‘Here To Stay’ and The Contested Ethics of Presence 

In debates over irregular immigration in destination states, it is precisely the fact of immigrants’ bodily presence in the state’s territory that organizes the conversation. On the one hand, it is the fact of their territorial presence which is illegalized; this illegalization, in turn, both occasions and justifies their subjection to repressive governance and bodily removal. On the other hand, it is the bodily presence of these immigrants in the territory of the state which serves as the basis for many of their claims of right and recognition against that same state.  That is to say:  immigrants and their advocates treat immigrants’ “already-hereness” as precisely the normative basis for their protection.  The result is that debates over irregular migration are comprised of competing and cross-cutting struggles about the meaning—material and discursive—of territorial hereness, with that hereness understood as both ground for repression and basis for protection.  This paper analyzes this paradoxical constellation as a “contested ethics of presence.”
Linda Bosniak is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University School of Law.  She is the author of the “The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership,” and many articles, essays and book chapters on the subjects of borders, citizenship, equality, territoriality and transnational migration. She spent the academic years 2015-2017 at School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, first as Member and then Visitor. She has taught at Princeton University and at the University of Graz, and has been awarded fellowships through the Rockefeller Foundation, Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation. She is currently writing a book on the ethics of territorial presence.

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