This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.

This classic work in Australian sociology examines the way in which Australian institutions have responded to the influx of migrants of non-Anglo-Saxon origin. Until the end of the sixties, the typical Australian reaction was that these migrants could be, and were being, assimilated into the mainstream of British-Australian society and culture. At the end of the sixties, both the assimilationist philosophy and the claim of successful and effortless absorption came into question, and migrants of non-English speaking background began to be defined as problems. Now, in a third phase, migrants themselves are rejecting the notion that they are, above all, problems or people with problems. Instead they are asserting their rights and dignity as legitimate minorities in an ethnically plural society. The author goes on to trace in detail the response of the institutions of education, health, and the trade unions to 'the migrant presence'. 'Well written, well presented, well documented and challenging.' - C. A. Price, The National Times 'Well written, sympathetic to the point of anger and should be included in any course on Australian society or public policy. an invaluable contribution.' - James Jupp, Politics

The conditions of alienation and exclusion are inextricably linked to the experience of the migrant. This ground-breaking volume explores both the increasing emergence of the theme of migration as a dominant subject matter in art as well as the ways in which the varied mobilities of a globalized world have radically reshaped art's conditions of production, reception, and display. In a wide-ranging selection of essays, fourteen distinguished scholars in the fields of visual studies, art history, literary studies, global studies, and art criticism explore the universality of conditions of global migration and interdependence, inviting a rethinking of existing perspectives in postcolonial, transnational, and diaspora studies, and laying the foundation for empirical and theoretical directions beyond the terms of these traditional frameworks.

At the crossroads between international relations and anthropology, The Migrant Passage analyzes how people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala navigate the dangerous and uncertain clandestine journey across Mexico to the United States. However much advance planning they do, they survive the journey through improvisation. Central American migrants improvise upon social roles and physical objects, leveraging them for new purposes along the way. Over time, the accumulation of individual journeys has cut a path across the socioeconomic and political landscape of Mexico, generating a social and material infrastructure that guides future passages and complicates borders. Tracing the survival strategies of migrants during the journey to the North, The Migrant Passage shows how their mobility reshapes the social landscape of Mexico, and the book explores the implications for the future of sovereignty and the nation-state. To trace the continuous renewal of the transit corridor, Noelle Brigden draws upon over two years of in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork along human smuggling routes from Central America across Mexico and into the United States. In so doing, she shows the value of disciplinary and methodological border crossing between international relations and anthropology, to understand the relationships between human security, international borders, and clandestine transnationalism.

A century-long history of immigrant incarceration in the United States Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant's Jail, Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state–building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century. From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials, and build bigger jails—which they then had incentive to fill. Trapped in America’s patchwork detention networks, migrants turned to courts, embassies, and the media to challenge the cruel paradox of “administrative imprisonment.” Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and a variety of local sources, Nofil excavates the web of political negotiations, financial deals, and legal precedents that allows the United States to incarcerate migrants with little accountability and devastating consequences.