Anthropology essay final

Handout – Life, undocumented, and the lived experience of illegality

Leo Chavez https://escholarship.org/content/qt6zh533s6/qt6zh533s6.pdf

As people move across ever more porous national boundaries, their status is determined by those nation-states, not some essential quality inherent in the migrants’ genetic code or personal philosophies on life. Policymakers… construct classifications to further bureaucratic control of populations, including, and perhaps most especially, migrants (Inda, 2006)… Illegality is a status resulting from political decisions made by governmental representatives who could just as well have decided to allow migrants to enter under the sanction of law – as legal immigrants, legal workers, or legal guests of some type (Ngai, 2004). The migrants themselves are the same people, whether deemed legal or illegal by their countries of destination. What marks the illegal is the receiving state’s unwillingness to recognize the conditions that create a demand for labour, most notably falling fertility rates, aging populations, and values that imbue certain jobs as “immigrant jobs”. As a result, a legal fiction emerges. This fiction recognizes that “X” number of migrant labourers will be attracted to most of the industrialized nations, but also recognizes that politicians will respond to their constituents’ fears of immigration by allowing far fewer legal immigrants/workers to enter legally than are contained in the actual flow (Coutin, 2005). The surplus could have been allowed to enter legally, but instead the “illegal” entrant is constructed. The total flow, the “X” number of in-migrants, continues albeit under these constructed categories of legal and illegal migration. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life” Annual Review of Anthropology (31)

Handout – Life, undocumented, and the lived experience of illegality

Willen, Sarah. 2012.“Migration, “illegality,” and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and

debating health-related deservingness” Social Science and Medicine, 74:6.

Quotes from “illegal” migrants in Israel –

Life as an illegal foreign resident is really like living underground. You’re anonymous, without a

name, without an identity, without an address. You live underground, no one can know about

you, no one can find you. You’re afraid of every person you meet in the street because anyone

could turn you in to the police and that’s the worst thing that could happen. They’ll deport you

from here and you’ll go home without money to the difficult situation there.

- Joseph, “illegal” migrant worker from Ghana2

… Like the other day, I was waiting behind a bus stop with a friend. There were two Israelis

sitting there. The bus had just passed, and an African woman from my building had gotten on –

the one with the cute daughter. We used to say hello even though she doesn’t know Hebrew and

I don’t know English, but still we’d always say, “Shalom, shalom”. So I’m talking to my friend,

who’s also [undocumented], and over her shoulder I can see cops in gray uniforms. I’m waving

my hand as I talk, but as soon as I see them I stop what I’m saying and keep waving my hand. I

can’t stop waving my hand. So I say to my friend, “My hand is moving by itself”. Otherwise I

stayed completely frozen until the cops left”.

- Tanya, “illegal” migrant from Ukraine

(Sarah Willen, Toward a Critical Phenomenology of “Illegality”: State Power, Criminalization,

and Abjectivity among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, Israel, 2007)