Humanitarian Border Policing

As crossing borders have increasingly become a risk to life for irregularised migrants excluded from accessing safe and legal transportation, humanitarian rationalities and practices in border policing have developed in response. This chapter examines the structural, normative, and instrumental politics and effects of humanitarian border policing in the Global North through a focus on policies and practices in Australia, Europe, and the USA. It argues that humanitarian border policing understands and produces irregularised migrants as both at risk and a risk and that logics of care are enacted that aid (border) control. The chapter shows how humanitarian concerns for life are mobilised to expand zones of intervention on land and at sea, increase policing budgets, and introduce new technologies. In addition, the chapter explores the limits to the existing literature on humanitarian border policing and draws attention to how the appeal to saving lives masks structural injustices alongside the coloniality of humanitarian border policing.