Disciplining the human rights of immigrants: market veridiction and the echoes of eugenics in contemporary EU immigration policies

This paper investigates the technologies of controlling migration and how the human rights of third-country nationals are disciplined and limited in many European Union member states. It discusses the rationalities of allowing entry as they are inscribed in the Schengen visa regulations and in the regulations relating to resident permits and family reunification rights in various European countries. Specifically the paper sheds light on how market veridiction results in the disciplining of human rights in these policies. The analysis is conducted through a Foucauldian governmentality framework entailing an analysis of the problematisations of immigration through market veridiction and how these are applied today to limit immigrants’ human rights. The paper then compares these rationalities to eugenic justifications for problematising immigration in the USA from 1860s onwards. This historical comparison shows how social Darwinist notions of human worth continue to function at the level of rationalities and technologies of disciplining immigrants’ human rights. The paper concludes that market veridiction makes human rights function inside a framework of (e)quality in which human worth is calculated as ‘quality’ and not as ‘equality’, and shows how migrants’ human rights are made to function as something to be earned rather than something inherent or inalienable.