Illegality

Un port fluvial organise le trafic entre deux villes frontalières, Brazzaville et Kinshasa, situées de part et d’autre du fleuve Congo en Afrique centrale. Il est devenu en une dizaine d’années un espace notoire de trafic dans lequel une vaste activité de petite contrebande — connue de tous, mais visible et cachée, tout à la fois— s’est organisée pour l’importation à Kinshasa via Brazzaville des textiles imprimés d’origine asiatique. A travers une analyse des pratiques frauduleuses dans un port fluvial qui réunit plusieurs services de l’Etat chargés en principe d’appliquer la loi, cette contribution examine comment les acteurs qui travaillent dans ce poste frontalier et ceux qui y circulent, construisent ensemble les normes d’importations et de passages illégaux des marchandises.

"Do unauthorized im/migrants have a right to health? Do they deserve health care, or health protection, or access to the social determinants of good health? Are they party to prevailing social contracts, or does their exclusion from mainstream systems of health promotion, prevention, and care “make sense”? Questions like these, which generate considerable attention in multiple spheres of scholarship, policy, and public debate, revolve around an issue that merits substantially greater consideration among social scientists of health: health-related “deservingness.” In addition to putting the issue of health-related deservingness squarely on the map as an object of analysis, the paper further argues that we cannot focus solely on those with power, influence, and public voice. Rather, we also must investigate how deservingness is reckoned in relation to – and, furthermore, from the perspectives of – unauthorized im/migrants and members of other groups commonly constructed in public and policy discourse as undeserving. Additionally, we must also examine the complicated relationship between universalizing juridical arguments about formal entitlement to health rights, on one hand, and situationally specific, vernacular moral arguments about deservingness, on the other.

KEYWORDS: Israel – unauthorized im/migration – im/migrant health – “illegality” – deservingness – health care access – idioms of social justice mobilization – renegade moralities"

Given the vast scope and magnitude of the phenomenon of so-called “illegal” migration in the present historical moment, this article contends that phenomenologically engaged ethnography has a crucial role to play in sensitizing not only anthropologists, but also policymakers, politicians, and broader publics to the complicated, often anxiety-ridden and frightening realities associated with “the condition of migrant illegality,” both in specific host society settings and comparatively across the globe. In theoretical terms, the article constitutes a preliminary attempt to link pressing questions in the fields of legal anthropology and anthropology of transnational migration, on one hand, with recent work by phenomenologically oriented scholars interested in the anthropology of experience, on the other. The article calls upon ethnographers of undocumented transnational migration to bridge these areas of scholarship by applying what can helpfully be characterized as a “critical phenomenological” approach to the study of migrant “illegality” (Willen, 2006; see also Desjarlais, 2003). This critical phenomenological approach involves a three-dimensional model of illegality: first, as a form of juridical status; second, as a sociopolitical condition; and third, as a mode of being-in-the-world. In developing this model, the article draws upon 26 non-consecutive months of ethnographic field research conducted within the communities of undocumented West African (Nigerian and Ghanaian) and Filipino migrants in Tel Aviv, Israel, between 2000 and 2004. During the first part of this period, “illegal” migrants in Israel were generally treated as benign, excluded “Others.” Beginning in mid-2002, however, a resource-intensive, government-sponsored campaign of mass arrest and deportation reconfigured the condition of migrant “illegality” in Israel and, in effect, transformed these benign “Others” into wanted criminals. By analyzing this transformation the article highlights the profound significance of examining not only the judicial and sociopolitical dimensions of what it means to be “illegal” but also its impact on migrants' modes of being-in-the-world.

By default, stateness is usually considered as a state’s legal ability to deliver goods or services. This understanding implies that stateness is structured by the rule of law. However, as historical and current examples show, this legal ability often relies on practices that one would define as illegal and that any measure of ‘stateness’ must take into account. Using the case of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires as an example, I propose the notion of hybrid stateness i.e. an understanding of stateness that considers the state’s ability to operate illegally. This short piece addresses the institutional and budgetary setting of the provincial police force and tackles the question of where the illegal resources for performing police’s duties come from.

"This article compares the politics of place and belonging within two non-metropolitan
communities—Woodburn, Oregon, and Leadville, Colorado—that have witnessed a
significant increase in Latino immigration during the last fifteen to twenty years. Today
both communities are approximately 50 per cent Latino, a demographic change that has
reworked understandings of place identity and social belonging in each. Through a
comparison of the two towns we seek to chart the unique regional political economic
dynamics driving these changes, examine their spatial imprint, and interrogate how local
context shapes the extent to which new arrivals are able to make effective claims to a sense
of place and belonging despite hierarchies of race, class and ‘illegality.’ Assessing the
differences between these two immigrant destinations provides insights into how
sociospatial relations are crucial to analyzing immigrant–receiving society interaction,
and contributes to scholarship on the uneven geography of immigrant incorporation in
the contemporary USA."