Deterring Transnational Migration: Public Information Campaigns, Affective Governmentality, and the Family
By: Kate Coddington (she/her/hers) and Jill M. Williams (she/her/hers)
In May 2022, the US government released a new advertisement campaign describing the dangers of hiring a “coyote” to migrate to the US. Targeting families in Central America and Mexico, the digital advertisements featured pictures of grieving people with text such as “El coyote nos quitó a nuestro hijo. No deje que destrya su familia. Dígale no al coyote.” [The coyote took our son from us. Do not let him destroy your family. Tell the coyote no.]
Photo by Nenad Stojkovic, Flickr Creative Commons
These advertisements represent just the latest attempt by the US government to use public information campaigns to persuade would-be migrants not to travel, a practice that has been growing in popularity with many countries around the world since the 1990s (for instance, see examples from Sweden, UK, and Australia). Public information campaigns take many shapes, from billboards, radio ballads, and social media advertisements to films, traveling exhibitions, and street theater performances. Several years ago, we began a comparative research project exploring the development and dissemination of these campaigns in the US and Australian contexts: what kinds of messages are these countries promoting? And do these kind of advertisements represent a new kind of border enforcement? One of the things we found is that a common theme central to these campaigns is the family: to be a good mother, father, son or daughter, the campaigns argue, is to stay at home.
In this paper, we explore how these campaigns use the family as a way to emotionally target would-be migrants. US ads targeting mothers of Central American youth, for instance, used the words of a grieving mother who says, “My daughter, I would give anything for you to be here with me,” alongside images linking migration to possible kidnapping, disappearance, or death if the youths left home. Meanwhile, Australian ads circulated throughout Central Asia feature a woman narrator, who cries, “I should have kept the money I paid to the people smugglers for my family. That way it would have been better for all of us. Now I have lost everything. I am left with nothing… nothing!” Here, migration attempts are connected to a future of debt, shame, and financial ruin for families. The paper argues that these advertisements represent countries’ attempts to use emotions to govern how potential migrants behave, what we term “transnational affective governmentality.”
Interestingly, in the different sites, we see very different emotions used to do this work: in the US case, emotions such as love, grief and loss are mobilized to get migrants to stay home, whereas in the Australian example, emotions such as shame, guilt, and humiliation play more central roles. The advertisements in both sites, however, use emotional messaging about the importance of family to tether migrants to place: they suggest that migration is not compatible with being a good mother, father, son or daughter. Yet in each case, focusing on the family as the site of decision-making about migration conceals the complex political, economic, and social reasons why people decide to migrate, as well as the role of the state in creating dangerous conditions for migration.
At the current historical moment when there are more refugees globally than at any time in human history, it is imperative that we continue to critically examine the varied strategies used by border enforcing countries to keep people from migrating and claiming asylum. Our research on public information campaigns points to the importance of exploring how contemporary efforts to hinder transnational migration draw on and reproduce gendered beliefs, responsibilities, and expectations.
Read the full article here: Deterring Transnational Migration: Public Information Campaigns, Affective Governmentality, and the Family
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Kate Coddington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her major research focus is on the experiences of people unable to access asylum, from unrecognized refugees in Thailand to destitute asylum seekers in the UK. Current research involves exploring the role of public information campaigns in border enforcement and the gaps in refugee governance in the Asia-Pacific region.
Jill Williams is an Associate Research Professor at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women and affiliate faculty in the School of Geography, Development, & Environment and Department of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. In her work, she employs a feminist geopolitical approach to examine the development, implementation, and uneven impacts of contemporary US border enforcement efforts. Research projects have explored state responses to migrant deaths and the humanitarianization of border enforcement; the mobilization of discourses of violence against women to justify border militarization; and the economies of profit and care that shape migrant family detention and release practices.