Alongside the emergence of the new mobility paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006), especially in the social sciences, the security paradigm has gained importance as well. It is said that “the security paradigm is now becoming so ingrained that it is impossible to ignore the impact of security concerns on the development of migration policy” (Collyer 2006, 255). The mobility of people is shaped by a variety of formal and informal institutions, such as laws and policies that influence which groups have the right to travel to and reside in a certain country. This article is concerned with Finnish border and immigration regimes and the interplay between mobility and security within law and policy. The paper offers a historical account on the way in which security has been involved in the governance of immigration in Finland. We analyze policy reports, legal texts, case law, parliamentary plenary debates, and minutes of committee hearings that shape and define mobility. By combining political history with legal analysis, the article takes a transdisciplinary approach to mobility and its limits and sheds new light into the discussion of the mobility paradigm.
Our analysis provides empirical evidence that there has been a clear movement toward increased securitization over time. In political speech, restrictive measures are justified by a presumed threat to Finland's national security. The individual rights of migrants and notions of the human security of migrants appear in these debates on the other end of the spectrum.
This chapter introduces the central conceptual and theoretical framework of the volume, which is the nexus between everyday security, forced migration and family separation. We discuss the problems with the term ‘refugee’ and justify everyday security as an approach. We then present the global and transnational scope of the book, which enables us to rebalance previous scholarship on families and migration. Finally, we provide a brief roadmap of the contents of the book.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.