Time, the state system and the double chronopolitics of managing ‘migrants’: implications of the Windrush scandal

Abstract

This article examines the double chronopolitics of managing migrants through tracing how the spatialised state system positions migrants as ‘out of place’. Taking its cue from the 2018 Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom, which revealed that the state had declared long-term legal residents illegal, the article interrogates the moral order engendered by the imaginary of the state system. It shows how thinking time unsettles hierarchies that the apparently timeless imaginary legitimises. First, the article briefly explores literatures that highlight the significance of time in making the state system and migration. Second, it examines migrantisation and racialisation in the Windrush scandal by tracing how time is imagined as shared. Third, it investigates how ‘migrants’ are governed through time and a logic of linear progression. Finally, it shows how ‘migrants’, who appear to introduce temporal tensions into the community’s shared time, are exposed to a double chronopolitics: being imagined as both in the past and of the future. Managing ‘migrants’ in response involves attempts to (impossibly) govern the future. The article argues that this double chronopolitics faces its own impossibility in the subject position of the more-than migrant, which – by exceeding the system – offers an opportunity to think beyond migration as crisis.