It’s not a state of exception, but a regime of exception---Capitalism is the root cause.

Mulvey Gareth and Davidson Neil- Profs @ U. of Glasgow, UK; “Between the crises: Migration politics and the three periods of neoliberalism”; [TMS—GK]

Vanguard and social neoliberalism emerged sequentially, but once the latter had modified the overall nature of the regime, it became possible for governments to alternate. The return of the Conservatives to office in the United Kingdom, first in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats (2010) then as a majority government (2015), might suggest that crisis neoliberalism is simply a return to vanguard politics, but this would be simplistic. Vanguardism cannot be revived in its original form, partly because the division between vanguard and social neoliberalism has to a certain extent broken down, but mainly because most of the original economic objectives of vanguard neoliberalism were achieved. That said, a return of aspects of vanguardism may be more evident in migration practice, to which we return below. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, wrote the German legal theorist and future Nazi Carl Schmitt (2006 [1922]: 5) in 1920. By this, Schmitt meant that sovereigns, which could be collective bodies, were defined by the ability to suspend established legal norms during moments, which they deemed to be crises or emergencies. In effect, the decision to which Schmitt refers involves identifying those groups which are to be treated as outside the law. Much of the more critical securitization work points to migrants being placed outside of the law through the employment of ‘extraordinary measures’ (see, for example, Bigo 2002). At the dawn of neoliberalism, left commentators predicted that a new form of ‘exceptional state’ was emerging in response to the crisis (Hall et al. 1978). Their error was partly one of timing and partly in relation to where the exception lay. For what is being constructed are not ‘states of exception’ but rather regimes of exception – involving both preemptive repression and diversionary scapegoating of groups ranging from people with disabilities to the entire Muslim population and, increasingly, to migrants from both inside and outside of the EU.