What makes a migrant legal or illegal? This article by Agnieszka Kubal suggests that rather than a black and white distinction between legal and illegal, there is an in-between category of ‘semi-legal’. Kubal focuses on semi-legality to explain the complex and nuanced situation of many migrants trapped in legal ambiguity that is not only tolerated, but somewhat fuelled in many neoliberal migration regimes.
The article uses data from 360 interviews with international migrants in the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom to give voice to those whose 'lives are shaped by law' and examine migrants’ own interpretations of their standing within state legal frameworks.
The full article is available at Wiley Online Library