Making and unmaking migrant irregularity: a border city during Italy’s ‘migration crisis’

Irregular migration is a significant political concern in countries around the world, with vast budgets being spent on attempting to control it. In policy circles and popular discourse, it has usually been described as the process of crossing a national border without permission or illegally. By reducing irregularity to a form of mobility, such views are, however, overly simplified. This chapter explores the ways that irregularity is not simply a form of mobility but a particular mode of incorporation of migrants into a subordinate and precarious legal, economic and social status. It does so by focusing on the Italian port city of Siracusa, in Eastern Sicily, during the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015, to show how border cities such as this are contested spaces in which the status of migrants is repeatedly negotiated, made and unmade.