On 17 September 2024, Dr. Saskia Bonjour (Associate Professor of political science, University of Amsterdam) will give a lecture on ‘Migration lawyers as normative political actors in the family migration regime’.
Families which include “strangers” – i.e. non-citizens – require state permission to live together in Europe. For families which are considered “strange” – deviant from the dominant norm – such state permission is not self-evident: queer/same-sex families or polygamous families are commonly denied family migration rights. One of the key arenas where what counts as “family” for migration control purposes may be contested is the courts, and the key actors who may do so are lawyers. Following Sule Tomkinson (2014; 2019), Jonathan Miaz (2021) and Anne-Marie d’Aoust (2022), I conceptualize lawyers as political actors, who in fighting the state for their clients through migration law play a crucial but ambiguous role in migration regimes, confirming and contesting the legal and social norms at the heart of these regimes. Based on interviews with lawyers specialized in Dutch family migration law, I seek to identify the implicit and explicit norms that shape lawyers’ views on the migration regime, as well as their professional practice. I find that lawyers mobilize dominant norms both to confirm and to challenge the status quo in the migration regime. I also find significant variation in the normative choices that lawyers make in their professional practice.
