The emotional infrastructure of migration governance

Migration governance regulates not only who moves but how people are made to feel. Fear, humiliation, and exhaustion are not incidental to migration control but patterned into its emotional infrastructure – the policies, technologies, and bureaucratic routines that structure mobility. This article conceptualises emotional infrastructure to show how emotions, while lived as contingent and subjective, acquire durability when affective intensities are codified, routinised, and reproduced through bureaucratic systems. Extending the infrastructural turn in migration studies, it distinguishes affect as diffuse, relational intensity from emotion as socially legible and administratively interpretable form, and theorises emotional infrastructures as cross-scalar mechanisms through which power, legitimacy, and endurance are organised. A three-layer analytic – macro (state affective strategies), meso (institutional emotional regimes), and micro (migrants’ emotional subjectivities) – demonstrates how repertoires such as suspicion, detachment, and despair are stabilised across governance scales. The article reframes emotions as infrastructural forces rather than managed variables, relocating ethical responsibility from individual encounters to the bureaucratic arrangements that systematically produce affective harm, while also highlighting counter-infrastructures of care and dignity.