ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the central conceptual concern of how and why do migration legal practices disavow responsibility for the violent effects of their power. It begins with a case of immigration's breach of privacy in order to situate the gulf between non-citizens' experience of discretionary power and what the law claims is a just approach to responsibility. Drawing on policing and administrative law scholarship, the chapter proposes three lens though which the organisation of discretionary authority in migration control registers with greater clarity: the concentration of power at the front end of the migration process, the targeting of status, and the masking of differentiation through legal rhetoric of equality. Turning to issues of responsibility for power, the chapter contends that conceptualising the plural legalities of migration law using the tools of legal scale and jurisdiction is productive for identification of the disjuncture between frameworks of responsibility and migration laws effects.
