For Whom the Law Tolls? On the Legal and Socio-Political Exclusion of Undocumented Immigrants

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Robert Barsky’s book Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law. The Flight and the Plight of People Deemed “Illegal” (Routledge, 2016). In particular, it discusses two arguments sustained therein: first, that the irregular (illegal character of the undocumented immigrants’ legal status exposes them to arbitrariness in the application of the law by the host county’s “frontline” legal officials. Secondly, that arbitrariness as a mechanism of legal exclusion is typically supplemented and reinforced by mechanisms of socio-political exclusion. The author first analyses these exclusionary mechanisms, while in the latter part of the article, he analyses the case of the Erased in Slovenia, in order to test the theses and the methodology proposed in the previous part.