Hacking migration control: Repurposing and reprogramming deportability

Abstract

What sort of political actors are international migrants? This article approaches this question by studying how migrants move between legality and illegality. We have struggled to understand the political content of this behaviour, because we have viewed it as either an attempt to gain the state’s acceptance as quasi-citizens or an attempt to autonomously subvert the state. However, migrants are more ambivalent political actors than either of these perspectives suggest. We argue that the political content of migrants’ efforts to move between legality and illegality can be better understood as a form of ‘hacking’: the ‘repurposing’ of institutionalized forms of political status in ways that compel the ‘reprogramming’ of systems of control. In order to develop this argument empirically, we draw on ethnographic research on the governance of migration between Myanmar and Malaysia.