Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life
2002/09/11 by Nicholas P. De Genova, Nicholas De Genova · 3,413 citations
Social Sciences · #Business #Epistemology #Everyday life #Gender studies #Law #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration studies #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Order (exchange) #Political science #Politics #Scholarship #Sex work and related issues #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432
published in Annual Review of Anthropology 31(1), 419-447 (Annual Reviews)
openalex publication_date 2002/09/11 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
▪ Abstract This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant “illegality” and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant “illegality” as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the “illegality” of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of “illegalization” themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant “illegality.”
Citations
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