s response to the threats to both its power and imperial trade posed by the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slave labour relations in 1833

Imperial Logic on Human Mobility

The Abolition of Slavery and the Start of Coolieism

The Logics of Constraining Free Mobility

Conclusion