Remote biopower: Constructing the system of immigrant health controls

Abstract The selection of migrants based on judgments about their health was a fundamental driver of state migration controls. The USA was a global leader in elaborating these controls, which have become the international norm. The construction of a legal and logistical infrastructure generated state capacity not only to control immigrants on arrival, but also to extend control outward, first over migrants in transit, then to points of embarkation, and finally to places of origin. An historical-institutionalist analysis of the US case using federal laws, regulations, reports, and congressional debates to trace the policy process shows how between the 1880s and 1920s a system of remote controls was developed based on five innovations: 1) the creation of legal fictions in quarantine spaces that a migrant has not legally entered the territory; 2) sanctions on companies carrying inadmissible passengers; 3) stationing officers abroad to carry out screening; 4) transforming neighboring states into restrictive buffer zones; and 5) the establishment of a consular health certificate regime. Policymakers had two goals in creating remote controls: shifting the costs onto private companies and neighboring states and expanding how controls could be used. The original motivations were ensuring that immigrants were safe in transit, healthy on arrival, able to work, and free of contagion. By the 1920s, a consolidated system based on eugenics projected remote biopower, the flexing of Foucauldian biopower beyond the state’s borders. The long-term individuation of medical controls nevertheless retained latent, group-level controls that were activated by the Trump administrations.