Navigating the Law: Tactics of Avoidance and Appropriation

Author(s) : Anna Wyss

Source : https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529219623.ch006

“This chapter disentangles migrants’ ambivalent relationship with the law from a socio-legal perspective on the migration regime. Rather than simply standing ‘before’ the law – and thus outside of it – migrants with a precarious legal status frequently seek to act ‘with the law’ in order to use it to their favour. However, they often get caught up and lost within legal procedures when trying to legalise their presence, simultaneously feeling trapped by the law. The chapter conceptualises migrants’ tactics and their legal consciousness as when they use creativity to evade the implementation of certain laws while trying to appropriate other legal frameworks to their advantage. Their tactics can thus both involve practices of avoiding the law (such as eluding states’ law enforcement) or practices of appropriating the law (such as engaging in legal proceedings in the hope of regularisation). Finally, this chapter discusses the issue of marriage, which is one of the last resorts people turn to in order to legalise their presence. The chapter thus zooms into migrants’ navigation of the law and further discusses migrants’ agency at the margins of the state.”