Irregular migration and the politics of (in)visibility

Abstract

While categorisations into ‘lawfully’ and ‘unlawfully’ resident, ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’. ‘documented’ and ’undocumented’ migrants are part of modern states’ practices of making populations ‘legible’ and thus subject to acts of governance (Scott, 1998), such categorisations are also deeply ambivalent, as those classified as ‘irregular’, ‘undocumented’ or ‘clandestine’ are not necessarily easily identifiable, countable and indeed governable. Irregular migrants are in a sense ‘less legible’, as irregular migrants’ identity remains in the shadows and key features of the irregular migrant population remain unknown. Irregular migrants thus are elusive subjects of governance (Boswell/ Badenhoop, 2020). At the same time, irregular migrants are at times also hypervisible – migrants rescued at sea are a case in point, while those subject to illegal push-backs operations are again a consciously hidden category. A third dimension of (in)visibility concerns the (in)visibilisation of particular aspects of an individual’s situation (such as vulnerability or family links to legal residents) employed, for example, in contestations of deportations. A further dimension is the relationship between (in)visibility and access to fundamental rights: often it is only wilful ignorance and a ‘don’t ask/don’t tell’ approach that enables irregular migrants to access basic rights – so-called firewall policies represent the most formalised version of such an approach. This panel seeks to unpack these different dimensions and the politics of (in)visibilisation and (in)visibility in the context of irregular migration and addresses conceptual, theoretical and empirical dimensions.

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