Keeping migrants at the margins. Governing through ambiguity and the politics of discretion in the post-2015 EUropean migration and border regime

Abstract

This article deals with the roles of ambiguity and discretion in the governing of migration and how they contribute to the marginalisation of migrants at the borders of EUrope. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Sicily, it connects legal-institutional ambiguities of two recent policy interventions in the field of migration governance in Italy – the Security Decree-Law and the Hotspot Approach – to the discretionary practices by public officials tasked with their implementation. By theoretically and empirically tracing the co-constitutive relationship of ambiguity and discretion, the article draws on and contributes to recent inquiries into grey areas of governance, particularly in the field of (critical) border regime studies. Based on two distinct cases, it analyses how ambiguity and discretionary local practices are related both to each other and to the contemporary fragmentary reconfiguration processes of the EUropean Migration and Border Regime, and shows how they intersect to form spatio-juridical grey areas that foster the spatial and social marginalisation of migrants in EUrope.