Informing for the sake of it: legal intricacies, acceleration and suspicion in the German and Swiss migration regimes

Borrelli, Lisa Marie; Wyss, Anna (2022). Informing for the sake of it: legal intricacies, acceleration and suspicion in the German and Swiss migration regimes. Citzenship studies, 26(7), pp. 944-960. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/13621025.2022.2137941

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In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state.

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