Call for
Papers
Illegality
Regimes:
Mapping the Law of Irregular Migration
A
Conference at the VU University Amsterdam
30
May - 1 June 2013
Recent
years have seen the development of increasingly sophisticated legal and policy
approaches to address the phenomenon of irregular immigration. Many states have
moved beyond traditional means of law enforcement, such as criminalization,
without necessarily abandoning them. In addition, they have begun to employ
other areas of law (such as administrative law and labor law) in pursuit of
controlling irregular immigration.
For
example, the verification of legal residence status, by means of ID-controls,
has become increasingly necessary in the day to day life of all people: citizens
and non-citizens alike. Private citizens, and not government agents, are
evolving into the primary enforcers of these policies, as they have been made
legally responsible for the control of legal residence status, for example in
the case of employment.
These
legal and policy instruments have sometimes been justified with reference to
economic theories, such as 'attrition through enforcement', the broken window
theory, and most recently 'self-deportation', a term that ironically originated
in a stand-up sketch performed by two Hispanic comedians in the mid '90s, and
has since then been promoted to a major policy proposal in the Romney campaign
for the US presidential elections.
Among
economic scholars, a debate about the (lack of) effectiveness of these policies
has been growing the last couple of years. What is still absent, however, is a
more rigorous analysis by legal and other social science scholars. This
conference aims to explore the more systemic dimensions of these responses to
irregular migration. For this purpose, scholars from all disciplines are invited
to consider (any of) the following questions, or to respond with additional
insights and approaches:
Alessio Lo Giudice, a Juris Diversitas member, has recently published La democrazia infondata. Dal contratto sociale alla negoziazione degli interessi (Carocci, 2012):
