CHAPTER 4 Illegibility in the Migration Regime [The] ‘correct understanding of something and misunderstanding of the same thing are not entirely mutually exclusive’. (Kafka, The Trial, Chapter 28, authors’ translation) In Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’, we are told how the doorkeeper initiates frequent interviews with the man from the country, about his home and other things. Yet the doorkeeper poses the questions with deliberate indifference and always concludes by stating that the man cannot be let in. The man has also collected things from his journey, all of which he gives to the doorkeeper, hoping that any of those things will help his case. The doorkeeper accepts all of this, yet without offering any reassurance. The man tirelessly continues his efforts to persuade the doorkeeper and awaits in front of the gate for many years, uncertain as to what it is that stands between him and the law, and whether he will ever access it. The tireless yet seemingly meaningless efforts of Kafka’s man from the country to make sense of what ‘the law’ demands from him bear stark similarities to the struggles of our migrant interlocutors trying to ‘read’ the legal authorities impacting their fate. The absurdity and unpredictability they experience in these endeavours can partly be explained by migrants’ limited knowledge of and access to ‘the law’, by the gaps and overlaps in legislation (see Chapter 2), but also by the unpredictability of legal practice—and by officials’ limited knowledge of these very same legal frameworks. © The Author(s) 2019 T. G. Eule et al., Migrants Before the Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98749-1_4 111 112 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS In the previous chapter, we showed how, beyond black letter law, discretionary decision-making opens up for creative possibilities of ‘tinkering’ with the law in order to make it fit the reality at hand. This chapter explores the effects of informal legal practices and equally informal forms of knowledge about law, which are used by migrants, experts of migration law and state officials alike. Hence, this chapter asks how knowledge transfer regarding law takes place among migrants, state and other actors, and argues that rumours and other forms of uncertain information play a crucial role in shaping their strategies and behaviours. In order to understand how law as practice is anticipated and acted upon, we have to consider the ways in which information about law is accessed, shared, interpreted and used within spaces of asymmetrical negotiations. From the perspective employed in our research, we find that for both lay people and state officials, ‘the law’ is rather removed from black letter texts. As a result, legal practices cannot be understood from a comparison of lawas-text and (in)action alone. Instead, we need to understand the different shapes in which law is present in the everyday life of the different actors in the migration regime. Moving inside migration offices, detention and asylum centres, and border control posts, we find messy and sometimes contradictory practices, which do not rigidly follow black letter law but build on informal knowledge and expectations that are used to compensate for often unreadable and mistrusted legal frameworks. Indeed, by relying on vague ideas of law, on oral traditions and rumours, state actors, legal advisors and migrants, respectively, appropriate the law and produce new hopes, ideas and practices of law that are ‘true enough’ for them to act upon. Importantly, by shedding light on migrants’ anticipation and usages of law, we highlight how they not only stand ‘before the law’—as in Kafka’s parable—but are also caught up in legal procedures and thus need to engage with law. Yet, due to migrants’ precarious legal position and the difficulties they experience in anticipating migration control enforcement, the law holds an almost magical power, which causes migrants to feel powerless in front of the law. While law can open up new opportunities, it also serves to reproduce existing power relations. The chapter is structured in three parts. First, we show the ways in which state practices are experienced as absurd and overwhelming. Crucially, it is not only the formal powers granted to state actors, but also the informal and unreadable ways in which these powers are executed that evoke feelings of powerlessness among migrants. Second, without overstating the informality and obscurity of these practices, we find 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 113 it important to describe what we call the ‘illegibility effect’, in order to highlight the importance of knowledge, however imperfect, in navigating the migration regime. The third part of the chapter examines how knowledge about law is accessed, traded and used by all actors in the migration regime. We show that everyone struggles to know ‘enough’, and that due to the complexity of the migration law enforcement, migrants as well as legal advisors and state officials base their actions on rumours and informal ideas of the law. The fourth part of the chapter concludes by stating that uncertain information is inherently productive and shapes not only informal practices but also serves as basis of formalised law enforcement. This dynamic also contributes to making legal practices ‘illegible’, not only to those subjected to the law, but also for state officials enforcing it. We hold that illegibility is mostly an outcome of informal practices rather than an intentional programme. However, it can also be deliberately used to either enhance or obstruct law enforcement. EXPERIENCING BUREAUCRATIC ABSURDITY Daniel, a man in his mid-thirties, had been living in Austria for many years. His asylum case had been rejected and when asked if he understands why he is not granted asylum or any other sort of residence permit in Austria, he emphasised the influence of police officers, ‘references’ as he called them, which were assigned to his case. According to Daniel, they hold great discretionary power with regard to legal procedures: D: You see these people [the authorities] … they do what they like. They handle us the way they like. […] A: But do you know why you don’t get documents? D: Because [the reference] doesn’t want to prove it. […]. It’s his decision. He’s my reference, everybody here has a reference. A: But there is also law? D: Law does not work for us […], for immigrants […]. It depends, if you have a good reference […]. Is he or she in a good mood, they can do anything for you. (interview Austria 2016) When anticipating or reflecting on the outcomes of their applications for asylum or other forms of legal residency, many migrants recalled courses of events that had little to do with due process, rule of law or actual 114 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS black letter migration law. To them, the way border and migration officials handled their cases seemed confusing and biased. Indeed, one of the recurring themes in migrants’ experience with law enforcement in Europe was the perception of arbitrariness and absurdity. In the above quote, Daniel does not perceive decision-making as being based on legal frameworks, but rather on the current state of mind of officials, who hold a considerable amount of leeway. This is a common way among migrants to make sense of how law enforcement works, which can partially be explained by decision-makers’ discretionary power (see Chapter 3). In a similar vein, Bruno, an asylum seeker whom Anna met in Switzerland, spoke of ‘luck’ when he reflected on his asylum procedure. In 2013, he had arrived in Italy and requested asylum. As he experienced the procedure taking too long, he moved on to Switzerland where he submitted a second asylum request. I don’t know maybe God says that my luck is not in Italy. […] I think that Italian people […] just negative us without no reason. Because I told [them] my problem […], why I left my country and it’s true. […] Something real happened to me. That’s why I left my country. […] They don’t want for us to have documents. (interview Switzerland 2014) When Bruno talks about how he interprets decision-making by Italian authorities, it sounds as if law enforcement happens in a capricious way, depending mainly on authorities’ ‘will’ and their reluctance to believe asylum seekers. Much less does Bruno see legal decision-making based on the elaborated legal framework, which aims at defining who is deemed worthy—respectively unworthy—of being granted protection. Rather, he understands official decisions as a result of feelings of aversion on behalf of authorities, against him and other persons in his situation. Also, the fact that he refers to ‘luck’ underlines his perception of decision-making on legal cases as being arbitrary. Similarly, when Ben, an asylum seeker in Switzerland, was asked why he came to Switzerland although another Schengen state was competent for his asylum case, he replied that maybe this time he will be ‘luckier’. He had already been deported within Europe according to the Dublin Regulation and consequently must have known about the low chances of being granted protection status in Switzerland. The fact that ‘luck’ was often mentioned when it came to hopes of regularisation might appear as puzzling, given the meticulous bureaucratic apparatus set up in order to make decision 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 115 on regularisation in accordance with ‘the law’—and, as we have shown, given that actors still subscribed to this idea. In the previous chapters, we have described the highly complex legal framework, the informality within decision-making and bureaucrats’ substantial discretionary power that characterises migration law enforcement. It is unsurprising that these aspects in combination cause migrants—and as we will show, state functionaries and legal experts alike—to experience migration law enforcement as lacking a rational legal foundation. Often, ‘the law’ is perceived as absent, not functioning or trumped by individual bureaucrats’ autonomy, personal preferences or pure luck. In her work with Eritrean migrants who arrived in Italy and later moved on to other countries within Europe, Belloni (2016) makes similar observations. She conceives of her interlocutors as a kind of ‘gamblers’: ‘Migration has become a bet in a lottery in which the “jackpot” is what they and their group of reference perceive as the “good life” in northern Europe’ (2016, 104). Similarly, Ryo (2017) shows how ‘legal cynicism’ is fostered among migrants in the USA as a result of the realisation of the discrepancies between black letter law and law in action (see also Gould and Barclay 2012) and a belief that the legal system is punitive, arbitrary and deliberately made opaque for those who are subjected to it. Furthermore, multiple studies have shown how difficult it is to navigate the legal migration regime in Europe, and highlighted migrants’ struggles in learning about and accessing the justice system (e.g. Schapendonk 2017; Tuckett 2015; van Liempt 2007). Similarly, we find people struggling—and often failing—to comprehend a muddle of legal procedures that is of crucial importance to them, as it determines their prospects of a future (legal) stay (cf. Coutin 2000; Hoag 2010; Scheffer 2001). Indeed, migrants’ voiced frustrations are directly related to the unpredictable state practices they experience within European states’ bureaucratic labyrinths, and not a mere result of their negative experiences with state authorities in their home countries—a common perception among street-level bureaucrats. Writing on the arbitrariness of the US migration control regime, Barsky explains the unpredictability in procedures and outcomes as an effect of officials’ ‘unbridled exercise of power’ (2016, 16), which is indeed similar to what migrants observe in their encounters with legal authorities. Similarly, in their study of the work of the South African Home Office and deportation practices, respectively, Hoag (2010) and Sutton et al. find that ‘seemingly absurd forms of state power are all 116 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS around us’ (2011, 640). As noted by Ryo (2017; see also Tyler 1990), the resulting mistrust in the ‘legal system’ has wider implications: the normative judgement of migrants about the law and state authorities influence not only migrants’ interactions with authorities, but also the reputation and (de)legitimation of the legal system as such (see also Epp et al. 2014). The perception of law as being arbitrary and absurd was to some extent shared by migrants’ support networks, NGOs and even legal experts working in the field of migration and asylum (Spescha 2016). During an interview (in 2016) with Lou, a member of staff working for an umbrella organisation of numerous NGOs engaged in support of asylum seekers and refugees in Austria, the conversation turned to the general risk for illegalised persons to be deported to their country of origin. Lou said that for Nigerians the risk is rather high due to the existing readmission agreement between Austria and Nigeria. We talked about whether this risk is increased when a person has a criminal record. This had been the observation of one of our migrant interlocutors from Nigeria, who had lived for many years in Austria as a rejected asylum seeker and who had told Anna that as long as he behaved ‘correctly’ and did not engage in criminal activities, the risk of deportation would be low. Lou replied: ‘Well, that is the question. I believe, this is rather arbitrary’. Two elements are important to highlight here: first, how both our Nigerian interlocutor and Lou attempt to anticipate the actions of law enforcement. Whereas both do not know what exactly is going on and struggle to make sense out of it, the rejected asylum seeker in this case tries to retain control over his destiny by meticulous law abidance, which shows the disciplining effect of potential law enforcement. This resembles what Goffman (1961) called ‘secondary adaptions’ or what Dubois (2010) termed ‘good recipients’. Second, the readmission agreement between Austria and Nigeria (BGBI. III 2012) says nothing about any priority to deport criminal offenders: it only mentions that ‘any person who is not or is no longer eligible to enter or to reside in the territory of the Requesting Contracting Party’ (Art. 2 of the BGBI. III 2012) can be repatriated and will be readmitted. This highlights the discrepancy between policy aims and their implementation and calls attention to limitations of law-as-text. From our research, the interpretations of Lou and the Nigerian interlocutor fearing deportation both seem plausible. Some of the decision-makers we interviewed stated a strong preference for removing criminal offenders, referring to them to Lisa and 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 117 Tobias as ‘the real issue’, ‘the right ones’ or even ‘the rats’, and to Annika as the ‘bandits’ (interviews in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany 2015–17). Others, however, were much more pragmatic and would simply prioritise whichever deportation case they had in front of them or that which seemed easiest to enforce. Importantly, as these examples also show, the attribution of arbitrariness to law enforcement is not limited to the perceptions of migrants, but includes, as in this example, professionals who have been dealing with migration law for years (see also Spescha 2016). Even street-level bureaucrats would at times acknowledge that their daily mood affected their way of processing cases, including how far it was worth ‘digging into it’. They similarly admitted to there being a lack of clear guidelines (or knowledge) of the law. An example is Alexis, a former migration court official who now works as legal advisor for the Red Cross in Sweden. Reflecting on how it was to ‘change sides’ from defending the negative asylum decisions made by the Swedish Migration Agency in court, to representing the asylum seekers who experienced having been wrongfully rejected, Alexis explained: When you work at the migration agency or in the court, everyone shares the opinion that asylum seekers get a proper trial and have nothing to fear. But when I started working for the other side [i.e. civil society], this perception changed. It happened more than once since I started working for the Red Cross that we changed a rejection and deportation order into a refugee status. And that makes you wonder how many more cases like this there could be. (interview Sweden 2016) Alexis’ story highlights how a change of ‘sides’—from enforcing to challenging migration authorities’ interpretation of law—had become an eye-opener that made Alexis question the assumption of a fair and just legal system. For some officials, believing in the capacity of the legal system to deliver justice and produce ‘correct’ outcomes served as a coping mechanism, or was even a necessity that enabled them to legitimise their profession in face of harsh work realities (see Chapter 6). Yet Alexis’ story also highlights how perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of law enforcement can change, depending on which role an actor takes on in the migration regime. Taken together, these factors are likely to have added to migrants’ feelings of being subjected to non-tangible procedures. Indeed, in all studied countries, we have collected accounts of persons—migrants as well as state officials or legal experts—who experienced law to be hard 118 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS to comprehend when only referring to the law-as-text. The widespread nature of this perception leads us to suggest that messiness and a certain degree of arbitrariness are constitutive features of law enforcement in the migration regime. Unpredictability and ‘unreadability’ of control practices was an experience shared, to a varying degree, by all actors involved (Das 2004). THE ILLEGIBILITY EFFECT In Denmark, newly arrived asylum seekers are obliged to take part in an introductory course to the Danish asylum system, given in the Red Cross run reception facility where they stay upon arrival. The first hour of the course is held by the migration office, the second one by an NGO providing legal advice. The following field notes are based on observations during one of these courses. There is great confusion in the room. Asylum seekers sit down in language groups: Arabic, English, Kurdish, but Farsi is missing so one asylum seeker volunteers to translate into Farsi. It is difficult for the asylum seekers to hear the interpreter over the long tables. The official from the migration office who is giving the introductory lecture is stressed and irritated – there is so much to be presented in one hour, and the clock is ticking. It takes more time for some interpreters to translate than for others. The migration official quickly introduces the different authorities involved in the asylum process: the police registers the application, the migration office processes it, and the Red Cross and municipalities run asylum centres. The official quickly moves through the three ‘phases’ of the asylum procedure: first, assessment of the asylum applications, which are sorted into manifestly unfounded, Dublin, or regular procedure; then there is the assessment of the substantive claim, which ends in residence permit – or rejection. But, the official stresses, a rejection doesn’t mean it ends there, as it is automatically appealed to the refugee board, ‘so even if the migration office rejects you, you might walk out of the board with a residence permit! But if it’s still a rejection, you must leave the country or you might get forcibly deported by the police.’ Here, a man interrupts and asks how long one has to wait to apply for asylum again after a final rejection? ‘I must not tell you that’, the migration official replies. ‘Or you can apply for humanitarian permit. But you must be very old or very sick to apply’. (field notes Denmark 2016) This brief introduction to migration law highlights several reasons why it is difficult to understand how law works in practice: Decisions are made, 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 119 but they are not definite. The duration of a legal procedure cannot be estimated, and authorities are selective in what information they disclose (in this case, the official does not want to tell how long a rejected asylum seeker must stay underground before a new asylum application can be filed, presumably as not to encourage asylum seekers to abscond and await a second chance). Different actors are responsible for different phases of the same legal procedure, contributing to the perception of a confusing labyrinth of institutions and legal foundations. The multiplicity of actors in the migration regime renders understanding their specific roles and tasks very difficult—especially for those unfamiliar with the local context (see also Chapters 2 and 6). Thus, migrants stuck in this system often struggle with fully understanding the mandates of agencies and actors, which in reality also often overlap. Crucially, the above vignette emphasises the difficulty of conveying information between different actors; indeed, the interweaving of different responsibilities and actors in combination with limited access to information adds to the difficulty of anticipating how migration law enforcement works. To grasp the feelings of disorientation and uncertainty about the course of action of legal procedures, we draw upon Veena Das’ (2004) notion of the ‘illegibility’ of the state. Her concept helps to explain both why migrants—and often also street-level bureaucrats and non-state actors, including humanitarian agencies and legal experts—experience the state as inscrutable, and as a result, as being highly unpredictable (see also Hoag 2010). We elaborate this concept by adding an in-depth analysis on the effects of the seemingly magical practices of migration control at the margins of the state, via the ‘many different spaces, forms, and practices through which the state is continually both experienced and undone through the illegibility of its own practices, documents, and words’ (Das and Poole 2004, 9f.). We find it helpful to apply the notion of illegibility to the migration regime as it allows us to explain why law, despite its inadequacies and its inherent inconsistencies, exerts an almost magical power. Das describes the state as being powerfully present in everyday life but remaining impalpable at the same time: [W]e come to see the state as neither a purely rational-bureaucratic organization nor simply a fetish, but as a form of regulation that oscillates between a rational mode and a magical mode of being. As a rational entity, the state is present in the structure of rules and regulations embodied in the law as well as in the institutions for its implementation. From 120 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS the perspective of the people with whom I worked, the law is the sign of a distant but overwhelming power that is brought into the framework of everyday life by the representation and performance of its rules in modes of rumour, gossip, mockery, and mimetic representation. (2006, 162) Das’ theorisation is based on ethnographic work during the riots after the assassination of the former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as well as on divorce agreements drawn by an Indian caste. Clearly, this is a rather different context to the one presented in this book. However, we find it useful to incorporate her ideas into our theoretical toolkits in order to understand the working of European states, and to refrain from the idea that these states work based on clear-cut rules (see Rozakou 2017 who made similar observations in Greece). Das herself emphasises that this is by no means a specific feature of non-Western states. Moreover, we regard Das’ understanding of the state as useful, because it takes seriously the importance of ‘the margins of the state’, which she argues is where the state project can be best observed (Das 2006, 183). Indeed, it is part of the logic of the state that ‘it constructs itself as an incomplete project, because there are always margins on which people have to be educated to become proper subjects of the state’ (Das 2004, 249). Migration control practices certainly fall into this category of state practice. Importantly, state practices not only seem obscure to lay persons but even to state functionaries (Das 2004, 234). Thus, even though migration law enforcement remains ridden by vast and substantial power asymmetries, the difficulties in reading and understanding its intricate working are shared by most actors involved. In addition, street-level bureaucrats often experienced migrants’ actions as unpredictable and ‘unreadable’. Many officials told us, for instance, that they struggle with anticipating migrants’ actions and expressed frustration about ‘loopholes’ in the laws and regulations that they could ‘exploit’—such as when they enter marriages of convenience, or when asylum seekers take advantage of the protracted appeal process to remain in the country after their claims are rejected (see Chapter 5). As a prison officer working in migration detention in Denmark, who perceived failed deportations as a result of resistance tactics (rather than the shortcomings of the asylum procedure) told Annika of asylum seekers: ‘These guys are sneaky’ (Denmark 2017). Furthermore, and in line with Hoag’s analysis of street-level bureaucrats in the South African Department of Home Affairs, street-level officials perceived not only the law or the migrants subjected to it but also the 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 121 public as the creator of illegibility as it ‘exhibited magical, dangerous qualities’ (2010, 10). Needless to say, however, the disempowering effect of illegibility is by far more intense with regard to migrants living in precarious situations. To them, the difficulties of anticipating legal outcomes increased their feelings of stress, uncertainty and powerlessness. The anticipation of law becomes ever-present in the everyday life of migrants holding precarious legal status: life becomes dictated by looking out for police patrols, keeping up with bureaucratic procedures or adapting everyday life to the house rules in asylum facilities. Adrian, whose asylum application had repeatedly been rejected, expresses his feelings of hopelessness in face of a seemingly omnipresent, powerful law: I know what’s gonna happen to me. I get 5% chance to have a normal life here. But suddenly the law is against me. […] If you are in the middle, the law is already surrounding you and you can’t move because nobody believes you. (interview Switzerland 2014) Adrian experiences law as something that ‘locks him up’. This can be understood literally, because he had been detained and imprisoned several times due to his illegal status. It is also related to a sense of immobility generated by a fear of being detected by the police as soon as his semilegal status of asylum seeking would be withdrawn by the authorities. At the same time, law is perceived as personalised. It is not law-astext that illegalises Adrian, but it is law as practiced in the figure of a migration official who does not believe Adrian’s story. Adrian’s testimony shows how the experience of being ‘confined by law’ has the effect of constraining his agency, generating feelings of profound uncertainty. This reveals the ambivalent meaning of law for migrants with precarious legal status and reflects the argument developed in Chapter 2: we have to take note of the ideas of law and the state that circulate among different actors. On the one hand, there is the narrative of law as being a guarantor for objectivity, rationality, fairness and due procedures. On the other hand, law is experienced as inaccessible, and as the cause behind experiences of arbitrary decision-making, police violence and unfair outcomes. Both narratives can coexist alongside one another despite being incompatible. The former narrative is often upheld as an (ahistorical) truth that legitimises status quo; the latter deemed anecdotal and irrelevant according to the still hegemonic narrative. In the above example, law causes 122 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS hope ‘to have a normal life’, and at the same time, there is the constant fear of ‘law turning against oneself’ as experienced by Adrian. Both perceptions—and their divergence—shape people’s subject positions in relation to law and the state. STRUGGLES OVER ACCESS TO AND KNOWLEDGE OF LAW Access to information is a cornerstone of the judicial system: knowing on what basis legal action is taken against somebody is fundamental for judicial and administrative procedures. For instance, article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which regulates deprivation of liberty, states the importance of law being sufficiently precise for people to be able to foresee what actions could result in the deprivation of liberty. Nevertheless, when studying encounters between migrants and bureaucrats as well as legal advisors, we observed how substantial information often got lost in translation (see also Borrelli 2018a), and how the asymmetrical power relations within the migration regime were also reflected in unequal access to knowledge. Conversely, holding the ‘right kind’ of (informal) knowledge could enhance migrants’ hopes and prospects, and their ability to navigate migration control practices. Everyday Limitations to Knowledge of Law Given the ‘unreadability’ of migration law as practiced, access to knowledge that can enhance the anticipation of legal action is of crucial importance for all actors involved. However, as this section shows, particularly migrants were regularly confronted with limitations to knowledge. The great confusion characterising the introductory course for asylum seekers in the Danish asylum centre outlined above illustrates this point and exemplifies how transfer of knowledge often fails. Despite formal information folders and campaigns disseminated by authorities regarding the rights and obligations of asylum seekers, actually fulfilling the requirements of authorities and anticipating outcomes is far from a straightforward process. Much like Kafka’s man from the country, many of our informants found it challenging—if not impossible—to grasp and live up to what was asked of them by ‘the law’ and legal authorities. Law might be predictable in its written form and might seem clear when read. While it enables a rough calculation of the odds of success, the implementation of law leaves, as we have shown in Chapter 3, 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 123 substantial room for interpretation (Ewick and Silbey 1998). In addition, migrants might have encountered badly informed state officials, are often unfamiliar with the local context and lack supporting social networks and financial means to pay for lawyers. Financial, social and educational resources hence all affect their ability to access information and their positioning in the legal playing field (Tuckett 2015). Access to formal as well as informal information is often also restricted in the spaces where migrants are held waiting during bureaucratic procedures, notably in detention centres (as we observed in Denmark) but also in asylum centres (as in Switzerland) (cf. Wall et al. 2017; Dekker et al. 2016). Indeed, the ‘official’ channels of knowledge transfers, which aim at informing migrants about their rights, often fail to reach their audience. Knowledge transfers might also not be successful because migrants are not used to reading information or because the information people actually need is rather of ‘unofficial’, more tacit nature. Having to learn, adapt to and comply with the official and unofficial requirements of the law poses a significant challenge to migrants, even more so because the legal language is difficult to access. However, nor do state officials necessarily speak ‘legalese’. Some of the exchanges we observed between migration agents and migrants were fraught with confusion, mainly because of the inadequate and insufficient knowledge or communicative skills of state officials. A prime example is the interaction between Gian, a Swiss migration officer, and Awet, whom Lisa visited in deportation prison. Without interpreter, Gian resorted to broken English to explain the intricacies of the Dublin Regulation Swiss imprisonment orders, re-entry bans and legal opportunities for explanation: My name is [Gian]. I am from the police. You know your situation? […] This is my order. You sign? You go back Germany. You sign or not, what you want. […] Germany wants you. You go Stuttgart or Frankfurt. I don’t know which—which village. But I organise plane for you. […] The territory of Switzerland is closed for you, three years no Switzerland. Only information, migration gave it to you, just info. You sign or not? […] You understand? Yes, you understand. The territory of Switzerland is closed to you for three years and you can say to the problem what you want, here. I explain you situation now. You understand. (field notes Swiss Cantonal Police 2017) Later, Awet repeatedly asked whether he can ‘go back’, but it was unclear if he refers to ‘going back’ to his country of origin or ‘going to get his bag’, his belongings. Gian ends this exchange rather curt, 124 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS pointing out that in any case, ‘now it is Germany’—Germany is now responsible for his case. After the visit, Gian seemed rather pleased with the exchange and was confident that Awet had understood all relevant details of his case. To us, and seemingly to Awet, very little of this seemed comprehensible. To give another example, the following field notes from research in a Danish detention centre highlight everyday barriers to access information about one’s own legal case: The prison officers are doing the evening count of detainees in one of the wings. A man comes up to us with a paper, asking: ‘does it say I get out of here?’ – ‘No, no – says Robin, one of the prison officers, who seems a bit stressed by the sudden interaction – and continues, seemingly in an attempt of a joke: ‘We can take away your freedom but we can’t take away your dreams!’ We exit the wing and the prison officers shut the door behind us. Once we are out, Robin gets told off by a colleague: ‘I don’t know what these decisions mean and therefore I never read them out to them, so I don’t give them the wrong information’. (field notes Denmark 2017) By actively deciding what kind of information to block, blind out or deliver to migrants, street-level bureaucrats not only mark their power, but also make judgements of what is relevant according to their experience and their perceptions of migrants’ prior knowledge (capacity). Yet officials would also acknowledge that migrants’ limited and at times non-existing trust in the state often prevented them from accepting the information given by authorities. Contrary to that, many street-level bureaucrats also continuously highlighted how well informed migrants were about, for instance, the Dublin procedure (upon arrival in reception centres); indeed, some migrants, especially those who have longterm experience with migration law enforcement, held considerable knowledge on how ‘the system’ works. The examples of Gian and Robin illustrate that migrants often receive insufficient, confusing or even inaccurate information in their everyday encounters with police, prison officers or staff in asylum shelters. Yet it might be unsurprising that these actors lack knowledge about legal details; in the end, they are no legal experts. We also found that even legal advisors and lawyers hold limited knowledge about black letter law, as illustrated in the following vignette: 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 125 At a network meeting for legal advisors, a representative of a large Christian NGO presents a case where the right to appeal was denied because apparently, they had missed the appropriate deadline. The representative, who has worked in asylum advice for over a decade, is perplexed by this, and seeks help from their peers. The group dissects the case and finds that the issue must be with the moment of disclosure of the asylum decision to the client, as the applicant is a minor. However, no one is sure when this ‘moment of disclosure’ happens, or how long the formal deadline is. The fact that one case was dismissed clearly affected everyone in the room, and over the next thirty minutes, the group tries to collectively remember what the law specifically stated. Noticeably, even though everyone had a smartphone with them, no one actually bothered to check the text of the law in this discussion. On the way home, Jo, a lawyer who lives in the same city as we do, admits feeling embarrassed about the situation. ‘We kind of have a good grip on what’s going on in the asylum law, in Strasbourg [at the ECtHR] and of course what’s happening in Iraq or Afghanistan, but, you know, many of us are weak on the administrative law side. I mean, it’s really difficult for the advisors who didn’t study law, but even we lawyers, you know…’ Jo shrugs. (field notes Switzerland 2016) As we hear from Jo, even lawyers often lack accurate knowledge on the relevant legal frameworks; indeed, often they do not even bother consulting the law in the book. This begs the question of how we can grasp the ‘shape’ of law in its ordinary ubiquity. Law and the state are rarely present in the everyday in their ‘written’ form: instead, the state’s ‘signature’ (Das 2004) is enacted through the everyday discourses and practices of (here) detention or asylum centre staff, through police controls, in the importance of having a ticket in public transport, the food delivered in a housing facility, or in encounters with lawyers. Thus, law becomes real in a variety of shapes, which causes actors to scramble for alternative channels of information apart from black letter law in order to decipher the legal mode of operation. Actors are thus forced to constantly attempt to ‘read’ the logic of the migration regime and find themselves acting on the basis of very shaky grounds. In some cases, we found that lack of knowledge about laws among migrants was the result of more or less deliberate withholding of information among state officials (Borrelli 2018b), which then further increased the impression of arbitrariness in law enforcement. Indeed, street-level bureaucrats admitted they would simplify information or filter it, often assuming 126 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS that detailed information was given by an other state agency (field notes Sweden, Switzerland 2017). Street-level bureaucrats of all researched countries often highlighted how sure they were that the information they were supposed to give or repeat to migrants had already been provided in the reception facility, during the asylum hearing, by staff working in the housing facilities or by other agencies. This assumption causes street-level bureaucrats to avoid eventually necessary repetition of information and instead focus on the efficiency—meaning on a smooth and quick procedure—of each meeting. For instance, we observed several occasions in which asylum seekers were ‘informed’ that their case fell under the Dublin Regulation through curt phrases like ‘Italy wants you back’, ‘Germany has decided on you’ (field notes Switzerland 2016, Sweden 2017). Often, detainees were only hastily informed that they could appeal against a decision. And as in the very first observation in Chapter 2, asylum seekers wishing to return home were sent to several agencies rather than being informed on the correct legal procedure. Even though predictability is considered an important feature in the daily work of bureaucracy, in some cases, a certain opaqueness is strategically used by state officials to enable law enforcement. Suddenness and unpredictability in law enforcement can for instance be used by state officials to get hold of illegalised migrants (Burnett 2008; Gibney 2008; Gill 2009). For example, we were able to observe how state authorities would keep deportations unannounced in order to keep migrants ‘calm’ and to make the deportation process as smooth as possible (see Chapter 5; Borrelli 2018b). As a result, migrants have to remain on their guard and exhibit a high amount of flexibility, as they need to be able to spontaneously react to law enforcement efforts. As a Swedish migration official working with returns explained: We use a ‘ladder’ of coercive measures when we prepare for deportations, and there’s for sure a balance we have to strike here between how transparent we can be without risking that the measures become ineffective. Because if they know exactly when they will be detained, they will make sure to abscond before that happens. So, we have to be careful here. We’re supposed to have predictability in our work but it has its downsides, too. (interview Sweden 2017) The official here clearly outlines a contradiction between transparency and ‘effectiveness’ of migration control enforcement, especially in the context of deportations. During the planning of deportations in 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 127 Switzerland and Sweden, police officers often mentioned that they would keep the exact date of deportation a secret to the detained person. They legitimised this knowledge asymmetry, where deportees were kept in a state of ignorance, by using humanitarian reasons, such as reducing the risk that deportees would hurt themselves (see also Borrelli 2018b). A Danish detention official acknowledges that the strategy may even go as far as lying to migrants regarding the intentions of law enforcement as to minimise conflicts and ensure the ‘smooth’ operation of law enforcement: The police don’t always tell detainees why they are here. I guess they want to avoid conflict, which is understandable; but sometimes they even lie and say they’re taking the detainee to Sandholm [the Red Cross asylum centre next door]. And then it’s on us to tell them that now you are here and nobody knows how long you’ll have to stay here. Of course, that’s frustrating for detainees. (field notes Denmark 2017) Similarly, during several interviews, the illegibility of control practices was mentioned as a strategy of the state to prevent so-called pull effects: Blaine, a staff member of the Swiss Dublin unit in Italy explained that Swiss authorities attempt to base their decisions regarding the humanitarian clause1 not on obvious categories of vulnerability in order to avoid a situation where more migrants would use this information to reconstruct their case. That’s why Switzerland doesn’t want to create categories (such as pregnant women, etc.). We don’t want to create a pull effect. It happened with Syrians when Germany said we don’t transfer Syrians anymore to other Dublin countries. So, we keep a low profile first about the criterias and second, we judge case by case. It’s really [based on] the medical assessment, specific situations. (interview Italy 2015) 1 Article 17 of the Dublin III Regulation states that ‘[a]ny Member State should be able to derogate from the responsibility criteria, in particular on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, in order to bring together family members, relatives or any other family relations and examine an application for international protection lodged with it or with another Member State, even if such examination is not its responsibility under the binding criteria laid down in this Regulation’ (Regulation (EU) No 604/2013). 128 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS This supports the analysis of an experienced staff member of an NGO assisting refugees in Austria. When talking about regularisation opportunities in Austria, the NGO official interpreted the lack of transparency as an intentional strategy on behalf of state authorities and indeed an inherent characteristic of the migration regime: ‘There are also cases which could be regularised. But there is, so to speak, a politics of conscious… hmm, ambiguity, too. To make no automatism of regularisation visible (laughs)’ (interview in Austria 2016). These examples demonstrate that street-level bureaucrats themselves not only perceive migration law as implemented in an inconsistent and sometimes even chaotic manner, but they also actively take part in the production of misunderstandings and fogginess. Even more, the active withholding of information highlights that illegibility can be actively used as a tool of law enforcement. Given such considerable obstacles and constrains to access information, how do the different actors acquire relevant information about law-in-practice and how do they navigate and contest illegible migration control enforcement? The Informal Shape of Law-in-Practice So far, we have shown that law is more often present in an oral, more dynamic form than as black letter text. Also, as knowledge of lawas-text is not sufficient to anticipate how law is implemented, people have to resort to other forms of legal knowledge. We now turn to the question of how this oral knowledge is produced and acquired. Despite the challenges in accessing information and the fact that it might have been delivered in close to incomprehensible ways, it remains indispensable for migrants to collect knowledge about the migration regime, as the words by Henry, a rejected asylum seeker, illustrate: If you live in this situation, you have to know everything. You have to know a lot of people. Tunisians, Algerians, Africans… […]. You have to know everything. Like this, every day you will get to know another story [he laughs]. […] This one came out of prison. Why? He got a wife. Another one will enter prison. […]. There are many stories of this. Like this you have experience. Every person tells you, you have to do this, this, this. Like this you find a solution. You understand? Like this you have a lot of information. (interview 2014) 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 129 If we speak for example about people that have no papers and that are looking for a solution to get papers. They are trying to get information on all European countries […]. For example, I am now in Switzerland, I have to change [the country]. I have a little information that in Spain you can make papers, maybe I will depart there. Maybe in Italy there is a law that they issue papers. […]. People can also look for marriage. […] For example, I have heard that in Norway there are many women… [he laughs] […] ‘Ok, I’ll try my chance.’ Like this all persons will search for what they want. And like this they will make their direction. (interview 2015) As Henry says, in order to navigate the migration regime, it is important to gain knowledge about different national policies, loopholes in law implementation, regularisation opportunities, but also about information regarding jobs in the informal labour market. Unsurprisingly, ‘official’ channels do not provide this kind of information—or they might be considered as untrustworthy. Henry highlights the importance of knowing many people and the circulation of information among co-migrants. The unreadability of the migration regime causes migrants to base their decision-making rather on informal and ambiguous information than on ‘official’ knowledge that comes in a textual shape. Indeed, the illegibility of law enforcement generates a circulation of rumours, which can be understood as ‘word of mouth communication of “unsubstantiated” information’ (Harney 2006, 376). Rumours ‘fill in the gaps in our knowledge’ (Knapp 1944, 22) and provide us with information and thus add to the sense-making—even though the information might not be ‘true’, it is ‘true enough’ for people to act upon. Eckert (2012) introduces ‘rumours of rights’ next to governmental and commercial forms of legal export as one of the principal ways in which information about laws is transmitted. Eckert explores how ‘[r]umours of rights travel across the globe, spreading legal norms in a particular manner’ (2012, 147). She continues: Firstly, what is known about law is shaped by the fears and hopes of those who transmit the rumour and those who hear it. These processes of horizontal knowledge transfer thus select legal knowledge in relation to concrete situations, particular perceptions of problems and conflicts that differ from the often discussed top-down processes of legal dissemination. (ibid.: 148) 130 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS Whereas Eckert centres her discussion around rumours of certain, potentially favourable rights, we find it important to broaden her approach in order to include rumours regarding strategies of law enforcement. These can potentially serve as warnings and enable tactics of evasion. Rumours can also provide relevant information about loopholes in migration control or other promising prospects such as work or opportunities of legalisation. As the above quote by Henry shows, in migrant hubs, collective knowledge is created through constant exchange of experiences and information (Borri and Fontanari 2015; Brekke and Brochmann 2015; Szczepanikova 2013). As we will argue, rumours can be inherently productive with respect to migrants’ journeys because they play a decisive role in their decision-making and can therefore determine migrants’ onward movements, as well as authorities’ responses to them. Illegibility further helps to explain why the regulatory apparatus of the migration regime appears as overwhelming, but also why individuals can maintain hope against all odds and keep finding new chances and opportunities. Indeed, it is its unpredictable nature that produces hope and makes migrants remain and endure hardships, in spite of low chances of regularisation. Thus, we take this endurance as being propelled by illegibility of law enforcement. As in the above quote by Henry, learning about the occasional success stories of other migrants produces hope and makes people move on (see also De Coulon 2015). For instance, as we showed in Chapter 2, there are many persons who do not get deported to the country where fingerprints have been registered first as foreseen by the Dublin Regulation. Such inconsistent implementation of law causes people to move on despite their awareness of the fact that so-called secondary movement is possibly reversed through deportation (cf. Belloni 2016). Thus, rumours—independent of the ‘veracity’ of their content— can be fundamentally productive with regard to the continuity and direction of migrants’ journeys. As Leo explained in a conversation with Anna: L: I have heard that next month in February there is an opportunity… to get papers in Italy. I don‘t know. The truth is, I have a friend who lives in Zurich. He told me… He asked me to come here. ‘Here you can work’. A: Where is the work? […] What kind of work did he talk about? L: He told me: ‘Come here, it is better than Italy, than France.’ He told me like this. And that’s how I came. I did not know the rules. […] I thought I can work with the papers they gave me. (interview Switzerland 2015) 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 131 Such rumours of opportunities reflect the everyday reality of migrants with precarious legal status in that they are uncertain. Acting upon them can, in turn, generate new opportunities, but also perpetuate the instability of migrants’ situation. People might hear about a certain opportunity and take the chance and travel to another country just to find out that the information was wrong or does not apply to their specific case. False rumours can hence result in unnecessary mobility and add to the zigzag trajectories of migrants’ ‘interrupted journeys’ (Wyss 2019). Crucially, not only migrants rely on uncertain information about law. Instead, we find that law enforcement is often based on information that cannot be found in black letter text but that is nonetheless ‘true enough’ for state officials to act upon (cf. Silbey 2005). Indeed, state agents often learn and practice law enforcement through stories of law, by means of ‘oral traditions’ (Eule 2014). When information moves from mouth to mouth, it can change its content depending on the people involved, also depending on what information is added or corrected (see also Eckert 2012). Similarly, Borrelli (2018a) has shown how information is ‘whispered down, up, and between the lanes within migration offices’, where information seeps between actors, who might themselves act upon this kind of uncertain information. Indeed, informal knowledge of law was also crucial among streetlevel bureaucrats, who otherwise struggled with keeping up with the often-changing and at times outright impenetrable black letter law and instead had to establish practices that ‘worked for them’ (see Chapter 3; see also Borrelli 2018a). In difficult cases, officials would often consult each other rather than the law itself, resulting in stories of law being used as the basis for decision-making (see also Eule 2014). Many of those who had tried to read up on the law shared their frustrations and consequently based their decision-making rather on collectively shared routine than on consultation of black letter law. A typical example of this was Mika, a caseworker in a German migration office who talked about having given up on reading legislative changes and (quite literally) playing it by ear. Mika’s motto was ‘Augen zu und durch’—grit your teeth and get to it. Consequently, according to Mika, new or difficult case constellations were best solved in exchange with other colleagues, whose recollections of legal text and changes were then compared with Mika’s own knowledge. If others were busy or if Mika was alone in the office, the preferred option was to simply postpone decision-making. Often, the ‘gut instinct’ would be in line with the actual law, confirming findings 132 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS from previous research on migration caseworkers (Eule 2014). Thus, when evaluating the residence application of a young woman, whose income was barely enough to cover the legal minimum for herself and her young son, Mika (correctly) found it to be ‘reasonable’ that advances on spousal maintenance covered by the state would not count as ‘relying on social welfare’ (a change in law that was only enacted six weeks earlier), and thus granted the residence permit. Deliberate ignorance of legal text is even more pertinent—if somewhat extreme—in the following example based on Tobias’ notes during his fieldwork in a German migration office. The unit head in a migration office sorts through the enormous pile of documents on their desk. Apparently, they are all recent (binding) notifications over changes to the law, decrees, court decisions and procedural orders that they now have to go through. The unit head explains how they categorise them into three types: a) rubbish – which is immediately thrown onto the paper recycling pile, b) stuff to file somewhere – the unit head has folders that simply read ‘migration law’ and c) files that the unit head would read and tell the other employees about. Overall, they share their opinion that most decrees are gegorene Schifferscheiße (‘rotten seamens’ feces’) as they are too long and nobody reads them anyway. (field notes Germany 2015) Perhaps the most extreme example was Uli, who became head of a German migration office during Tobias’ fieldwork there in 2015. Having transferred from the city’s welfare office, Uli was confident about being able to quickly pick up the legal framework on the go. In a meeting six weeks into the appointment, however, Uli confided about struggling even with basic principles, such as the difference between a residence permit and a deportation order. When several options were suggested to Uli, such as reading up on the law, taking a seminar or shadowing some of the other caseworkers who were more experienced, Uli mused that perhaps, actually knowing the law was not so important after all, because ‘no one seems to know what is really happening, and it all still kind of works’. Studies on the implementation of law often highlight how law takes on a different life in action or practice—to the extent that it is highly diverging from the original framework (Falk Moore 1978). For some officials, like Uli, this fact does not seem to raise any considerable concern. Others, in turn, make an effort to follow the law in the book as 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 133 closely as possible. Yet officials also experience the inherent limitations to the implementation capacity of state bureaucracy due to political, normative or administrative tensions between regulatory frameworks, between policy-makers and bureaucrats, and within the bureaucracy itself (Lipsky 1980; Edwards 1980; Bardach 1980). As one Swedish border police officer who was in the position of taking legal decisions on detention put it: ‘[The politicians] give us the policies and law, but not the tools how to make use of them’ (see also Borrelli 2018a). This officer was one of the most precise and knowledgeable regarding legal frameworks and paragraphs whom Lisa encountered. However, being aware of black letter law and trying to make use of it, the officer was frustrated with the incapacitation since no guidelines and frameworks were given and often law remained vague and unclear. Such diverging positions vis à vis black letter law could be found throughout all researched offices. Some admitted limitations to their individual knowledge, but also acknowledged that they were not sure whether complete knowledge of law was even possible, as they regularly encountered situations where no legal guidelines were applicable. Struggles Over the ‘Right’ Kind of Knowledge However, for migrants, informal knowledge of law is frequently insufficient. Especially in cases where they intend to engage in legal procedures, substantial information about law in the books is indeed necessary. Here, lawyers can act as intermediaries and as a last resort for hope. Peter, whose asylum case Spain was competent for, had moved onwards to Austria. He had hoped to legalise his status as he said: ‘The lawyer fights for me, they have human rights here. So… the lawyer fights for me and my case and […] I can stay’ (interview in Austria 2016). The lawyer as a figure that seems to be endowed with some sort of magic aura reminds of the magic of the state. Unsurprisingly so, since it is the lawyer that implicitly holds the promise to have the means to make a person ‘legal’. Yet, the ‘legal language’ adopted by lawyers in conversation with their clients frequently leads to misunderstandings and even to exaggerated hope, which risks resulting in disappointment when the case does not proceed as quickly and positively as anticipated—and as understood as a ‘promise’ from the lawyer. As a legal advisor in Denmark whom we interviewed in 2016, put it, ‘lawyers are often a bit square and hide themselves behind paragraphs in their interactions with people, and 134 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS they are not always prepared for the uncomfortable talks’. Thus, if lawyers hold a potential key to accessing the law, they are, in turn, themselves not easy to access. Many migrants cannot afford paying a lawyer and rely on NGOs offering legal advice services. Yet, in many interviews with migrants it was mentioned that ‘free lawyers’ (pro bono legal advisers, who don’t charge fees) don’t help. The fact that lawyers are hard to reach, for instance due to insufficient financial means, might even enhance such magical aura. Some of the legal advisors interviewed also expressed concern that their ad hoc involvement might add to the unfairness and arbitrariness of the legal system. A Danish pro bono legal advisor put it the following way: We can help when asylum seekers have waited disproportionately long for news on their process. We have the private email addresses of immigration officials and write and ask ‘what’s up?’. This usually works, which is good for the individual as it does speed up the case. Usually if we get involved, we can ‘press the right buttons’ and speed up the process and the asylum seeker then normally receives his or her decision within a couple of days after our email – but this is also very unfair, it’s nepotism. I get a bad conscience for the others when I only help a few but not the rest… it also shows how unfair the system is. (interview Denmark 2016) Importantly, the lawyer’s concern can help explain the experiences of migrants who base a positive outcome of their legal case on luck, as outlined above. It requires serendipity to find the necessary intermediary who presses ‘the right button’ and pushes the case into the favoured direction. Even more, individual commitment by lawyers and state officials might rely on attributions of sympathy, deservingness and vulnerability to the migrant in question as a condition for extraordinary efforts (see also Kalir and Wissink 2016). This again has a disciplinary effect upon migrants who consequently need to perform a suffering, apolitical and deserving subject position as this might enhance their changes to obtain support (see also Chapter 6). As Henry pointed out above, migrants seek out sources of information in their daily interactions with other migrants, or other intermediaries like migration detention and asylum centre staff, friends, volunteers or social workers. Importantly, although some of these people possess considerable knowledge of migration and asylum law, most of them are not legal experts. This might be problematic for other reasons, as voiced in this interview with Kari, a case officer at the Swedish Migration Agency: 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 135 K: We have legal representatives of unaccompanied minors who often give them false expectations. And that’s terrible! I noticed this when I worked in detention too—NGOs would come there and give people false expectations, and they just mess it up for the detainees. I don’t know if you watched the documentary on Swedish detention? Well there you could see it, Red Cross workers saying ‘we will sort this out’ but I think this is dangerous! It’s so easy for them to say, but the asylum seekers will then have to live with the consequences – not those who give them these false expectations. The legal guardians, for instance, they often work against us – and this makes me angry. It’s so easy for them to say ‘don’t worry, I’m on your side, we’ll sort this out’ but what does that mean in practice? We therefore have to ask those guardians: is the kid aware of what will happen if he’s rejected? It’s better if we find their real parents, have you tried to do that? But instead they say ‘don’t give up yet’ and they hope for the ‘impediment to enforcement’ as the last resort… A: Don’t they keep track of the laws and regulations? K: Not everyone knows the rules and laws as we do. It’s not that we see a purpose in returning anyone, if someone gets their case reopened that’s amazing – it’s just not so common… so the most important part of our work is giving them the right information! That we are clear, even though that sometimes implies that we are mean… (interview Sweden 2017) Kari’s rant about the ‘terrible’ advice provided by migrants’ support networks demonstrates the struggle over the ‘right’ kind of information, which in Kari’s view is the final decision on rejection, which asylum seekers and their support networks try to contest. However, what constitutes ‘correct’ information is—given the discretionary power of decisionmakers and the informal application of law (Chapter 3)—not always possible to define. For Kari, the case is determined, there might be additional avenues for regularisation opening up—and this can give rise to new hopes and aspirations among migrants. Still, state officials often retained substantial suspicion and even contempt with the many advisors and ‘do-gooders’ involved in ‘helping’ migrants’ cases. Another Swedish migration official remarked: You also have lots of lawyers who don’t know anything. You only need 15 ECTS [equal to half a semester at university] to become a legal advisor and there are lots of people giving them advice on what they should and shouldn’t do. And why then should they listen to us, when they spend one hour talking to us and the rest of the time outside talking to everyone 136 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS else, legal advisors and others who tell them what to think, say, and do. Then they make the wrong decisions and they go underground. (interview Sweden 2017) Interestingly, the officials insist on the importance of migrants listening to them (i.e. the state authorities) and emphasise the importance that they obtain the ‘right kind of information’, also implying that state officials possess such knowledge of the ‘correct’ reading of law. This was also true for Swiss and Italian migration officials, who regularly complained about the lacking professionalism of legal advisors or even their exploitative attitudes. However, as we have shown in this chapter, public officials are far from always being the most reliable source of information. Their frustration naturally relies on a state-centric understanding of what kind of information is ‘correct’ and ‘useful’, as reflected in their irritation with migrants making the ‘wrong’ decision and going underground, rather than accepting and complying with a deportation order. Yet as noted by Renee, a Danish prison officer working in an open Danish deportation centre: ‘All we can do is tell them what the procedure is. But we don’t know what’s best for them to do […] if they choose to stay here even though they got rejected, it’s probably because it’s a better option than returning to wherever they are from’. (interview Denmark 2016) The struggle over the right kind of information regarding migration control extends beyond Europe’s geographical borders. In certain countries of origin, European states have devoted significant resources to various deterrence programmes, which aim at providing information to potential migrants who are perceived to naïvely fall for unrealistic rumours about Europe being the land of milk and honey (cf. Andersson 2014). In collaboration with a Nigerian film-maker, the Swiss State Secretariat of Migration has for instance produced a ‘Nollywood’ movie on the hardships during Swiss asylum procedures and the lack of prospects for regularisation in the case of Nigerian citizens (swissinfo. ch 2017). A similar effort to discourage asylum seekers from choosing Denmark as their country of destination was taken by the Danish government, which posted ads with information on the newly adopted restrictions in asylum seekers’ rights and highlighted the bad conditions for asylum seekers in Denmark in four Lebanese newspapers (The Independent 2015). The Danish Ombudsman criticised the ads for breaking public authorities’ obligation to inform people about their legal rights and found the ads to be misleading and therefore contrary 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 137 to existing principles and regulations.2 A staff member of the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), whom Annika interviewed, remarked on the issue: The DRC has tried to calm the situation and balance reports as the situation has given rise to a lot of misinformation and rumours. So, counsellors were sent to the border to inform refugees about asylum regulations and conditions etc. Misinformation not only came from government campaigns but also from civil society. The DRC even made a ‘counter-poster’ to the government’s information posters, where they explained what implications new regulations would actually have for refugees, what’s relevant/irrelevant for them. (interview Denmark 2017) These examples summarise well the different aspects we have elaborated on: the uncertain information, the contestation over knowledge as well as the many actors engaging in it. We can conclude that the struggle over useful and accurate information concerns not only migrants with precarious legal status but to a certain degree also state officials, legal experts and civil society actors. At the background of a highly illegible migration regime, the consequential clamour for knowledge makes people build on informal and rumoured information. THE PRODUCTIVITY OF ILLEGIBILITY While we have given a few examples of how state agencies limit migrants’ possibilities to ‘read’ or predict law enforcement, we do not conceive of illegibility as being intentionally created by the state, nor by some sort of mastermind or an overarching agency. Yet illegibility can be used productively by different actors and must therefore not only be understood as a disruptive and destabilising element, but indeed, an inherent fact that all actors within the spaces of asymmetrical negotiations have to relate to. Indeed, there are several practices that we identified as relying on uncertain information and that are thus created through illegibility. In what follows, therefore, we will elaborate on the productivity of illegibility. 2 See http://www.ombudsmanden.dk/find/nyheder/alle/kritik_af_flygtningeannonce_/ pdf1/. 138 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS Appropriating Law—Acting upon Informal Knowledge of Law Migrants with precarious legal status are frequently—if not constantly— confronted with law in their everyday life. Their actions are highly circumscribed and indeed, defined by it, be it in asylum shelters, during asylum procedures, or in the anticipation or actual enforcement of police controls, in detention or during deportations. Their intense and frequent exposure to law gradually makes them more ‘legally conscious’ (Ewick and Silbey 1998). The presence of law and importance of navigating it can be illustrated by the honest surprise of one recognised refugee in Italy when Anna mentioned to him that she does not have a lawyer: ‘As a refugee you must get a lawyer. […]. Of course, I need a lawyer, I am a refugee here’. Consequently, while migrants frequently try to avoid law enforcement aiming at their exclusion, detention and deportation, they also engage actively with the law by applying for asylum, or trying to use other legal avenues to regularise their status. With time, then, comes a shifting relationship to law. Here, it is helpful to draw on Scheel’s (2017) conceptualisation of practices of appropriation, which he considers as a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott 1985): ‘These highly asymmetrical power relations explain why migrants, rather than openly contesting restrictive border regimes, usually try to recode the mechanisms of control into means of appropriation’ (Scheel 2017, 9). In order to recode law—or to appropriate it—individuals need to display a certain degree of compliance. There was, for instance, one interlocutor who had been moving between Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany for more than ten years. He had requested asylum twenty-three times and seemed to exhibit a considerable amount of legal expertise, which rendered him more resilient towards states’ attempts of control. State officials would sometimes even acknowledge that migrants might be savvier of the legal system than they were themselves. Albin, an experienced case officer at the Swedish Migration Agency’s return unit, said: ‘They talk to each other and they keep track of what they need. It happened that they even correct me—they tell me “no this is how it is”, or “now you are supposed to give me that, and it turns out they are right”’ (interview in Sweden 2017). Hence, legal consciousness and migrant expertise make certain practices of law become less inscrutable and more appropriable. While navigating the migration regime, 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 139 migrants build on informal and incomplete, but ‘good enough’ knowledge not only to avoid, but also actively engage with law. Migrants’ support networks, legal advisors and activists similarly adopt practices of appropriation. In many cases, this involves building on informal practices, such as in the case of Michele, a priest involved in antideportation protests in Sweden (interview in Sweden 2018). At the heart of these protests was the writing of appeals in order to prevent deportations to Afghanistan. When Annika asked Michele whether a lot of legal expertise was required for their actions, Michele replied: ‘No, I was surprised myself, I’m not a lawyer but you read up, right? And it’s case law that counts. For one of the guys we managed to get out of detention and stop his deportation, it was a teacher who knew him who just wrote the appeal. He’d never done it before but it was successful!’ Another example comes from Switzerland: Meeting up and discussing cases was important to the legal advisors Tobias followed. Sharing knowledge and experiences with different judges or types of argumentation helped them find solutions to their own clients that they would not have otherwise. At one of these meetings, a lawyer brings up a case where a claim for asylum was rejected. The applicant is part of the extended family of a refugee, and over the course of the discussion, it becomes quite apparent that most agree that there is probably no legal basis for asylum. However, several people recall that the asylum office has granted a humanitarian residence permit on such cases before. One of the more experienced advisors suggests loosely referring to this in the appeals, and arguing that there has been a tradition of granting asylum to the extended family of persecuted persons. (field notes Switzerland 2016) Here, rather than resorting to black letter law to appeal the rejection of this case, the legal advisors ‘invented’ a legal tradition, which clearly deviated from the relevant legal foundation, but crucially, actually reflected state practices. The legal advisors thus sought to counter and make use of informal practices by building a formal legal argument on them— something clearly not ‘by the books’ in a civil law country. As outlined in Chapter 3, the asymmetrical negotiations over law enforcement in the migration regime rely heavily on informal practices. We have shown there how street-level bureaucrats routinely act on what they think is ‘safe to assume’ or ‘true enough’—often as a strategy to deal with the complexity of cases and the rate of change in law. State agents act on what seems 140 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS appropriate in the given setting—be it expired visas or technically nullified residence permits. As we have argued elsewhere (Eule 2017), this has more to do with finding a ‘satisfactory’ than finding the ‘correct’ or ‘best’ or ‘most efficient’ solution. Thus, during our research, we had many encounters like the one with Paris, a young lawyer who instructed police officers and wrote practical guidelines in Switzerland, and who told us at a workshop that the key task of their job was to ‘make law less law-like’ in order for practitioners to apply it. Similarly, Ira, an experienced lawyer and former prosecutor, asserted that ‘you as sociologist have to look at the facts and the numbers and try to find out what seems true—we lawyers can just go with our gut feeling’. As a result, decision-making thresholds are lowered and become more informal. Bureaucrats deal with law by doing what is ‘good enough’ because they often need to react spontaneously and deal with unclear regulations unfit to always provide accurate solutions for the complex realities they encounter. They thereby become complicit in producing more illegibility, because their actions are not necessarily predictable to migrants. Yet, while referring to rumours of rights, we have emphasised that migrants similarly base their decision-making on uncertain information. Disempowerment Through Unpredictability of Law Enforcement Whereas inconsistencies of legal practices can evoke hope, the illegibility effect also causes additional disempowerment of migrants with precarious legal status. Even in situations where migrants know what legal means can be used against them, it remains unpredictable when they will be enacted. The obscurity of everyday bureaucratic and law enforcement procedures forces them to envisage best case but also worst case scenarios, especially as deportation is experienced as an ever-pending sword of Damocles. Hence, illegibility often has violent effects on migrants and perpetuates power asymmetries. Indeed, if bureaucrats have to deal with a rather absurd system in their everyday work, they will leave the situation at the end of the day and walk out of their office and away from the sometime unsolvable clash between policies, frameworks and legal text. Thus, while the ‘thicket’ of illegibility can be found both for state agents and for migrants who struggle to distinguish between supportive and contrary agents, it is important to note that this has very different consequences. While confusion or mistrust among agencies or in their relation to legal authorities can be inconvenient for state agents, they are 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 141 not facing existential threats as a result of these unreadable practices. For migrants, however, illegibility becomes a second, powerful form of domination by the state. Indeed, migrants not only have to face the brunt of state force, namely, to be held, searched, interrogated, imprisoned and deported by legal means; they also cannot predict what happens next, or, in some cases, what happens at all. We conceive of such unpredictability of law enforcement as one of the forceful effects of illegibility. It is this ‘intermittent nature of government control, the illegibility of the law’ (Das 2006, 177) that causes constant feelings of stress for migrants at risk of deportation and renders any sort of planning almost impossible (see Chapter 5) as the following words by Daniel illustrate: You know, here one never knows their plans. They can wake up one day and say that my asylum is finished, they can come with police to pick someone [up] where he is sleeping in the morning, everything is in their hands. (Facebook conversation 2015) Such unpredictability also makes it more difficult to anticipate the functioning of the migration regime and to resist and evade its enforcement of control. Indeed, De Genova (2002, 2016) has shown how incomplete and unpredictable law enforcement is reminding all migrants of the possibility of being exposed to law enforcement in the form of, for instance, detention and deportation, which constitutes a powerful means of social control (see also Hasselberg 2016). Thus, illegibility fuels the disempowering effect of the highly precarious condition of ‘deportability’ (De Genova 2002; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Wicker 2012). While it is difficult to assess the degree or nature of intentionality behind such implicit disciplinary measures, we would argue that the effect of illegibility is certainly strongest for the most vulnerable, but tangible to all actors caught up in the migration regime. The occasional opportunities it offers to those who are successful in navigating and enduring a highly uncertain situation does not compensate for the fact that illegibility increases the power asymmetry between the enforcement part of the migration regime and migrants. CONCLUSION Law permeates the European migration regime, but not as clear-cut rules, but as vague concepts, as rumours, ideas and invented traditions, as causes for hope, despair and limitless bewilderment on all sides. Only 142 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS in recognising that informal legal practices can regularly be observed in much of migration law enforcement can we make sense of practices that otherwise appear absurd. However, despite this observed muddle of law, belief in its rationality and logic of equity is maintained because the ideological power of law has not vanished (see also Silbey 2005). Moreover, the high levels of informality and creative problem-solving reveal state agencies that are both bafflingly mediocre at their job yet seem incredibly powerful because they might do or decide almost anything next. We have shown the usefulness of Veena Das’ (2004) concept of illegibility as it describes the power of exactly such messiness and lack of transparency in the context of India’s bureaucracy. As this chapter has demonstrated, we need to incorporate such ideas into our theoretical toolkits in order to fully understand how European states wield power over their subjects, too (Mathur 2016; Rozakou 2017). Informality and illegibility are not merely the results of policy failure. Instead, they are both systemic and productive. Within the migration regime, frictions and gaps create challenges, as the legal regime is largely unpredictable and illegible even for the agents implementing it. However, the migration regime does not collapse, not even during the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015 (Buckel 2016; Fiedler et al. 2017; Hess and Kasparek 2017; Rozakou 2017). Instead, it is fraught with informal practices which hold the migration regime together and not least provide opportunities for actors to engage with law. The routine of improvisation and informality curiously produces and reproduces stability and assumed legitimacy and thus contributes to the production of order (see Chapter 7). Understanding governance thus requires an examination of piecemeal activities that enable order, echoing Gibson Burrell’s (Cooper and Burrell 1988) ‘diabolical’ (Jones et al. 2005) take on organisational theory. Focusing on the productive nature of informality reveals the double power asymmetry of legal powers and illegibility, as described in above. We have also touched upon the ambivalent meaning of law for migrants with precarious legal status as with regard to Adrian’s example who both attributed hope and feelings of containment to ‘the law’. ‘The question—both in Kafka’s tale and in the case of deportees—is the ‘abstractedness’ of the law, that is, its availability in terms of international conventions and declarations, and at the same time its inaccessibility for those who need it’ (Khosravi 2009, 54). Hence, power and privilege can be maintained and preserved through this seeming disconnection, which 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 143 allows for the law to keep its aura of legitimacy and of holding an overwhelming power (Silbey 2005). We argue that the obscure presence of law and the fact that law-in-practice is far from being applied based on clear-cut regulatory frameworks might even enhance law’s power. Migrants, in turn, base their hopes on law as it holds the magical power to legalise their status. Despite the fact that most rights remain inaccessible to them, a glimmer of hope—often caused by the alleged sacredness of human rights (see also Eckert 2012)—remains. The illegible presence of the law also holds inaccessible promises which in turn reinforce its powerful presence. Thus, as Teubner argues in his interpretation of Kafka’s parable, it is not about ‘pure negativity, but excessive ambivalence. For the Law always produces both at the same time: it puts some people in the wrong, others in the right. With its condemnations, it causes pain, suffering and torment, but it also simultaneously creates the certainty of expectation and trust, upon which people can construct their life plans’ (Teubner 2014, 411). ‘Everyone strives to reach the Law’, says the man, ‘so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?’ (Kafka, Before the Law, authors’ translation). Kafka’s parable ends without the man from the country ever having accessed the law. Thus, whereas the endurance of the man from the country might have compelled the doorkeeper to justify why the law remains inaccessible for those who need it, this has simultaneously forced him to waste his entire lifetime waiting. Migrants’ endurance also makes law enforcement difficult, which can be illustrated with Agamben’s interpretation of Kafka’s parable: ‘[T]hen it is possible to imagine that the entire behaviour of the man from the country is nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law’s being in force’ (1999, 174). However, the migrant is constantly forced to stay and wait, in front of the door, which might open or not, or she is forced to constantly move while remaining in waiting. The illegibility in the migration regime forces migrants to incur numerous detours in their attempt to fulfil their migration projects—both spatial detours with regard to the course of their journeys within Europe and temporal ones, when they find themselves trapped or at a standstill with regard to their life course. In the following chapter we will dig deeper into this temporal aspect of the migration regime and show how law is enforced through making people wait, on the one side and on the other, how actors make use of time as a way of asserting their agency. 144 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Bardach, Eugene. 1980. The Implementation Game: What Happens After a Bill Becomes a Law. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barsky, Robert F. 2016. Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law: The Flight and the Plight of People Deemed “Illegal.” 1st ed. Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge. Belloni, Milena. 2016. “Refugees as Gamblers: Eritreans Seeking to Migrate Through Italy.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 14 (1): 104–19. BGBI. III (Bundesgesetzblatt). 2012. “Agreement on Readmission Between the Austrian Federal Government and the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” 12. https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokumente/BgblAuth/ BGBLA_2012_III_116/COO_2026_100_2_778706.pdfsig. Borrelli, Lisa Marie. 2018a. “Whisper Down, Up and Between the Lane— Exclusionary Policies and Their Limits of Control in Times of Irregular Migration.” Public Administration. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm. 12528. ———. 2018b. “‘I Spy with My Little Eye Something That Is …’— Unannounced Deportations as Humanitarian Practice?”. Borri, Giulia, and Elena Fontanari. 2015. “Lampedusa in Berlin: (Im)Mobilität Innerhalb Des Europäischen Grenzregimes.” PERIPHERIE: Zeitschrift Für Politik Und Ökonomie Der Dritten Welt 138/139: 193–211. Brekke, Jan-Paul, and Grete Brochmann. 2015. “Stuck in Transit: Secondary Migration of Asylum Seekers in Europe, National Differences, and the Dublin Regulation.” Journal of Refugee Studies 28 (2): 145–62. Buckel, Sonja. 2016. Welcome Management: Making Sense of the “Summer of Migration” Interview by William Callison. Near Futures Online “Europe at a Crossroads.” http://nearfuturesonline.org/welcome-management-makingsense-of-the-summer-of-migration/. Burnett, John. 2008. “‘Dawn Raids’. PAFRAS Briefing Paper Number 4. Leeds: Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers.” http://www.statewatch. org/news/2008/apr/uk-patras-briefing-paper-4-%2Ddawn-raids.pdf. Cooper, Robert, and Gibson Burrell. 1988. “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction.” Organization Studies 9 (1): 91–112. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 2000. Legalizing Moves. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://www.press.umich.edu/16184/legalizing_moves. 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 145 Das, Veena. 2004. “The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility.” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Life and Words. Berkeley: University of California Press. Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Coulon, Giada. 2015. “‘L’illégalité Régulière’ Au Cœur Du Paradoxe de l’Etat-Nation Ethnographie de l’interface En Tension Entre Requérant.e.s d’asile Débouté.e.s et Autorités Suisses.” Neuchâtel: Neuchâtel. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (January): 419–47. ———. 2016. “Detention, Deportation, and Waiting: Toward a Theory of Migrant Detainability: GDP Working Paper No. 18.” Global Detention Project (blog). 2016. https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/detention-deportation-waiting-toward-theory-migrant-detainability-gdp-working-paper-no-18. De Genova, Nicholas, and Nathalie Peutz. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dekker, Rianne, Godfried Engbersen, and Marije Faber. 2016. “The Use of Online Media in Migration Networks.” Population, Space and Place 22 (6): 539–51. Dubois, Vincent. 2010. The Bureaucrat and the Poor: Encounters in French Welfare Offices. Farnham: Ashgate. Eckert, Julia. 2012. “Rumours of Rights.” In Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations, 147–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, George C. 1980. Implementing Public Policy. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. Epp, Charles R., Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald P. Haider-Markel. 2014. Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eule, Tobias G. 2014. Inside Immigration Law: Migration Management and Policy Application in Germany. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2017. “The (Surprising?) Nonchalance of Migration Control Agents.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13 69183X.2017.1401516. European Commission. 2013. “Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 Establishing the Criteria and Mechanisms for Determining the Member State Responsible for Examining an Application for International Protection Lodged in One of the Member States by a Third-Country National or a Stateless Person (Recast).” http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri= CELEX:32013R0604&from=EN. 146 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. 1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Falk Moore, Sally. 1978. Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach. New ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fiedler, Mathias, Fabian Georgi, Lee Hielscher, Philipp Ratfisch, Lisa Riedner, Veit Schwab, and Simon Sontowski. 2017. “Contested Movements to and Through EUrope. Introduction.” Movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 3 (1). http://movements-journal.org/issues/04. bewegungen/01.fiedler,georgi,hielscher,ratfisch,riedner,schwab,sontowski– umkaempfte-bewegungen-nach-und-durch-europa~en.html. Gibney, Matthew J. 2008. “Asylum and the Expansion of Deportation in the United Kingdom1.” Government and Opposition 43 (2): 146–67. Gill, Nicholas. 2009. “Longing for Stillness: The Forced Movement of Asylum Seekers.” M/C Journal 12 (1). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index. php/mcjournal/article/view/123. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Gould, Jon B., and Scott Barclay. 2012. “Mind the Gap: The Place of Gap Studies in Sociolegal Scholarship.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8 (1): 323–35. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102811-173833. Harney, Nicholas. 2006. “Rumour, Migrants, and the Informal Economies of Naples, Italy.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 26 (9/10): 374–384. Hasselberg, Ines. 2016. Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life. 1st ed. New York: Berghahn Books. Hess, Sabine, and Bernd Kasparek. 2017. “De- and Restabilising Schengen. The European Border Regime After the Summer of Migration.” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 56 (April): 47. https://doi.org/10.18543/ ced-56-2017pp47-77. Hoag, Colin. 2010. “The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33 (1): 6–25. Jones, Campbell, Rolland Munro, Philip Hancock, and Melissa Tyler, eds. 2005. “Gibson Burrell: Diabolical Architect.” In Contemporary Organization Theory. Sociological Review Monographs. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review. Kafka, Franz. 1937. Before the Law. London: V. Gollancz. Kalir, Barak, and Lieke Wissink. 2016. “The Deportation Continuum: Convergences between State Agents and NGO Workers in the Dutch Deportation Field.” Citizenship Studies 20 (1): 34–49. https://doi.org/10.1 080/13621025.2015.1107025. 4 ILLEGIBILITY IN THE MIGRATION REGIME 147 Khosravi, Shahram. 2009. “Sweden: Detention and Deportation of Asylum Seekers.” Race & Class 50 (4): 38–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0306396809102996. Knapp, Robert H. 1944. “A Psychology of Rumor.” Public Opinion Quarterly 8 (1): 22–37. van Liempt, Ilse. 2007. Navigating Borders. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Mathur, Nayanika. 2016. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Delhi, India: Cambridge University Press. Rozakou, Katerina. 2017. “Nonrecording the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Greece: Navigating Through Irregular Bureaucracy.” Focaal 2017 (77): 36–49. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2017.770104. Ryo, Emily. 2017. “Fostering Legal Cynicism Through Immigration Detention.” Southern California Law Review 90 (5): 999–1053. Schapendonk, Joris. 2017. “Navigating the Migration Industry: Migrants Moving through an African-European Web of Facilitation/Control.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, July, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369 183X.2017.1315522. Scheel, Stephan. 2017. “Real Fake? Appropriating Mobility via Schengen Visa in the Context of Biometric Border Controls.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 0 (0): 1–17. Scheffer, Thomas. 2001. Asylgewährung. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius DE. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Reprint edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Silbey, Susan S. 2005. “After Legal Consciousness.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1 (1): 323–68. Spescha, Marc. 2016. “Vom Geist der Abwehr.” Jusletter, no. 840. http://jusletter.weblaw.ch/services/login.html. Sutton, Rebecca, Darshan Vigneswaran, and Harry Wels. 2011. “Waiting in Liminal Space: Migrants’ Queuing for Home Affairs in South Africa.” Anthropology Southern Africa 34 (1–2): 30–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/2 3323256.2011.11500006. swissinfo.ch. 2017. “Nollywood against Migration.” SWI Swissinfo.Ch, February 21, 2017. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/nollywoodagainst-migration/42977128. Szczepanikova, Alice. 2013. “Between Control and Assistance: The Problem of European Accommodation Centres for Asylum Seekers.” International Migration 51 (4): 130–43. Teubner, Gunther. 2014. “The Law Before Its Law: Franz Kafka on the (Im) Possibility of Law’s Self-Reflection.” SSRN Electronic Journal 14 (January): 405–22. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2419057. 148 EULE, BORRELLI, LINDBERG AND WYSS The Independent. 2015. “Refugee Crisis: Denmark Discourages Asylum Seekers with Newspaper Adverts in Lebanon.” August 9, 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisis-denmark-discourages-asylum-seekers-with-newspaper-adverts-in-lebanon-10490666.html. Tuckett, Anna. 2015. “Strategies of Navigation: Migrants’ Everyday Encounters with Italian Immigration Bureaucracy.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (1). http://berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ cja/33/1/ca330109.xml. Tyler, Tom R. 1990. Why People Obey the Law. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wall, Melissa, Madeline Otis Campbell, and Dana Janbek. 2017. “Syrian Refugees and Information Precarity.” New Media & Society 19 (2): 240–54. Wicker, Hans-Rudolf. 2012. “Das Ausschaffungsregime: Die Juristische, Institutionelle Und Soziale Konstruktion von Illegalität in Der Schweiz.” In Migration, Differenz, Recht Und Schmerz. Sozialanthropologische Essays Zu Einer Sich Verflüchtigenden Moderne, 1990–2010, edited by Hans-Rudolf Wicker, 115–34. Zürich: Seismo Verlag. Wyss, Anna. 2019. “Stuck in Mobility? The Interrupted Journeys of Migrants with Precarious Legal Status in Europe.” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 16 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2018.1514091.