US Border Patrol on the US-Mexico border. byroN José sun/Flickr. Creative Commons.
We are led to believe that there is something self-evident and straightforward about migrant ‘illegality’. Some migrants are categorised as ‘illegal’ because they have presumably violated ‘the Law’. Yet in most depictions of these migrants, there is little if any account of what the law truly is, or of how it came to be so. The law, after all, has a history, and it is a deeply politicised history of deliberate and more or less calculated interventions. As such, it is impossible to contemplate the real social and political condition of migrants outside of the larger contexts that produce specific predicaments of ‘illegality’.
Migrants only become ‘illegal’ when legislative or enforcement-based measures render particular migrations or types of migration ‘illegal’—or in other words, illegalise them. From this standpoint, there are not really ‘illegal’ migrants so much as illegalised migrants. The real origins of such illegalisations are to be found in the deliberations, debates, and decisions of lawmakers. The law that illegalises migrants remains largely invisible, while the spectre of the devious and cunning migrant becomes hyper-visible through mass media representations of border policing. This is what I have described in my book Working the Boundaries as a spectacle of enforcement at ‘the’ border, whereby migrant ‘illegality’ is rendered spectacularly visible.
