Abstract
Drawing on Foucault's approach to knowledge and power, this paper aims to strengthen theoretical perspectives on migration and to revise social theories by reflecting on the constitutive role of migration in the formation of society. Differing from studies that use a methodological approach based on Foucault, I draw on his work to develop a constructivist theory of society by examining and problematizing two dominant lenses through which migration is commonly problematized: the epistemological-political grids of the “people,” associated with sovereign power and nationalism, and the “population,” associated with biopower and capitalism. Both grids are crucial for understanding how migration is constructed as a specific object of knowledge and incorporated into mechanisms of power. Taken together, they allow us to reconnect the often separated debates on sovereign power and biopower—or nationalism and capitalism—and to reflect on the central tensions of contemporary migration societies. By highlighting the relevance of border and migration processes that Foucault barely addressed, I open up an alternative perspective on people and populations through an analysis of the marginal figures of “vagabondage” and “bad circulation” that are currently most associated with migration.
In the news about migration, articles often seem to contradict each other, even if they refer to the same political camp: “We need more deportations” is one typical statement, and “We need more immigration” is another. The German newspaper Die Zeit, for example, headlined: “Federal government approves bill for faster deportations” (25. October 2023); politicians from the opposition additionally called for “irregular migration movements” to be stopped “with physical force” if necessary (Die Zeit, 24 October 2023). 1 In the same period, however, articles appeared with the following headlines: “German parliament passes reform of skilled worker immigration law” (Die Zeit, 23 June 2023) and “Hurdles to be dropped”: “Companies cannot fill 1.7 million jobs. Germany needs skilled immigration. A new law is supposed to facilitate this - How can labor migration succeed?” (Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 November 2023). Much discussed at the time was also a cover story in Der Spiegel magazine, which portrayed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with a serious face and quoted him on the cover with the announcement “We must finally deport on a large scale”; in the interview, he explained “too many are coming,” but when asked, he said “more immigration will also be needed” (Der Spiegel, 21 October 2023). Migration is thus framed as a challenging threat, on the one hand, and as a necessary resource, on the other. It appears as a problem per se or as a reality to be managed and optimized. But in what social contexts do these contradictory statements arise, and how do they relate to each other? Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I unpack the epistemological-political grids that constitute such dominant objectifications of migration and elaborate on how they are linked in the fabrication of societies. By analyzing the far-reaching effects of knowledge and power, Foucault's approaches are particularly suited to question established categorizations not only from media, political, or everyday discourses but also from migration studies (Tazzioli, 2019; Walters, 2015). 2
This paper contributes to reversing objectifying views of migrants by problematizing two dominant lenses through which migration is commonly problematized: the epistemological-political grids of “people” and “population.” Both concepts are crucial for understanding how migration is constructed as a specific object of knowledge and incorporated into mechanisms of power. In terms of the “people” grid, migration has become a central object of bordering and securitization in the name of national community and homeland, and corresponding attempts to expel and seal off borders, especially since the end of the Cold War (Balibar, 2004; Bigo, 2002); at the same time, with regard to the “population” grid, there is a tendency toward neoliberal “migration management” that emphasizes the usefulness of specific migrations and accordingly provides for selective immigration opportunities and limited residence rights (Georgi & Schatral, 2012). Taken together, the analysis of these two frameworks allows us not only to elaborate central tensions of contemporary migration societies but also to reflect on how migration and society are interrelated and mutually constitutive.
For this reason, the initial aim of this paper is neither to develop an in-depth empirical analysis of statements about migration nor to directly propose a new Foucauldian research approach to the growing field of critical migration studies, but rather to outline various modes of the mutually conditioned co-production of migration and society. In doing so, I aim to reconnect both migration studies and Foucault's work to broader issues and debates in social theory (see also Jørgensen & Schwiertz, forthcoming). Proposing elements of a Foucauldian theory of society allows us to approach migration not as a problematic deviation from established “society” that needs to be measured and justified, but rather to examine the knowledge-power mechanisms through which relations of migration and society are co-produced. This makes it possible to question homogenized and closed notions of society that are often used as comparative foils for observing and evaluating migration phenomena, such as dominant discourses on integration (Schinkel, 2018).
The paper therefore has three aims, which also signal its particular scope: (a) to elucidate the concepts of “the people” and “the population” through a close reading of Foucault (and thus to discuss only to a limited extent the more specific and sometimes more complex approaches of critical population studies or nationalism studies); (b) to focus not only on the concepts individually, but rather on their interrelation; and (c) to discuss these concepts in terms of the co-constitution of migration and society. In short, drawing on Foucault, I argue for reconnecting the concepts of “the people” and “the population” in order to better understand their complementary but tense relationships in the co-constitution of migration and society. After reviewing migration studies that mobilize Foucault in the first section, I take up criticisms of a one-sided use of his categories in the second section, in which I rearticulate a (de)fragmenting theory of society that links the notion of biopower, emphasized by Foucault and in the reception of his works, more closely to the notion of sovereign power. To this end, I elaborate on the concept of “people” associated with sovereign power in the third section, and the concept of “population” associated with biopower in the fourth section, in order to make the difference as well as the relationship between these two frames of sociality analytically productive. In discussing the relations between “people” and “population” in the fifth section, I highlight the entanglement of these epistemic-political grids that constitute dominant categories of social order and, at a secondary level, social theoretical concepts of critical analysis, which I illustrate with brief analyses of deportation and labor migration regimes.
Foucauldian migration studies and theories of (migration) society
Reviewing the literature on Foucault and migration, it is striking that while Foucault's approaches have become a central reference in general sociology, migration is rarely addressed in social theory debates on his work (important exceptions are, e.g. Delitz, 2025; Tazzioli, 2019; Tsianos & Karakayali, 2010; Walters, 2015). In migration studies, however, various strands are already drawing on Foucault's analytics of power in a productive way, and arguably it is among the fields in which it is currently most “used” (Mezzadra, 2017), although this, too, is rarely linked to broader debates in social theory, which could tend to obscure the genuinely theoretical contribution of Foucault's work.
Drawing on Foucault's concept of the dispositif and his work on the panopticon, Didier Bigo elaborated early on how migration is constructed as a problem of national security and presented “through the categories of the national and the state as a danger to the ‘homogeneity of the people’” (Bigo, 2002, p. 67). 3 The discourse of nationalism turns migration into an object of risk: “Securitization of the immigrant as a risk is based on our conception of the state as a body or a container for the polity” (Bigo, 2002, p. 65). With the concept of “securitization,” Bigo describes a “transversal political technology” of the governance of migration (ibid.) through which the fight against the supposed danger of “illegal migration” is depoliticized into a necessity. Bigo’s work and other critical studies of current border regimes are significant here because they show how the distinction between “internal” and “international” security has increasingly dissolved: Whereas the enemy used to be localized on the other side of the border, it is increasingly transnational non-state phenomena that are to be categorized and controlled as “mobile risks” (Bigo, 2002; Bigo & Guild, 2005; Walters, 2002). This diffusely constructed threat is personified in racist figures of the “Muslim,” the “Black,” or the “migrant” (Walters, 2002). 4 With his concept of the “ban-opticon,” which according to Bigo is neither reducible to sovereign power nor to biopower, Bigo shows how certain groups such as migrants are sorted out as risk groups to be kept under surveillance (Bigo, 2002, p. 82, 2008).
While Bigo emphasizes mechanisms of exclusion and sorting, which I will theorize with the Foucauldian “people” grid, William Walters focuses more on mechanisms of regulation and productive power, which correspond to the “population” grid. Drawing on Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, he analyzes European borders as a contingent social practice of “(re)bordering” (Walters, 2006, p. 145), distinguishing between the geopolitical, national, and biopolitical dimensions of borders: They not only construct identities by demarcating inside/outside—they are increasingly a governmental technology to regulate populations (Walters, 2002; Walters, 2006). The border is not an exclusively repressive apparatus: Rather, the border can be regarded as a privileged institutional locale where political authorities can acquire biopolitical knowledge about populations – their movements, health, wealth. In a sense, then, the border actually contributes to the production of population as a knowable, governable entity. (Walters, 2002, p. 572f.)
Slightly differing from these approaches with a focus on border regimes (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020; Bigo, 2002; Tsianos & Karakayali, 2010; Walters, 2015) and studies that primarily employ a methodological approach based on Foucault, e.g. using his concepts of “discourse” or “dispositif,” I draw on Foucault to advance concepts of a social theory that opens a perspective on the co-production of migration and society: how the fabrications of society impact migration and how migration is key to this fabrication process. While I argue that such a perspective is insightful for studies of migration and migration societies (see also Delitz, 2025), I also draw on debates in migration studies and related fields that critically reflect the mobilization of Foucault to stimulate a rearticulation of his concepts in this paper.
Whereas studies that focus on migrant resistance (Stierl, 2018; Schwiertz, 2021, 2022), counter-conducts (Tazzioli, 2019), and a relative “autonomy of migration” (Casas-Cortés & Cobarrubias, 2025) often criticize that Foucault and especially governmentality studies focus too much on social orders at the macro level without sufficiently taking into account struggles and movements of migration (Papadopoulos et al., 2008), studies that emphasize the efficacy of things, nonhuman beings, and technologies in the sense of the material turn stress that these very aspects are insufficiently taken into account (Dijstelbloem & Broeders, 2015; cf. Lemke, 2021 for a reply). These criticisms are important to note, as they point to limitations that also apply to this paper, which is why I would like to emphasize that it is crucial to complement the analysis of the societal problematization of migration with analysis of struggles and concrete material assemblages.
Another strand of migration studies that take up Foucauldian perspectives refers to postcolonial theories. Here, Foucault's concepts are criticized for being too one-sided to examine contexts beyond Europe as well as the specific exclusion of migrants within or at the borders of Europe (Mayblin & Turner, 2020; Minca et al., 2021; Revel, 2019). There is a critical discussion of the notion of “biopolitics,” which Foucault used to elaborate on a type of power that in contrast to sovereign power operates less through coercion and more through incentives (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020). First, the concept of “biopolitics” could lead to a one-sided view of productive mechanisms that promote life, based on a binary distinction between “making live” and “letting die” (Minca et al., 2021, p. 2). This perspective loses sight of the relations of domination and violence that characterize the field of migration, which in many respects can be understood as “necropolitics” (Mbembe, 2003). Important here is also Aradau and Tazziolis’ concept of “biopolitics multiple” to better reflect the heterogeneity of practices and measures to regain control over migration, and to “approach biopolitics not as a homogenous binary logic, but as plural technologies” (2020, p. 11). Second, the concept is accompanied by a Eurocentric view: Based on the Foucauldian typology of power, the supposedly “backward” sovereign power is identified with the Global South; the “more progressive” biopower with the Global North (Minca et al., 2021, p. 3). In the following, I would like to take up these critiques by referring back to Foucault, but with a different accent: The aim is, first, to avoid one-sided emphasis on the concept of biopolitics and, second, to understand sovereignty and biopower not separately, but in a reciprocal conditional relationship by combining the concepts of the people and the population through a theory of society. In this sense, I do not directly aim at proposing an alternative migration studies approach, but rather at elaborating on a closer rereading of Foucault's writings with regard to the co-constitution of migration and society, which can then be used both for the sub-discipline of migration studies as well as for other sociological fields.
Rearticulating a theory of society after Foucault
Although Foucault himself was skeptical about broader theoretical claims and theory in general, I elaborate on the approaches of a (de-)fragmenting theory of society with reference to Foucault in the following (Bublitz, 1999; Honneth, 1993; Lemke, 2015). Being aware of this ambivalence, my aim here is not so much to reconstruct Foucault's work in terms of the history of ideas, but rather to rearticulate his approaches regarding the relationship between migration and society. I take Foucault's work as a starting point without adopting his method: working with but not like Foucault. This goes hand in hand with a dis- and rearticulation of his concepts (Schwiertz, 2024): Based on a de-fragmenting reading of Foucault, I reassemble concepts he formed and conceptualize a theory of society that nonetheless opens up a fragmenting perspective of different ways of looking at “society” and “migration.” I speak here of a fragmenting theory of society, since with Foucault, no general principle can be identified to describe society in its totality. Rather, he shows different perspectives and mechanisms through which sociality is fabricated within the social contexts he examines (Bublitz, 1999, p. 20).
While Foucault’s analytic of power in the first half of the 1970s focused more on the exclusion and disciplining of certain social groups, in the mid-1970s, he increasingly began to examine broader societal relations as such. Foucault developed his theses on the “disciplinary society” (1995, pp. 209, 216–218), the “normalizing society” (2007, 397), or the “society of security” (2007, p. 11). However, I would like to focus less on the historical diagnoses of these notions—through which analytical perspectives are often narrowed and which, many decades after Foucault's analyses, in part no longer seem timely. In order not to repeat a one-sided reference to types of power or their dichotomous distinction, as criticized in the previous section, but rather to relate them more closely, I examine two concepts through whose linkage the social production of society can be understood more precisely: the concepts of “people” and “population.” In the following, I aim to elaborate a particular genealogy of these concepts. I thereby do not claim to comprehensively present the history and impact of both concepts, but develop a genuinely Foucauldian perspective, based on a rereading of his texts and the rearticulation of his concepts. At the same time, this should contribute to linking both concepts, since it is precisely the view of their interplay that opens a multifaceted perspective. On this basis, reductionist analyses can be problematized, which examine migration politics either in terms of nationalism or only in terms of neoliberal population management, whereas I would like to argue for an analysis of the complex articulation of both. This is relevant to understand the entanglement of Foucauldian power types and to better link analyses of migration studies that focus either on the exclusion of migrants, e.g. with regard to right-wing populism, or on the exploitation/instrumentalization of migration in the context of labor regimes.
“The people” as an epistemic-political grid
“The people”
In the penultimate lecture of Society Must Be Defended (2003 (1976)), Foucault examines how collectivities are fabricated, claim legitimacy for themselves, and in the process pacify social conflicts and create unity. The underlying question could be as follows: How are entities constructed in the grid of juridical power that can appear and act as sovereigns, that are subjects and objects of sovereign rule? He distinguishes between the processes of nation-building under feudalism and monarchy and in the context of revolutions.
More specifically, in this passage, Foucault examines the fabrication of a “nation” in the French Revolution. He refers to the famous pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? published by Abbé Sieyès in January 1789, shortly before the overthrow of the estates’ hierarchy of nobility, clergy, and third estate. With reference to this text, in which Sieyès describes a nation as a social body, Foucault elaborates on four aspects of a radical reshaping of the nation-form (2003, pp. 222–223; cf. Isin, 2012, pp. 36–37). First, a political subjectivity is formed “from below” that, unlike the monarchist nation-form, does not need a superior ruler figure to become sovereign. Second, this nation is not only based on formal laws; it is also based on substantial conditions of collective labor and public functions. Related to this, the third aspect is that, in contrast to the historical discourse of the aristocracy, the nation is founded less in terms of a common history than in terms of the present: an actuality as a labor and functional coherence in the here and now. The fourth aspect refers to a leap from the particular to the universal. The nobility reaction was still for a partial right, their privileges as a special group of the nobility. The Third Estate is also particularized but claims to represent the universal: it sees itself, according to Foucault, as “capable of Statist universality” (2003, p. 222). Even though the French Revolution represents a radical break, the rule of the people is also perceived as national sovereignty, since there had already been a nationalization of the state under the king's rule in the previous century (pp. 141–142). Popular sovereignty was already conceived within the framework of “the nation as subject-object of the new history” (p. 143) and described as a bestial being, as Engin Isin points out following Jacques Derrida (2011): “as soon as man emancipated himself from the command of one beast (king), he was absorbed into the command of another beast (‘we, the people’)” (Isin, 2012, p. 35).
Despite these continuities, in comparing the feudal with the democratic rationale, we can see how sovereign entities and bodies are constructed in different ways, which is still significant today, beyond the opposition of Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. Abstracting from historically concrete nation-states, an ethnic nation can be contrasted with a democratic nation, which, in the case of the concept of the people, can also be understood as the difference between ethnos and demos (cf. Balibar, 2004). Both are related to a different “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 2003, pp. 226–229): One form of nation constitutes itself backward-looking in relation to its history, constructing and naturalizing an ethnicity of shared properties; the other forward-looking in relation to its actuality in the present: a political community of self-government and collective production/reproduction. Related to this, different spatial epistemic grids can also be identified: For the conservative nation, external demarcations are constitutive, traditionally above all the demarcation from other nations; what, on the other hand, constitutes the democratic nation is not such a demarcation, but rather the ability to organize collective coexistence based on living labor and to govern itself in the process.
In sum, the nation appears as a concept that represents the unity of a corporate body and seeks to pacify social tensions and legitimize a claim to rule: either consciously particular, with the nobility as the privileged state of society, or universal in the figures of the king or the people as a nation. Especially in those figures, the imagination of unity and totality is revealed: The king as well as the people appear as representatives of the whole society and therefore entitled to rule over it—as sovereign.
Paradoxically, in the course of the democratization of the concept of the nation, which is no longer represented by an elite but equated with the people, there has at the same time been a de-democratization of the concept of the people, which is defined increasingly in terms of a conservative nation, backward-looking and through demarcation. Although the nation in the French tradition first emerged in terms of the ideals of self-determination and universal social inclusion, historically an ethnic, conservative concept of nation has prevailed, based on the imagination of a unified culture and demarcation from an outside, which is currently personified as “migration” (Balibar, 1991). In the following, I will focus on this dominating ethnic concept of the people and how it is enacted by means of exclusion.
The people and its “other”: exclusion of the vagabond criminal
A closer look at dominant approaches to migration and their predecessors reveals how hegemonic concepts of society as a nation rely on the construction, devaluation, and disenfranchisement of an Other. In his lectures on The Punitive Society, Foucault elaborates on how criminality in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century is no longer only related to acts of crime but is personified in the figure of the criminal. The criminal is stylized as an “enemy of society” (Foucault, 2015, p. 45). Accordingly, a violation of the law is understood not only as harm to concrete persons and private interests but as an “attack on society” (Foucault, 2015, p. 62): “the delinquent at the end of the century is defined as a social enemy. Thus, we see the theoretical notion of the criminal as someone who breaks the social contract” (Foucault, 2015, p. 149). The discourse on the enemy of society is closely linked to a contract-theoretical thinking in the line of Hobbes and Rousseau, the imagination of an overall social consensus and cohesion, as conceived with the grid of the people as a nation. The antagonism of the criminal and society is constitutive of the unity of the latter, in that conflicts are externalized. Thus, social cohesion and peace can be imagined by sidelining troublemakers and potential resistance can be pacified and disciplined by the threat of marginalizing oneself through deviant behavior.
In the further course of the lectures on The Punitive Society, it becomes clear how criminalizing discourses are linked to a problematization of migration and a demarcation between good sedentariness and bad migration. Based on a paper by the physiocrat Guillaume-François Le Trosne (Mémoire sur les vagabonds et sur les mendiants, 1764), Foucault traces how vagabondage is designated as “the fundamental category of delinquency” (Foucault, 2015, p. 45). Vagabondage does not appear as individual idleness, as in discourses before, but as “a social group that appears as a counter-society” (p. 46), and that is “no longer part of the order of citizens” (p. 50). The fundamental sin here is the violation of the norm of sedentariness, which is problematized in Le Trosne's economic discourse as leaving an assigned workplace: [The] entry into the world of delinquency is the fact of travelling around, of not being settled on an estate, of not being defined by a job. Crime begins when one has no civil status, that is to say geographical location within a definite community. (p. 46)
Le Trosne's writing reveals a deep linkage between migration and criminalization that underlies the constitution of the social “other”—and thus of society itself—and that continues to have an impact in various forms today, as critical studies on the construction of “crimmigration” show. The term “crimmigration” is used to describe the increasing linkage of migration controls with the criminal justice system in the United States (Menjívar & Kanstroom, 2014) but also a general criminalization of migration. Criminalization in this sense not only leads to an expansion of the legal basis for detention and deportation but also serves as an “ideological glue” of anti-migrant politics: The discursive linking of insecurity and crime with migration is—in interaction with further racist discourses—codified in social common sense and legitimizes social exclusion and state violence (Gonzales, 2014, p. 6). Today, criminalization is more closely linked to racialization and racism than in Le Trosne's narration, and especially in societies that describe themselves as “post-racist,” racial alterization proceeds via criminalization: By constructing migration as an enemy of society due to the criminality attributed to it in common sense, a defense against it is suggested, and, at the same time, the social unity and sovereignty of a national people are generated through this antagonism. Thus, Le Trosne's depiction of the “vagabond” is only an exemplary “figure of migration” (Schwiertz, forthcoming), the analysis of which could inspire not only studies of more recent figures but also of the constitutive effects of the social co-production of migration in a broader sense.
“The population” as an epistemic-political grid
“The population”
The grid of the population gives a different picture of society. It is an epistemic-political grid that operates less on exclusion and more on selection and optimization. Foucault traces back, how this concept emerges in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century (Foucault, 1978, p. 25, 2003, p. 245). “Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a ‘people’, but with a ‘population’, with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables” (Foucault, 1978, p. 25). This new political “figure of population” (Foucault, 2007, p. 79) acquires its significance with biopolitics, which emerges as a productive “power over life” in response to the challenges of industrialization and urbanization (Foucault, 2003, p. 248).
In its entirety, the population appears as a social-biological “species body” (Foucault, 1978, p. 139), which is extremely heterogeneous and eludes direct intervention. Precisely because this multiple social body cannot be grasped in all its details and controlled directly, it is a matter of regulating populations indirectly and by means of estimating probabilities in their development. It is a governmental technology that acts less directly on individuals than on factors in their coexistence, which does not so much prohibit as promote and stimulate (Foucault, 2007, pp. 76–79, 2008, pp. 296–297). The goal here is to achieve acceptable mean values in order to enable “adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital” (Foucault, 1978, p. 141) and overall to “optimize a state of life” (Foucault, 2003, p. 246). Intervention takes place, for example, in the contexts of public health, private savings, or urban milieus. In this respect, however, access to populations relies not only on self-regulation of markets and social contexts but equally on targeted control: Biopolitical mechanisms continuously intervene. In addition to sexuality, which Foucault examines in more detail, the constructions of social categories such as gender, class, race, and ethnicity become variables for population regulation. This particularization of certain traits, behaviors, and groups is fundamental to biopolitical mechanisms designed to ensure “the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault, 2003, p. 249) by promoting certain factors of population development and restricting others.
Biopolitics and sovereignty, or population and people, can be distinguished analytically, but empirically they must be examined in their interrelation. Foucault already elaborates on this at the end of his lecture Society Must Be Defended regarding the National Socialist regime, in which both biopolitical population politics and völkisch sovereignty are taken to an extreme. About two years later, in Security, Territory, Population, Foucault also shows regarding liberal and neoliberal governance that security dispositifs do not replace sovereignty. In his analysis of the liberal regulation of food shortages, it becomes clear how the hunger of a part of the population is accepted, while at the same time, their potential resistance is forcibly kept in check (Foucault, 2007, pp. 30–49). In his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault then relates this context to society as a whole. In the “civil society” constituted by the nation-state, concepts of people and population are articulated: This “complex whole” of civil society makes it possible to govern people according to both registers simultaneously as legal and economic subjects—to make them “governable” (Foucault, 2008, p. 295). On the one hand, this totality construction makes it possible to unite the sovereign and the biopolitical mechanisms in an omnipresent government (p. 296). On the other hand, civil society facilitates social cohesion, in that the unequally positioned economic subjects of the population, placed in competition with one another, obtain equality and a common interest as a national people (pp. 300–308)—an interrelation that Balibar captures with his notion of the “national-social state” (2014, p. 3). In civil society, the nation thus appears as the principle of social integration complementary to the logic of the market—with migration leading to tensions in this pattern but also having a constituting effect.
Optimizing the population through mobility: regulation of circulation
In contrast to the dichotomous demarcation of settled “national people” and migrating “criminals” in the national grid of “the people”—an exclusionary relationship between society and counter-society—finer differentiations are made in the population grid. Non-sedentariness or migration is no longer categorically problematized, but a dynamic differentiation of “good” and “bad” migration is introduced.
In the first part of Security, Territory, Population, Foucault discusses various power techniques of urban planning and, in contrast to sovereignty and disciplinary power, elaborates on the biopolitical “apparatus (dispositif) of security,” whose point of reference is the population. Security dispositifs do not aim at an ideal configuration of space, but at shaping and optimizing a given space (Foucault, 2007, pp. 11–22). Their emergence at the end of the 18th century reacted to a changing problem situation: In view of growing cities and trade networks—but also the nationalization of larger social formations, borders, and citizenship (Brubaker, 1992)—urban space could no longer be demarcated by a city wall. This was seen as a “problem of circulation” (Foucault, 2009, p. 13), since flows of goods and people are vital for a city, but at the same time are perceived as a threat if they transport supposedly sick people, criminals, and vagabonds. Consequently, it is not possible to isolate oneself from these phenomena, which are perceived as threatening, without endangering the productivity of the population, which is why security dispositifs—in contrast to the uniform exclusion of the criminal as an enemy of society—aim at minimizing the risks associated with mobility, even though this inevitably means that sick people, criminals and vagabonds will continue to enter the city, “knowing that they will never be completely suppressed” (p. 19). Security dispositions thus aim at “organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad” (p. 18). Transferred to the field of migration, this power technique is not about a closure against migration or a symbolic exclusion, but about an efficient regulation of real migration flows oriented on cost-benefit calculations, as it is conceived in current programs of a neoliberal migration management. At the same time, the quotation shows that it remains part of this calculation to eliminate the supposedly dangerous, which refers both to the correlation of the types of power analytically distinguished by Foucault (p. 107) and to the unmediated violence of neoliberal migration management.
Rearticulating “people” and “population” as political bodies of modernity
Comparing and relating the grids of people and population
Although I have worked out the concepts of people and population on the basis of different passages of Foucault’s work and they are mainly contrasted by him, they do not describe distinct areas separated from each other, but specific epistemic-political grids that highlight particular social contexts. I grasp people and population as nested and complementary but also contradictory concepts so that their rearticulation generates tensions. As Foucauldian concepts of analysis, they are formed in a constructivist manner: They are associated with different perspectives on the social, each creating specific power-knowledge relations. It is also important to note the two dimensions of the concepts in terms of Giddens’ double hermeneutics of social science: On the one hand, “people” and “population” are epistemic registers of political practice through which specific knowledge of social structures and corresponding modes of action are constructed and regularly reproduced, their regulations often remaining tacit in the sense of Foucault’s concept of discourse or Bourdieu's concept of doxa; on the other hand, they are analytical concepts that enable a theoretical understanding of these processes of construction as well as the mechanisms of power associated with them, thereby elaborating the contexts, conflictuality, and contingency of these processes, which are often disregarded in everyday and governmental practice. By describing the given as less self-evident and as a result of social forces and inequalities, a genealogical approach to “people” and “population” opens up perspectives of radical critique.
Moreover, these epistemological-political grids are not merely linguistic constructs of knowledge, but social constructions with material foundations and effects (Hacking, 2002, p. 100): They are (re)produced through statistical data, identity documents, practices of self-optimization, or everyday racism, to name just a few elements. In this context, the arts of governance in the name of the national people or the productive population are not only operated “from above,” by state apparatuses and other ruling institutions. Rather, these grids are also applied by individuals and groups to themselves and others: This is demonstrated by everyday practices of normalization and “self-normalizing” (Link, 2004, 24), through which the behavior of others or oneself is to be kept within the (hegemonically defined) “framework,” or of ethnic attribution, for instance, through remarks such as “You speak good German!” through which a boundary of national belonging is drawn (Yildiz & Rotter, 2023). These distinct elements, as well as the grids of people/nation and population in whose contexts they stand, are not simply expressions of a given society; rather, they are mechanisms that form society.
Beyond governmental technologies, “people” and “population” are different ways of conceiving and producing social collectivity on a large scale. First, they are different techniques of knowledge production and representation. The concept of the people works through homogenization: It is based on unifying distinctions of “we” and “they” groups (the “others”); in the construction of the people, social complexity is reduced, whereby, in addition to the imagination of unity, violent mechanisms of exclusion and assimilation are at work to produce uniformity. The concept of population, on the other hand, works through heterogenization: It is based on an operationalization of difference through variables, which capture and regulate a population in detail. This is because the sovereign concept of the people “operates in the imaginary” when the unity of a community is legally codified and represented, whereas the biopolitical concept of population works “within the reality of fluctuations” when empirical knowledge forms the basis of the regulation of a population (Foucault, 2007, p. 37). Both the imagination of an antagonism between migration and society and the supposedly realistic utilization of migration in society are based on a powerful but contingent fabrication of social entities. Crucial to this fabrication are the above-discussed categories of vagabond and bad circulation, which both reveal external and internal demarcations of the bodies of people and populations and are at the same time constitutive of them.
Second, the collective grids of people and population are associated with different political rationalities and spheres that are separated in liberal discourses, although they are empirically related. The construction of the people aims primarily at legitimizing and enforcing the ruling power of society; the construction of the population aims at securing and promoting social modes of reproduction and production. Two political-normative evaluation grids are also connected with this. For popular sovereignty, the criterion is to correspond as adequately as possible to a popular will (what in political science terminology can be called input legitimacy), whereas for population regulation it is crucial to increase efficiency and productiveness (output legitimacy) (Foucault, 2008, p. 16).
One grid is usually taken apart in the critique of national exclusion, the other in the critique of capitalist exploitation, whereas it is the combination of both analytical concepts that opens up a view of the tensions of fabricating modern societies in their relationship to migration. Each grid cannot operate to its full potential without jeopardising the operation of the other, either by undermining unity or by blocking circulation. The regulation by the population grid, which is oriented toward social productivity, counteracts, undermines, and perforates the unified demarcations of the people grid. Conversely, this clear demarcation of inside and outside, the homogenization of a society by the people grid, runs counter to a more efficient utilization of mobile groups by the population grid. These tensions are reflected in the contradiction between (neo)liberal policies of skilled labor immigration, on the one hand, and a nationalist, right-wing policy of closure against migration, on the other. And both are rearticulated in the compromises of current migration regimes, in which these tensions are by no means eliminated, but lead to ever new crises. At the same time, the two grids complement and stabilize each other, as the population grid facilitates the wealth of a nation, and the people grid facilitates the pacifying cohesion of the unequal social relations on which the population grid operates. While I have emphasized the specificity of the two concepts in the respective sections, it is important to stress how migration appears at the intersection and through the tensions of the grids of people and population, which I will now illustrate.
Migration at the intersection of the grids of people and population
Through an exemplary analysis of the discourses on skilled migration and deportation, I would like to show how mechanisms that are clearly related to one of the two epistemic-political grids can at the same time be linked to the rationality of the other, in order to highlight the complementary and tense relationship between people/population: (a) immigration programs that are primarily oriented toward the population grid but assign migrant workers a status that is likewise overdetermined by the people grid and (b) struggles over deportations that are to be advanced and enforced primarily in the name of the national people, whereby the situations fought over here are often overdetermined by the population grid, which makes it possible to bypass or resist exclusion and deportation by referring to one's own usefulness.
Demography and skilled migration
The fundamental exclusion of migration in the people grid is frequently opposed not so much from the perspective of migrants or from a humanitarian point of view, but in the interest of optimizing the population. It is precisely in this discourse on the usefulness of migration in the face of “skilled labor shortages” and “demographic development” that the grid of the “population” typically dominates. In the summer of 2021, to give an example, the chairman of the German Federal Employment Agency demanded that 400,000 migrants per year be brought to Germany—significantly more than before: This would not be a matter of “asylum” but “targeted immigration to fill the gaps in the labor market.” 5 Ethnic concepts of the people are indirectly acknowledged, but they are regarded as subordinate to the interests of the economy, when he said: “You can stand up and say: We don’t want any foreigners. But that doesn’t work. The fact is: Germany is running out of workers.”
This emphasis on the usefulness of migration as part of a population to be optimized is central to neoliberal “migration management” (Georgi & Schatral, 2012). This is well illustrated by the approach of the German government's coalition agreement of 2021, which can also be read as a programmatic readjustment of the relationship between the people and population. It does not aim at a simple demarcation of a national people from the “others” but rather perceives Germany as a “country of immigration” and focuses on shaping the reality of population movements: “With an active and ordering policy, we want to shape migration in a forward-looking and realistic way. We will reduce irregular migration and enable regular migration” (Coalition Agreement, 2021, p. 138). This quote demonstrates a policy that does not merely start from an ideal (of imagining a homogenized ethnic nation) but starts with actual circumstances (“realistic”), which does not merely prohibit but shapes future-oriented (“forward-looking”) with an “active and ordering” approach. To this end, bad circulation is to be minimized and good circulation maximized: Migration is therefore not excluded across the board, but a distinction is made between “bad” and “good” migrations. What is defined as “regular migration” is measured by utility calculations, which are operationalized according to sector-specific criteria in a complex system of immigration regulations. The relatively open migration policy is declared a core element of a “skilled labor strategy” that assumes that Germany needs “more labor immigration” (p. 32)— an approach that has been codified in the reform of skilled worker immigration law (“Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz”) in 2023.
In the population policy approach to migration management, however, these targeted immigration mechanisms are not only highly selective but are also linked to deportation mechanisms intended to reduce or reverse the bad circulation categorized as “irregular migration.” The announcement of a “deportation offensive” and the more rigorous “deportation of criminals and dangerous persons” (p. 140) reveals linkages to criminalizing discourses of the national people grid and the persistence of a sovereign decision about belonging and borders. Migrant “criminals and dangerous persons” are the subjects who, as the essential others of the nation, form its constitutive outside, and, at the same time, the measures of deportation and bordering are legitimized qua criminalization. Furthermore, re-regularization mechanisms show how the failure of previous regulatory approaches is also to be considered and productively utilized. Provided that they demonstrate outstanding “integration achievements” (including the demonstration of German language skills, particularly good academic, vocational or professional performance, and civic engagement), residence rights are granted to persons who have already been expelled and merely have a “toleration” status (the temporary suspension of deportation). In line with principles of meritocratic citizenship, rights are thus granted to population groups that prove to be particularly productive. The citizenship law also provides for a meritocratic selection mechanism: For example, naturalization is to be accelerated “in the case of outstanding integration achievements.”
Although this case shows how mechanisms of population regulation are central, their effectiveness is based on relations of domination and violence. The fact that the above-described demands for the granting of rights are placed on certain individuals is based on their principal disenfranchisement qua migrantization and thus on the national people grid. These are demands that are not placed on German citizens to the same extent—which in turn is translated into a graduated system of rights for different migrant groups according to the cost-benefit calculation of the population grid. Nevertheless, it is only because of the fundamental difference of national/nonnational that such an invocation and productization of groups becomes possible. By categorizing them as non-belonging, a work of making oneself belong can be called for. Nevertheless, this linkage of marginalization and disciplining is not limited to the field of migration, insofar as the governing of migration functions as a laboratory of precarization and intersects with other social fields.
Demonstrating usefulness and integration achievements to protect against deportation
A good two years later, in addition to the reform of the Immigration Act for Skilled Workers (“Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz”), the self-declared progressive coalition has above all expanded its focus on repressive migration measures, leading some legal experts to say that it is “one of the most right-wing governments Germany has ever had in terms of migration.” 6 This can be seen not least in the “deportation offensive” demanded by the right, proclaimed by the chancellor as quoted above and codified in a bill for faster deportations in the spring of 2024 (“Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz”). The talk of a “loss of control” (Joachim Gauck) and of migration as the “mother of all problems” (Horst Seehofer) echoes the early anti-migrant discourse that Foucault elaborated in Le Trosne: in which the exclusion of migration constitutes a national society, while at the same time the presence of migration appears as an attack on the nation, in whose defense national sovereignty is to be restored and legitimized. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that very few of the ordered deportations are actually carried out, so that in addition to the “border spectacle” (De Genova, 2013) of the symbolism of sovereignty, it is above all the potentiality of deportation, which De Genova (2002) defines as “deportability,” that functions as a technology of control and discipline. Furthermore, deportations, while central to the imagination of a national people, are at the same time linked to the population grid.
Another case in point of the close interplay between the grids of people and population are therefore conflicts around residence rights, in which the willingness to work hard and the compliance with nationally defined norms of the persons concerned are often emphasized in order to prevent their deportation (Rosenberger et al., 2018). According to discourses of integration, assimilation, and “good” migration, two forms of performative citizenship can be distinguished that allow migrants to justify their residence despite the lack of a formal status: In the population grid, this is meritocratic citizenship, through which rights are conferred depending on labor, performance, and “human capital”; in the people grid, this is national-cultural citizenship, which opens up rights depending on cultural fit to the norms of an imagined national community (Schwiertz, 2021).
The strengthening of discourses on integration and usefulness in the sense of the population grid has led to deportations being problematized even by conservative politicians in some cases. For example, Oulios cites statements by conservative politician Armin Laschet, who described the deportation of a high-achieving student who had lived in Germany for more than 10 years as not only “inhumane” but also contrary to Germany's economic interests: “And we deport these children as if there were no demographic change or economic crisis in Germany. Absurd!” (cited in Oulios, 2015: 240f.). In another case of a high school student threatened with deportation, most supporters pointed to her excellent integration, with one politician calling her a “German by achievement” (cited in Schwenken & Schwiertz, 2021, p. 99). Similar narratives are also articulated by larger right-to-stay campaigns, for example, when those who have spent most of their lives in Germany and who are, so to speak, “like Germans” come to the fore, making it seem frighteningly unjustified that they are excluded from many spheres of society. As in local anti-deportation protests, such right-to-stay campaigns also refer to the dispositif of integration by tactically citing figures of “good” migration through individual cases (Schwiertz, 2019, p. 299f.; Anderson et al. 2011). This also shows how the grids of people and population are internalized by those affected, leading to processes of adoption and “self-normalization.”
The downside of this opportunity structure is also a forced deportability of the supposedly useless and non-integratable, “bad” migration. In the sense of the population grid—“maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad” (Foucault, 2007, p. 18)—a uniform boundary between the national people and migration is not imagined here, but rather the reality of migration is approached in order to regulate it through deportations or the threat of them. Deportations are ascribed to the task of “‘making room’ for the ‘desired’ immigrants by enforcing the departure of the ‘undesired’ - if necessary by force” (Oulios, 2015: 220).
Conclusion
Problematizing the dominant view on migration, I have developed elements of a Foucauldian theory of society that suggest reversing the perspective. It shifts the focus from migrantized social groups to the epistemic-political grids of “people” and “population,” through which dominant notions of migration and society are mutually co-produced. These elements of a constructivist, multi-perspectival, or (de)fragmenting theory of society show how sociality is constructed through various grids that aim at unity on the one hand and usefulness on the other. As these grids operate through demarcation and selection, migration becomes a central reference point for the fabrication of society under the current conditions of the Global North. Therefore, the discussion of migration did open up an alternative perspective on the concepts of people and population drawn from Foucault's works through an analysis of the categories of vagabondage and bad circulation, which are most currently associated with migration. This highlighted the relevance of bordering and migration processes, which Foucault barely addressed, for the constitution of society.
Taking these interrelations into account could also help to revise and advance perspectives drawing on Foucault to avoid a modernist stage model of development from people to population as well as the analytical outsourcing of sovereign power to non-European territories (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020; Mayblin & Turner, 2020; Minca et al., 2021). Such a Foucauldian theory of society makes it possible to go beyond the limited analytical perspective of governmentality and biopolitics studies in several ways. The study of the interrelated constructions of people and population, each of which entails a holistic approach to society, can render the fabrication of society comprehensible that does not remain limited to individual types of power, but, like Foucault, starts from their conjunction. Indirect biopolitical population regulation is linked to direct interventions of sovereign rule and violence, thus responding to the criticism that governmentality and biopolitics studies cannot adequately capture the dominant approach to migration. Furthermore, the interrelatedness of the concepts of people and population allows us to grasp key tensions in the field of migration, as I have outlined through the brief examples, and which could certainly be extended through a more comprehensive analysis of how and in what conjunctures capitalism, nationalism, and racism interact regarding these two grids (Balibar, 1991, 2004; Hall, 1980), also in the broader context of “a postcolonial world of nation-states” (Sharma, 2025, p. 5).
Yet, it is necessary to deepen the perspective on larger societal settings developed here by perspectives on modes of relations in smaller- or medium-scale settings, which could not be further developed in the context of this paper. The theoretical conceptualization of people and population in general terms needs to be grounded in situated analysis that considers how the people and populations are differently enacted in particular sites (Scheel, 2020), e.g. through data practices or integration courses. While primarily hegemonic articulations have been examined here that Foucault also focused on, it would furthermore be important to analyze these in conjunction with counter- or non-hegemonic rearticulations of a concept of the people as demos in radical democratic manifestations, such as refugee protests (Stierl, 2018; Schwiertz, 2022), or the alternative enactment of a population as a vibrant community of commoning or mobile commons. Thereby, the genealogy of people and population could also bring into view how these concepts are renegotiated, reappropriated, subverted, or transformed in tactics and struggles of migration enacted by plebs or “migrant multiplicities” (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020; Tazzioli, 2019, p. 15; Agustín & Jørgensen, 2025).
Overall, the social theory outlined here is linked to a critical analytics that aims to reveal the inherent contingency and conflictuality of social phenomena. The way migration is treated within the grid of the people and the population is not only of interest for migration studies but tells a lot about the self-description of a society and is thus relevant for social theory. In terms of Foucauldian genealogy, this theoretical work is intended to trigger the “truth effect” that power mechanisms in their respective specific relations can be recognized as such and challenged. I would thus like to show how many modes of representing and dealing with migration refer to problematic conceptions of people and population, the critique of which would require a comprehensive rethinking and other-doing. The critical reconstruction of the concepts of “people” and “population” aimed not only at providing theoretical tools to better grasp the tense co-construction of migration and society; it should also push us to think beyond this objectification of migration in dominant discourses, beyond epistemological-political grids that operate by constructing migration as either a threat or a resource.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Urs Stäheli, Kyan Pur-Djandaghi, Thorsten Schlee, the participants of the workshop of the Section “Migration and Ethnic Minorities” at the 41st Congress of the German Sociological Association (2022) in Bielefeld, and the participants of the authors' workshop for the special issue co-edited with Martin Bak Jørgensen in which this paper appears.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
