ABSTRACT

Migration law and legal practices involve extraordinary powers to make people illegal which are often overlooked as a consequence of their discretionary nature and of legal conventions of its administrative jurisdiction. Far from discretionary authority operating with residual flexibility to deal with exceptional matters, it is organised in particular ways that enhance its power and obscure responsibility for its effects. The conclusion draws together how discretionary authority and non-responsibility have been organised through the policing of status. It argues that if, as a number of scholars have argued, the differential regimes of entitlements produced by migration laws bolster a system of 'global apartheid', then it is even more important that the law's work in marginalising the voices of those it makes illegal be resisted. The chapter also offers a fundamental insight that is emblematic of how officials imagine the authority that immigration law extends.