Biopolitics and Necropolitics in the Global Governance of Migrations

The international governance of migration refers to the global nature of the migratory phenomenon, where it is advocated that the management of human mobility goes beyond internal processing frameworks and is placed within a multilateral effort (^{Ghosh, 2000}; ^{Mármora, 2002}; ^{Castro Franco, 2016}). The international migration regime is based on the idea of orderly mobility, driven since the 1990s by various international development agencies, and has found its expressive epitome in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration adopted in 2018 by a majority of United Nations (UN) member states. The approach to migration management established in these efforts is based, in short, on the orderly and multilateral management and regulation of migrations, as well as the effective administration and channeling of migratory flows. In general, this approach emphasizes administrative processing and multilateral governance through a framework of legal devices, migration and border management infrastructures, as well as state and private actors implementing reception and processing practices.

However, critical readings of this global migration management regime point out the need to interpret these efforts in light of their linkage with neoliberal forms of control and governance of migration. This relationship encompasses technocratic, utilitarian, economic, disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical connotations regarding the management of human mobility between countries, relegating the human rights of migrants to a secondary position, and which ultimately, becomes a global and violent regime of migration control (^{Overbeek, 2002}; ^{Mezzadra, 2005}; ^{Geiger & Pecoud, 2010}; ^{Estévez, 2020}; ^{Varela Huerta, 2020}; ^{Domenech, 2017}; ^{Ortega, 2022}).

These critical poststructuralist-inspired perspectives are concerned with the exercise of power and control over migration and borders within the framework of a social system subordinate to the functioning of a global economic order. To a large extent, they emerge from a Foucauldian interpretative framework where power is exercised through the guidance and domination of behaviors. The analytical interest of these approaches focuses on regulation and control as central instruments of power, particularly in the regulatory mechanisms of the population’s biological processes by the State, which are driven by economic interests and violently exclude populations associated with certain phenotypic and social aspects, resulting in racist and classist management of the migrant population.

Migration regulation, established within the global governance of migrations, manages, controls, constructs, and expels individuals in mobile situations from certain countries based on biopolitical devices, serving the reproduction of the global capitalist economic system (^{Ortega, 2022}). These devices find in national borders a sociopolitical framework where filtering, selection, entry, and stay of individuals in mobile situations and seeking international protection are implemented, constituting a border regime serving the global economic functioning led by developed countries, in which the legality or illegality of migrant individuals is constructed (^{Casas-Cortes et al., 2014}). The externalization of borders, framed in the discourse of global migration governance as a “cooperation mechanism,” is perhaps the clearest expression of how a biopolitical regime of borders crystallizes. Through agreements that transfer unwanted migrants and asylum seekers to “first countries of arrival” or “safe third countries” such as Turkey, Greece, Malta, Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador, international protection responsibilities are evaded (^{Ortega, 2022}). The Migrant Protection Protocols in Mexico and Title 42 implemented in the United States are examples of this type of migration management.

The violence in multiple dimensions (state, neoliberal, patriarchal, colonial) involved in the global regime of migration control, particularly in contexts associated with countries with colonial experience, has prompted reflection on how, alongside the regulatory mechanisms for controlling the lives of migrant populations, terror and death are also administered (^{Estévez, 2020}; ^{Varela Huerta, 2020}).

The necropolitical perspective (^{Mbembe, 2011}) indicates that, in addition to the regulation of life, the administration of death is used as a governing mechanism in maintaining the globalized neoliberal regime. It operates by constructing and recognizing the subjectivities of colonized peoples (and thus a significant portion of migrant populations) not only as docile, as Foucault argued, but also paradoxically as both productive and disposable. Migrant individuals are used for massive agricultural labor or for development megaprojects and infrastructure construction but are expelled once these projects are completed. Massacres and deaths of migrants occur in territories where para-state logics linked to organized crime operate, confinement spaces where practices of containment, surveillance, and exclusion are enforced, uninhabitable enclaves where the precarization of discarded and immobilized migrant populations intensifies, and so on.

The governmental migratory biopolitics, thus, is not opposed but constitutive of the necropolitical management of migration, since it refers to the way in which state institutions, laws and political norms, civil society organizations, judicial mechanisms, and various forms of bureaucracy collaborate in the administration of migrant individuals through different strategies of selective inclusion, but above all, widespread exclusion that, ultimately, by disregarding their responsibility for protection, they contribute to the precarization and abandonment of these populations, leading to their death (^{Estévez, 2020}). In other words, on one hand, there are the biopolitical legal devices that are selectively operated judicially based on racial and social profiling, and on the other hand, there are the necropolitical devices in their multiple dimensions. These range from extreme acts such as massacres and femicides, to the criminalization of movement or the construction of detention centers with carceral practices, and even the legal disengagement from assumed responsibility for protection.

Title 42 can be understood as a biopolitical and necropolitical mechanism that, in the context of the pandemic, has operated in the multilateral management and exclusion of mobilities at the Mexico-U.S. border, by allowing border agents to selectively deny international protection processes and expel asylum seekers from U.S. territory to violent territories, while also collaborating with Mexico and other southern countries in their channeling and assistance. This is the case of Miriam, an internally displaced person who fled from Michoacán due to the confiscation of her belongings and threats from criminal groups. When she attempted to seek asylum, she was returned to Tijuana under Title 42. She shares her experience:

(…) we decided to stay there [in El Chaparral]—we bought a small camping tent—(…), it’s a mess in El Chaparral, they fight among themselves, it’s very ugly, it smells very bad, and one can't stand being there (…) we paid 100 or 200 pesos a day to use the bathroom. We paid because there are some bathrooms there—as support—but they weren’t clean, to be honest. (…) There is a lot of danger there [in El Chaparral]. Children are stolen, and there is a lot of danger (Miriam, personal communication, July 2021).

This testimony, along with others later collected, illustrates how the health argument was used as an instrument of migration control, as it highlights the health risks faced by people who remain on the southern side of the border. In this sense, there is a clear biopolitical and necropolitical disregard for international protection, as well as the lethal endangerment of the bodies of vulnerable populations in highly dangerous contexts.

Global Regime of Health Security and Immunization

The COVID-19 pandemic has aligned well with these biopolitical and necropolitical mechanisms of global migration management, not only because efforts to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus have served as the missing pretext to build administrative walls against migration and asylum in the United States, but also because they are part of a history of medicalization of international relations and epidemiological surveillance driven by developed countries, activated through Title 42 as a form of health immunization against contemporary migratory flows.

The expulsion of migrant populations on health grounds in the United States is not something new or unique to this pandemic; it is a practice that has been carried out since the 19th century, selectively based on racial differentiations and moralizing nativist ideologies. The anti-Chinese campaigns in the late 19th century United States, driven by nativist ideologues who blamed Chinese migrants for epidemics such as leprosy, malaria, or chickenpox—migrants who faced harassment, segregation, violent coercion, and public ridicule—ultimately resulted in the expulsion of these populations not only from towns but from the country itself, as well as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (^{Shah, 2001}). In the early 20th century, bolstering these nativist ideas, scientific discourses popularized the notion that racial and national group differences possessed innate biological characteristics. From this, the intersection of eugenics, public health, and migration led to the creation of inadmissible subjects deemed susceptible to carrying communicable diseases, and thus profiles of deportable individuals began to be delineated based on their biological characteristics (^{Goodman, 2020}). Throughout the 20th century, Chinese, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Haitian, Mexican, and African migrants, among others, have been subjected to expulsion and/or containment policies, being linked as a threat associated with various epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, chickenpox, yellow fever, Ebola, or HIV, among others. All of this has contributed to the fabrication of the migrant stigma as a health threat that carries germs, viruses, and bacteria unknown to Americans (^{Kraut, 1994}).

In addition to recognizing these biopolitical, racializing, and exclusionary actions against migrant populations based on pseudo-sanitary arguments, it is possible to understand how an international epidemiological surveillance was organized from countries in the global North with the purpose of health immunization in these territories; resulting in a geopolitical organization of globalized health security, devised from specific countries. According to ^{Aldis (2008)}, health is a concern in international politics that justifies global cooperation in sanitary matters, but with claims of security, it emerges as part of a historical development of 200 years, where global health policies have expanded based on locally rooted techno-scientific knowledge—product of Western hegemonic science—which has been universalized by international medical authorities. In this regard, ^{King (2002)} suggests that a racist and colonial medical hegemony that serves as the foundation for global health authorities to intervene locally within that established order.

The medicalization of international relations has developed through various channels such as diplomacy, medical and health cooperation, as well as military operations and so-called humanitarian interventions (^{De la Flor, 2018}). It is through these avenues that the medicalization of security and the pursuit of health immunity have been shaped. This is achieved by framing and organizing contagious diseases (such as Ebola, HIV, COVID-19, among others) as threats to international security.

In the 1990s, U.S. health and security experts recovered the concept of “emerging infectious diseases,” a term coined by renowned virologist Stephen Morse in 1989 to acknowledge viral threats to U.S. public health and assess the risks posed by the emergence of relatively unknown viruses to national security and the country’s commercial interests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which have played a crucial role in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and worldwide, have been at the forefront of institutionalizing the link between security and health. It was argued from there that these emerging viral diseases could pose a threat not only to the nation’s public health but also to its international commercial, political, and economic interests (^{King, 2002}).

Once the concept of emerging infectious diseases was put to the test, the CDC incorporated health matters as a priority of U.S. national security. Efforts and resources from research centers and security agencies were focused on establishing a global surveillance procedure to address what was considered a threat to their security. “Thus, between 1995 and 2005, the two main strategies that make up the current Global Epidemiological Surveillance System were created: the GOARN (Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network) system and pandemic preparedness” (^{De la Flor, 2018, p. 52}). These epidemiological surveillance strategies based on securitization tactics, proposed by the two economically most powerful North American governments, were adopted by the World Health Organization (^{Organización Mundial de la Salud [OMS], 2007}), which defined global health security as:

the activities required, both proactive and reactive, to minimize the danger and impact of acute public health events that endanger people’s health across geographical regions and international boundaries (^{OMS, 2007, p. 9}).

A regime of biopolitical governance was constructed in association with the narrative of global health security, and national borders gained greater importance in the securitization of health, thanks to the pressure exerted by the U.S. and Canadian governments on the WHO (^{Davis, 2008}; ^{Basile, 2020b}). The use of the adjective global in this strategy is a way to universalize what hegemonic countries consider as health threats. Evidently, according to ^{Davis (2008)}, global governance as a measure to address emerging infectious diseases has benefited the interests of countries in the so-called global North, as their priority is to protect their citizens through epidemiological surveillance that keeps epidemics outside their borders. In this sense, the global epidemiological surveillance apparatus would be more of a geopolitical instrument that, with the consent of the WHO, favors Western states (^{De la Flor, 2018}).

If this regime of health security and immunization is globally oriented by the WHO but driven by the U.S. government, Pan-American health cooperation is no exception and can be seen as a regional mechanism to organize epidemiological surveillance and pandemic management, guided by the interest of maintaining U.S. political, military, and economic hegemony in the region. According to ^{Basile (2020a)}, the idea of Pan-Americanism finds its correlation in epidemic statistics when referring to “The Americas” as a whole, but always guided from Washington, where vertical campaigns have been organized for disease control and elimination in the region.

The relationship between health and security presents collective health as a means of maintaining global security. Various authors, working from a critical epidemiology perspective, have argued that medical language converges with a military logic, and it is often the military who have been responsible for implementing security interventions in health matters⁵ by employing militaristic language, whether against opponents in a war or in response to the danger posed by a global infectious disease (^{Basile, 2020a}; ^{De la Flor, 2018}; ^{Breilh, 2010}). In that sense, it is possible to consider a colonial, imperialistic, and militaristic logic in the construction of this regime, which continues to operate in the implementation of policies such as Title 42.

^{Parrini (2015)} pointed out, based on ethnographic work in the southern border of Mexico, that medical devices function as surveillance mechanisms at the border to maintain social and health boundaries, segregating migrants who are constructed as potential carriers of dangers to the local society. This largely involves the health regulation of bodies, where medical science and the policing apparatus become indistinguishable. However, epidemiological surveillance necessarily involves the control of populations in mobility, considered as viral threats. This becomes a paradox of institutional action, as security corporations aim to exclude irregular migration from the territory, while medical institutions need to have sedentary control over it. The difference with Title 42 is that it managed to erase this paradox by becoming a biopolitical regulation that, in discourse and practice, both excludes populations in motion and maintains epidemiological surveillance over these bodies. According to ^{Mbembe (2019)}, “this redistribution of life into distinguishable scales of healthiness and unhealthiness is a key dimension of contemporary migration regimes” (p. 11).

The arguments put forth to activate section 265 of Title 42 respond to this framework of securitization of health that equates health threats with threats to national security. This not only impacts the sensitive border region but also falls within the realm of a logic of biopolitical migration control. Thus, the deportations of migrants that have occurred over the course of two years of the pandemic under the restriction of Title 42 are not related to violations of immigration regulations but rather to the regime of health security and immunization, which paradoxically has served the purpose of migration control in the past two years.

It is important to mention that not all migrants and asylum seekers were expelled under Title 42, but only those considered susceptible to overcrowding at land-based migrant stations, specifically impoverished individuals from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa, according to the ^{CDC (2020)}. For those traveling by air or sea with resources, this rule did not apply. The racialized difference has been notable regarding the preferential treatment received by asylum seekers from the Russo-Ukrainian war, where it has been observed in March 2022 how, while these populations from Ukraine are granted immediate access without being subject to Title 42, individuals from countries in the Global South have been denied entry under this prerogative. This can be interpreted within the immunization logic proposed by ^{Roberto Esposito (2006)}, in which the body of the State is “immunized” with doses of migrants who are considered non- threatening, racially compatible, or simply suitable for the reproduction of the economic system. Those impoverished migrants have been deemed a security threat to the northern country and have been expelled despite the risks it entails.

The Construction of Threats and the Securitization of Borders

According to Cameroonian philosopher Achille ^{Mbembe (2019)}, at the same time an era of planetary entanglement is being experienced, where proximity and exposure to other bodies are more prevalent than ever due to globalizing processes that underpin contemporary forms of capitalism, strong processes of contraction are also being experienced, as well as containment, and enclosure, which result in the division of regions, the construction of walls, and the process of bordering. Through these mechanisms, certain spaces become impossible to cross for undesirable populations, who are often subjected to processes of racialization and come from countries with colonial experience.

According to ^{Mbembe (2019)}, this is because the experience of proximity and closeness is seen not as a possibility or opportunity, but as an exacerbated risk to the reproduction of the social, political, economic, and cultural system. This has resulted in the construction of walls and enclaves of segregation whose function is to slow down and/or halt the movement of certain populations in order to manage the risk of proximity. National security, therefore, is the most commonly cited reason to justify the commitment of certain countries, such as the United States, to strengthening their borders.

The securitization of contemporary borders is a parallel project that supports and consolidates the functioning of a globalized neoliberal model driven by Western countries, which has generated and exacerbated scenarios of inequality throughout the world. According to ^{Brown (2019)}, the neoliberal rationale that predominated in the last decades of the 20th century—cutting across multiple legal, social, political, and even cultural spheres—, served as a catalyst for acute developments of social inequality based on racial, colonial, sexual, and other criteria. In the same line of reasoning, ^{Bigo (2002)} states that the securitization of migration is based on a political-symbolic approach installed in specific territories subjected to the outcomes of the neoliberal management model: a structural discouragement shaped by personalized narratives in which freedom confronts anything that threatens its scope and, therefore, anything that is perceived as a risk to security: everything that is not from here, the unknown, the foreign and unfamiliar.

According to the Copenhagen School, securitization can be understood as an Austinian speech act. This means that the discourse of security should not be seen as separate from practice, as when something is discursively framed as a security issue, there is a parallel process of acting accordingly, especially if the contextual conditions are conducive to such action (^{Buzan et al., 1998}; ^{Vigneau, 2019}). From this perspective, by naming a specific situation or dynamic as a security risk, it becomes insecure in practice, particularly when there is synchrony between the political ideology and the context in which this discourse unfolds. This approach provides analytical tools to consider how the implementation of Title 42 helped construct the perception of migrants as a threat to U.S. national security in the context of a pandemic. This has had direct consequences in strengthening border security and the biopolitical management of contemporary migration.

According to Buzan et al. (1998), prominent theorists of securitization, three characteristics of security can be identified: 1) the identification of a risk, 2) the sense of urgency to address it, and 3) the imperative of exceptional measures to confront the risk and threat. Securitization, in a political sense, operates through a perpetual and parallel framework of public actions, cultural narratives, social practices, and contextual elements—which, of course, do not unfold linearly and can be analyzed through various phases of reaffirmation, intensification, or relaxation— (^{Bourbeau, 2011}). Additionally, securitization is also a relational process, according to a sociological conception (^{Balzacq, 2011}; ^{Vigneau, 2019}), which means that the declaration of a threat, risk, or insecurity of an object is not inherent, universal, given, or immutable, but rather, as a relational process, it is elaborated through the interaction of various positions of power.

Securitization can be understood, then, as an

intersubjective process, whether intentional or not, through which an object is constituted as a security issue, through the combined effect of discourse, practices, and context, requiring the immediate use of defense or control mechanisms (^{Vigneau, 2019}).

Consequently, the securitization of national borders refers to the interactive process through which certain external factors, such as migration or viral diseases—but also terrorism or drug trafficking—are constructed as a threat to the security of a country and its political and productive system, which activates processes of structural reinforcement of the border apparatus.

The history of the tightening and securitization of the borders between Mexico and the United States can be read in that sense, as it allows us to analyze the structural, social, and political processes that reinforced them,⁶ while also observing how the enemies, risks, or external threats that had to be combated or excluded from the territory were constructed in parallel: terrorists, drug traffickers, undocumented migrants, emerging infectious diseases, and so on (^{Del Monte Madrigal, 2021}).

Of course, all these processes and strategies by the United States, as demonstrated by ^{Leo Chavez (2013)}, have been underpinned by a narrative of the Latino threat that has been promoted in the public sphere throughout different stages. These discursive formations have constructed the image of migrants as illegal foreigners who refuse to integrate into the nation by maintaining their language and cultural practices even while on U.S. soil, making them perceived as an invading force.⁷ As can be observed, the reinforcement of borders is a nexus of political and discursive actions in constant flux, constructing its security based on the rejection of the foreign as dangerous.

^{Mbembe (2019)} argues that one of the major contradictions of the liberal order is the tension between freedom and security. A society that prioritizes its security seeks to dissolve all uncertainties that would jeopardize its assumed freedom. Therefore, newcomers must be examined with the aim of exterminating any potential risk. This leads us to think, along with the Cameroonian philosopher, that “the objective of a securitarian society is not to affirm freedom but to control and govern modes of arrival” (Mbembe, p. 12). The proliferation of technologies to reinforce borders, as well as the normative provisions used for this purpose, such as Title 42, collaboratively contribute discursively, performatively, and practically to the reclassification of migrants into desirable or undesirable categories. Consequently, they establish themselves as biopolitical  devices that construct external threats, leaving populations seeking international protection adrift in scenarios of terror and violence.

Necrosecuritization refers to the process in which the death of certain individuals—particularly racialized people—is promoted as a means to secure the lives of others (^{García Flores, 2021}). In its conceptual development, necrosecurity is the counterpart of biosecurity, which focuses on ensuring life against biological threats by blurring the line between public health priorities and those of the armed forces. On the contrary, necrosecuritization implies the promotion of death to preempt other deaths; it aims to secure the lives of socially valued populations through a kind of counterfire involving the exposure to harm of expendable populations. In this sense, certain deaths signify better health for socially deemed deserving and normatively majority groups (^{Lincoln, 2021}).

Although this concept could be seen as a conceptual derivation from the three axes mentioned earlier, it seems to me that the logic that instrumentalizes death—necrosecurity—does not fully align with the dynamics of Title 42. The fact that populations from the South are exposed to life- threatening risks through their expulsion is done under the pretext of safeguarding against the alleged biological threat, but it is ultimately driven by a political calculation to reinforce migratory control in times of pandemic exceptionalism. In any case, this policy can be considered on the threshold of both biosecurity and necrosecurity logics, as it adopts a war-like language and seeks to contain biological threats within the realm of political calculation, while also expelling populations to places where they are more vulnerable and thus exposed to greater threats, including death.

Consequences of Title 42 on Mobile Populations

One of the corollaries of the biosecuritarian and necrosecuritarian actions resulting from the expulsions authorized by Title 42 is related to the increased vulnerability of asylum seekers to risks associated with violence and criminality in Mexico. Despite documented evidence that the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) have left international protection seekers stranded at the border in a situation of vulnerability and hopelessness (^{Miranda & Silva Hernández, 2022}), the organization ^{Human Rights First (2021)} reported, as of August 2021, more than 6 300 violent attacks against asylum seekers or individuals returned to Mexico under Title 42. This data is significant as it represents a four-fold increase in attacks compared to those reported during the years of MPP implementation.

In addition to these aggressions, migrants are unable to rely on the protection of security institutions. A migrant who returned to Mexico in February 2022 reported that as soon as they entered Mexico, they were approached and mistreated by the municipal police: “They turned me upside down (...), stole my money, and hit my knees and hands. I’m in pain, they threw me to the ground” (^{Humanizando la Deportación, 2022}). Instead of providing certainty and protection, law enforcement agents have come to be perceived as a source of risk and violence by the migrants themselves.

On the other hand, the WOLA organization (^{Isacson, 2023}) documented how in the last three months of 2022 and the first of 2023, migrant shelters in the city of Tijuana experienced an alarming increase in attacks, threats, and hostilities that not only endanger the security of the migrants trapped at the border (many of them as a result of expedited expulsions under Title 42), but also make them vulnerable to organized crime.

The implementation of Title 42 has also meant returning forcibly displaced individuals to dangerous contexts precisely because of the violence in their countries of origin, as described by Zoila, who, coming from Honduras, fled from Ojinaga to reach Tijuana, where she was mistreated again upon being returned to Mexico under Title 42.

In Ojinaga, they tried to kidnap my baby (...) they told me they were angry with me because a mother doesn’t abandon her children, even though I was pregnant. They didn’t kill me because they said they don’t kill in front of children (...) that’s why I came here to Tijuana (...) when we arrived, we were living in El Chaparral, but there I was assaulted and had my identification stolen. A woman told me to come to this shelter (Zoila, personal communication, July 2021).⁸

This testimony reinforces the fact that Title 42 has been a biopolitical and necropolitical mechanism for migration management. However, perhaps the case of Kenia best exemplifies the danger of staying or being returned to the Mexican side, as she has experienced aggression from both criminal groups and police officers.

I left Honduras due to extortion (...) they gave us two days to pay the fee (...) it was an organization over there, Maras and gangs (...) [during the journey] the problems started in Veracruz. We were waiting for a bus when some people arrived and grabbed us, blindfolded us (...) we were there for eight days (...) when we got out and were on the bus, we were grabbed again. We were apprehended by the federal police. I thought we were being deported. It was practically a kidnapping because they kept us for two days in the middle of the forest, enduring cold and sun (...) until my cousin sent them money (...) [after attempting to cross into the United States] We didn’t even know why we were expelled until my husband asked, “you were expelled under Title 42”. There at the border crossing, they gave us food and issued us a paper to move around here, a permit, they put us on a bus, and we arrived here (Kenia, personal communication, July 2021).

In the testimonies of individuals who were returned to Mexico under Title 42, it is evident that a consistent experience is confronting a wide spectrum of violence—from criminal groups, authorities, certain social sectors, and even within their own families—which they have had to navigate either in their places of expulsion or during their transit through Mexico. To a large extent, it is this violence that has compelled these individuals to undertake the migratory journey in search of international protection, and yet they are being returned and placed in a highly vulnerable situation.

As can be seen, Title 42 was established as a mechanism that exacerbated precarity and placed populations fleeing violence and terror at high risk of fatal consequences. In this regard, Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided insights into understanding the underlying motives behind the implementation of this order when it described Title 42 as “the most egregious example of how public health authorities have misused their authority to help create discriminatory migration policies” (^{Human Rights Watch, 2021}).