This article gives a
philosophical account of how and why public authorities employ time in the
context of long-term pre-removal immigration detention (LPID) in Europe. Existing
philosophical accounts see immigration detention as an expression of sovereign
power, disciplinary power or governmentality. Most persuasive is the paradigm
of detainability (De Genova). This article finds that the existing
philosophical accounts can capture aptly most forms of migrant detention and
areas of migration policy (e.g., asylum detention, hotspots, and the border
detention regimes at the fringes of Europe), but not LPID in Europe. An
alternative logic can better explain how and why authorities deploy LPID:
indifference. Authorities simply do not care about the migrant’s time. They are
indifferent and think they can afford to be indifferent, because the problem is
politically, legally, and logistically irrelevant. A practical upshot of the
findings in this article relates to modes of resistance. If LPID is not a
matter of disciplinary power and governmentality, then the corresponding modes
to resist disciplinary power and governmentality are unavailable or obsolete.
By contrast, if LPID is better understood in terms of indifference, resistance
may come from an unexpected source, namely individual officials acting by
stealth.