Transpassable

These rules not only define the legal lanes but more importantly determine the conditions and strategies that make the legal lanes transpassable. In other words, "inclusive exclusion" produces broken lines of regularity and legality, lines that the immigrants are constantly made to cross as subject to the law but not subject in the law.

On the one hand, migrants develop tactics to negotiate the changing conditions of il/legality, since, recalling our opening metaphor, the boundaries of legality/illegality are constituted not as continuous but as broken lines rendering the legal lanes transpassable. On the other hand, because it is the sovereign state that lays down the rules of the flow, the individual strategies end up reproducing the power of the state, which reaffirms the tenuous legal status of the immigrants on the edge of being the exceptions to the rule.