Illegalised and undeportable migrants as translocal legal subjectivities

The mechanisms of border control display a transnational dimension, in which a variety of legal and normative orders affect the norm-making processes. The presence of unauthorised migrants in receiving societies reveals the emergence of new forms of normativity, produced by the interactions of local, national, supra-national, regional legal and normative processes. Mechanisms of border control can be better understood if we look at illegalised and undeportable migrants as translocal legal subjectivities, who are able to change the functioning of normative systems through their very existence as mobile subjects. Drawing from a case study of the interaction between the police and illegalised and undeportable migrants in Bologna (Italy), this article empirically assesses translocal legalities in the field of border control, and demonstrates how these encounters challenge an idea of law as based in the logic of sovereign authority, while opening new spaces of possible governance