Introduction: ‘Lunatic Immigrants’

Abstract

The Introduction surveys the current literature on migration and mental illness, and the policy and practice of medico-legal border controls. In doing so, it positions this book as going ‘beyond the asylum’ in its approach; taking a bureaucratic view of the attempts to exclude insane immigrants using a broad archival knowledge base. Considering border control from a number of vantage points: policymakers, migrant recruiters, medical reformers, port officials, shipping operators and the migrants themselves, provides the main research theme running through this book—the evolving attempts to measure and exclude the ‘transient insane’.