Internal bordering in the context of undeportability: Border performances in Italy

Introduction

Criminology has been concerned with borders for quite some time and there is now a growing body of literature on what is known as the “criminology of mobility” (Aas and Bosworth, 2013). According to Ben Bowling (2013: 292), the tradition of geography-based border studies merges in this literature with an attention to the criminalization of immigration exhibited by scholars in the field of “punishment and society” (Simon and Sparks, 2012).

In any event, borders are by no means a marginal topic. They play a central part in reconfiguring the “assemblages of power” (Sassen, 2006) caused by globalization. Borders exist not only between states, but also within nation-states. This has become particularly clear in the fields of critical migration and geography, where borders have come to be seen not just as lines delimiting a territory, but also as defining who is in and who is out. Borders have been recognized as a mode of interaction, and I use the term “bordering” here to mean the processual and relational dimension of borders (Fontanari, 2017; Weber, 2013).

The criminology of mobility has described the procedures and dynamics of internal bordering mechanisms, which include the exclusion, deportation, and detention of migrants, by looking at the grassroots level of micro-mechanisms of control (Bosworth, 2012; Kaufman, 2013; Pratt, 2005). Yet, as I have argued (Fabini, 2017), internal bordering mechanisms comprise both formal and informal control dynamics, and the latter do not result in arrests. Where a high mobility coincides with porous borders and harsh immigration laws, many migrants who are defined as illegal (Dauvergne, 2008) might not be deported in the end. Susan Coutin (2000) developed the concept of “legal non-existence” to describe the condition in the USA of those “illegalized” ¹ migrants who remain in the receiving territory without any official authorization to do so.

Instead of being deported, the vast majority of illegalized migrants seem to remain in this limbo of legal non-existence in the country of arrival—in Italy, at least (Fabini, 2017). That is why I believe the dynamics of informal control in internal bordering should be a specific object of criminological inquiry.

Unfortunately, the informal control of migrants has been under-investigated in criminological research on borders, despite the rapidly growing body of work focusing on the topic (e.g. Khosravi, 2011; Pickering, 2011; Van Der Leun, 2003; Weber, 2013; Wonders, 2006). Practices of informal control are hard to detect and cannot be investigated in courts or through official documents because they take place in a gray area of police discretion. This article looks at the performances of borders in the interaction between the police and migrants, which is seen as a core part of internal bordering processes, especially in a context of undeportability. The gray area of police discretion in checking migrants’ identities and deciding whether to deport them can be seen as one (and possibly not the least important) of the many steps in the process of subjectivation of illegalized migrants in the societies that receive them by means of informal bordering practices.

My work examines the subjectivation processes of illegalized migrants in Bologna, Italy, where deportation is not the most common outcome of interactions between the police and illegalized migrants, and where high levels of illegalization and processes of criminalization coexist with the condition of undeportability. In section 2, I explain the theoretical framework and the concepts of subjectivity and border performativity, and their connection with the state. After a brief explanation of my methods in section 3, I present the theoretical concept of undeportability that emerged from the field (section 4). Then I describe the variety of strategies adopted by illegalized migrants in their confrontation with the police in section 5. In analyzing the data, I employ Althusser’s concept of interpellation in combination with Foucault’s idea of subjectivity to shed light on the discipline and resistance coexisting in migrants’ behavior during internal bordering. I then stress the role of emotions and desires in describing when and how illegalized migrants resist (even individually) the processes of subjection (section 6). In the conclusion, I build on the concept of border performativity, and further argue that acknowledging migrants as active agents in constructing their own subjectivities as illegalized migrants helps us to recognize the changes that are already taking place at borders and within states.

On the concept of border performativity

It was Nancy Wonders (2006) who introduced the concept of “border performativity” in criminology. As she put it, "border performativity takes as its theoretical starting point the idea that borders are not only geographically constituted, but are socially constructed via the performance of various state actors in an elaborate dance with ordinary people who seek freedom of movement and identification. The choreography of this dance is shaped by state policies and laws, but it is increasingly shaped by larger global forces as well" (2006: 64–65).

Performativity is a concept that has conventionally been widely used regarding gender. To say that gender is performative means that gender should be seen not as an individual’s innate quality, but as the end result of a series of acts (see Butler, 1999). Performativity reverses the idea that gender identity is a source of secondary reactions. The point of saying that gender (for instance) is performative—or, in other words, the product of deeply routinized repetitions of acts—is that it can be resisted and transformed (as it may be experienced by many as oppressive).

Talking about border performativity is tantamount to saying that borders do not exist before the individuals who cross them. Borders and migrants are mutually constitutive through border performances.

Wonders’ concept of performativity refers to the idea of performativity developed by Susan Leigh Foster (1998). While Butler’s concept of performativity is influenced by the speech act theory of JL Austin (1955)—according to which under certain conditions language “does” things, Foster’s discussion on gender performativity builds on dance, theater, and performance studies.

Using the example of dance, Foster suggests that the concept of “choreography” is better than that of “performance” as a way to understand how gender identities might change, one performance after another. According to Foster (1998: 5), choreography is “the tradition of codes and conventions through which meaning is constructed in dance”, while performance “concentrates on the individual execution of such code”. The script establishes a set of rules that change, depending on the time and place. Bodies perform the script each according to their ability, their interpretation of the text, the emotions they wish to communicate to the public, and so on. Choreography connects the performing body to specific surroundings. The script for a play is meaningless per se, because decisions about its setting, and how the action is staged in a given production can change the meaning of the script.

By seeing borders as a choreographic dance, Wonders enables us to investigate how states try to choreograph their national borders, often responding to global pressures, and how migrants influence the dynamics that make borders change. Just as a script means nothing in itself, as Foster said, so too—according to Wonders (2006: 66)—can the real meaning of national borders only be understood when “they are ‘performed’ by state agents [and] by border crossers”.

Wonders’ concept of performativity combines feminist social constructionist theory with the relational theory of the state. The idea of “the state as a social relation” was first introduced by the structural Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, and subsequently developed by Bob Jessop (1990). Jessop argues that the state is always in the making: it is unlikely to ever exist as a unified entity that has been built once and for all in a given territory. He therefore proposes “state projects” as a more useful term for describing the state as a “contingent and provisional outcome of struggles to realize more or less specific ‘state projects’” (Jessop, 1990: 9). The idea of state is involved in the concept of border performativity too. The importance of borders today in the constant remaking of the state in times of globalization emerges, in fact, from the related concept of “border reconstruction project” (Wonders, 2007). Border reconstruction projects are dynamic, historically situated processes involving governments and governmental agents, but also major corporations, business sectors, the media, and ordinary citizens. The challenge is to respond to globalization and “keep important aspects of state power intact while extending power into new, transnational spaces” (2007: 34).

In this article, I develop a theoretical approach that sees how borders perform as subjectivation processes even of illegalized migrants. I use the term subjectivity in the Foucauldian sense. As defined by Casas-Cortes et al. (2015: 83–84), subjectivity “oscillates between the subject as subjected by power and the subject as imbued with the power to transcend the processes of subjection that have shaped it. Technologies of government and technologies of self emerge as inseparably intertwined.” While the subjects do not pre-exist the power relations that give rise to them, they can act on these relations by exerting agency. My work examines the subjectivation of illegalized migrants in Bologna, Italy—in a context of what I define as undeportability—in an effort to connect border performativity with the dynamics of border transformation, and thus of constant transformation of the state, focusing on the various actors involved.

Method

Bologna is a medium-sized city with a population under 400,000 in Emilia-Romagna (north-eastern Italy). In 2016, there were 59,646 non-Italian citizens living in Bologna, more than 15% of the total population. This research was based on 36 one-to-one in-depth interviews conducted at different times: from January to February 2011; from November 2013 to June 2014; and from January to May 2015. Data were thus collected prior to the so-called “refugee crisis”, which began in 2015 (Garelli et al., 2018). The data only concern illegalized migrants living in the country, not refugees or migrants in transit to other European countries. The final sample consisted of 34 men and two women from 20 to 40 years old, mainly from Senegal and Morocco, but also from Tunisia, Pakistan, India, China, Cuba, Egypt, and Syria. These migrants were illegalized at the time of the interview, or had previously been in this condition. Experiences and perceptions were collected from illegalized migrants who had spent at least two years in Italy, and thus had time enough to learn social norms and expected behavior; in other words, they had been socialized in their host environment. The sample is not representative of women, ² nor of all the nationalities living in the city. In the following sections, my empirical research is used to illustrate illegalized migrants’ border performances, and how they exert their power in interactions and confrontations with the police within a specific context of undeportability. Only those migrants who challenged the border regime by crossing the public space instead of hiding in the private spaces where they lived are represented in my sample.

The context matters: Structural and contingent undeportability in Italy

I explore the informal control involved in internal bordering in a context of undeportability. The aim of this case study is to contribute to the criminological debate on border performativity by proposing this theoretical concept of undeportability as a contingent and possibly changing condition of a structurally extreme unlikelihood of deportation.

According to the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT), there were 3,714,137 non-European citizens living in Italy in 2017, the largest numbers coming from Morocco (454,817), Albania (441,838), China (318,975), Ukraine (234,066), and the Philippines (162,469). Italian immigration policies can be interpreted as policies of illegalization. On the one hand, naturalization is difficult: by law, people born in Italy to non-Italian parents do not automatically acquire Italian citizenship. On the other hand, it is easy to become illegal: people may lose a job and be unable to renew their residence permits, or be asylum seekers whose application is denied. International protection was denied in the first instance in 60% of cases in 2016 (Civil Liberties and Immigration Department, 2017). In 2017, 226,934 new residence permits were issued, 34% of which were for protection, and 5.7% were job-related. There were about 435,000 illegalized migrants living in Italy in 2016, accounting for about 8% of the total immigrant population (ISMU, 2016).

Italy’s restrictive immigration laws have traditionally coexisted with a tolerance of the presence of illegalized migrants, who have been always welcomed in the widespread shadow economy, even in times of economic recession (Finotelli and Ponzo, 2018). Kitty Calavita (2005) says that the otherness of migrants is created by three different but related elements—means of law, economic marginality, and racialization—each of which depends on and triggers the others. Intriguingly, the numbers of migrants deported from Italy each year are low (Fabini, 2017), and statistical data show “a consistent pattern of steadily reducing levels of deportation from 2000 to 2011” in Italy (Weber, 2014: 12).

De Genova (2002) employs the concept of “deportability” to point to the vulnerability of illegalized migrants forced into a condition of existential precariousness. I wish to extend his theoretical contribution by suggesting that a related but opposing concept—undeportability—better applies to Italy. Admittedly, I am not the first to use the term. Giuseppe Campesi (2015) talks about “undeportability” in his discussion of illegalized migrants in the Italian immigration detention system: sovereign power—exemplified by the power to deport—may be reaching a peak at the Temporary Holding Centers for Repatriation, or Centri di Permanenza per I Rimpatri, (CPRs), but the collective resistance enacted by the illegalized migrants detained at the CPRs is also very strong. They can undermine the deportation machine by refusing to cooperate. Many Italian detention centers have been even destroyed from the inside by rioting migrants, for instance (Bolzano, 2015).

My use of the term undeportability is slightly different. The term does not refer to the legal limitations on deportation (as in art. 19 of Italian immigration law prohibiting the expulsion of migrants whose lives would be at risk or who could be tortured if they returned to their home country, or who are in other vulnerable situations). My research suggests that illegalized migrants in Italy (during the time of my data collection, at least) were illegalized and deportable in a context of undeportability in the sense that they were officially ordered to leave or sometimes placed in detention centers, but only a handful of them actually left the country. These illegalized migrants were aware of how difficult it is to deport them, and they devised resistance strategies to avoid the risk not of being deported, but of being controlled, humiliated, and displaced. As we shall see throughout this article, border control goes well beyond deportation.

Undeportability has to do with a variety of material and structural limitations on the deportation regime in Italy. The first material limitation is the number of places at Italian detention centers: there were 500 in 2014, 720 in 2015, and 574 in 2016 (only 359 of which were actually available). As at 30 December 2017, there were 266 migrants detained at four CPRs in Brindisi, Caltanisetta, Rome, and Turin (Commissione straordinaria per la tutela e la promozione dei diritti umani, 2017). The shortage of places makes it very unlikely for an individual to be detained in a CPR. A new law was passed in March 2017 on the opening of new CPRs in every Italian region, for a total capacity of 1600 places. However, by the moment of writing this article, detention rates have been dropping too: the total number in 2008 was 10,539, while in 2016 (from 1 January to 15 September) it was just 1968.

Then there is the fact that only certain nationalities are likely to be deported, and this depends on reentry agreements with the country of origin. On 20 January 2016, the chief of Italian police, Alessandro Pansa, declared before Parliament:

We deport Nigerians, Tunisians, Egyptians, and, albeit less frequently, Moroccans and Algerians. We also have an agreement with the Gambian police, with which we are organizing deportations. We almost never deport migrants of other nationalities because we have no reentry agreements in place. ³

Another important element influencing the context of undeportability is the nature of Italy’s police system. There is no proper immigration police force patrolling the internal borders. There are the immigration and frontier police (that only mans the country’s external borders). The police tasked with internal bordering are the general local and national police forces and the Carabinieri (military police). I argue that this has important implications: for one thing, border control is not prioritized over other tasks. Border policing studies show that, in Italy and elsewhere, the police tend rather to use immigration law instrumentally, as a way to expedite control of other minor crimes (Weber and Gelsthorpe, 2000). In my research on ID checks conducted by the city police in Bologna in 2011 (Fabini, 2015), I found that city police officers choose which migrants to stop for an ID check on the basis of elements such as where they were encountered, whether they were suspected of drug dealing, their age, and their nationality (for example, the police in Bologna stopped Senegalese, Tunisians, and Moroccans, but not many Chinese and Pakistanis). Migrants can also be targeted for causing a disturbance, which may simply mean moving through a public space. Migrants are very aware of this issue, and one of the first things newcomers learn is which places should be avoided because they are “too risky”.

Clearly, the police exercise discretion. According to the extensive literature on police discretion, police operate as “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980) in a condition of “low visibility” (Goldstein, 1960). Their primary role is “peace keeping”, not “law enforcement” (Banton, 1964). Just as police prefer most of the time to keep the peace without initiating legal proceedings (Bittner, 1970), so too—when managing internal borders—they do not enforce these borders against all the illegalized migrants they encounter. They pick and choose. This is partly due to their limited time and resources, and partly because the police have historically controlled the poor (Campesi, 2009), and they continue to do so in regulating the presence of migrants (Melossi, 2003). Poverty has long been a constant, though not necessarily static mechanism of othering and exclusion (Weber and Bowling, 2008).

As all this suggests, the police’s mandate is impossible to fulfil; and I argue that this applies to the case of borders as well. The police cannot deport all illegalized migrants. They have to “manage illegality” instead (Fabini, 2017). Stressing the role of the police is important in delineating the concept of undeportability.

Undeportability is both a structural and a contingent condition. For a start, it depends on the political orientation of the government, which may or may not put pressure on the police to prioritize immigration control over other tasks. Central government also directly affects the resources available, in terms of money and places in CPRs. The local government matters too, and there is more interest in checking migrants in some places than in others. Finally, migrants’ nationalities matter: not all migrants experience the same undeportability context. There may be reentry agreements with some countries and not others, or some nationalities may be protected against deportation because of the situation in their home countries. I define undeportability as that situation in which, as well as actual structural and contingent limits on deportation, there are border-performing actors who share a strong awareness of these limits. A perceived undeportability is revealed, for example, in migrants’ reactions when ordered to leave. Being stopped and receiving an order to leave the country within seven days ⁴ did not appear to make much of an impression on the migrants I interviewed. In fact, the following situation was quite common:

Sure, they [the police] stop you, and say: “Documents!” You say: “I don’t have any documents.” So they take you to the police station, take your fingerprints, and let you go. They take you to the police station, take your fingerprints, and let you go, and so it goes on.

(Z, Morocco)

Being ordered to leave seems almost like a ritual internal bordering performance. Deportation is not impossible (it does happen sometimes), but the fact that it is perceived as extremely unlikely may affect the still asymmetrical balance of power between illegalized migrants and the police.

Interpellation in a context of undeportability: Resistance and adaptation as two sides of the same coin

As the previous considerations suggest, to analyze the contemporary mechanisms of internal bordering, I focus more on the process of differential inclusion than on exclusion. Internal bordering is more concerned with disciplining migrants, while seeking neither to bar them from entry, nor to eject those already in the country. As Dario Melossi (2008: 242) put it, discipline

has nothing to do with the kind of labor that goes on inside prison, or with “rehabilitation” as commonly intended […] The point of discipline seems to be to submit yourself to what the bearers of social power want you to. No more, no less.

Newcomers are disciplined when they agree to occupy a subordinate position within the receiving society.

As the following stories show, the migrants of my case study are constantly under some sort of disciplinary pressure, and either they try to resist or they adapt. In the inquiry into what might be interpreted as an unspoken process of inclusion, which is also a disciplinary process, I take “migrant struggles” as a vantage point in the analysis. By this I mean “the daily strategies, refusals, and resistances through which migrants enact their (contested) presence—even if they are not expressed or manifested as ‘political’ battles demanding something in particular” (De Genova et al., 2015: 80).

M is a 28-year-old Moroccan man, who had been living in Bologna for five years when I interviewed him in 2013. Like other interviewees, he said several times that he was not worried about deportation: he realized that the police enforced internal borders mainly by following set patterns, and he learnt those patterns. Just like M, the migrants I interviewed talked about the chances of being stopped by the police, and of being ordered to leave. What they did not take seriously was the risk of being held in a detention center and actually deported. One said:

If they stop you and you have no documents at all, they will not deport you; they will just order you to leave in seven days. It used to be different. Two or three years ago, if they stopped you, they would deport you. Now, they don’t deport people anymore, or they only do so in the most serious cases.

(L, Morocco)

Interviewees shared the belief that they lived in a situation of undeportability, that they did not risk deportation as long as the police did not perceive them as dangerous, and being seen as dangerous was often associated with drug dealing—or being suspected of doing so (Campesi and Fabini, 2017). By the same token, many of my interviewees talked about being stopped by the police on their way to work, or being asked about their jobs when stopped for an ID check. In these stories, the police let migrants go when they heard that they were employed, even if they had no residence permit. Alvise Sbraccia (2011) describes the police patrolling a park and not enforcing immigration law in the case of an Albanian bricklayer. Although it emerged that he was in Italy illegally, he showed his calloused hands as proof that he was an irregular worker, not a criminal. The decision to let the bricklayer go, Sbraccia claims, suggested his legitimacy to occupy the public space. In a way, illegalized migrants who decide not to hide, who move in the public space, and behave as “good people” despite living in conditions of deprivation, can be said to be resisting the border by adapting to it. At the same time, given the structural conditions of deprivation, drug dealing (though risky) may be interpreted as a form of resistance too. It sometimes becomes a way to make a living wage, a peripheral activity alongside a ‘proper’ job, or a survival strategy after losing a previous job. Both the informal and the illegal economies have been conceptualized as sites of resistance, largely because they are a way to escape state control and become emancipated from a plurality of powers (Saitta, 2013).

Given the limited resources and mandate to enforce a law that is impossible to enforce, the police cannot actually impose all the rules. Migrants are not free to do whatever they like, but neither are the police. When patrolling urban spaces and trying to “keep the peace”, the police may be more inclined to negotiate the terms of an acceptable disorder than to fail in the attempt to establish an impossible order (Palidda, 2000). Generally, illegalized migrants who have jobs are not a danger to society, in the eyes of the police at least. The police will still try to control their movements in the public space, preventing their presence in some parts of the city and allowing it in others. Under certain conditions, illegalized migrants are not a threat to the police’s peace-keeping task: they represent an acceptable disorder. To some extent, the police are compelled to frame their control practices in accordance with the border-crossers’ resistance strategies. Given a law impossible to implement and the reality of undeportable illegalized migrants, the only possible scenario is for controller and controlled to find a way for them both to co-exist in the same territory.

Resistance “is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault, 2003: 125–126), and power can never be without a counterpart. According to Foucault (1982: 789), the exercise of power is:

not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.

Bringing Foucault’s reasoning to bear on border control, the police exercise control over migrants not just by applying coercive force, but also by “inciting” them to action. During internal bordering, migrants exert agency in the processes that produce them as subjects.

The illegalized migrants that I interviewed had a plethora of strategies for resisting (in) internal bordering: staying away from certain parts of the city, especially at night; not hanging out in groups of co-nationals; entering the shadow economy; buying fake work contracts to obtain a residence permit; always buying tickets when travelling on trains and buses; learning to speak Italian adequately; always showing confidence before police, and respecting their authority; using irony in interactions with police; providing the police with aliases when stopped for an ID check. In other words, the illegalized migrants in my sample resisted deportation by doing things that would either help them avoid police control (buying bus tickets, working irregularly, providing aliases, buying fake work contracts), or give the impression of their being well integrated in society (speaking good Italian, joking, showing respect). Illegalized migrants also try to avoid the risk of deportation by not doing things, however (avoiding certain spots, not hanging out with co-nationals). These migrants move in the public space, but they obey the rules of the game. Paradoxically, they resist the borders by not doing.

Can we talk of resistance when the strategy implies not doing things, or should we speak of adaptation instead? Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation may be a useful starting point to grasp the ambiguities associated with adaptation and resistance coexisting in the same actions. Althusser (1971) discusses interpellation in the interaction between the controller and the controlled. In the well-known allegory, if a police officer addresses someone saying: “You there!”, that someone becomes a subject the moment they turn. By turning, they identify themselves with that “you”, and accept the terms of domination. Interpellation refers to the mechanisms by means of which ideology (through the Ideological states apparatuses) transforms “concrete individuals” into “concrete subjects”. Importantly, “[w]hat is represented in ideology is […] not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (1971: 101). According to Althusser, interpellation is total and complete subjection.

Since it was first introduced, the concept of interpellation has been widely used, but scholars have acknowledged the agency of interpellated subjects, in the sense of their capacity to exercise power and produce change. Judith Butler (1999) recalled the concept of interpellation as the moments when gender is performed. Echoing Althusser, she mentions the doctor declaring, “It’s a girl!” at the birth of a baby as the first act of performing the newborn’s gender. ⁵ Referring to the Foucauldian concept of subjectivity, Didier Fassin (2013) argues that interpellation is not a one-way process. It goes in two directions: “the political subject is the product of the dialectic relation between subject and subjectivity, a relation through which each one is appointed a social position that he or she could accept or reject” (2013: 33–34). Building on this theoretical idea, Pietro Saitta (2017) defines two possible reactions from the marginal subjects being interpellated: flight (to avoid the police in the case in point), or strategic interaction, aimed at controlling emotions and avoiding suspicion. According to Saitta, flight is the preferred resistance tactic of marginal people in urban multicultural contexts. This tactic, he says, is used by Arabs escaping police checks in the Parisian suburbs (Fassin, 2013), and by African-Americans escaping the police in Philadelphia (Goffman, 2014). Subjects escaping control identify themselves with the subject being interpellated, but they also resist domination at the same time. In contrast, strategic interaction—the aim of which is likewise to resist domination—is common among nationals (Saitta, 2017).

The illegalized migrants that I interviewed often opted for strategic interaction. They knew they were an easy target for police checks. Their appearance made them easily identifiable as non-Italian, for a start, and they knew there was a greater risk of being stopped if they went to certain parts of the city. On the other hand, they also knew that, if they were stopped, they had a chance of negotiating the terms of their stay in the city. Aware of the undeportability context, they were not surprised by the police’s discretionary use of its power, and they knew what to expect depending on how they behaved. In this sense, the police and migrants exhibited “complementary and antagonistic roles” in their border performance (Salter in Johnson et al., 2011).

What I am arguing here is that, the moment “illegalized” migrants are interpellated by the police, and thus made subjects, they may resist the terms of subjection by doing or not doing things. In subjectivation processes, there is always an ambiguous relationship between resistance and adaptation. For example, a strategy that might look like resistance could be better explained as adaptation when seen through the lens of undeportability and informal bordering. This is the case, for example, of illegalized migrants who provide the police with fake identities. In fact, one of the main obstacles to deportation is uncertainty about an illegalized migrant’s identity. Providing the police with a fake identity may have unexpected consequences, however. M (from Morocco) was stopped by the police together with two friends, and none of them had a residence permit at the time. He was not afraid because he did not have his passport with him, so he knew it was highly unlikely that he could be deported. Meanwhile, his friends were “literally freaking out” and expecting to be sent back to Morocco because they had their passports on their person. When the three were taken to the police station, however, his two friends were released after a couple of hours with an order to leave the country “because the police knew their identity”, while M was kept in custody for the night. Although M knew he would not be deported, spending a night in a cell was both unexpected and experienced as criminalizing. M learnt his lesson and, from then on, he reportedly always had his passport with him. Two other interviewees, Sd (Morocco) and S (Egypt), had similar experiences. Now they always reveal their real identity when stopped by the police to avoid being detained. In general, illegalized migrants want to avoid being deported, but they also consider spending a night in jail a traumatic and unjust experience that they prefer to avoid.

These stories prompt two conclusions. First, by revealing their identity even though they were illegalized migrants, M, Sd, and S showed how confident they were of their undeportability. Second, the fact that illegalized migrants are expected to reveal their real identity—unless they want to be kept at the police station for hours, or overnight—shows that detention without deportation is part of the border regime designed to discipline and differentially include through subordination. Migrant struggles may aim to avoid not just deportation, but also humiliating situations. Being in a context of undeportability does not mean that a migrant is beyond the reach of the border regime, as long as there is a chance of coercion or humiliation (Villegas, 2015). In a way, for illegalized migrants to agree to reveal their identity is a way both to resist the border regime in the form of “detention without deportation”, and to adapt to the police’s expectations of them. In the process of subjectivation through the performance of borders, the subjectivity of illegalized migrants is in a constantly unsolved tension between resistance and adaptation. The role of discipline shows how bordering practices affect migrants even in a context of undeportability, suggesting that criminologists need to look beyond deportation and detention when analyzing borders. The role of resistance shows that illegalized migrants’ subjectivity should be included in the analysis to find room for transformation and its dynamics.

The production of subjectivity and the role of emotions

As emerged from the previous section, one of the tactics that the illegalized migrants of my case study used in the subjectivation process is individual resistance (Scott, 1985), which can only be understood in relation to the police’s control practices, which also depend on structural and contingent restrictions on the feasibility of deportation.

It has been nicely stressed how emotions are crucial for individual resistance to emerge (see Saitta, 2015: 24s). Explanations of migratory movements depending on push and pull factors, such as wage differentials and so on, do not account for the whole subjective dimension of migration—the migrants’ desires and aspirations, and even their misconceptions, behind their migratory projects (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015: 83–84). In my case study, emotions played a fundamental part in the processes producing the subjectivity of illegalized migrants; their hopes and expectations drove them to resist (or adapt to) the border regimes. Some of the emotions the migrants exhibited during their interviews gave a better idea than their actions of their incomplete subjugation to police power. They had a variety of reactions when “caught” at an internal border: sometimes they were ashamed (“If you stop me, people stare at me as if I was different, and you make me feel uncomfortable”), sometimes angry (“I hate it when you stop me!”), surprised (“Why are you stopping me??”), or very calm (“This is your job, I am fine with it, and I know nothing serious will happen to me”).

Many migrants I interviewed tried to behave as they felt they were expected to do in an effort to avoid being stopped in the first place. This was the strategy adopted by B (Senegal): he said he did not drink alcohol, he always dressed “properly”, and he never walked around town with other Senegalese, to avoid attracting the attention of the police. M (Senegal) did likewise. This strategy did not always work, however, and did not prevent them from feeling angry or humiliated when they were stopped for an ID check. Even when they were allowed to go, they tended to experience the episode as unsettling:

It’s bad when they stop you in the street; it’s bad because you’re ashamed, because they can’t do that, because you did nothing, and they stopped you anyway […] They stop you and always ask you for your documents, always, and the fact that they always do that drives you mad. It makes you a bad person, an angry person. It’s stressful.

(B, Senegal)

Even if they were angry about being stopped, some migrants would be outwardly respectful and self-confident. Others would negotiate with witty comments and jokes. Interestingly, this mode of negotiation is a peculiar feature of “Italian culture” (Melossi, 2002), and migrants who make jokes when they are stopped are presumably seen as well socialized in the receiving society. M (Morocco) gave several examples of episodes when the police let him go, despite finding that he was staying in Italy illegally, after he joked with them. Here is one such story:

Once I was in […], I was cycling to the square and they were going in the opposite direction. I stopped at the traffic light […] and they stopped alongside me. When they were close enough, I spoke first, saying: “Hi, any problems here?” They asked: “Do you have documents?”, and I said: “No!” Laughing, they answered: “That’s the problem!”, and with that they left. They really liked my joke, they left and did nothing. They just said bye.

(M, Morocco)

M claimed he often used jokes and irony when dealing with the police. Once, he refused to show his train ticket to a policeman, saying that it was not the police’s job to check people’s train tickets, and that, as he was rich, he’d rather pay the fine than queue to buy a ticket! “You need to be strong,” he explained.

Most of the time, migrants were aware of how police discretion worked, and they sometimes even took advantage of it. They looked for ways to resist the exercise of police power, countering that power and negotiating with it. A recurring feature in the interviewees’ stories was that the police sometimes told an illegalized migrant they had stopped to “get lost”. Most of them interpreted the police’s behavior as normal and acceptable, but two interviewees disagreed. They did not really understand why the police were telling them to make themselves scarce, and they failed to comply with the suggestion. On the other hand, M spoke about how angry it made him when the police told him to go home. He suggested that illegalized migrants are accepted as long as they are invisible, and he protested against this need for invisibility:

When I was a clandestino I always used to wander around without my documents. They don’t bother you too much in Bologna. But once they found me in [a very central square] and asked me for my documents. I was with a friend of mine. He had his documents, and I didn’t. The cop asked me: “Do you have your documents?”, I said: “No”, and he told me to get lost. I said, “No!”, I swear, and “Why are you telling me I have to get lost?” He just repeated: “You have to go!”, but I said: “I’m just staying right here. Take me with you if you like, but I’m not moving from here.” I didn’t leave, I swear I didn’t leave. […] “You check on me, and then you just tell me to get lost? What am I? Some kind of shit you say to get lost to? Who do you think you are?” Then he left, he walked away. I swear!

(M, Morocco)

This excerpt shows how a strategy of resistance can push beyond the simple fact of remaining. Both parties in the negotiation agreed that M could remain in the city even though he did not have a residence permit, but they disagreed on another level: the process of subjection enacted by the police officer acknowledged that M could remain illegally in Italy, but only if he were invisible. The process of subjectivation, whereby M opposed the police officer, went beyond the simple right to stay: he claimed that he had the right to be visible. As M sees it, he is visible, he exists, he has no residence permit because of the law, and the police can do nothing but face the fact.

The illegalized migrants of my sample saw themselves as police targets, but they adopted a process of subjectivation to counter the police’s process of subjection. They resisted being interpellated as possible subjects for deportation by exploiting their awareness of living in a context of undeportability, and they used their agency to remain.

Immigration laws in the Global North criminalize illegality in itself (Dauvergne, 2008), but the illegalized migrants I interviewed rejected the idea of being classified as criminals. They refused to be interpellated as criminals, and this was the ultimate resistance strategy on which all their other strategies were founded. During his trial for immigration-related crimes, M (Morocco) became angry. He said he was not a criminal and there was no need for handcuffs. G (Cuba) was upset because, in her view, the detention center where she was sent looked like a prison for migrants. Opposition to the process of criminalization emerged in many other stories too. S (Egypt) spoke with great disappointment about the first time the police kept him at the station overnight. He whispered that it was the first time in his whole life that he had been in a place like that. Generally speaking, the interviewees were surprised when I asked if they had ever been in trouble with the police. They said they were not criminals, so the police were not interested in them. The attempt made with immigration legislation to criminalize illegalized migrants by constructing their “illegal” position as a form of criminal behavior has resulted in a failed interpellation process, as the migrants’ emotions—shame, surprise, and even anger—demonstrate.

Conclusion

There is a reality of border under-enforcement taking place in the “obscene of inclusion” hidden under the surface of the “scene of exclusion” and the “spectacle of borders” (De Genova, 2013). When the general expectation for illegalized migrants in a given state is deportation, and this aspect of border control is spectacularized, the illegalized migrants who remain in the country and submit to processes of internal bordering generally go unnoticed. They are nonetheless challenging and even resisting the border regime.

This article looks at border performativity in the processes of subjectivation of illegalized migrants in Bologna, showing how borders are performed in an “intricate choreographic dance” with the police. The migrants in my sample were aware that they are expected to have an (even irregular) job, to commit no crimes, to go to some parts of the city and not others, to agree to staying invisible, to reveal their identity when asked, and so on. I argue that illegalized migrants are not just passive recipients of orders from above that restrict their freedom, however. Given the relational and processual nature of borders, illegalized migrants exercise their power, and this affects their controllers’ behavior and ability to engage in bordering practices. The theoretical insight of border performativity is crucial to grasping the migrants’ agency during internal bordering. I contend that migrants transform borders when they interact with agents and agencies of social control, negotiating the conditions that allow them to remain in the territory, even without any kind of official authorization.

The theoretical concept of undeportability is developed in this article to shed light on the contingent and structural conditions that produce the context in which deportation is practically impossible. I theorize that delineating a context where migrants are easily illegalized but almost impossible to deport goes to show how producing the subjectivity of illegalized migrants is an unavoidable part of border management.

The fact that negotiations take place in a context of undeportability makes it clear that the performance of borders does not depend merely on immigration laws distinguishing between tourists and migrants, or between migrant workers and asylum seekers, or even between legal and illegalized migrants, for instance. Border performances also go beyond the law; and it is beyond the law that the subjectivities of illegalized migrants who remain are being produced.

Illegalized migrants are made, and make themselves subjects in their host countries. They are bound to the context in which they live, a context that they influence, and that influences them. Just as the subjectivity of illegalized migrants is constantly in the making, so too are the borders. What emerges from the intricate dance between the police that can rarely deport them and the illegalized migrants who, by doing or not doing certain things, adapt or resist, is the transformative potential of borders. The transformation works in two interrelated ways, however, with new practices of liberation on the migrants’ part, and novel control practices on the police’s (see Wonders, 2015). In a context of undeportability, the migrants’ agency in the negotiation may be strengthened, and borders paradoxically undergo a transformation in the sense of operating more and more as a dispositif of differential inclusion rather than of exclusion. On the other hand, the afflictive potential of border regimes undergoes various transformations too, as the police find ways other than deportation to discipline illegalized migrants, such as humiliation, dislocation, temporary confinement, and so on.

The continuous transformation of borders would also be associated with a constant transformation of the state. I argue that illegalized migrants should not be seen as individuals out of place. They are produced by states that are always under construction, and because they are embedded in borders, they inhabit the core of this ongoing reconstruction.

The changes cannot be interpreted by looking only at the choreography (state policies, laws, and wider global forces), or only at the performance of borders. The changes taking place through border reconstruction projects can only be understood by looking at the whole picture, the choreography and the performance of the dancing bodies interpreting the script. In fact, the script talks of the state criminalizing illegalized migrants, but the performing bodies refuse to be interpellated as criminals. In their dance with the police, illegalized migrants interpret the script by acting as subjects who take advantage of the context of undeportability, who might accept to be exploited in the labor market, but who negotiate their right to be visible and to occupy the public space. Behind the script of immigration laws that seek to punish, deport, or detain illegalized migrants, the borders are being transformed through the constant and unavoidable need for the police and illegalized migrants to perform borders by negotiation.