Description
This roundtable brings together scholars working on historical and contemporary border security, migration governance, and visa regimes to critically unpack legalised pathways to human international movement. Through various critical approaches, participants question the ontological assumptions of legalisation of certain pathways to international movement, inviting the audience to reevaluate who gets to cross international borders with safety and dignity. While policy narratives in the Global North and beyond often frame legal migration as accessible and orderly, research and lived experience reveal a deeply stratified system in which legality of who gets to cross international borders safely is constructed by power, leading to uneven access for different groups of people to international spaces. Our panellists unpack the genealogy of legalisation of certain pathways to migration over time and space. The roundtable aims to open a space for dialogue on the epistemic and legal mechanisms through which states and security actors define what counts as legal movement, the role of security infrastructure in legalisation of certain pathways of international movement, the role of visa regimes and bordering practices in relation to international hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and case study and comparative insights across geographies. The roundtable takes a critical approach to the question of legalised migration and provides a platform to reflect on methodological challenges in conducting this research.
