Enacting migration through data practices

Today, migration features prominently in headlines and political debates. How many people immigrate in a given year and the question of how to regulate migration can decide elections or, as recently demonstrated by the vote for Brexit in the UK, shape the future of the European Union (EU). In the context of this intensifying politicization of migration, though, the knowledge practices that are mobilized to constitute migrations as intelligible, actionable objects of policy-making and related disputes and interventions of government have not yet received much scholarly attention. Such knowledge practices include, for instance, the production of migration statistics, the registration of migrant bodies in biometric databases, the projection of future migration flows or the visualization of migration routes used by illegalized migrants, as in the annual Risk Analysis Reports of the EU border-agency FRONTEX in Figure 1.1 This inattention is astonishing because, from an epistemic point of view, migration does not exist independently of the concepts, definitions, methods, statistics, visualizations and various other data practices that are mobilized to produce knowledge on migration for the purposes of its ‘management’. Commonly understood as movement to and residency in another nation-state from a previous country of residence, migration refers to the decisions, practices and movements of scores of people who move and criss-cross national dividing lines in various ways and for various reasons and time-spans. Hence, migration is not a reality ‘out there’ to which policy-makers and other stakeholders have direct access. Rather, what is known, negotiated and targeted as migration is mediated by a plethora of data practices, including registering, enumerating, counting and estimating to storing, cleaning, imputing, extrapolating and anticipating. These data practices, while often framed as matters of technocratic expertise, are of course political, sustaining the knowledge regimes that inform and shape migration policies, border regimes and migration management. The contributions to this special issue (SI) demonstrate this irreducibly political character of data practices and related forms of expertise that enact migration as an object of government.