Law in the Margins: Economies of Illegality and Contested Sovereignties

Abstract

Liberal theory has long fetishized state law as a fortress against disorder, anarchy, and private violence. To prevent violence writ large, it advocated, the nation-state should be endowed with its monopoly, as the impartial and rational guardian of civilization and social peace. Yet, as critics suggest, the normative binary of law/violence and the legal purity of the state is empirically untenable and, as such, remains an ideological construct sustained and perpetuated through law and its fictions. In this paper, I revisit these debates to reflect on legal fictions in the context of migration policing. I draw on ethnographic research I conducted with immigration and police officers in the UK. Amid the growing economies of illegality that rely on migrant labour which these officers are in charge of suppressing, their everyday work reveals spaces of legal murkiness and ambiguity. The paper explores the paradoxes, dilemmas and contradictions that such legal ambiguity gives rise to and their implications for state sovereignty.

Full text

e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, XX, 1–17
hps://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac078
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© e Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).
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Law in the Margins: Economies of Illegality
and Contested Sovereignties
AnaAliverti*,
*A. Aliverti, School of Law, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United
Kingdom; email: a.aliverti@warwick.ac.uk
Liberal theory has long fetishized state law as a fortress against disorder, anarchy, and private vio-
lence. To prevent violence writ large, it advocated, the nation-state should be endowed with its
monopoly, as the impartial and rational guardian of civilization and social peace. Yet, as critics sug-
gest, the normative binary of law/violence and the legal purity of the state is empirically untena-
ble and, as such, remains an ideological construct sustained and perpetuated through law and its
ctions. In this paper, I revisit these debates to reect on legal ctions in the context of migration
policing. I draw on ethnographic research I conducted with immigration and police ocers in the
UK. Amid the growing economies of illegality that rely on migrant labour which these ocers are
in charge of suppressing, their everyday work reveals spaces of legal murkiness and ambiguity. e
paper explores the paradoxes, dilemmas and contradictions that such legal ambiguity gives rise to
and their implications for state sovereignty.
KEY WORDS: border controls, legal ctions, economies of illegality, modern slavery, sovereignty,
policing, order, civilized spaces, legality
INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, a thriving industry operating fully or partially outside the law and proteering
from the social and legal precarity of migrants has ourished in many urban areas in the UK and
in other global North countries to serve a growing demand for a range of services: from hand
car washes, agricultural and food industries, scrap metal factories and nail bars to cannabis ‘fac-
tories’, and sex work (Cruz 2013; Clark and Colling 2018; Gadd and Broad 2018). ese ‘econ-
omies of illegality’1 connect localized sites to a larger web of global transactions, networks and
routes that span many continents, highlighting the reliance of contemporary forms of capitalist
accumulation, production and consumption on global connections and inequalities (Norstrom
1 I use the term ‘economies of illegality’, instead of illegal economies, to refer to the myriad of economic activities and
everyday consumption practices that depend to some extent on illicit practices. e term highlights the centrality of illicitness
and illegality for global capitalism. Drawing on cultural economy (Hudson 2013; Gregson and Crang 2017), it contests the strict
dierentiation between legal and illegal economies.
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2 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
2007). ey have become the targets of policy making around illegal migration and criminal
exploitation, and enforcement activity, prompting novel forms of multiagency collaboration
between the police, the immigration service, and other agencies (such as the Gangmasters and
Labour Abuse Authority) (Bogg et al. 2020).
Law and its sturdy enforcement have been the preferred antidote prescribed to tackle the
various moral, social and economic vices aicting an increasingly unequal and interconnected
world. In this paper, I question some of the assumptions underpinning this orthodox approach
to crime and illegalities. Decit of law, according to it, is to blame for the multiplication of
organized criminal networks that haunt civilized Northern spaces, proting and exploiting vul-
nerable people, undermining competition and destabilising civil order. e Northern state thus
emerges as an island of rationality and order amid the chaos and wildness unleashed by globali-
zation. e protective aura of the state, through nationalistic aempts to assert its sovereign
power, is palpable in the resort to border and immigration controls to divert ows of diseases,
risky strangers, and other threats.
Building on legal and anthropological scholarship on the relationship between law, sover-
eignty and order, I argue that such relationship is much more complex and goes to the heart of
contemporary problems of governance, including crime. I suggest that law is intrinsically con-
nected to violence. By craing a certain normative order, creating legal ctions and rejecting life
outside the law, the law produces violence and disorder (Wall 2020). Violence and lawlessness
stem from preserving spaces of legality and civil order, ‘that great steaming morass of chaos
that lies on the underside of order and without which order could not exist’ (Taussig 1987, 4).
Modern state formation and capitalist accumulation coincided with signicant increases in vio-
lence and illegal practices in various societies around the world (Heyman 1999; Anders 2007).
Under contemporary conditions, according to Jean and John Comaro (2006, 5), economic lib-
eralization and globalized capitalism have created ‘spaces of rampant lawlessness and violence,
and a concomitant erasure of received lines between the informal and the illegal, regulation and
irregularity, and order and organized lawlessness’ (also Mbembe 2019, 19). ey urge us to
rethink the relationship between, on the one hand, law and order, and on the other, lawlessness
and disorder, through their dialectics -rather than in competing terms. Insofar as the econom-
ically prosperous North needs an underdeveloped South, the manufacture of ‘walled spaces
of sovereign legality’ (Comaro and Comaro 2006, 35) relies on zones of lawlessness, both
materially and conceptually. Such an understanding unseles received geographies of crime and
violence as global niches in wild southern corners of the world, and interrogates the nature of
order that the law creates: a magical reality.
is paper questions the myth of the contemporary Northern states as territorially bounded
and omnipresent, and argues that the eorts to sustain that myth through law creates zones
of legal ambiguity. It does so by exploring these legal margins, where the ghost of lawlessness
haunts residents and their sentinels alike. In focusing on these murky spaces shaped by aempts
to evade law’s power, the paper seeks not only to question the strict separation between law and
violence but also the legal hegemony of the state. It argues that, in seeking to assert its authority
through law, the state reveals its edges and lacunae, and the legal ctions that sustain its scaold-
ing. e margins are hence privileged terrains for understanding the state as incomplete and
incoherent, where it is simultaneously constructed and unseled (Das and Poole 2004; Blom
and Stepputat 2005).
I study these geographies of lawlessness through material I collected during an ethnographic
study with police and immigration ocers in two large English suburban areas. Policing (and
border policing in particular) epitomizes state sovereignty as it involves the drawing of social
and territorial boundaries, eliminating ambiguity, and making people and places legible (Loader
and Mulcahy 2003; Gundhus and Aas 2016; Aliverti 2020b), sometimes through violence. As
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Law in the Margins • 3
such it is a key site to understand the relationship between law, violence, order and sovereignty.
Amid the growing economies of illegality that rely on migrant labour, border policing work
reveals the ctions created by law to maintain that order, the violence involved in sustaining it,
and the porosity of the boundaries created, evidenced by border workers’ complicities in the
illegal practices they are supposed to suppressed and their cynic aitudes towards their work.
e paper explores the paradoxes, dilemmas and contradictions that the task of policing the
borders within gives rise to and their implications for state sovereignty. Before this analysis,
I detail recent policies around immigration and ‘modern slavery’, expand on the theoretical
framework of the paper and describe the methodology used.
PURSUING ILLEGAL MIGRANTS, RESCUING MODERN SLAVES
In what a critic branded ‘a carceral and punitive approach to stamping out labour market
exploitation’ (Fudge 2018, 568), in the last decade the British government introduced a range
of immigration and criminal laws to tackle irregular and exploitative labour practices—them-
selves outcomes of the compounded eect of economic deregulation and globalization, labour
exibilization and migration illegalization (Wills et al. 2009)-. ese laws seek on the one hand,
to curtail access to work and life-support services to migrants without papers, and on the other,
to identify and safeguard victims of exploitation. Contemporaneous major pieces of legislation
(the Immigration Acts 2016 and the Modern Slavery Act 2015) were passed pursuant of these
two distinct but interconnected strategies, through the ‘hostile environment’ and the ‘modern
slavery’ policies.
Under the rst, a range of civil and criminal sanctions aimed at deterring irregularized
migrants by turning their lives in the UK inhospitable and ultimately unbearable. Statutory
measures in the 2016 Act include preventive orders to tackle non-compliance with labour stand-
ards by employers, a new criminal oence of working illegally and a stricter criminal oence
of illegal employment.2 ese measures added to an already restrictive legal framework which
curtailed access to work to unsuccessful asylum claimants, limited non-EEA labour migration,
and deprived migrants working illegally from any enforceable employment rights, under the
common law doctrine of illegality (Bogg 2018). In fact, ‘hostile environment’ laws amplied
this doctrine to its most extreme eects to deprive people without the right papers from access-
ing lifesaving services, from housing, healthcare and education, to banking and driving (Aliverti
2015).
Under the second, the notion of ‘modern slavery’ became rmly established in the legal
framework to designate various forms of grave exploitation, which were already criminalized
under various acts criminal and immigration acts. e 2015 Act introduced a number of puni-
tive, preventive and protective orders. Among the laer are a specic defence for slavery victims
when oending under compulsion, and visas for overseas domestic workers determined to be
slavery victims.3 Likewise, the Act created duties on corporations to prevent slavery in their
businesses, and on public bodies -including immigration and border control ocers- to identify
and safeguard slavery victims.4
Both policies were justied for the ultimate purpose of preventing the exploitation of vulner-
able individuals. In her speech to the House of Commons in support of the 2016 Act, the then
Home Secretary, eresa May, explained: ‘illegal working is one of the principal pull factors for
people coming to the UK to live and work illegally, but those who do so are particularly vul-
nerable and can nd themselves living and working in dangerous and degrading conditions …
2 Respectively sections 14, 34 and 35.
3 See Part 5.
4 Respectively, Part 6 and ss 40, 52.
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4 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
Increasingly, we are seeing labour market exploitation becoming an organized criminal activity.5
By linking illegal migration, labour exploitation and organized crime, these policies underscored
the protective function of border and immigration controls, complicating the professional roles
of frontline sta (Pickering and Ham 2013; Hadjimatheou and Lynch 2016; Aliverti 2020a).
ey simplify and aempt to domesticate complex social, political and economic processes and
relationships born out of an interconnected and unequal world, through the template of law
and its enforcement, and uphold the state as an avatar of civil peace. In turn, they conceal the
violence of law and the ctions that sustain it, as I explain in the next section.
INTERRUPTING OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGIES: VIOLENCE,
SOVEREIGN POWER AND LEGAL FICTIONS
e supremacy of the rule of law, the centralization of coercive power in the state as prerequisites
for civil and economic order, and the legal geographies that such predicament helps shape, have
a long vintage. Liberal theory has long fetishized state law as a fortress against disorder, anarchy,
and private violence. To prevent violence writ large, the nation-state should be endowed with its
monopoly, as the impartial and rational guardian of civilization and social peace. is ‘myth of
the state’ revolves around its role as protector of a particular form of social order (Blom Hansen
2001, 222), which in turn has been dened in racialized, dichotomous terms: either civilization
or barbarity (Fitzpatrick 1992, 63; Moore et al. 2003). e centrality of law for modernity as
a crucial instrument for forging civil order served to legitimize the political dominance of the
European nation-state (Hussain 2003; Kostal 2005). As colonial bureaucrats, jurists, criminol-
ogists, and corporate investors have long armed, state sovereignty, rule of law, civil order and
economic development go hand in hand (Maei and Nader 2008). Refusing to concede alter-
native forms of social and moral ordering outside state law, the Hobbesian nightmare stymied
political imagination and as a consequence this imperialist construct endures (Roitman 2006;
Taussig 2007; de Waal 2021).
e ‘myth of modern law’ (its sacred nature, autonomy, and coherence), as Peter Fitzpatrick
(1992) explained, is part of a ‘western cosmology’ which has been critical for its authority.
Exoticizing it, by revealing its mythical foundations and its magical ecacy, its contradictions
and suppressions, its ctions and fantasies, aempts to subvert western rationalities and with it,
deconstruct the political power founded upon it. Fitzpatrick (1992, 52) observed that ‘Law, like
the deity, creates its own eect of invoking formulas within law which are mythically adhered
to by priests and people’. Legal ctions aim at mediating law’s internal contradictions, the most
obvious of them being the relationship between law and violence. For while law is based on
rationality and freedom and associated with peace and order, its rule is sustained through the
iniction of violence. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘Critique of Violence’, Jacques
Derrida (1992) argued that violence is not external to the legal order; it is intrinsic to it. In such
intrinsic relationship lies the problematic or contradictions of law -which Derrida compares
with the contradictions in the law of war. e monopoly of violence strives to protect the law
itself and with it the system of privilege and power that is at its origin. In the task of preserving
social order, law reproduces its founding violence, hence the distinction between founding and
preserving violence fuses (Derrida 1992, 44).
is tension between law and violence is epitomized in the Latin maxim ignorantia juris non
excusat which reveals the limitation of rationality for governance (Dubber 2005), and conveys
the ctional nature of legal subjectivity (homos juralis) as universal, abstract, individual and dis-
embodied (Lacey 1998; Norrie 2001). So too, the foundation of state authority, grounded on
5 HC Deb 13 October 2015, Col 197.
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Law in the Margins • 5
a ctional foundational civil contract between individuals and a mythological Leviathan, has
been craed to legitimize political power and law as its tool. e ‘state’ has been entrenched in
our imagination as a ‘jural artice’: a bounded, monolithic, coherent entity distinct from society
and corporations. Such myth has enabled its wielding of ‘a host of quasi-magical, monstrous
powers’ (Comaro and Comaro 2009, 118). ese ctions are made more obvious in the con-
text of European colonial expansion through the designation of vast parts of the earth as terra
nullius, endowing colonial selers with property rights over them, and through the brutal force
used to deect opposition in the name of law (Fitzpatrick 1992). In what Taussig calls the ‘pol-
itics of representation’ (Taussig 1987), the colonial project manufactured ‘a magical reality’ to
serve the colonial endeavour, creating a rupture of signication between things and words, and
producing eects of truth. Legal ctions6 are, Stewart Motha argued, an ‘as if’: narratives reiter-
ated over time that have the eect of establishing truths. Legal ctions sustain political facts and
shore up the scaolding of sovereignty (Motha 2018, 13). is edice is an artice and as such
it is inchoate and fragile, ‘haunted by the eternal return of the unseled origin’ and ‘the problem
of unresolved violence’ (3) which is at the heart of its foundation.
e violence of law, hidden through its ctions is prominently, yet surreptitiously, apparent
and exposed in the policing of law’s margins and its zones of ambiguity. Its enforcement in the
context of the policing of migration lays bare how in rendering some human beings and the
economies that sustain their livelihood beyond the pale, such violence is inevitably unleashed
and intensied (Ty 2019, Super and Ballesteros-Pena 2022). Indeed, Michelle Ty (2019,
309) argued that ‘the border, for Benjamin, is not a there; it is rather an enactment of violence’.
Enabled through ctions (most prominently, the doctrine of illegality), legal violence ‘at the
border’ reveals through the denial of entitlements and the abjection from ‘the circuits of legality’
to human beings regarded as ‘illegal’ (Costello and Mann 2020; Akhtar 2021; Ochoa 2021).
Such abjection, some scholars observed (Davii 2019), is a prime manifestation of Agamben’s
state of exception. As others documented (García Pinzón and Mantilla 2021), law enforcement
does not placate private violence, but on the contrary it can incentivize an economy of violence
outside the state.
e task of policing the borders within, that is the margins running through the state’s politi-
cal body, involves the elimination of zones of legal ambiguity, and the assertion of state author-
ity. As I will show, such a task makes the ction of law evident and give rise to paradoxes and
dilemmas. In the next section, I turn to the study I conducted with police and immigration
enforcement ocers on the labour of policing these margins.
METHODOLOGY
I conducted this study between 2017 and 2019 in two large police constabularies and the
respective Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams. ICE teams are the oper-
ational arm of the Home Oce’s Immigration Enforcement (IE) agency. ere are 18 ICE
teams across the UK formed by arrest-trained immigration ocers with a range of powers to
enforce low-level immigration oences, particularly illegal entry and stay, breaches to visas,
and facilitation of illegal immigration. A parallel IE structure formed by immigration and
police ocers trained in criminal investigations -the Criminal and Financial Investigation
(CFI) teams- has been set up to address serious and organized immigration crimes, such as
human smuggling and tracking, and organized passport fraud (Home Oce 2017). While
6 e concept of legal ction is not a modern invention but dates back to the doctrine of legal ctions in Roman law. is
doctrine goes to the heart of the relation between law and truth, and law and fact, and underscores a conception of law as a force of
(public) good and fairness. As Andrea Alciato noted, ‘ction is a disposition of the law as though of a real thing which is contrary
to truth (the objective facts) although possible, and made for the purposes of equity’ (Alciato quoted in Maclean (2002, 154).
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6 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
the CFI teams are involved in complex, large operations oen leading to criminal charges,
the everyday work of the ICE teams in responding to allegations of immigration breaches
routinely exposes them to the economies of illegality built around people on socially and
legally precarious status. Within the ‘multiagency’ model and the policy turn towards safe-
guarding the vulnerable in policing, ICE have become a key partner given that a substantial
part of the work of the police nowadays involves foreigners as both presumed oenders and
victims.
Aer securing access to the ICE teams through their managers, I was allowed to shadow
immigration ocers and observe enforcement operations with their consent, and I then emailed
individual ocers who I share my shis with to invite them to interview. Fieldwork involved the
shadowing of ICE ocers in police custody; the observation of training sessions, enforcement
operations in businesses and private residences, and case management work and police–immi-
gration ocials’ interactions at a distance from control rooms; and semi-structured interviews
with police and immigration (ICE and CFI) ocers. Observations of police custody were con-
ducted four days per week for four months, and of enforcement operations fortnightly during
a period of 12 months. e data derives from approximately 1,000 hours of non-participant
observations and over 100 interviews with police and immigration ocers at dierent ranks.
Field notes of daily shis were collated in diaries, and interviews were audio recorded. Both
were transcribed and then analysed together. Participants are identied through pseudonyms,
and the names of places mentioned are ctive to preserve the anonymity of individuals and
institutions.
I accompanied immigration and police sta during pre-arranged intelligence-led opera-
tions. Most of the joint enforcement operations observed for this study related to allegations
of exploitation (particularly, forced labour) and illegal employment. ese ranged from large
scale operations with a number of agencies to more routine visits to premises and businesses,
such as car washes, food processing plants, cannabis ‘factories’, fast food restaurants, ware-
houses, and brothels. As many facets of immigration enforcement (Aliverti 2021a), these oper-
ations are oen referred to in murky and euphemistic terms as ‘harm reduction visits’, because
their aim is to identify and safeguard vulnerable individuals facing exploitation. However, they
sometimes resulted in enforcement action, including the arrest of people without the right
papers.
ese ‘visits’ were particularly insightful for appraising the nature of the everyday work of
these ocers, the challenging material conditions in which it takes to play, and the extremely
precarious conditions in which the people they police live and work. In my eldwork notes, I
pay particular aention to the texture of these atmospheres not least because of their impor-
tance for understanding everyday border work but also to emphasize the deeply relational,
emotional, and sensorial nature of ethnographic research. Witnessing and oen unwiingly
partaking in the violence involved in these operations by dint of travelling in ICE ocers’ vehi-
cles and following them around, made me somehow complicit in this violence. My presence
undoubtedly shaped these ocers’ behaviour and, despite aempts to distance myself from
them by carrying a university lanyard and introducing myself to the people being interrogated,
the messy nature of these encounters inevitably precluded any academic pretence of passivity
and detachment.
‘Being there’ made me also privy to the ethical dilemmas these ocers face. Away from the
scenario of British immigration politics, where moral and legal categories are neat and border
enforcement is oered as a solution to multiple global evils, border work oen demands navi-
gating uidity, indeterminacy and ambiguity, and leaves these ocers uncertain, impotent and
dirty, physically as much as morally. I turn to such work in the next sections.
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Law in the Margins • 7
SETTING THE SCENE: THE FAUX, THE ILLEGAL AND FUSSY LEGAL
BORDERLANDS
It was 6.30 a.m. and a freezing January morning. It had snowed all night. I heard on the radio
that there were trac congestions everywhere and that trains were delayed. I managed to catch
mine on time, as I prepared for a large enforcement ‘visit’ with one of the ICE teams. I got o the
train and ran frantically to the ICE oce, fearing I will be late for the brieng meeting and would
miss the operation I spent so much eort arranging. Frank, the porter, greeted me and told me
reassuringly: e ‘guys’ are still upstairs as many of them were late due to the weather. e brief-
ing room was packed with uniformed sta. e meeting was conveyed to prepare ocers for an
operation to one of ICE’s most visited quarters: Sham Town.
I have known of the area by name since I started eldwork with this team, but I never went
there. ere is a mythical aura to it: ‘it is a strange place’, ‘it is not a normal place’ ‘it doesn’t
look like England’, ocers repeatedly conveyed with a mixture of puzzlement, disdain and thrill.
Sham Town, this miniature ‘third world’ at the heart of one Britain’s metropoles, is deantly
perched on the edge of the glossy business quarters that paradoxically signal the city’s recent
overhauling, fuelled in part by the acquisition and revamping of its many cherished buildings
and institutions (from football clubs to media outlets) by global capital. Sham Town is made
of labyrinth-like alleyways, where electricity is shared by its many businesses, corners are lled
with ‘spoers’ and shuers are down when the police are around. A panoply of law enforcement
agencies monitored the area closely and, as with ICE, they hit it frequently with the hope of
dismantling the web of economies of illegalities that the quarters harbour. No maer how many
operations they mounted and how many tons of counterfeited merchandize they seized, mem-
bers of the multiagency team protested frustratingly in one of the meetings I aended: ‘the next
week is all back in site’.
e operation I was about to join involved two large warehouses allegedly employing
migrants without the right papers. ‘ey are cash in hand’, Liz, the immigration ocer (IO) in
charge of the operation prefaced the meeting. As though alerting her team of important opera-
tional clues, she continued: they do not publicize their services through ordinary channels and
were not registered as a business. Some time ago, she continued, the police received intelligence
of ‘modern slavery’ involving 16 people who were living and working inside the premises. e
paper le also said that the owner was Afghani and that he had been nationalized as British years
ago. When the police and ICE visited them some time ago, he did not allow them to enter to
inspect. With a judicial warrant, they were hopeful that they would be able to talk to the work-
ers. Aer the ocers donned their gear, we were set to go. As the car I was travelling in with
other ocers approached Sham Town, I was made aware of the peculiar landscape of the area:
‘this is my area’, IO Ben told me proudly, ‘the shops at the front are ne but as you go down,
there are small shops, all selling counterfeited goods. ese small stalls are not very active at the
moment because the Christmas period is over and there is not that much activity’. We passed
the main road with the shuers of stores all down. ere were a few people outside of them: ‘it’s
good weather to be a spoer’, another ocer added sarcastically.
e car suddenly stopped, and my companions got o swily and ran to the entrance. As
I sat patiently inside, I saw the street blocked by a long caravan of IE vans and unmarked cars
from which an army of ocers disembarked. Some of them started to question men outside the
warehouses. I was then let in by one of the ocers: a vast, tall and bared concrete structure full
of industrial-like, stacked shelves reaching the grey metal ceiling. Inside, it was grim: very dark,
humid and cold. Other ocers were questioning people and rushing about. I got inside a room
tucked to the side of the security oce where Liz and two other ocers were searching and
questioning a man. is improvised ‘sta room’ was furnished frugally with a small dirty stove, a
fridge and a sink full of used tea leaves, and with the workers’ shoes and coats lying on the oor.
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8 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
Somehow ironically, given the precarious working conditions in the site, the door exhibited a
large poster on ‘health and safety laws’ prepared by the health and safety department. Sa, a
skinny, young man, was obediently answering IO Nigel’s questions through a Pashtu interpreter
on the phone, while handcued. When I asked why he was handcued, I was told that he ran
and climbed through the shelves when the team walked on. Performing a search on him was
complicated by the various layers of clothes he was wearing to withstand the freezing conditions
inside. Even as I continuedly sipped a thermal cup of tea to keep me warm, I was unable to feel
my toes aer standing there for a few minutes. I tried to imagine what he went through to come
to the UK and what it must have been like to end up in this warehouse surrounded by ocers,
a story foreclosed in the dull bureaucratic exercise of interrogation to determine whether this
man was an ‘illegal’.
He told the ocers his name and said he did not remember his date of birth: ‘I’m not an edu-
cated person’, he muered. ‘I am 18, or at least I was 18 when the police stopped me’. ‘If you are
18, I am 23. Stop the games and answer the question!’ a frustrated Nigel cried. Liz was losing her
patience too. She had been up on visits since 4 a.m. and was visibly tired and cold. As they could
not determine his home address and date of birth, Sa had to be digitally ngerprinted. Aer
various aempts, the machine showed a match in the immigration record. It turned out that his
name was roughly what he said, and he was down as aged 20. I learnt later that he had entered
the UK three years before in the back of a lorry, and had claimed asylum. He then stopped
reporting periodically to the Home Oce. His records also showed that Belgium ocers had
rst ngerprinted him and that, following European-wide asylum rules,7 he was due to be trans-
ferred to Brussels so his application could be processed there. But because the deadline to send
him back had passed, the application was closed. ‘I’m not going back. I rather be killed here’, he
asserted resolutely. Liz turned around to explain to me the dierent pieces of the puzzle: Afghan
nationals could not be sent back then, so he would have to be dealt with in the UK. ‘He knows
that, and he understands more than what he says’, she added vehemently. Sa was asked about
his address once more. He said that he had been homeless until he found a place in a mosque.
He was then oered a job in the warehouse ‘for £10 a day, to buy tobacco and my own food’. He
said he did not have anywhere to stay but Liz was not convinced: ‘his hair looks clean’. As Nigel
continued to question Sa, Liz speculated: ‘he doesn’t want to give up his address and because
he doesn’t have an address he can’t be bailed’.
Sa is, according to British law, an illegal immigrant and is not allowed to work. Yet, as he
had no identity documents, his European return had expired and his return to Afghanistan was
doomed to fail, there were no legal grounds for detaining him. On the other hand, because he
had no address, he was not able to be ‘temporary released’ under conditions of reporting to
the Home Oce. Liz rounded up this legal maze: ‘even if we are not able to detain or bail him,
we have a duty of care to nd him accommodation’. Yet, since his asylum case was closed, they
found themselves without many options: there are no grounds for state intervention of either
the punitive or benevolent variant. Aer some thinking, Liz proposed to (in her words) ‘resus-
citate his asylum claim’ so ‘he can be allocated a bed space’ with the National Asylum Support
Service (NASS), the Home Oce department tasked with arranging accommodation for asy-
lum seekers at risk of destitution. At the end, Sa was escorted out of the warehouse and taken
to the ICE oce, so that he could be oered accommodation.
Such unorthodox and pragmatic decision raised a few eyebrows among her colleagues. Aer
all, immigration decision-making is, as its ocers boast, a dark quasi-magical art to solve con-
temporary policing problems (Aliverti 2021b). As many other people I met during my two
years eldwork with the ICE team, Sa from Sham Town poses signicant conundrums for
7 e Dublin Regulation, then binding for the UK, before its exit from the EU.
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Law in the Margins • 9
state sovereignty, and for those exercising its power, in a global world. Bureaucratic traces of his
life have been sparingly produced, if recorded at all, and these fragile artifacts -in the form of
birth certicates and identity documents- are easily misplaced, destroyed, and forgoen. Border
crossing unhinges individuals from such bureaucratic structures, making states’ aempts to x
identities even more arduous. Contra Agamben, instead of ‘bare life’, he inhabits a space of legal
indeterminacy, a condition that rather than enabling the wielding of absolute power, is perplex-
ing, disorienting and bamboozling, upseing its very basis. is scene encapsulates the tensions
of sovereignty noted by Hansen and Stepputat (2005, 13) between ‘the will to arbitrary vio-
lence and the existence of bodies that can be killed but also can resist sovereign power, if noth-
ing else by the mere fact of the simple life force they contain’. His bare life reveals the ctions of
law and the violence that it hides as well as its limits.
Evidence of the multiple ways in which law enforcement is entangled with law breaking,
mounting enforcement of border controls, and a growing appetite to make people legible, have
fed a counterfeit industry and ever ingenious aempts to ‘scramble[] received signs of iden-
tity’ (Comaro and Comaro 2017, 104) and unsele states’ monopoly on maers of identity
and recognition. While passports from some countries are regarded as the ‘golden standard’ for
proving citizenship, they are rare to nd. Immigration ocers are at pain of admiing other,
more colloquial forms of identication, such as Facebook proles, to pin down contempo-
rary personhood. For some people, their bodies are the only available truth: ‘you only have
the words, you don’t know who these people are or what they have done -IO Roger confessed
while ngerprinting a man who just arrived at the police station to claim asylum. You can’t ask
their governments, imagine the Sudanese government is the biggest criminal gang!’. On some
occasions, embassy employees and foreign police ocers are called on to identify their own cit-
izens, a practice largely reliant on racialized markers of citizenship and on diplomatic stick-and-
carrot bargaining games. e notion of legal legibility, and the practices to assert and perform
it, reveals the space of ambiguity between life and law, between bio-physical and jurial person-
hood, opening up spaces of uncertainty and suspicion. As Sa and his fellows experienced, their
bodies, and the racial judgements made upon them, become the locus of truth (Reeves 2013,
also Fassin and D’Halluin 2005; Kelly 2006). Ultimately, the truth about individual identities is
always precarious, partial and contingent upon the pragmatic goal of removal. It leaves frontline
ocers, like Liz, impotent and disoriented, unable to wield their power.
Although shadowy and spectral, adject and stripped of politico-legal personhood, people like
Sha are integral cogs in the operation of the global economy and are instrumental for meet-
ing the constantly uid and evolving demands for cheap, exible, quick, and on-the-go goods
and services. ese ‘global proletariat’ increasingly ll the warehouses and repurposed sites of
much capitalism reproduction not in remote and exotic global corners, but right at the heart
of Britain’s suburbs. In the next section, I dig deeper into the political economy of migration
illegalization, and the informal spaces and practices springing up to sustain albeit in precarious
ways their existence.
SUBVERSIVE GEOGRAPHIES: MIMICRY AND THE BORDERS OF LAW
Sham Town is a unique space. Its internal geography is shaped by informality and organized
around aempts to evade the state’s glance and iron st. From its demographic makeup to the
goods sold there, one struggles to distinguish the fake from the authentic, and it is precisely this
space of ambiguity which casts doubt on the very notion of authenticity and on the state as its
arbiter. e fake and the counterfeit, as Comaros (2006, 15) put it, ‘open an uncertain space
between signiers … and what they signify’ to the point that ‘there is lile practical dierence
between real and faux’, unlocking alternative forms of identity and value aside from state law.
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10 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
Sham Town is one of the many places I visited during eldwork considered as hives and magnets
for economies of illegality. ese spaces are talked about with a mix of disdain and thrill, marked
by their dierence from an imagined England. Mimicry, Homi Bhaba argues, articulates ambiv-
alent logics: on the one hand, ‘it is a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which
“appropriate” the Other’, as ‘almost the same but not quite’; on the other, it poses an ‘immanent
threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’. It ‘emerges as one of the most
elusive and eective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (Bhaba 2012, 122).
Dodginess and mimesis, enforcement ocers insist, are valuable clues for spoing illegal
migrants. ‘If you go to these places where there are foreign nationals and there is animosity and
nd out that food safety is not great – you feel something is not right’, detective constable Becky
lectures an assorted audience of social workers and health and safety inspectors during a session
to train them on immigration law enforcement, ‘refer the case to us because, if they are breaching
a rule, they’re probably breaking other rules as well.’ is felt sense that ‘something is not right’,
the sensorial and intuitive ‘out-of-place-ness’ (Douglas 2002 [1966], 118) that underscores the
‘cop nose’, is organized around racial semiotics and the decoding of smells, moral sensibilities,
vague measures of civility, cultural competencies and visual cues (Sekimoto 2018; Sekimoto
and Brown 2020). Racial knowledge, Ann Stoler reminds us, is as much sensorial as somatic
(Stoler 2016, 250). Oen, though, the racialized taxonomies of polluted spaces are less subtle.
On one occasion, as the immigration team approached a residential area made of tall Victorian
houses, once home to the local genteel class and now dissected into housing units to accommo-
date various families, IO Tim boldly elaborated: ‘ere are no whites in here’. In the eyes of law
enforcement sta, these are polluted, unruly, dirty spaces, ‘almost but not quite’ England, which
demands concerted and bold legal intervention, or wholesale bulldozing.
is infrastructure at the margins of the law in practice manifests in ctive residences (‘postal
boxes’) where a person is registered as a lodger to receive their mail but does not live there, ctive
jobs (contrived work) arranged for family visa applicants who are unable to certify a certain salary
threshold required to bring their family into the country, ctive marriages to bypass immigration
laws, and faux currencies (or crypto money). Meanwhile, people survive, live, love and work in the
most precarious places and conditions. ey sleep in cupboards, lorry carriers, on sofas, or other
places unsuitable for human habitation which do not gure in the housing register, in constant
fear of res and frost, and of being evicted or arrested. Many give up their labour in exchange of a
hot meal, in relations that resemble more like favours than contracts, and are based on reciprocity
and trust. eir workplaces suddenly pop up and disappear as soon as demand dries out. ey
are ghostly and ephemeral sites, adaptable and well suited to sustain the fast pace of modern life.
e hyper-precarity of those ‘living at the margins’ of law forces them to develop avoidance strate-
gies, alternative norms and systems of governance based on reciprocity, solidarity and trust, which
as Bloch and McKay documented, can further instead of alleviating social exclusion, and render
them prey to extortion (Bloch and Mckay 2017, 82, also Gaibazzi 2017; Jiang and Wang 2021).
In these social and legal borderlands, the domains of the legal and illegal are rendered fuzzy,
interdependent and interconnected (Coutin 2005). Far from being gheos or strongholds,
they are well engrained in contemporary urban geographies and economies. One of them, a
large food warehouse I visited with the ICE team, was dedicated to cut vegetables to go into the
ready-made salad and meal bags sold in mainstream supermarkets, and almost entirely crewed
by people who failed their asylum claims and are legally banned from work. e owner was
ned multiple times for hiring this workforce, but never paid the nes and was at risk of having
his business shut down. I stood near IO Rashid as he questioned a man called Sohan, who said
he was from Pakistan. He was skinny, in a hoodie and jeans, with wellies covered with vegeta-
ble pieces. His hands bore the imprints of life’s hardship and unkindness, which he adamantly
sought to hide. Struggling to understand and speak in English, Sohan said that he came there
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Law in the Margins • 11
to clean the place and stay for 3 to 4 hours at a time. He was encountered on another operation
when he said he was cleaning the site. In exchange for doing some work, Soha said that the
owner paid for his rent and food. ‘Do you pay any taxes?’ ‘Have you done any health and safety
course to work here?’ e question sounded bizarre, but Rashid was following a wrien ques-
tionnaire prescribed for ‘illegal working cases’. At some point, he stopped and in reprimanding
tone lashed out: ‘I’m noting your answer, but I don’t know if you realize that they are silly …
You are not supposed to work’ Rashid addressed him rmly and told him to leave the premise.
Inside this place it was humid and freezing cold, the strong smell of onions and potatoes made
ones’ eyes itch. It was late at night and the team had been on similar operations all day. Frustrated
and exhausted, the ocer in charge decided to stop the interviews, send people away and close
down the premise. ey had a closure order in place as it was the third visit where they encountered
workers in similar conditions. e le suggested that there was some level of exploitation happen-
ing there, but because they could not establish that the workers were being coerced, it was treated
as a breach of minimum wage rules, a much lower administrative charge rarely investigated. As we
were all departing, the owner arrived protesting: ‘you came once, twice, three times. Immigration,
you can’t do this! is is my building, it’s my business.’ ‘ We can do it if you keep employing illegals.
You can go to prison for this’, Rashid replied while handing down the closure order.
Many of the ‘harm reduction’ and enforcement operations I aended with the ICE teams
were motivated to ‘rescue slaves’ and punish their vile exploiters, in line with ‘modern slavery’
policies. Such pristine distinction, however, rarely exists since ‘many victims have skeletons in
their own cupboard’, as an NGO worker specialized in slavery cases put it. Oen, these oper-
ations resulted in ocers nding people living in treacherous conditions and working for the
‘day’s meal’ grateful for being oered a place to sleep and work by those a step ahead in their
migration journey and in slightly more comfortable positions. Filtering out ‘real slaves’ from the
enlarging pool of global poor, it turns out, relies on legally narrow ideas of coercion and free-
dom. ese people complicate the moral characters in the ‘modern slavery’ laws, which as the
ocers in charge of enforcing them aest, feature their own ctions and myths. On the ground,
they boil down to mundane indicators: whether people have food in the fridge, how many daily
meals they take, whether they are clean and tidy, and have a place to sleep, and if they keep their
passports with them. Wrestling with these contradictions, ocers are le with crude choices:
‘ere are no good results -IO Sam admied. Either they go back or are released into poverty.’
Borders conceived in literal and gurative terms as both material and social are subversive spaces
that ‘challenge not only national economic regulations and monopolies, but also raise morally charged
questions of sovereignty, legality, and legitimacy’ (Heyman and Symons 2012, 543, also Reeves
2014, 15). e spatial, legal and social margins I explored here have been rendered as peripheral,
wild zones, in need of state colonization by legal and policy discourse. Yet, following Vena Das and
Deborah Poole (2004), we might think of the margins as rivers running through the political body of
the state, rather than lying outside of it, where its solidity, rationality and coherence are questioned,
and where alternative forms of economic and political action are rehearsed and enabled. Margins,
Das (2004) argued, are important for understanding the functioning of the state as an unnished
project. e next section turns to the frontiers of legal and illegal, and the complicities involved.
ON ENFORCEMENT GAMES AND COMPLICITIES: THE MORAL
ECONOMIES OF IMMIGRATION
Police constable Paul, who specialized in complex organized crime, once put in simple terms as he
explained his role in dismantling drug tracking networks to a new recruit: ‘this is a game: they
hide, we nd them’. A similar language was used by IO Roger: ‘I said to one detainee, I will send
you to detention and in 8-9 days you will be back there, and then next time I come I will nd you
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12 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
again.’ ey both laughed, he said, the man acknowledging that it was true: ‘it is all a big game, they
know it. We know it. It keeps me in my job.’ e law-enforcement-as-a-game metaphor speaks of the
cynicism with which some ocers regard their job, and it spells its ludic character. It acknowledges
the plot-like, mutually constitutive nature of lawbreaking and law enforcement, and underplays its
moral overtones and rigid lines between enforcers and transgressors. While much enforcement
work assumes a clear distinction between the legal and the illegal, and the legal purity of those
tasked with enforcing the law, in practice those assumptions are turned on their head as their work
exposes them to the porous frontiers of legality.
Such porosity, that is the blurred line between legal and illegal practices, is particularly evident
in the multiple forms of complicities with illegal activities that snared both the public and the
ocers themselves. e public, IO Felicity complained, is too oblivious to and uncurious about
signs of immigration lawbreaking: ‘people are quite easy to go “oh yes there is a fella from India
who lives next door” but … they don’t understand so … it doesn’t maer, you know: has that per-
son been naturalized, did they have legal stay in the United Kingdom, is he facilitating somebody,
has he been facilitated? Is he part of modern-day slavery?’. eir job, she suggested, is to infuse with
moral content the distinction between legal and illegal, and acquaint the ‘public’ to the signs of ille-
gality. Other ocers spoke in bolder terms about these social complicities. Rather than ignorance
and indierence, much exploitation and abuse is enabled through the wilful blindness of mundane
consumption practices. Penny, an experienced detective at a modern slavery unit, expands:
I just think it has got to be something about the fact that we provide a marketplace for it, it has
got to be. If we are providing a marketplace, where you see some sex workers and they are a
mess, like I think about those two girls we recovered from [city], there is no way that a client
could have seen those women and not known that they were being exploited because they
looked horrendous so what do we do about that? What do we do about that marketplace that
allows for that to go on? And about those restaurants and those houses where those people
were living. Unless we tackle that, unless we tackle the demand for it, that low paid, low skilled
work and that environment, then we’re never going to rescue people because for all of those
reasons, people want to earn money and they want to support their families just like we do. It
is the reason you and I are probably sat here, isn’t it?
While many public campaigns around modern slavery have aempted to encourage public
awareness and ethical consumption practices (see posters below), enforcement ocers nd
themselves engulfed within an economic structure sustained through exploitative practices
where law enforcement remains, at best, a futile aempt to tilt market forces within a world
polarized by wealth distribution, at worst, an enabler of the worst forms of exploitation.
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Law in the Margins • 13
Frontline sta themselves partake in that market. During eldwork, many ocers I shad-
owed admied in passing buying counterfeit clothes, consuming smuggled cigarees and illegal
drugs, and helping family members to enter the country illegally. Complicities in these various
economies of illegalities can be explained through the notion of ‘market anomie’. As Karstedt
and Farrall (2006, 1015) argued, by engaging in shady practices, citizens are enacting neo-liberal
roles as ‘sovereign consumers’ which prioritized unrestrained prot and self-interest. e per-
vasive nature of practices that enable exploitative conditions -including through consumption
of goods and services- challenge the strict distinction between legal and illegal. As Abraham
and van Schendel (2005, 7) states, ‘licit and illicit practices coexist in social life and are together
imbricated in state processes’.
e blurring line between legal and illegal surfaces in the very nature of border control work
whereby the morality of law and sovereignty is contested. e function of law in prohibiting
border crossing, including some forms of facilitation and smuggling, generates signicant moral
ambivalence not just among the people subject to it, but by the ocers in charge of enforcing it.
Heyman and Symons (2012, 548) distinguish two moral stances towards border practices: one
distant to ‘the border’ characterized by essentialized and absolute positions, and other, proxi-
mate to ‘the border’, which is morally plural and shaded. ‘e border then, imagined and politi-
cally practised at a distance … or in isolated detention and removal sites, is a crucial simplifying
move, giving “order” to ambiguous membership. In fact, ongoing relations cut across actual bor-
ders just as much–they are transnational – and thus such sites are also morally complex’ (also
Mehta 2018).
is dichotomic perception on the morality of borders coexist in immigration enforcement’s
accounts of their work and the people they are called to police. Unambiguous moral evaluations
that adopt a legally formalistic appraisal of migration are sometimes followed without inter-
lude by morally ambivalent stances. Moral ambivalence and uncertainty are oen animated by
human proximity and social identication. A former prison ocer and child of Irish migrants,
IO Barry puts it down to ocer’s own biographies:
While young ocers tend to see things in black or white, I see these people not as oenders.
I know they are formally crimes, but they just came here for a beer life for them and their
families, just in the same was that your parents and mine did. I used to deal with real criminals,
these people are easy to deal with. With age you realise life is complex, it’s not black and white.
Human proximity unseles rigid and xed legal categories; on occasions, it dismantles
the ction that the law creates and exposes its violence. ese ‘guardians of the border’ are
simultaneously moral guardians (Koch 2021), who in doing so not only reveal the ethics of
immigration enforcement but also broader tensions between law and morality and spaces of
legal indeterminacy.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I question the orthodox approach to tackle ‘modern slavery’ and other forms of
criminal activities reliant on exploitative practices. I pointed to the aws of the approach, reliant
on law enforcement, which ignores the intrinsic relationship between law and violence. I showed
the violence at stake in defending the ‘walled spaces of sovereign legality’, and the ‘as ifs’ that sus-
tain those material and metaphorical walls that form the myth of the state. Focusing on the work
of frontline sta tasked with policing the internal borders and margins, I also elucidated the
spaces of indeterminacy which render the ctions upholding that myth unstable. As a core part
of policing (Fassin 2013), physical encounters between state ocers and migrants-qua-citizens
lay bare the legal ctions that strive to order and simplify, on occasions dispel the myths of the
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14 • e British Journal of Criminology, 2022, Vol. XX, No. XX
law as an avatar of social order and civil peace, and interrogates the sturdy and coherent image
of the state emanating from policies and discourses around ‘modern slavery’. Metaphorically,
this is a Leviathan mutilated and stripped o its material and symbolic assets, a monster with its
eyes covered. To paraphrase Derrida, the magic spell that foregrounds its authority fades as the
violence that sustains it becomes pristine.
To go back to the scene in Sham Town, Liz’s remedy to bring Sa back to ‘legal life’ to enable
state power is telling not only of such sense of sovereign bewilderment and impotence, but also
of the ctions and articiality of law to name and recognize, or to make people disappear. For,
if as Hansen and Stepputat (2001, 21) argue, ‘the myth of the state is actually sustained by the
rather mundane practices of authorization and recognition carried out by the state … by literally
implanting it in people’s lives’, it is also sustained, I would argue, through acts of misrecognition.
rough rendering a human being ‘illegal’, the state inicts the ction of legal death. Such legal
ctions, which reinstate the state as the arbiter of social and legal existence, not only expose people
to extreme harm and misery and seclude them into ‘spaces of nonexistence’ (Coutin 2005, 14), but
also at points render state power feeble and futile, and reveal the contradictions of the law.
Despite adject and stripped of politico-legal personhood, their biological and economic per-
sona is very real. Beyond the function of illegality for capitalist reproduction (Calavita 2005; De
Giorgi 2010), the contradictions created by the law -the simultaneous erasure of personhood by
turning people into ‘illegals’, liminal entities, shadows and legal zombies, its sheer violence, and
the problems that such negation poses for the upholding of sovereign power- interest me the
most. As research on municipal activism demonstrates, local bureaucrats actively pursue inclu-
sionary policies that widen welfare access for migrants without papers, at times defying national
laws. Formal exclusion of migrants, Spencer and Delvino (2019) suggest, creates signicant legal,
social, moral, security and public health challenges for local authorities which they oen address
through their informal inclusion. e practices of these local bureaucrats and frontline sta, like
Liz, acting within ‘the state’ are powerful for laying bare the instability and indeterminacy of legal
categories. Oen, the ocers in charge of enforcing these laws are those contesting such illegality.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am particularly grateful to the police and immigration ocers who allowed me to observe
their work and took part in interviews, as well as their managers for granting permission to con-
duct the research project based on which I wrote this article. I am also grateful to a number of
colleagues who read versions of it and provided invaluable comments and critiques: Henrique
Carvalho, Valerie Hayaert, Dan Mahews, Rimple Mehta, Samuel Singler, Gail Super, and two
anonymous BJC reviewers. Finally, I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their gener-
ous nancial support without which I would not have been able to conduct my project.
FUNDING
is work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust through its Philip Leverhulme Prize in
Law [grant number: PLP-2017-170], the Economic and Social Research Council Impact
Acceleration Account [ESRCIAA2_004_2019] and various grants from the University of
Warwick.
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Law in the Margins • 15
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