Paper short abstract:

Drawing from research on migrant 'illegality' in Israel, I will discuss whether and/or how the notion of transgression can help to perceive, analyse and grasp the realities of illegalised migrants' lives and what implications this has for ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

‚Illegal' migrants are transgressive beings qua socio-political definition. Wether they crossed state borders 'illegally' or became 'illegal' in the migration process, migrants' transgressions of legal space and borders of the nation state are produced in a historical process of state definition on who belongs and who does not. This illegalisation process entails fundamental consequences for the daily territorial, emotional, social, economic, legal, and bodily practices of migrants.

How can the notion of transgression here help to perceive, analyse and grasp the meaning of humans' lives? Rather than celebrating illegalised migrants' 'transgressiveness', I intend to i) analyse their space and practices of transgression and, ii) discuss what implications the research on migrant 'illegality' bears for the anthropological process of 'fieldwork'.

In my talk I will draw from extensive research on Filipina transmigrants in the urban space of Tel Aviv, migrant illegality, and the Israeli migration regime. In Israel, the entry and import of a large number of labor migrants from Asia, Latin America, and West Africa went hand in hand with a restrictive migration regime based on the temporalisation and illegalisation of migrants. As my research shows, recent changes in the legal, economic and political structuring of migration in Israel had a decisive impact on how migrants feel, talk and act upon the spaces of 'here', 'there' and 'elsewhere'. Since the de jure state of 'illegality' in Israel has become a de facto state of deportability for those migrants, who had become 'illegals' by transgressing the limits of the migration regime, knowledge on and techniques of outfoxing its officials became of utmost importance. In this situation of crisis, full of distrust, misery and fear, anthropological 'fieldwork' often took the form of a collaborative enterprise. Since 'illegals' often perceived research not only as a hassle but as threatening, I had to prove my personal commitment, thus frequently transgressing the boundaries between activist and anthropologist.