Hunting Illegals

This chapter discusses the hunt for illegals. It begins by considering stateless people, whose legal exclusion is no longer presented as punishment for a crime, but as a status, directly connected with the individuals' political status. If the stateless person is excluded from the system of legal protection it is not because he has committed an infraction: on the contrary, he is himself that infraction, by the simple fact of existing, by his sole presence on the territory of the nation-state. Making persons infractions, making their lives a permanent infraction, is thus the first characteristic of this new system of legal exclusion. The chapter then turns to a new form of legal proscription, which is distinct from that of stateless persons, a recent historical product of policies of the illegalization of migrants. This new situation of the illegality of immigrant workers is connected with states' refusal to grant them the right to reside and work legally.