Controlling Migrants:

Vagrancy Laws, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany

More than 3,000 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in 2021. At the US-Mexico border, the official death rate in 2021 stood at 728. The consequences of migration controls have brought the vulnerabilities of the world’s marginalized populations into sharp relief. This pushes us to ask how and why states seek to control migration. Heeding that call, my first book, Controlling Migrants: Vagrancy, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany, shows that to police people on the move states rely on a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities to define who can be considered a migrant, to track and surveil those targeted, and to detain and deport those cast as illegal and unwanted. The book further reveals that these capacities were developed through the entangled histories of local-subnational and global-colonial mobility controls.

Drawing on one year of archival research in Germany, the book traces the institutionalization of migration control in Germany through five historical moments that saw an intensification of attempts to police and govern the mobility of those considered outsiders. These include internal mobility controls to police vagrants and Roma people at the parish level from the 1500s onward, the mechanisms developed to manage Polish seasonal workers in Prussia alongside Chinese indentured laborers in the German colonies in the Pacific from the 1890s to 1914, Germany’s first comprehensive citizenship law in 1913, the use of hardened mobility controls as essential tools to render foreign workers exploitable during World War I, and the construction of the figure of the illegal migrant when the German state began to target Jewish migrants fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 1920s.

Through these cases, the book shows how over time the rules, practices, and tools that were developed in a set of multiple – and seemingly distinct - spaces turned into Germany’s contemporary migration control regime, driven by attempts to police the racialized boundaries of belonging and manage migrant workers.

By retrieving these histories, the book makes three central contributions. First it develops a multi-scalar methodology to study the formation of state institutions and contemporary security practices. In transcending an analysis focused only on the local, state, or international level, the book speaks to the increasingly prominent efforts in the social sciences to bring multiple levels of analysis together and to push beyond forms of methodological nationalism. 

Secondly, it adds to the burgeoning post-colonial scholarship. Where the post-colonial literature has been prone to overlook dynamics in the metropole and focus predominantly on the colony, my book instead reveals the multi-directional entanglements between these spaces. It thereby offers new insights into understanding the co-production of contemporary techniques of state control between the colony and the metropole. The book also expands the geographical scope of the post-colonial scholarship, which has been predominantly Anglocentric, by focusing on Germany as an under-studied case of the effects of colonialism on current forms of state control such as policing and bordering.

Finally, the book contributes to the study of comparative racial politics by theorizing how colonial racial hierarchies intersected with domestic forms of exclusion driven by anti-Roma sentiments and antisemitism in the making of mobility controls, and by conceptualizing Germany as a colonial and a racial state.