Mobility and the Security Paradigm: How Immigration Became Securitized in Finnish Law and Policy

Abstract

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 secu-rity of migrants appear in these debates on the other end of the spectrum.