The securitisation of migration in the UK has reinforced the binary categorisation of population versus ‘other’. Whilst the exposure of the mechanisms of biopolitical control in literatures critical of securitising practices has been extremely valuable, the notion of the population itself, and its relationship to the other, has remained largely unexplored in these accounts. This paper seeks to disrupt the accepted binarisation by shifting focus towards the ‘margins’ of the population, understood as the domain where populations are ontologically and discursively constituted, demarcated and disrupted. Through a focus on migration practices in the UK, or the complex play of governance-resistance productive and disruptive of the figure of the immigrant, the paper explores the ways in which the categories of population and 'other' - inside and outside - are both most forcefully reinforced and break down in the 'margins'.
