“No One Is Illegal”

This chapter suggests that a radical regrounding of political community must challenge not only the bounds of nation and borders, and create cosmopolitan solidarities, but also the depoliticization produced by a juridical understanding of political agency. It points to the paradoxical role of the law in, at the same time, confirming and containing the migrants’ political agency. The “No One Is Illegal” movement, taken as a case study, has effectively denounced the productivity of law in producing migrant illegality and thus exposed law’s complicity to the exclusionary policies of the nation-state, while at the same time the movement returns to the law to require universal possibility for all people to exist within the law, and within the law’s protection. Such juridical foundationalism cannot solve the challenge of depoliticization and the associated practice of objectification. This remains to be addressed by an enactment of the universal capacity of the political subject to reinvent herself and her relationship with the world beyond the horizon of the existing law and of human rights.