Subjects, aliens, and undesirables: Managing mobility and insecurity in the British Empire

Abstract How do states use migration control to track both foreign and domestic threats? This article approaches this question historically, examining colonial migration control policies employed by the British Empire in South Asia. Studying the imperial state reveals important antecedents for the contemporary migration regime and shows that empire states engaged in similar practices even as they were monitoring imperial rather than nation-state borders. Papers – in the form of identity documents such as passports that could be flagged – emerged as a critical tool in the quest to repress transnational solidarities and anti-colonial resistance. Examining the ways in which migration control was operationalized within the empire along with the logics guiding such regulation, this article argues that colonial migration control was deployed as a tool to target threats to the empire, not only those considered Britain’s enemies abroad but also British subjects and citizens. The pretext of collaboration with enemy aliens allowed the hardening of borders and an intensification in how they were policed. I argue that states use the justification of external or foreign threats to monitor internal or domestic threats. The colonial border did not merely serve as a tool to constrain the movement of enemy aliens or foreigners, but also to enable the surveillance of ‘undesirable’ British Indians who were considered suspicious. This article thus centers the imperial security perceptions that undergird the contemporary racialized migration regime and shows that these perceptions were crystallized at the height of empire.