Performing Border Externalisation: Media Deterrence Campaigns and Neoliberal Belonging

Migration deterrence campaigns are part of a set of border externalisation strategies that extend one nation’s border into other territories. Building on the literature of border externalisation, migration deterrence, and feminist media studies, we address these campaigns as critical performative strategies that enact neoliberal ideologies and depoliticise migration. We analyse three cases – two from the US and one from Europe – in which nations target would-be migrants with multimedia messaging to persuade them to stay home and become productive citizens in their countries of origin. We argue that these campaigns reify neoliberal notions of the moral, responsible citizen, and the criminal or bound-to-falter migrant. In particular, deterrence media embrace the paradoxical notion that migrants are responsible for making the right choice yet possess no agency. As our discussion demonstrates, strategies that discourage people from moving enact neoliberal ideologies that treat migration as a purely individual decision, decontextualised from issues of structural inequality.