The deep structure of internal borders

The externalisation of borders around the world has attracted significant scholarly interest and activist concern. However, in order to reinforce boundaries of membership, many governments across the Global North have simultaneously been intensifying and diversifying their internal bordering efforts, aimed at expelling a variety of ‘crimmigrant others’. Understanding borders as processes for the sorting of populations to enable differential treatment, reveals internal borders to be ideologically infused technologies of differential in/exclusion. In this chapter I use empirical case studies to delineate the ‘deep structures’ connecting three very different instantiations of the internal border in Australia, by identifying the recurring themes that connect them. Shifting the focus from external to internal bordering highlights the increasingly permeable boundary between inclusion and exclusion, between physical borders and social boundaries, between the domains of administrative and criminal law, and between forms of physical and social exclusion directed towards both citizens and non-citizens.