The borders of sovereignty

This chapter argues that both the privatisation of immigration control and the criminalisation of breaches of immigration law arise from a decay of national sovereignty that is primarily endogenous to the nation state itself rather than being a consequence of any external force of globalisation. It reviews the normative debate about the privatisation of immigration control to demonstrate that privatisation is a domestic policy choice that facilitates an official effort to evade the political accountability through which the state’s sovereignty is constituted. The chapter goes on to show that the legal structure of ‘crimmigration’ offences is shared with a much larger category of pre-emptive offences. These offences serve to identify enemies of the legal order and in so doing institutionalise a novel condition of decayed political authority, referred to here as the ‘exceptionalisation of normality’. Crucially, these offences are found throughout the contemporary criminal law, mostly in areas with no connection to global labour flows, indicating that they target migrants as simply one among many, predominantly domestic, threats to a weakened state. The chapter concludes by arguing that the source of this endogenous weakening of sovereignty in the UK is to be found in the decay of almost all of its national political traditions and institutions.