This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. “This book is a major achievement. A remarkable and insightful study that through close analysis of the practices of migration control in 8 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland) provides powerful new insight into the power of the state at its margins and over those that are marginalised.” - Andrew Geddes, Director, Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute “Migrants Before the Law provides a much-needed account of the dizzying legal labyrinth that migrants navigate as they seek to survive in Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnography in detention centres, migration offices, police stations, and non-governmental organizations as well as on interviews with key government actors, advocates, and migrants themselves, this book explores the systems of control and forms of migrant precarity that operate along Europe’s internal borders, in multiple national and transnational contexts. Readers will come away with a deepened understanding of the perverse workings of power, the ways that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law foster both despair and hope, the degree to which the immigration “crisis” is both manufactured and experienced as real, and the ingenuity of migrants themselves in the face of Kafkaesque state practices.” - Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Migrants Before the Law is an excellent exposition of the dispersed sites of the law and the hinges and junctions through which this apparatus is actualized in the lives of migrants facing deportation, contesting their status as illegal migrants or seeking to regularize their precarious position. Written with great sensitivity and an eye to minute details this book is also an achievement in furthering the method of collaborative ethnography and new ways of staging comparisons.” - Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

This is the first monograph providing a comprehensive legal analysis of the criminalisation of migration in Europe. The book puts forward a definition of the criminalisation of migration as the three-fold process whereby migration management takes place via the adoption of substantive criminal law, via recourse to traditional criminal law enforcement mechanisms including surveillance and detention, and via the development of mechanisms of prevention and pre-emption. The book provides a typology of criminalisation of migration, structured on the basis of the three stages of the migrant experience: criminalisation before entry (examining criminalisation in the context of extraterritorial immigration control, delegation and privatisation in immigration control and the securitisation of migration); criminalisation during stay (examining how substantive criminal law is used to regulate migration in the territory); and criminalisation after entry and towards removal (examining efforts to exclude and remove migrants from the territory and jurisdiction of EU Member States and criminalisation through detention). The analysis focuses on the impact of the criminalisation of migration on human rights and the rule of law, and it highlights how European Union law (through the application of both the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and general principles of EU law) and ECHR law may contribute towards achieving decriminalisation of migration in Europe.

In 1975, Texas adopted a law allowing school districts to bar children from public schools if they were in the United States unlawfully. The US Supreme Court responded in 1982 with a landmark decision, Plyler v. Doe, that kept open the schoolhouse doors, allowing these children to get the education that state law would have denied. The Court established a child's constitutional right to attend public elementary and secondary schools, regardless of immigration status. With Plyler, three questions emerged that have remained central to the national conversation about immigration outside the law: What does it mean to be in the country unlawfully? What is the role of state and local governments in dealing with unauthorized migration? Are unauthorized migrants "Americans in waiting?" Today, as the United States weighs immigration reform, debates over "illegal" or "undocumented" immigrants have become more polarized than ever. In Immigration Outside the Law, acclaimed immigration law expert Hiroshi Motomura, author of the award-winning Americans in Waiting, offers a framework for understanding why these debates are so contentious. In a reasoned, lucid, and careful discussion, he explains the history of unauthorized migration, the sources of current disagreements, and points the way toward durable answers. In his refreshingly fair-minded analysis, Motomura explains the complexities of immigration outside the law for students and scholars, policy-makers looking for constructive solutions, and anyone who cares about this contentious issue.

Although America is unquestionably a nation of immigrants, its immigration policies have inspired more questions than consensus on who should be admitted and what the path to citizenship should be. In Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura looks to a forgotten part of our past to show how, for over 150 years, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, with immigrants essentially being treated as future citizens--Americans in waiting. Challenging current conceptions, the author deftly uncovers how this view, once so central to law and policy, has all but vanished. Motomura explains how America could create a more unified society by recovering this lost history and by giving immigrants more, but at the same time asking more of them. A timely, panoramic chronicle of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers new ideas and a fresh perspective on current debates.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy. This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States ?has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.

This volume conducts an in-depth analysis of the ECtHR’s case law in the area of migration and asylum as regards the most relevant rights of the ECHR, exploring the role of this court in this area of law.