The proliferation of borders and the right to escape

It has often been noted that a weakness of migration studies is the tendency to take policy categories as a starting point for research (Lindley 2014, 8). This weakness is even more critical today, when the conceptual nomenclature surrounding migration is challenged both by the shifting patterns of migration management and control and by the dynamics and subjective practices crisscrossing movements of migration themselves. This is true for some of the foundational partitions of migration policies (and studies), such as the demarcation line between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘economic migrant’, as well as for more subtle distinctions, predicated, for instance, upon the temporal dimension of migration (just think of the figure of the ‘temporary migrant worker’) or upon the ‘skills’ of migrants. Contemporary regimes of ‘migration management’ tend to work and continually redraw the boundaries between these and other categories, calibrating governmental tools that attempt to cope with the increasing turbulence and autonomy of migration. This tendency has become even more pronounced in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007–2008. While critical scholars and activists have effectively deconstructed the figure of the ‘illegal migrant’ in recent years, there is a need to connect the critique of processes of illegalization with more general transformations of both migration regimes and practices of mobility. This is one of the main tasks to be addressed in any attempt to forge a new language and new concepts which will make sense of the subjective stakes of contemporary migratory experiences