Professor of Migration Law
This text describes the regularisations in Dutch migration policy in the period between 1975 and 1996 (as amended in 1999).
Since the end of the Cold War, migration law and policy of the global North has been characterised by externalisation, privatisation and securitisation. These developments
have been conceptualised as denying access to migrants and as politics of non-entrée. This article proposes to broaden the analysis, and to analyse unwanted migration as merely one form of international human mobility by relying on the concept of the global mobility infrastructure. The global mobility infrastructure consists of the physical structures, services and laws that enable some people to move across the globe with high speed, low risk, and at low cost. People who have no access to it travel slowly, with high risk and at high cost. Within the global mobility infrastructure, travellers benefit from advanced forms of international law. For the excluded, international law reflects and embodies their exclusion before, during and after their travel to the global North. Exclusion is based on nationality, race, class and gender. The notion of the global mobility infrastructure allows for questioning the way in which international law reproduces these forms of stratification.
The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control, European Journal of Migration and Law 20(2018), 452-469
Onder het Zuid-Afrikaanse Apartheidsregime werd, net als nu in Europa, een situatie geschapen waarin grote aantallen mensen als illegale vreemdelingen werden aangemerkt. Dit artikel brengt in kaart hoe, op basis van de status van illegale vreemdeling, mensen uit hun huizen konden en kunnen worden gezet omdat ze niet mogen wonen waar ze wonen. De hiervoor gegeven rechtvaardigingen worden gegroepeerd in enerzijds binnenlands ruimtelijk beleid (ruimtelijke ordening in het geval van Zuid-Afrika, openbare orde in het hedendaagse Europa), en anderzijds buitenlands ruimtelijk beleid, dat will zeggen migratierecht. Een laatste deel bespreekt waar de vergelijking tussen Zuid-Afrika onder Apartheid en het hedendaagse Europa zinvol is, en waar de parallel haar grenzen bereikt.
Legitimatie van ontruimingen in het hedendaagse Europa en Zuid-Afrika onder Apartheid, Nederlands Juristenblad 2018, p. 856-864
This paper undertakes to investigate parallels between evictions of irregularized persons in Apartheid South Africa and contemporary Europe. In both cases, people were denied the right to a home (or at least: to the home they were occupying at that moment) because they were considered to be illegal aliens. But how did this situation come about? How did these people become illegal aliens? And while it seems obvious that illegal aliens can be deported from the territory, how did their alien status come to justify the destruction of their homes? Pursuing the association means we will not only identify similarities, but also try to establish where the association meets it limits. The aim of pursuing a visual association across time and space is not primarily to draw exact parallels. In contemporary Europe, the use of violence of a “white” state in order to destroy the housing of “non-whites” is accepted as a normal element in the regulation of “non-white” populations. The association with Apartheid seeks to problematize this normality by pointing to the uneasy pedigree of such practices.
Legitimizing Evictions in Contemporary Europe and Apartheid South Africa , 14 Ameriquests (2017) 1, p. 6-22
Dit artikel is de schriftelijke weergave van de Artikel 1 lezing die de auteur op 22 maart 2013 hield aan de Universiteit Utrecht. In hoeverre is het uit het oogpunt van het gelijkheidsbeginsel gerechtvaardigd dat niet uitzetbare asielzoekers die zich in Nederland bevinden anders worden behandeld dan andere personen die zich in Nederland bevinden op het punt van sociaal-economische grondrechten, zoals arbeid, sociale zekerheid, huisvesting, onderwijs en gezondheidszorg? De claim op deze rechten wordt afgeweerd door er op te wijzen dat de vluchtelingen daarvoor in hun eigen land moeten zijn maar daarmee wordt er ten onrechte vanuit gegaan dat he nationaliteitsrecht op internationaal niveau een sluitende lappendeken is.
Een co-referaat van prof. mr. Ernst Hirsch Ballin werd gepubliceerd in Nederlands Juristenblad 2013, p. 1263 e.v.
‘Wij zijn hier’. Gelijke behandeling van niet uitzetbare vreemdelingen, in Nederlands Juristenblad 2013, p. 1254-1262
In this chapter, I will argue that the debate about cosmopolitanism vs. sovereignty can only be considered as a relevant debate if the wrong questions are asked – at least in my field of expertise, migration law. The question which is at the heart of this debate in migration law (under which circumstances should aliens be admitted) is a false one. In my view, the issue is not the just distribution of membership. Instead, the debate is mostly about the position of aliens who are in the community already, and whom the community prefers to consider as nonmembers, or even as non-entities. If it would be acknowledged that the aliens whose position is being discussed are already in the community, it would become clear that their position can either be debated under the rubric of admission, or under the rubric of redistribution. The obsessive way in which the redistribution option is ignored suggests that the (ideological, material, and/or other) stakes for debating migration under the admission rubric are high.
A distributive approach to migration law: or the convergence of communitarianism, libertarianism, and the status quo, in Roland Pierik & Wouter Werner (eds): Cosmopolitanism in Context: Perspectives from International Law and Political Theory, Cambridge University Press 2010, p. 249-274