Selection of the Fittest?   Migration management: Mobility, membership and Human Rights in the light of global, regional and national political and institutional developments.

Migration management is a very important battlefield for national, regional and global governments and non-government institutions etc. It is obvious that the concept of migration management has developed into a more complex and suitable substitute or supplement to migration "control" in continuation of the many nation states realizing the need for labour immigration. Furthermore the concept includes the whole migration process in sending, transit and receiving countries.

The title "Selection of the fittest" strikes at least two key elements in this project:

Who makes the choice? It is of significance that there is a position from where selections and choices can be made.

Who is selected? The choice is based upon certain criteria from which human beings are included or excluded from a specific territory and a specific population.             

Politically the control of admission to the territory and territory based rights is with the nation state, all though the sovereignty is under pressure and according to some researchers already partly dissolved; de-nationalized (Guiraudon 2001) or transnationalised (Sassen 2005). Today however, no uniform and globally coordinated system of management of mobility exists. On the other hand do different and possibly contradictory and competing international, multilateral and bilateral initiatives exist?

One of the central elements as shown by Bauman (1989, 1991) and Herzfeld (1991), in modern nation state bureaucracies, is generating taxonomies in order to act upon them. Through constructing, maintaining and changing these taxonomies, bureaucracies in a specific social and political surrounding become capable of acting - e.g. of selecting and excluding migrants.

Bauman talks about the gardening state with the gardener's design that determine criteria, that " split the population into useful plants to be encouraged and tenderly propagated and weeds - to be removed or rooted out" (Bauman1991) and Herzfeld investigates the symbolic roots of Western bureaucracy in order to explain social production of indifference.

The aim of this project is to analyse selected institutions and stakeholders within the global migration regime through uncovering their background, position, rationale, organisation and impact. As one dimension of the project Denmark‘s role and the impact of the global migration management regime for Denmark will be included as well as a study of how different kinds of migration regularity or migrant illegality are lived in Denmark. 

 The project will:

1. Analyse how migration management is put forward as a transnational and global regime fixed between globalised economy and nationalised politics and in the light of the post colonial and geopolitical relations of power.
   
2. Investigate how regional and national management of economic migration is discussed and implemented focussing at direct and indirect mechanisms of selection.
   
3. Investigate the concrete practice of exclusion, which is an area with a growing international cooperation; illegalizing, identification and expulsion of irregular migrants.