Biopolitical settler colonialism: Dawit Tesfay Haile, ‘Settler colonial biopolitics at the border: a transnational entanglement of law, medical sciences, and migration control at Ellis Island’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

02Oct26

Abstract: Migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is known for its confrontation with racialized and gendered migration control. In line with this, this paper aims to analytically extend the migration control of that period to the biopolitics of settler colonialism. By patchworking transnational archives (in the United States and the Netherlands), it investigates how medical and immigration control infrastructures were established at Ellis Island (US) and how they operated to identify ‘undesirable immigrants’. Using the lens of biopolitics of settler colonialism, it pays attention to (1) the dominant racialized and medicalized imaginaries behind migration control, (2) the particular socio-spatial arrangement of migration inspection at Ellis Island, and (3) the transnational biopolitical entanglements at play, in the sense that administrative practices at Ellis Island informed practices of commercialized services (Holland America Line) and local authorities in the Netherlands. By empirically and analytically foregrounding the biopolitical formations inherent to settler colonialism in general, and the transnationalized medicalization of border control in particular, this paper shows how the construction of the ‘undesirable migrant’ simultaneously (re)produced the settler colonial imaginary of ‘whiteness’ as well as the imaginary of physical and mental fitness of the nation.