The state produces migrant illegality systemically to enable selective deportability

Evidence

To elaborate these concerns I investigate the relationship between the state and migration in terms of the production of illegality as part of informal and underground economies that often cooperate with formal markets for migrant labor. Beginning in Pakistan, the illicit mechanisms of labor migration blur into a complex economy that simultaneously produces a formal and informal market for labor. The Gulf region also serves as an important hub to naturalize illegality as a prototype to represent migrant workers and the framework to imagine migrants’ subjectivity in relationship to the state’s legal apparatus. As these frameworks of illegality circulate globally, they distinguish Pakistani workers within a larger labor diaspora, and under the global War on Terror, to demarcate dangerous migrants and potential terrorists. The identification of criminality is itself constructed through broad historical practices of demonizing and racializing migrants. That migrants are constructed through the concept of ”illegality” is a direct control of the migration system in which laws and regulations surrounding migrant life construct a selective system of deportability. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 653

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core concept of illegality as a state-produced construction enabling a selective deportability system, setting up the chapter’s analytical frame.
• XREF: connects to: States choose official labels for mass migrants that encode their intended outcome — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 54