How does your research speak to contemporary policies surrounding immigration and citizenship and their intersection with processes of racialization?

My research interests are the politics of citizenship, migration, and belonging. I study why states come to exclude their own citizens and what the historical antecedents are for doing so. In my dissertation, I argued that imperial history and the experience of colonial rule plays a significant role in laying down the foundations for such exclusions, particularly through security perceptions ascribed to different groups. I studied this using the case of the British Empire in South Asia and drew heavily from archival sources.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries was the time when the passport and visa system that is ubiquitous today was crystallized. And in that time, degrees of mobility were intricately tied to the functions and needs of mostly European empires, which were economic extraction (through settler colonization, slavery, and then indenture) and creating and maintaining racial purity and white dominance. Immigration controls were the mechanism through which racial distance was maintained and regulated. If you look at particular exclusionary citizenship and immigration policies today, in the United States, in Europe, Britain, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka—you name it, you can see that it is ultimately about achieving some form of racial or ethnic or religious homogeneity.

But if you extrapolate to the global scale and think about which passports give you the most mobility in terms of visa-free travel, and which ones give you the least, and tie that in with conversations we are having right now in academia about how conferences/workshops/research life in the West are so often unreachable spaces outside the grasp of global south scholars simply because of the nationality stamped on their passport, the underlying structure of that does not look that much different from what I find when I look at imperial migration controls.