#LucyInLockdown: The Race of Illegality with Dr Lorena Gazzotti

Date and time: Wednesday, May 13, 6 to 9 pm British Summer Time (UTC+1)

Register here.

Join us for our first #LucyInLockdown event of as we welcome by Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge alumna and Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow Dr Lorena Gazzotti.

What makes and unmakes illegality in the face of pervasive border control? In the past 40 years, countries in the Global North have increasingly restricted their migration policies to reduce the arrival of migrants, mainly from less well-off countries in the South. First emerged in Europe, Australia, North America, these restrictive policies have then been adopted also by Southern countries that partner with Northern governments in migration control. The securitization of the world’s borders has been accompanied by the emergence of a heated public debate about “illegality,” which criminalizes “clandestine migrants” as suspicious and deviant figures. In this talk, I argue that the application of migration policies and the policing of illegality are not neutral. Indeed, “illegality” is a category that is reinterpreted by border bureaucrats according to racial prejudices activated and expanded by migration control. Building on research conducted between 2013 and 2019 in Morocco, I look at how the category of “illegality” is policed at the street-level and experienced by different groups of light- and dark-skinned foreigners. Building on Sarah Ahmed’s understanding of Whiteness as an “orientation,” I show that “illegality” is deeply intertwined with racial hierarchies of border control, that structure societies and mobility according to notions of dangerousness, privilege and deservedness. Border bureaucrats, therefore, alter the applicability of the category of “illegality,” adopting a tough policing approach against dark-skinned individuals and a tolerant, almost indifferent stance against light-skinned ones, often independently from an individual’s own administrative status.