Ad-hocratic Immigration Governance: How States Secure Their Power Over Immigration Through Intentional Ambiguity

This article theorizes ad-hocratic immigration governance to capture a state’s intentional use of ambiguity to secure its power over immigration. It does so by analyzing how Moroccan and Tunisian authorities have governed immigration since the turn of the 21st century. Drawing on over 100 interviews conducted throughout 2016 and 2017 and policy analysis covering the 2000-2020 period, the paper shows that in both Morocco’s monarchy and Tunisia’s young democracy, legal reform has remained minimal over the past decade, as authorities have preferred to govern immigration through exemptions, informal arrangements and executive politics. The paper argues that the intentional ambiguity created by such ad-hocratic governance allowed both Morocco’s monarchy and Tunisia’s young democracy to respond to external and bottom-up demands for more immigrant rights while at the same time securing the state’s margin of manoeuvre over immigration: With authorities opting for flexibility, pragmatism and informality in immigration governance, migrants’ rights can be gone as quickly as they came, and nothing is guaranteed in the long term. Such theorization of ad-hocracy is not limited to Morocco and Tunisia, but also provides fruitful ground to theorize immigration governance across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as their European neighborhood, where states increasingly and deliberately mobilize flexible, pragmatic and informal policy tools to bolster migration control.