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This chapter has two main goals. First, it aims to provide one normative argument about one oft-traveled migrant journey: that of Central Americans and Mexicans who intend to enter the United States without legal authorization by traversing Mexico, the Sonoran Desert, and the heavily militarized Mexico-U.S. border. It argues that this journey is a violation of justice in the scope of U.S. immigration policy because it plays a key role in the perpetuation of socially undocumented oppression within the United States, in violation of relational egalitarian justice. Second, it argues, from a relational egalitarian perspective, for the demilitarization of the Mexico-U.S. border as a response to the ways in which the migrant journey reinforces socially undocumented oppression.

This chapter discusses variations in the nature of migrant journeys. It presents cases of forced migration, including the migration of Vietnamese refugees and the traumatic journeys of the Jews and Irish people. The migrations of the Jews and the Irish represent the largest European migrations of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, both the emigration of the Jews from the Russian Empire and the horrors of Irish famine emigration are discussed in detail.

This concluding chapter emphasises the role of ships in migrant journeys and the symbolic importance of the ship as a transporter of people from persecution and exploitation to freedom and acceptance. It summarises the refugee escape to Britain, the role of the Navy in the suppression of slave trade, and the symbolic and political importance of migrant journeys to the British nation.

This chapter traces migrant journeys to the edge of Europe and analyses the politics of rescue in the Mediterranean to reveal how the EU contributes to deaths at sea and simultaneously points to these deaths and broader migration flows as a crisis. Following migrant journeys into Europe demonstrates how migrants negotiate passage and challenge sovereignty—a reality often obscured in state narratives. Indeed, through alternating politics of neglect, security, and humanitarianism, southern EU member states have constructed a migration ‘crisis’, depicting long-standing migration flows across the Mediterranean as chaotic and unprecedented. Key to the crisis narrative is the portrayal of migrants either as victims with no agency or as villains endowed with a dangerous, Herculean form of agency. In contrast, migrant accounts reveal a longer journey that begins before the Mediterranean shores and the room for manoeuvre that migrants find and exploit that renders the EU more sieve than fortress. Their experiences illustrate how borders are contested spaces, but also how state inaction contributes to deaths at sea. This chapter contributes to the literature on spectacle by illustrating how both humanitarian and enforcement performances reify state power and construct ‘Europe’ as a discrete unit, a benevolent actor in control of its borders. In doing so, the spectacles cast the Mediterranean as an empty, marginal space and migrants as objects to be governed, as symbols of disorder and chaos. Significantly, the spectacles at sea brand migrants as ‘others’, which allows for their continued marginalization in Europe.

The introductory chapter first examines how and why EU migration policies have focused on control at the external border. The following section looks at how these policies encourage dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean and result in an increasing number of migrant deaths at the edge of Europe. In this context, shipwrecks play an important role in the politics of migration and are alternately cast as a humanitarian crisis and an enforcement problem, with migrants reduced to symbols of suffering or criminality and disorder. The Mediterranean space is reduced to an empty space, a mare nullius that allows for the projection of a unified, cohesive ‘Europe’ and provides a moral alibi for deaths at sea. Next, the chapter introduces the central case study of Malta, which EU policies place in the crosshairs of migration flows and migration control. It is from here, the EU’s smallest and most southern member state, that the book examines migrant experiences as well as Malta’s response to its new role as a migration gatekeeper within the EU. Finally, the chapter describes the methods and methodology employed before mapping the subsequent chapters of the book. In the book, ethnographic methods are combined with macro-level analyses in order to examine the relationships between local, national, and regional levels.

This chapter discusses the immigration policies that were implemented to prevent colonial stowaways from entering Britain. It describes the attempts of the British government in the 1950s to stop the illegal movement and permanent settlement of West Indians and West Africans in Britain. The chapter also presents case studies that feature narratives of other Nigerian migrant journeys that highlight the treatment of early settlers in Britain.

This chapter explores the migrant journeys of Huguenot refugees escaping French persecution in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It discusses published memoirs and escape accounts of Huguenot refugees who suffered religious persecution in France. One example is Reverend Jacques Fontaine's autobiography, A Tale of the Huguenots, which details the intense persecution in 1685 and his journey of escape following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.