This article brings attention to the junction where neoliberal economic policies and immigrant deterrence policies meet, producing infrastructure that has led to the tragic phenomenon of migrant deaths inside of shipping containers at the U.S. – Mexico border. The late 1980s saw five shipping container incidents in one week, highlighting the deadly consequences of increasingly restrictive border enforcement and irresponsible smuggling operations. Such tragedies demand a deeper exploration into why the United States, the richest country in the world, also maintains the deadliest land border in the world with Mexico. This article emphasizes the inherent tension between the neoliberal goal of expanding trade and the exclusionary goal of restricting routes for unauthorized immigration via a growing deterrence apparatus. These interdependent systems have shaped the border’s deadly infrastructure. By exploring their infrastructural contradictions, the article underscores how economic policies and anti-immigrant laws manifest in physical forms that endanger the lives of humans, calling for a reevaluation of the logics on which these systems are constructed to prevent future tragedies.

Abstract How does the contestation of territorial control by organized crime shape risks for migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border? Drawing on survey data from nearly 5,000 undocumented migrants (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte [EMIF Norte]), official homicide data from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension statistics, this paper combines panel data analysis, negative binomial models, and hierarchical clustering to examine how different forms of criminal territorial control influence migrant risk. I find, first, that contested criminal control, where multiple groups compete for dominance, is associated with significantly higher homicide rates. Second, migrants crossing through these contested territories face higher cumulative exposure to hazards, even after accounting for demographic vulnerabilities and border enforcement. Third, risk is unevenly distributed across the border: migrants crossing through eastern sectors, marked by fragmented and volatile criminal governance, experience higher dangers than those crossing western corridors where criminal authority, while not monolithic, tends to be more consolidated or negotiated. These findings extend sociological theories of non-state governance by showing that criminal organizations can sometimes reduce acute violence when they achieve relative coordination or stability, but that competition and fragmentation undermine this order and amplify migrant vulnerability.

OP 15: Exclusion and Discrimmination 1, B308 (FCSH), September 3, 2025, 17:00 - 18:00AimWith increased global securitisation of borders, the presence of border enforcement agents in healthcare contexts has been on the rise over the past decades. Yet, healthcare professionals have not commonly been expected to directly participate in border control. In recent years, the Swedish right and far-right government coalition has taken active steps toward legislating physicians’ duty to report to law enforcement and migration authorities when they encounter undocumented patients in practice. As part of the Boundaries Longitudinal Study, this research aims to illuminate physicians’ lived experiences, responses, and reactions to their expected involvement in border enforcement.MethodBased on a multi-sited ethnography, data was generated through constructivist interviews in conventional healthcare and ethnographic fieldwork in humanitarian contexts.ResultsPhysicians broadly refused their expected involvement in border enforcement practices. They perceived their mandate involve medical decision-making, and strongly objected to political involvement in the clinic. Many reported being willing to go to great lengths in their refusal to participate, including accepting losing employment or spending time in prison. While most believed their colleagues shared their objections, several feared that instilling mandatory reporting would lead to increased distrust among professionals in the workplace, and a deterioration of the collegial glue. They also worried that undocumented patients would avoid seeking healthcare altogether. In humanitarian care, prospect of mandatory reporting led to grave concern, shock, and disbelief. Expected impacts on patients was troubling, igniting several forms of questioning and resistance. Physicians also felt their identity was shaken, along with their views on the society they lived in.ConclusionThis research advances knowledge on physicians’ experiences, responses, and reactions to their expected involvement in border control practices, and the extent of their refusal to participate. Broad resistance to enacting migration control policies was observed, particularly when these interfere with medical decision-making and patient rights.

OP 8: Health Services 6, B304 (FCSH), September 3, 2025, 15:45 - 16:45AimThis study sought to examine how physicians navigate medical, ethical, and legal complexities of treating “liminal patients” —people living as undocumented migrants, seeking medical care.MethodsAn abductive constructivist grounded theory approach was applied to in-depth qualitative interviews with 46 physicians practicing in seven public hospitals in Sweden.ResultsThe empirical analysis identifies medicolegal anomie: a state of profound disorientation, estrangement, and paralysis, whereby the law, in the lived experience of the physician, is perceived as coercive, unjust, and incompatible with medical care. Reduced to bureaucratic actors, and overwhelmed by the disorder of things, physicians find themselves unable to reconcile the demands of law with their medical compass. Here, they morph into disoriented guides to the liminal patient. Yet, through the collapse of clinical norms, and a refusal to abandon their patient, legal communitas emerges—fragile, informal networks among like-minded clinicians offering solidarity and support. Legal communitas shapes how physicians navigate these encounters; providing solace in collective resistance. In its absence, disorientation and despair consume the physician, leading them outside of formal structures in the search for medical and ethical congruence.ConclusionThis study introduces medicolegal anomie, a novel empirically-grounded theoretical concept illustrating how, when caring for liminal patients, legal and institutional pressures estrange physicians from their professional ethos and identity, blurring boundaries between legality and illegality. Depicting the nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways in which physicians guide these patients, this work highlights how opportunities to resolve pathways to care emerge through the collective solidarity of legal communitas. Nonetheless, while ways to circumvent structural constraints exist, by deepening physicians’ sense of ambivalence and complicity in systemic exclusion, these professionals’ lived experience of law renders outcomes for liminal patients profoundly unpredictable. Ultimately, individual physicians’ desperate manoeuvres do not dissolve the broader crises engendered where border enforcement expects the engagement of medicine.

Since the mid-1980s, the US Border Patrol has positioned itself both as an enforcement agency and a provider of life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants in distress. Over the past few decades — as the agency ratcheted up border enforcement — the number of migrant deaths along the US–Mexico border simultaneously increased. In response, the Border Patrol launched various humanitarian programs and initiatives, including deploying “rescue beacons” throughout the borderlands. These beacons are small towers that allow migrants to press a button and call for help. While the Border Patrol has championed these beacons as saving lives, there is no systematic evaluation of the relationship between rescue beacons and migrant deaths. This paper aims to better understand the Border Patrol's humanitarian activities and their effects by exploring the relationship between rescue beacons and migrant deaths in Pima County, Arizona from 2001 to 2022. Although the Border Patrol links rescue beacons to saving lives, this quantitative study finds little systematic evidence that the beacons reduce the discovery of recovered migrant remains in their vicinity.

The intersection of gender, irregular legal status, and economic precarity places undocumented women in Leipzig at heightened risk of exclusion from both healthcare and the labor market. German migration policy, increasingly centered on border enforcement and deterrence, continues to neglect the realities of women working in informal care and domestic sectors. This policy orientation reinforces institutional barriers, especially in reproductive and mental healthcare, and marginalizes undocumented women within systems of care and employment. Between March and June 2025, a structured mini-review of academic and grey literature was conducted using the Vienna University Library and key NGO reports. The review analyzed gendered exclusions across Germany’s legal, healthcare, and labor frameworks, with a particular focus on Leipzig. Findings indicate a striking absence of gender-disaggregated municipal data, perpetuating the invisibility of undocumented women. This invisibility is unintentionally reinforced by Section 87 of the Residence Act (AufenthG), which obliges public authorities to report undocumented individuals, thereby deterring women from accessing healthcare or labor rights protections. The review confirms national trends of labor exploitation and healthcare avoidance among undocumented migrants while highlighting the significant data gaps in Leipzig, which undermine effective local governance. Addressing this invisibility requires gender-sensitive data collection, robust legal firewalls decoupling essential services from immigration enforcement, and targeted municipal investment in safe-reporting mechanisms. Taken together, the Leipzig case demonstrates how migration law, though not explicitly intended for this purpose, produces exclusionary effects and underscores the urgent need for rights-based reforms that recognize undocumented women as social and political actors rather than individuals rendered invisible through policy design and implementation.

ABSTRACT This article examines the overlooked role of Railway Workers (RWs) in implementing border control policies. Train drivers and ticket inspectors, normally responsible for passenger safety and ticket compliance, find themselves operating on cross-border routes where French police conduct identity checks and return irregularized migrants to Italy — operations linked to rising deaths at the border. Without clear guidance from their employer beyond the vague instruction to “facilitate police work,” RWs face moral uncertainty and workplace tension. They must reconcile professional ethics of care and fairness with the coercive demands of border enforcement. The article explores how they navigate these dilemmas when encountering migrants attempting to cross the border by train. Drawing on scholarship on Street-Level Bureaucrats and border control, the paper argues that RWs become de facto agents deciding who crosses the border—tasks that exceed their formal responsibilities. Two case studies illustrate this dynamic: a ticket inspector engaging in relational resistance to aid migrants, and a driver managing moral responsibility in the face of potential fatalities. The article concludes that border control is collective work involving multiple frontline actors, including those not formally tasked with migration control, whose everyday practices nonetheless shape migrants' trajectories and survival.

This report situates migration within the global economy. Whereas migration scholars once framed analyses in terms of privatization and the migration-industrial complex, subsequent analyses have approached the role of migration within the global economy in more varied and nuanced ways. I develop a perspective through the lenses of surplus populations and spatial fixes towards a more expansive approach centered on understanding the value of migration. Three key areas are surveyed in which geographers are examining how value is generated: the value of migrant labor, the value of migrant infrastructure, and the geopolitical value of migration. As numbers of migrants increase, protections for forced migrants become ever more tenuous, and the economic impacts of border enforcement strategies continue to grow, this is an important moment to reconsider migration within the global economy.

ABSTRACT Law enforcement agents (LEAs) operating at the forefront of European borders play a crucial role in the implementation of migration policies. As frontline actors, LEAs are often perceived as powerful agents who enforce legislation and determine who is granted entry or denied access to European territory. This study, conducted within the framework of the PERCEPTIONS project, examines LEAs’ perceptions of migration and their discretionary implementation practices in five European countries. Our findings challenge the assumption that LEAs perceptions of migration are key in explaining their practices as they exercise discretionary power in an unlimited or unilateral manner. Instead, we argue that LEAs’ daily practices are shaped through interactions within a complex network of actors. Adopting a networked and relational approach to discretion, this study highlights how power relations, negotiation, and inter-agency dynamics influence border enforcement, ultimately demonstrating that discretion is co-produced.

Five years after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic public health emergency, and amid a growing body of specialized scholarship arising from this exceptional historical moment, this Special Issue underscores the analytical and political urgency of revisiting the early years of 2020–2021 from the situated perspectives of migration and borders across Latin America and the Caribbean. This period offers crucial insights into the ongoing transformations of mobility and control across the Americas. The “emergency” conditions of the pandemic enabled a redoubling of border enforcement and anti-immigrant/anti-refugee policies, intensifying pre-existing re-bordering dynamics at national and transnational levels—particularly through the expanded reach of U.S. border externalization. Simultaneously, these conditions gave rise to intensified spatial struggles: from border crossings to mutual aid networks and autonomous organizing aimed at sustaining migrant lives increasingly exposed to abandonment and premature death. By foregrounding ethnographic accounts of these seemingly localized experiences, this Special Issue reveals how early pandemic dynamics shaped—and continue to shape—new hemispheric geographies of re-bordering, exclusion, and resistance. Revisiting these cases offers valuable insight into enduring forms of social struggle in defense of life and labor, where the autonomy and subjectivity of migratory projects emerge as central to contesting the expansion of our authoritarian present.

The world is rapidly increasing with Artificial Intelligence and it has also advanced with an increasing pace, has fundamentally transformed the creation, distribution and consumption of creative works, challenging traditional frameworks of copyright law across the globe. This paper explores the evolving intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Copyright law, analysing legal, ethical and policy questions surrounding authorship, ownership and infringement provisions when works are generated or assisted by AI systems. Also, it talks about different global perspective relating to AI and Copyright Law, such as United States, European Union, China etc. that are approaching AI generated content, revealing both convergences and divergences in legal interpretations and regulatory responses. The study also covers the implications for cross border enforcement, international copyright treaties and the future of creative labour. It is a comparative legal analysis, the paper highlights the need for harmonized global standards that balance innovation with the protection of intellectual property rights in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

Immigrant and mixed-status families comprise a growing population in the United States, facing numerous barriers to accessing essential health and social services. This study examines service access barriers within the unique context of New Mexico’s borderlands, where constitutionally protected bilingualism and welcoming local policies contrast sharply with restrictive federal border enforcement. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted five focus groups with 36 immigrant caregivers in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, with the objective of understanding the factors that facilitate and hinder immigrant families’ access to health, behavioral health, and social services in this socio-politically complex border environment. Thematic analysis revealed three overarching themes: (1) structural and organizational limitations, including language barriers and transportation challenges exacerbated by border checkpoints; (2) the persistence of “chilling effects” on service use despite a Democratic presidency and post-pandemic policy shifts; and (3) community-defined recommendations for improving service access. The findings demonstrate how federal immigration enforcement undermines local inclusion efforts, creating enduring barriers to service access even in historically bilingual, immigrant-friendly regions. The participants proposed specific solutions, including mobile service units and integrated service centers, that account for both geographic and socio-political barriers unique to border regions. These community-generated recommendations offer practical strategies for improving immigrant service access in contexts where local welcome and federal enforcement create competing pressures on immigrant families.

This article examines the visual governance of migration across the Central Mediterranean Route by analyzing the pictures chosen by Italian, Maltese, Libyan and Nigerien newspapers to illustrate undocumented human mobility. To tackle the challenges attached to images’ polysemic nature, we focus on one category of photographs: those portraying border security forces interacting with migrants. We then zoom into the equipment used by these personnel, examining whether they display weapons and/or wear biohazard protection. Our coding shows that pictures portraying security forces in biohazard clothing were became widespread in European newspapers well before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, becoming a routine since the 2014 Ebola outbreak. By becoming a trope in European media coverage of irregular mobility, border enforcement routines like the use of biohazard suits have turned into a visual discourse framing undocumented migration as a health threat no less than written texts. Conversely, biohazard clothing is largely absent the pictures used by Libyan and Nigerien papers, where pictures portraying migrants’ interactions with border enforcement personnel are scarce. These outlets, however, more frequently portray security forces carrying weapons, shaping visual discourses that may frame human mobility as a physical threat rather than a health risk.

An emergent issue for critical migration studies concerns the technological and diplomatic capacities of Western nation-states to externalize bordering practices. The extraterritorialization of border enforcement presents a dual problematic for migrants, intellectuals, activists, and civil-society members. They must navigate, on one hand, a pressing need to respond to the pre-emptive foreclosure of a “right to presence,” while on the other hand rethinking institutions of asylum to be capable of operating from a distance. In the following, I construct a new manner of thinking about border extraterritorialization in general, and in response, formulate rightful claims to asylum as articulated in absentia. Extraterritorialization practices and their logics are characterized by pro-jection, through which they give rise to a “general domain of ends” predicated on nation-state irresponsibility, outside of law and outside of their territories. I then elaborate upon a notion of cosmopolitanism that characterizes grassroots actions attempting to address these bordering practices, ones that challenge state-centric frameworks of politics. In advancement of this position, I discuss how a relation of responsibility may be constructed from a distance through civil society initiatives (private sponsorship), counter-public networks (exemplified by WatchTheMed), and counter-institutions (the International Parliament of Writers). All these examples represent a form of communicative reach.

This study examines scapegoating narratives in YouTube commentaries on the Rohingya refugee crisis, specifically how Indonesian and Malaysian netizens assign blame to various actors. Using semantic network analysis and topic modeling, the research identifies distinct patterns of blame attribution. Findings reveal that in Indonesia, criticism is directed towards the President, Indonesian Government, and the Indonesian National Army (TNI), often focusing on perceived weaknesses in border enforcement and a lack of decisive action. This scapegoating tendency may be exacerbated by existing public skepticism towards the performance of security forces. In Malaysia, the Prime Minister and ‘Kerajaan’ face backlash related to perceived policy failures and leniency towards refugees, reflecting a demand for stronger governmental intervention. This demand is intertwined with broader concerns about governance and political support within the country, where government effectiveness is closely scrutinized. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates how resistance to granting citizenship to Rohingya refugees and negative online portrayals are connected to digital discourses of nationalism and xenophobia, where exclusionary attitudes are amplified. Myanmar is consistently framed as the primary instigator of the crisis, often referred to in association with terms such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Meanwhile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is frequently criticized for enabling migration flows rather than effectively addressing the root causes of displacement. These perceptions often arise from public distrust, perceived institutional ineffectiveness, and the portrayal of humanitarian organizations in global media. The findings underscore how digital platforms serve as sites of political expression and polarization, where narratives of blame reflect deeper anxieties over sovereignty, national identity, and migration governance. This study also reveals how online nationalism is constructed and sustained through emotionally charged threat narratives, offering insight into the intersection between media discourse and refugee politics in Southeast Asia.

he project “Human Rights and Border Policies: A Comparison of Serbia and Austria” (HURIBO) explores the complex relationship between border control and human rights protection, focusing on the practices of an EU Member State, Austria, and EU candidate country, Serbia, situated along a major migration route. In the context of increasing migration pressures and evolving border enforcement strategies, the project critically analyzes how international human rights standards, particularly those relating to non-refoulement, collective expulsion, and access to asylum, are implemented at national borders. Through a comparative legal analysis, HURIBO investigates the compliance of Serbia and Austria with international and EU human rights obligations, particularly in light of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). Key activities during the first project year included participation in the international scientific conference “Law and Social Conflicts” at the Faculty of Law in Niš, a study visit to Austrian Institute for Human Rights by the Serbian research team. The project has strengthened academic cooperation between the Faculty of Law, University of Niš, and the Austrian Institute for Human Rights, University of Salzburg, laying down the groundwork for joint publication and policy recommendations.

Abstract The exponential growth of social media, the dark web, cryptocurrency, international cartels, cyber attacks, the collaboration of terrorist organizations, the rise of self‐regulated social media, and the complexities of money laundering are threats to Canadian democracy, the economy, and the rule of law. The global threat environment in an increasingly interconnected world indicates that Canadian security will be increasingly determined and shaped outside its borders via international events. Therefore, this administrative policy article argues that the lack of a spy agency solely responsible for foreign missions puts Canadians at risk at home and abroad. Moreover, the transition of the RCMP from contract policing into a federal police force dedicated only to national security and federal law enforcement, like the FBI in the US, is recommended. Finally, the creation of Canada's new protective service, rapid federal national security police force, and North American Rapid Law and Border Enforcement is urgently needed.

ABSTRACT Digital immigration status was implemented in Britain after Brexit, and it soon became a central component of the ‘hostile environment’ system of deputised border management. This paper argues that, in the presented case, digital technology reconfigured immigration status by shifting its operational logic from inscription towards computation. It thus produced trabnsactional subjects of border control. In paper-based systems, bordering practices slot individuals into relatively stable socio-legal categories when their status is documented. In contrast, the online-only system analysed here computes identity and status in real-time to enact legible subjects of border control. Its algorithmic logic computes biographic, biometric and immigration data – such as pending applications, grants of status, refusals, and rejections – to resolve records drawn from separate casework platforms and data stores into a singular identity and thus enact the subject of border control. These findings contribute to scholarship on digital borders, which shows that digitisation enables novel modes of immigration governance. However, the paper contests the notion that computation of personal attributes generates ‘data doubles’ as ‘traceable and sortable objects’ of border enforcement. Instead, it develops the notion of the transactional subject to show that ongoing computation of identity and acess becomes the overriding logic of border governance.

This study investigates the security implications of smuggling at the Sirari border between Tanzania and Kenya, a hotspot for illicit cross-border activities. Smuggling at Sirari involves the unauthorised movement of goods such as fuel, sugar, and narcotics and has become increasingly intertwined with organised crime, undermining national security and regional stability. The research employed a qualitative case study approach, drawing insights from 107 purposively selected participants, including border officials, local traders, and community leaders. Data were collected through interviews, focus group discussions, and document analysis, and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings reveal that smuggling operations are facilitated by corruption, economic hardship, selective law enforcement, and weak inter-agency collaboration. Participants reported that smuggling not only fuels the proliferation of drugs and weapons but also erodes trust in public institutions and fragments community cohesion. The study also highlights the inadequacy of current cross-border security mechanisms, citing poor coordination between Tanzanian and Kenyan authorities, lack of resources, and outdated enforcement infrastructure. Moreover, the normalisation of smuggling as a livelihood strategy reflects deeper socioeconomic and governance challenges in the borderland region. The paper concludes that addressing smuggling at Sirari requires an integrated strategy that combines enhanced border enforcement, bilateral cooperation, anti-corruption reforms, and community-based development programs. The findings contribute to broader discourses on transnational crime, regional security, and state sovereignty in Africa, while informing targeted policy interventions aligned with Tanzania’s development and security agendas.

Legal immigration remains a pressing issue shaped by both economic and policy factors. This article analyzes how irregular migration responds to relative wages and border enforcement, situating the phenomenon within broader global migration patterns. Wage differentials between sending and receiving countries have historically fueled outward mobility, as higher earnings abroad represent strong incentives for workers. At the same time, border enforcement and visa regimes influence the cost and risks of irregular migration, reshaping rather than eliminating flows. Drawing on migration theory, including neoclassical models, network theory, and political economy perspectives, the study highlights the complex interaction between economic pull factors and enforcement push factors. Statistical data and illustrative figures demonstrate how remittances, labor demand, and demographic pressures contribute to persistent migration, despite stricter controls. Comparative global evidence—from the U.S.–Mexico border to Europe’s Schengen area - confirms that enforcement alters routes and behaviors but rarely overcomes the wage-driven logic of migration. Migration is also sustained by social networks, which lower information costs and reduce uncertainty for new migrants. Moreover, global labor markets often rely on irregular workers to fill low-wage jobs that native populations avoid. Enforcement policies, while politically visible, frequently fail to address the structural demand for migrant labor. The persistence of irregular migration underscores the limits of short-term deterrence strategies. Ultimately, sustainable solutions require a balance between stronger border management, policies aimed at reducing wage disparities, enhanced domestic employment opportunities, and coordinated international cooperation