Bordering non-citizenship assemblage through migrant legibility: a conceptual framework for tracing hidden forms of legal and bureaucratic violence

In this paper, we conceptualise migrant legibility as a bordering practice where migrants seeking to maintain status or transition to permanent residency in Canada must negotiate the dynamic milieu of: 1) laws and regulations governing immigrant inclusion; 2) bureaucratic processes for verifying eligibility and admissibility; 3) informal social networks which can expand or restrict access to information and resources. Using two case studies from empirical research with migrants in Canada, we attend to the legal, bureaucratic, and social processes through which migrants must prove their humanity (i.e., biopolitical life) in the context of unpredictable, heterogeneous, multi-scalar, and often hidden forms of legal and bureaucratic violence. Through theorising the legal and bureaucratic violence of legibility, this paper illustrates the historical, political, and economic conditions through which migrant illegality and patterns of imperial/colonial/racial/gendered ordering operate in tandem with neoliberal multicultural constructions of equality and inclusion of autonomous and self-sufficient individuals.