Long abstract:

The calculation of migrant mobilities, understood as transforming mobile people into abstract, analyzable, and manageable populations, is a key element of “border management” approaches. This paper analyzes how calculation becomes justified through different regimes of worth. Drawing on Valuation Studies, the paper asks how the calculation of mobilites is (e)valued and justified in varying ways, endowed with different meanings and rationales of control, and thus enacted through different material devices and practices. To this end, it delves into the multiple regimes of worth, which must confer social and moral legitimacy to contemporary techniques and devices of calculation. These regimes will reveal not only differing conceptualizations and principles underpinning the concept of “calculation”, but also how border governance employs diverse ways of describing, valuing, and counting “mobilities”. Empirically, the paper suggests drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the Border Management Today journal, a global industry/private-led outlet that has issued publications between 2018 and 2023. The goal of the analysis is to enhance our understanding of contemporary calculatory concepts, practices, and devices in migration governance—not as an expression of a single universal rationale of bordering but by exposing the multiplicity of underlying values, ideologies, and justificatory principles. In a broader sense, the paper intends to contribute to a critical engagement with emerging value regimes, shifting discursive hegemonies, and the changing actor networks in “border management”.