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- Author: Ayelet Shachar x
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The border is one of the most urgent issues of our times. We tend to think of a border as a static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the map, as governments have developed legal tools to limit the rights of migrants before and after they enter a country’s territory. The consequent detachment of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border, an adjustable legal construct untethered in space. This transformation upsets our assumptions about waning sovereignty, while also revealing the limits of the populist push toward border-fortification. At the same time, it presents a tremendous opportunity to rethink states’ responsibilities to migrants. This book proposes a new, functional approach to human mobility and access to membership in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move.
In her lead essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar introduces the concept of the "shifting border." Whereas borders are traditionally understood to exist at a country's territorial edge, prosperous countries are increasingly utilizing sophisticated legal tools to selectively restrict mobility and access by detaching the border and its migration-control functions from a fixed territorial marker. The shifting border extends the long arm of the state to regulate mobility half the world away, while also stretching deeply into the interior, creating what have been referred to as “constitution free” zones or “waiting zones” where ordinary constitutional rights are partially suspended. To understand this development, Shachar proposes a change in perspective from studying the movement of people across borders to critically investigating the movement of borders to regulate the mobility of people. Looking at cases in the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia, she reveals a paradigmatic and paradoxical shift in the political imagination and implementation of the sovereign authority to screen and manage global migration flows in a world filled with multiple sources of law. When it comes to controlling migration, states are abandoning traditional notions of fixed territoriality, but when it comes to granting rights and protections, the same states snap back to a narrow and strict interpretation of spatiality which limits their responsibility and liability. Shachar concludes her essay by exploring whether there are limits on such authority, and if so, how to activate them and who should do so.
In her closing essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar begins by briefly restating her concept of the “shifting border.” She then moves on to address the three core issues raised by her interlocutors, which she labels as follows: 1) shapeshifting migration control and illiberal leeway; 2) legal institutions, social change, and constraints on governmental power; 3) the emancipatory power of ideas and political agency. Shachar concludes by observing that we cannot wait for perfection before we turn to counter preventable harm, death, and injustice. At the same time, we should not be afraid to contemplate robust, long-term solutions to the vexing problems of unfettered power, systemic exclusion, and official indifference to migrants’ rights, safety, and dignity.