The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security

Abstract

I answer a call by Nicholas De Genova and Ananya Roy asking scholars to investigate the historical roots of practices of illegalisation (that is, the use of law to render people illegal) and how these practices serve to re/institute a relationality between race and poverty. Using the case of regulations surrounding vagrancy in imperial Japan's metropole and its colony of Taiwan, I call attention to how illegalisation has historically been entwined with the racialised concept of the vagrant, spread globally through European anti‐vagrancy laws. I argue that this vagrancy concept was inserted into emergent border control and welfare regulations at the turn of the 20th century as a mechanism for systematically excluding racialised persons from state protection. Also, I elucidate how im/migration and social assistance schemes were historically co‐produced as legal architectures designed to provide greater socio‐economic security and status to the so‐called imperial races.