Migration Law's Place in Sovereign Times

Place

I write from land that forms part of the Treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Haudensaunee. The Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation are a sub-group of the Ojibwae Anishnabee First Nation, whose stewardship extended over approx. 3.9 million acres of lands, waters, and resources in Southern Ontario, including shorelines of Lake Erie, the Niagara River, and Lake Ontario. Approx three million acres of land was ceded in the Between the Lakes Treaty, No. 3 (1792), with land granted back to the Six Nations extending six miles on both sides of the Grand River. I am part of a settler-colonial occupation of these lands and recognize a responsibility and obligation to learn about the history of this land, including the peoples, knowledges, and traditions that were forcibly removed or erased in the name of colonial settlement, nation-state development, and economic progress.

Acknowledging¹ the place from which I live, work and write ultimately means recognizing that I am more than my singular self. I am here because of everything that came before me and sustains me, including the 'coloniality that is a part of me' (Walsh, 2023, p. 25). I recognize the collective -historical, current, personal, and structural- that allows me to be here, writing, and thinking, that grants me the privilege of residence, property ownership, employment, financial means, and education. Notwithstanding how loudly socio-cultural ideals project otherwise I am not an atomized, individual subject. The 'bounded individualism' (Haraway, 2016, p. 5) heralded by modernity is an empty shell, our individualism is only singular insofar as we have others to recognize and share this singularity with (Nancy, 2000). I am part of the land, the geography and architecture that I live and work on; I am part of the histories of immigration to Canada from WW2 war-torn Ukraine via Stuttgart's Displaced Persons camps and Manchester ÜK. I am part of a family that has fought against the stigma and disabling forces of ableism and ideas of 'normalcy.' And I am part of the colonial matrices of power. I am educated and employed in settler colonial institutions. I own a bank account and have a mortgage; I use both physical and remote technologies. My work and lifestyle, however much I try to minimize their impact, participate in and are complicit with capitalist, extractivist economies. My access to financial and technological power benefits from the exploitation and subjugation of racialized, migrantized (Anderson, 2025) labor, as defined and permitted by state sovereignty. And my settlement in Canada is possible because of the legacy of settler colonialism on stolen Indigenous land.

Because of the place and relationships from which I work and write, I have an obligation and response-ability (Haraway, 2016) to think critically about the norms and institutions that have constructed what we understand as law, borders, and citizenship. I cannot accept the normative force of law that permits that some people are seen as deserving of law and legal protection, while others are seen as undeserving and 'illegal.' And I recognize a clear connection between the irregular status of the 'migrant' and the persistence of patriarchal, colonial, capitalist power in Euro-modern law and legal institutions.

Situating My Research

In my research elsewhere, I have explored how immigration and labor laws in the Global North are failing to protect foreign workers (temporary, or otherwise non-citizen foreign nationals), in lower-waged labor, considered 'low-skilled' (Tataryn, 2021; Tataryn, 2025). An informal, yet normalized, category of irregular migrant laborer identifies persons who exist in the gaps of labor protections, often with precarious immigration status. Precarious immigration status exacerbates labor market vulnerability when work is undocumented (meaning without a valid work permit and valid immigration status), and workers are at the mercy of their employers to not report their precarious or irregular status. Some labor sectors infamously rely on foreign workers, for instance seasonal agricultural work, food processing, and hospitality (cleaning, security services), sometimes with special visa programs facilitating cross-border labor migration.² Labor migration in low-waged, 'low-skilled' sectors is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, certain labor sectors have come to depend on a steady supply of workers who are working for less than standard employment laws or contracts would offer: less protection, less money, and less security. The workers in these sectors work as if they were non-citizens or precarious (Anderson, 2013; 2025). These labor sectors are often racialized and precaritized but may be engaging second or third generation migrants alongside those with precarious or irregular immigration status. Racialization and precaritization exist alongside migrantization, which will be discussed in detail below. Anderson explores the relationship between the stigma and frenzy around the 'migrant' and the treatment of racialized or otherwise marginalized citizens. She observes, 'once migration is no longer at the border, it be-comes 'race'' (Anderson, 2025, p. 10). For example, in Tataryn (2025), greenhouse laborers in Sicily are racialized as 'migrant laborers' despite these laborers not always, or not clearly, being legally defined as im/ migrants; they may be second-generation migrants or European Union (EÜ) citizens.

Legal protection is failing workers in the 'apparently contradictory demands of sovereignty and capitalism, of supply chains and immigration controls' (Anderson, 2025, p. 1). Globalized labor markets demand increasingly mobile, adaptable, agile, and flexible workers, especially where labor needs cross jurisdictional and national borders. For instance, in outsourced manufacturing, tech (e.g. call centers, see Gray & Suri, 2019), and transnational corporations offering transportation (e.g. Uber), government services (e.g. SERCO), shopping (e.g. Amazon). The 'crisis' of labor (Standing, 2011; Perulli & Treu, 2025) and 'crisis' of migration (Anderson, 2025; Gill & Taylor, 2025) are played against one another: migration is portrayed as a threat to national labor and employment laws, and migrants are blamed for unemployment and lack of opportunity, or for 'stealing' local jobs. Distinctions of citizen and migrant, regular versus irregular labor, obscure the experience of place and work as well as how inclusions and exclusions operate formally as legal citizenship and informally within citizenship (Anderson, 2019; 2025).

The construction of migration as a basis for exclusion reaffirms the primacy of the nation-state through a 'methodological nationalism' (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). While methodological nationalism reinforces a distinction between migrant and citizen, in practice this distinction is less than clear. 'Migrant' is not a legally defined category, but a label that hosts a range of racial, socio-economic, linguistic, and moral preconceptions of who is deserving of citizenship and who is undeserving. These cultural and social preconceptions operate beyond legal rules; people with legal citizenship often fail to meet the very criteria that 'migrants' are deemed to fall short of (Anderson, 2013).

A 'methodological de-nationalism', according to Anderson (2019) , would involve 'migrantizing' the citizen. By deproblematizing the migrant as a category and identity and exposing what is common between the 'migrant' and the 'citizen,' we can, among other things, see how the migrantization of labor operates in tandem with the precarization and flexibilization of labor. Migrantization -denaturalizing the citizen and problematizing the normalcy of 'migrant'; precarization- lack of security, stability in work and income; flexibilization-trend towards non-standard working hours, casual contracts, on-call jobs, zero-hour contracts, under the guise of promoting flexibility for the worker while diluting labor protections and security. Anderson's call to 'migrantize the citizen' is not at the expense of recognizing the reality of immigration controls and the effects of irregular status or 'illegality' caused by im-migration laws. Rather, methodological denationalism aims to 'recover relationalities and interdependencies' (Anderson, 2019), such as the effect of precarization and flexibilization of labor.

These three elements have come to characterize labor sectors around the world -migrantization, precarization, flexibilization- and ensure a supply of workers often working without formal employment status, without secure contractual work arrangements, and/or without the ability to advocate for minimum wage, working time protections or protection against sickness or disability. As employers, businesses, farmers, face rising costs, labor is the site for cost-cutting measures (Piro, 2021). Particularly, laborers who are already marginalized due to race, socio-economic status, education, dis/ability, and gender bear the brunt of labor exploitation.

The ongoing fervor of political attention to migration spotlights the performance of nation-state sovereignty: 'undeserving bodies' are sacrificially excluded (Martel, 2022). Nation-state sovereignty exercises arbitrary (based on race, ethnicity and other conditions of 'desirability') exclusions, demonstrating what Borrows (1999) describes as sovereignty's alchemy, which will be discussed more below. The distinction between citizen and non-citizen is, in practice, opaque, especially in higher waged or 'skilled' labor. Moreover, decades of border securitization have demonstrated that irregular movement and work will not stop if there is a labor demand for cheap, exploitable workers. By being rendered irregular, illegal, or illegalized, these persons are present and participate in the social, economic, and political life of many locales around the world; yet the structures and systems of modern law -sovereignty, citizenship, and doctrines of illegality- render them removeable, criminalized, and ultimately invisible (Tataryn, 2025).

The illegalization/criminalization of migration and labor begs the question, what is the responsibility of law? What is the responsibility of constitutionalism? Some would argue that the constitution is responsible to its citizens alone. But are citizens only those that have formal legal status, or are citizens those that are present and participating in the social, economic, political life of a given territory? The limitations of constitutional protections for non-citizens reflect the problem of law's entanglement/ embeddedness in the nation-state, founded in the principle of sovereignty.

What is law?

The history of Euro-American jurisprudence teaches us that the answer to the question of what law is has never been simple. Law is more than rules (Hart, 1961). Law is historically specific (Unger, 2001). Our current Euro-modern legal frame has been formed and informed by ideological and historical contexts that are based in colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism (Adebisi et al., 2024).

Sovereignty

State sovereignty defines nation-states. State sovereignty is the justification for borders, border control, visas, and conditional entries. State sovereignty is the foundation of citizenship and select legal recognition of people living and working in each territory. State sovereignty prohibits freedom of movement. Border control, used to define sovereign territory, limits entry to the state as if such qualified, arbitrary, privilege was not only normal, but natural. The prerogative to control borders shows the 'uncontested authority of the colonial state' (Coulthard, 2014, p. 21) against a backdrop of normality; few imagine law or democracy to be organized otherwise. This is colonial domination: 'more subtle, less bloody' (Coulthard, 2014, quoting Fanon, p. 113). The ostensible universalism of the nation-state -sovereignty, citizenship, and property- constructs the experience of migration as in conflict with the 'normal', 'natural', statist citizenship-bound legal recognition. Notably the Canadian Supreme Court declared, "The most fundamental principle of immigration law is that non-citizens do not have an unqualified right to enter or remain in the country. In common law an alien has no right to enter or remain in the country" (Canada, Minister of Employment and Immigration v. Chiarelli, 1992, 1 SCR 711, at 733).

State sovereignty, a foundational concept of Euro-modern law, up-holds an incontrovertible right to border control and limited, qualified, entry into, or membership in, a nation-state. State sovereignty was asserted in the act of colonization. On the land that is now Canada, the British proclaimed their sovereignty over the territory through what Borrows refers to as 'raw assertion' (Borrows, 1999). Time was re-set to begin from that sovereign claim, relegating any previous land use or 'occupation' as pre-historical and pre-sovereign.

According to Borrows, 'sovereignty's incantation is like magic. [In Canada it was asserted] that Aboriginal title is a burden on the Crown's underlying title, thereby displacing all previous assertions of land title and subjecting them [Indigenous people and land claims] to the Crown' (Borrows, 1999, p. 12). The sovereign control by the Crown -(British) sovereignty over all the territory that is now Canada- was never ceded. Individual treaties negotiated some transfers of title, but Crown rule is and continues to place the Canadian sovereign prerogative, the Crown, above the rule of law (Borrows, 1999, p. 20). The Crown stands above the rule of law insofar as it controls the Master Narrative that subjugates all persons, communities, and forms of knowledge under the rule of law that the Crown ultimately defines and controls.

In its seizure of territory, proclaiming supreme authority over the land and forcing its settler legal system on everyone and everything within its stolen territory, the Crown structured dispossession (Coulthard, 2014, p. 7). The Crown imposed Indigenous legal subjectivity, as subjects under the settler-colonial law, through the creation of Indian Status in the Indian Act 1876. Indian status further dispossessed Indigenous people from their land, causing a vital, violent, rupture with their knowledge base. As Patrick Wolfe stated, 'the prime motive to settler-colonialism is control over and access to territory' (Wolfe, 2006, quoted in Coulthard, 2014, p. 7).

Consequently, sovereignty is highly contested in the land that is now Canada. Arguably, the Canadian government does not acknowledge the depth of this contestation; the sovereignty in question is not a battle between colonial powers or their offspring, for instance Quebec's sov ereignty movement. Rather, it is a reckoning with the colonial seizure of power, the 'raw assertion' of sovereignty (Borrows, 1999). Sovereignty was asserted with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and continued in the actions -Acts of Sovereignty and material settlement- of the British, and French. The colonial settlement of Canada happened as if the clock of history began with the Crown; the Crown's claim to sovereignty being a 'nothingness posing as something' and precipitating the full-scale destruction of Indigenous knowledge, tradition and people.

Since the assertion and settlement of the British dominion of Canada, the colonial claim to sovereignty has been resisted. Yet the machinations of the colonial empire were legally enacted through the Indian Act 1876, the creation of reserves, the forced re-education of children in Residential Schools, the controlled and limited access to waged labor, and the imposition of governance through an Indian Agent and elected band councils to replace traditional governance (see Bhatia, 2021, p. 42). The ramifications of the nineteenth century law continue in the ongoing poverty, malnutrition, lack of access to safe drinking water, and despair manifest through substance abuse in Indigenous communities, especially in Canada's north. This history and current reality have structurally attempted to obfuscate Indigenous resistance. Nevertheless, this resistance survives and coalesces in the determination to assert and affirm Indigenous sovereignty as Indigenous resurgence (Simpson, 2017; 'prefigurative politics' Coulthard, 2014, p. 159). It is a resurgence of sovereignty not under, but parallel to, the sovereignty asserted by the Crown.

While the epistemological foundations of Euro-modern law, rooted as they are in colonial modernity, prevent or at least block comprehension of parallel sovereignty (Indigenous sovereignty parallel to Crown sovereignty), parallel sovereignty brings into relief the artifice of the state. A parallel sovereignty would involve a reckoning with the limits of state sovereignty, opening possibilities to re-think borders and bordered nation-states 'along the lines of place-based citizenship, founded on values of stewardship and collective participation' (Bhatia, 2021, p. 39, citing: Fulfilling the Covenant Report Saskatoon: FSIN 2007).

Re-thinking bordered nation-states is becoming an increasingly necessary conceptual exercise given the global contestations over citizenship, territory, and authority. When state authority is imposed without any responsiveness or attentiveness to the population within its territory, the archic nature of state sovereignty is exposed: state sovereignty assumes supremacy and necessity prior to experience. Sovereignty ideologically operates as a (false) necessity (Marks, discussing Unger, 2009). Sovereignty as a concept and legal principle commands itself as the only possible way to organize populations and territory. This primacy prevents legal creativity and collective imagination from extending to-wards other possibilities. State sovereignty, and the organization of the world into nation-states, originating in the Treaty of Westphalia, exists as if it were not only a normal way to organize populations, but the only way. The pervasiveness of the state creates false contingency in immigration policy and law. False contingency (Marks, 2009, p. 14) in immigration policy and law appears when (a) state sovereignty makes immigration policy and law necessary, as regulations and rules at the territorial border, and then (b) restrictive immigration controls seem to be the only contingent possibility to ensure that citizenship is protected and preserved for those deemed worthy and acceptable to be inside the nation-state. 'False' here refers to what is excluded: 'it is false because it is misleading: it skews understanding, stunts enquiry and dazzles analysis' (Marks, 2009, p. 17). Due to the ideology of state sovereign-ty, immigration is often viewed as in crisis, and the territorial border under threat. Anti-immigration sentiment that seeks to protect against migration deemed undesirable lives in tension with humanitarianism that may see a reason for citizenship to be expanded or entry into the state facilitated. Marks explores how, because of false contingencies, the 'injustices of the present order are made to appear as though they were random, accidental and arbitrary' rather than a consequence of structural, historically specific, ideology and decision-making (Marks, 2009, p. 20). The 'migration crisis' is a crisis, an injustice, insofar as it performs state sovereignty at the border of the nation-state.

Place is central to both the act of migration and the perceived threat it poses. Migration occurs in a place; it is an action on land and territory. What is irregular migration, if not an act to occupy place, to make a place one's own, notwithstanding permission from those that have claimed sovereignty over it. Does this sound familiar? A basic tenant of colonialism is 'the settlement of foreign populations to support the expansion of non-Indigenous societies' (Borrows, 1999, p. 15). The nation-state as a product of colonial modernity is built from the migration of colonial power onto land that was previously occupied by humans, living beings and ecosystems.

However, as explained above, the colonial seizure of territory restarted the clock of history; time began with the assertion of sovereignty. The colonial matrix of power privileges time: its own version of time. By framing Indigenous presence as pre-historical and settlement a precursor to modernity, time has been constructed in a way that further privileges the Master Narratives of the colonial matrix of power and Euro-modern law. What came 'before' Euro-modern law is primitive in comparison to modernity's progressive, neutral, and objective truth. Coulthard, citing Deloria, has identified a fundamental contrast be-tween Indigenous place-based orientation versus Western time-based orientation (Coulthard, 2014, p. 60). Considering the effect of privileging place over time demonstrates a radical difference between the Euro-modern legal form and alternatives such as those stemming from critical Indigenous legal knowledges.

Place versus Time

State sovereignty and its gatekeeper, immigration law, relies on a sense of time: time of entry into a nation-state, time of birth in a nation-state, timely application for immigration status or visa permission. Time is also a factor in the control of the state over citizenship and the differentiation of deserving versus undeserving citizen. 'Qualifying periods and temporal controls' are also a factor in state controls on welfare (Anderson, 2019). Based on the timing of one's application or assessment for state support the state differentiates 'deserving' from 'undeserving' citizens.

The law, through the legal system, exercises control through the seizure of time over place, creating temporal limits on access to legal status, citizenship, rights, and recognition. Anderson suggests, 'we can think of migrants as at the sharpest end of the temporal restrictions that surround access to many rights for citizens as well as foreigners' (Anderson, 2019; see also Sharma, 2020, p. 223). Like sovereignty, temporal controls are made to seem normal if not natural. This denies the historical and cultural specificity of contemporary immigration law and policies; modern nation-state immigration controls, including pass-ports and border security, emerged by the end of wwil 'as a permanent, necessary, and even "timeless" feature of state sovereignty' (Sharma, 2020, p. 114). In the post-war world, 'spatial and temporal limits to the "nation" helped define where the national society belonged, who belonged in any given national homeland, and who they ought to be with when they were there. For each "nation," separation became both a necessity and a virtue (Sharma, 2020, p. 114). This separation allowed nation-state sovereignty to be reinforced as a necessary pillar of legal, political, and economic organization.

That time is vital to one's legal status and access to legal rights 'is a result of particular forms of social regulation and law, not the other way around' (Grabham, 2016, referencing Greenhouse, p. 47). The 'idea of time passing irreversibly is, as such, a technique of modernity' (Grabham, 2016, referencing Latour, p. 23). Importantly, temporality is not homogenously experienced. In fact, the multiplicity of temporalities and the different, dynamic experiences of temporalities form a 'web of practices incompatible with modern national citizenship' (Tomba, 2022, p. 128). According to Tomba (2019), the temporality of the nation-state is an example of how the state tries to neutralize friction. Friction, nevertheless, exists. Conflict, as Borrows and Martel both distinctly describe below, is constitutive of community and law. While Euro-modern law and the nation-state through sovereignty and security ostensibly resist friction, or project a promise to end conflict, alternative approaches to law start from the tension. Tension, like difference, is generative for resistant thinking (Tomba, 2019, p. 10).

Flipping the script from avoiding friction to embracing it returns us to Haraway's reminder that 'it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories' (Haraway, 2016, p. 12). Rather than think of borders, relational thinking focuses on the 'multiplication of relations in an uncircumscribed space' (Tomba, 2019, p. 25) that allows for the expression of different temporalities, and their responses to a common problem (e.g. politics/democracy, capitalism/economy, property relations). While the techne of law seeks a limit that is secure and even predictable, the eco constantly re-awakens the new creation, re-constitution, of community and meaning because of the friction, the conflict, that is beings coming together.

The materiality of law has been explored by legal scholars as 'be-yond human relating as the basis for social existence' (Grabham, 2016, p. 484). Law's materiality involves understanding how legal objects and techniques, such as borders and immigration control, themselves create legal norms rather than are created by pre-existing legal norms. Placing this in the context of Indigenous research, legal objects and techniques need to be understood not only as carriers of legal normativity but demystified through understanding that 'an object or a thing is not as important as one's relationship to it' (Wilson, 2008, p. 73). Alternatives to state sovereignty, drawn from Indigenous legal theories, originate from the experience of beings coming together as material, embodied reckoning in place and presence.

Learning: Material and Embodied

What I refer to as Indigenous legal theories of alternative sovereignty involve a material, embodied reckoning in and on the land and territory. Under alternative sovereignties, that by nature of their being an alternative would not be called sovereignty, the focus of migration would not be on the movement, but on the arrival: the presence of being in relationship with place and life in that place. Reaffirming a connection to place would ground law's materiality to place, creating legal relations from the base of who is present, rather than who is recognized by the law of the state: in Canada, the Crown. Coulthard has argued that Indigenous movements, such as claiming sovereignty by demanding land back, resist a 'politics of recognition in contemporary liberal form [that] promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples demand for recognition have historically sought to transcend' (Coulthard, 2014, p. 3). Legal relations stemming from presence and relationality experienced from that presence (of beings coming together in common, as above) are radically different from seeking recognition in a pre-figured (archic) form.

Parallel sovereignties therefore originate from the communities themselves. There is no framework to fit into like there is in a statist governance structure. For Richmond, sovereignty is 'vernacular sovereignty in everyday' (2024, p. 44). It is lived and alive: 'everyday activities revitalize kindship in all its meanings, which may be the most important carrier of Indigenous influence into the future' (Richmond, 2024, citing Daigle, 2019, p. 45). Importantly, the everyday does not shy away from conflict and disagreement. Indeed, if one is honest about their day-to-day life, one would know this to be true. When discussing Indigenous legal knowledge, Borrows emphasizes that 'law springs from conflict' (Borrows, 2019, p. 239.). Conflict is present not only in the human world, but in the living more-than-human world. Borrows describes the Anishinaabe law practice learning from the behavior of watersheds:

According to Borrows, included in 'principles of Anishinaabe citizen-ship law; one's choice to either take care of, or neglect, their relations either strengthen or weakens, respectively, one's sense of belonging with the Anishinaabe nation and the degree to which the nation claims them back' (Borrows, 2016, p. 16). Citizenship is vitally linked to the relationship that is cultivated and nurtured with the people and place; it is a living material citizenship rather than a legal document or legal idea.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:

Applied to rethinking the meaning of borders and migration, if there is relationship, there is recognition and accountability. Communities and the social, political, economic structures that organize people and living beings 'can only come into existence by actual conflict, actual political expressions coming together and working things out (or not)' (Martel, 2022, p. 286). It is through tension, difference, and conflict that we know ourselves, as singular beings in a plurality of beings. This plurality of beings creates community, but community itself is a form that must always be responsive to the beings in plural. A community that is static, inviting others into a pre-existing form, denies the living, responsive activity to being in common (Nancy). Being in common, with other living beings, is response-ability. Thus, recognition of legal status and access to legal rights ought to come from being in relationship with others.

Relationships and relationality create the ability to respond: response-ability (Haraway, 2016).³ One cannot prefigure or predetermine relationship; it must be experienced and happening. Relationships happen in the eco of eco-techne, the responsibility then becomes techne but, building an alternative approach to law, the techne can be law as formed by responsibility, not a predetermined capitalist form. As a non-Indigenous scholar working on migration law, listening to the refusal of Euro-modern law that comes from Indigenous scholarship urges me to truly think and respond 'outside the box' of Euro-modern law, to recognize where existing 'networks of reciprocal resurgent movements with other humans and nonhumans [are] radically imagining their ways out of domination' (Simpson, p. 10). The Euro-modern law is not total; it is its archic drive that captures narrative and contingency to make it seem as if this understanding of law (and with it sovereignty, borders, and citizenship) was the only possible form.

The point is not that there is a new replacement law or legal system that will help 'migrants.' Rather, what stories we tell ourselves when addressing issues like the precarization, migrantization, and feminization of labor matters. These stories, whether Master Narratives or rooted in the culture and community of a given place, orient us to our starting point and expectation of law. For Val Napolean, 'law is the intellectual process of deliberating and reasoning to apply rules according to the context' (2014, p. 139). Context not only matters; it is vital to law. Thus, legal knowledge remembered and retold as stories provide grounding, context, for the challenges that require deliberation and reasoning. Stories, moreover, tell us who we are and tell us what law is beyond atomized liberal subjects of enlightenment/modernity. Rebecca Johnson writes of Indigenous legal knowledge as stories that have been shared with her, telling of the obligations that persons have to the creatures, the living world around them. As a non-Indigenous legal scholar, Johnson shares that these stories bring an awareness of law and legal creation happening around her and in her daily interactions. For example, when teaching business law, she incorporates storytelling and stories to teach about contracts and business regulation (Johnson, 2025).

Stories shape if and how state sovereignty is questioned and con-tested or whether it is assumed as normal and natural. It is vital that we reflect on the conditions of possibility that we deem acceptable, versus those that are assumed to be impossible or incorrect. These questions, and the stories that answer them, matter. They carry the potential to decolonize, epistemologically, ontologically and personally. Or they continue to repeat and refashion the colonial matrix of power.

Conclusión: Presence and Now-Time

Throughout history, a pervasive notion exists that either there is not enough space within the nationstate, or space can only be filled by specific, desirable people. Control and scarcity, including a scarcity of time, guides immigration policy. That people can fall into gaps, or more accurately the shadows of law, is a condition of Euro-modern law's specific frames of recognition. It is not accidental that membership in a nation-state is limited according to the individual states' criteria for citizenship or residency; rather, this is a condition of state sovereignty. Nevertheless, people who are present within a territory may still be living and working in that state regardless of recognized legal status. Their undocumented or irregular status, in the shadow of legality, serves a purpose within current legal-economic-political structures by tangibly providing cheap (informal, exploited) labor (Tataryn, 2021), as well as figuratively providing a 'foil' for the (Good) Citizen (Anderson, 2013).

It is not accidental that in the context of migration, 'undocumented' or 'irregular' people are most often bodies that are racialized and in low socio-economic positions. The labels irregular migrant, undocumented migrant, illegal migrant are commonly used to refer to people crossing territorial borders from the Global South to the Global North (or lower-income countries to higher-income countries, for example from Sudan to Egypt). These labels characterize people as desperate to the point of disregarding legal procedures and processes -in other words, desperate enough to engage in criminal behavior- in the hope of improving their life/economic conditions. These labels are rarely, if ever, used to refer to high-income, white European or North American persons living and working in a country where they do not hold citizenship and may have overstayed a tourist or work permit, or entered without proper documentation.⁴ Migration and 'migrant' status have evolved not as accurate legal categories, but broadly capturing a specter of a racialized, poor, exploited, and exploitable class. A class of people whose presence is mobilized as if it posed a threat to the security and identity of the sovereign, law-abiding, nation-state.

The violence that is experienced both at territorial borders and internally within nation-states when one is labelled a 'migrant' -and due to this label, less deserving of rights recognition and legal protection- is embedded in the colonial matrix of power. State sovereignty has become a Master Narrative. It is, in Euro-modern legal theory and practice, the unquestioned way that populations and territory are organized and controlled. The organization of our political society depends on citizenship in a state, a nation-state, bounded to a territory over which a governance structure holds sovereignty. To disentangle us from the conceptual and structural dependence on state sovereignty as the ostensibly only legitimate way to understand cross-border movement and citizenship involves work that is conceptual, epistemological, and personal (Walsh, 2023).

The call for No Borders, or imagining movement across borders with fewer, if any restrictions, shares with Indigenous methodologies of law a fundamental epistemological challenge to colonial matrices of power, specifically to state sovereignty. Decoloniality and decolonial praxis on migration means looking at movement -from one place to another place- not as legal or illegal, but as part of the circulation of being that takes place somewhere, on land. This is an approach that is ontological and epistemological, not intended to give policy or institutional guidelines, grounded in place-based, relational, and lived legality, rather than a state-centric legal form. Place-based knowledge involves community both as forming and being formed through the actual participation of people. I broaden this not just to compare and apply a form of epistemology from Indigenous scholars considering sovereignty and law, but to look at poststructuralism and post-anarchism's challenge to the hegemonic statist archist frame. It is through awareness of presence, collective experience in resolving conflict happening in the now-time (Martel, 2022), as we come together as beings in a common space and place, that we can begin to think of what law is, what law means, and what law can be and do to challenge colonial matrices of power and domination. Martel calls this 'now-time' which is 'accessed by stripping away false constructions of reality and 'trusting our own materiality' (Martel, 2022, p. 297).

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asks 'what does it mean to "prioritize being with each other, being with the work, being with the possibilities, more than they prioritize the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on wrongness?" (Simpson, 2017, p. 44). This calls on us -me as the author- to enact relational, grounded being within this very article. I recognized that saying yes to the invitation to participate in the workshop preceding this special issue and publication possibly reflected a colonial mindset: the motivation to continue my research despite the needs of my young family, the desire to engage in conversation with leading scholars and 'gain' a publication, once again navigating the 'gymnastics' of attempting to make law better within a structure -modern law- built on wrongness.

I have accepted that reality is much more complex. In resisting binary distinctions and predetermined categories, I recognize the relationality that is present as I have worked on this article, and the need to be with others, intellectually if not physically, to breathe life into my frustrations, my analysis, and the glimmers of alternatives that I hold onto even when they are contained as thoughts and intellectual insurgencies. I write with frustration and gratitude. Frustration at repetition; at the lack of site, lack of place for the crisis of epistemological frameworks of migration and labor. Frustration at the lack of attentiveness to our role in the perpetuation of coloniality in academic work as much as the praxis of decoloniality in our everyday lives as we relate to, interact with, and construct law, be it public, constitutional, and international, immigration, or labor. And gratitude for the intellectual energy that has been challenging colonial modernity, patriarchy, and capitalism for centuries. I write with profound gratitude for everyday spaces, presence, and life.