ABSTRACT
Migration law has long been understood to embody three distinct structural characteristics or stages: exclusion, admission, and deportation. This model has increasingly become descriptively inaccurate and normatively inadequate. As millions of people cross borders, often in desperation and fear, including many without legal recognition or with various complex legal statuses, states have reacted with increasingly sophisticated modes of governmental (and sometimes privatized) control. These evolving phenomena present profound analytic, legal, and normative challenges. This chapter describes two systems in which the traditional categories of migration study blur: a fast-track U.S. deportation system known as expedited removal, and the expanding global regime of so-called voluntary returns. The chapter considers how these mechanisms (one might call them “border cases”) offer productive ways to reframe critical (that is, both descriptive and normative) analysis.
