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Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, empirically grounded account of how often-futile, injurious policy measures devoted to pressuring non-deported people to leave are implemented and contested in practice. In doing so, it presents a critique of the widespread, normalised use of detention, encampment, and destitution, which routinely fail to enhance deportations while exposing deportable people to conditions that cause their premature death. The book takes the 'deportation limbo' as a starting point for exploring the violent nature of borders, the racial boundaries of welfare states, and the limits of state control over cross-border mobility. Building on unprecedented access to detention and deportation camps and migration offices in both countries, it presents ethnographic material capturing frontline officials' tension-ridden efforts to regulate non-deported people using forced deportation, incarceration, encampment, and destitution. Using a continuum of state violence as the analytical lens, the book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of how the borders of Nordic welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised 'others' to expulsion, incarceration, and destitution. The book is the first to systematically document the renewed deportation turn in Denmark and Sweden, and to critically examine its implications: for the people targeted by intensified deportation measures, and for the individual officials, institutions, and societies enforcing them. It offers an important, critical contribution to current debates on the violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic structures and practices that sustain them, and their human costs.

Migration-related detention, the administrative incarceration of people lacking legal authorisation to remain, has become a standardised technique used by states to violently regulate and discipline undesired mobility. As carceral junctions, migration detention camps serve to identify, confine, symbolically punish and expel people deemed 'out of place' in the national order of things. As bordering mechanisms, they are techniques of sorting and controlling populations, and sites where we can observe the enforcement of state racism. These processes of racialisation and expulsion operate corporally and affectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers working inside Denmark's migration-related detention camp, and engaging with the literature on race, emotion and border criminology, the article traces the role of racial affect in forging the identities of people interacting inside the camp. It demonstrates how prison officers' racialised suspicion, compromised compassion, and passionate nationalism partake in making incarcerated migrants into expellable subjects, and in ordering them in accordance with matrices of racial differentiation. The officers' emotions, I argue, should be understood as part of the camp's infrastructure, and productive for the border regime.

Abstract
The special issue discusses the intersections between social welfare and migration control, as well as how stratified access to welfare services is used to govern 'unwanted' groups. This article explores these intersections in Denmark' deterrence-oriented asylum policy regime, analysing the discourses and practices whereby people seeking protection are constructed as 'undeserving' poor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in different sites of enforcement of Denmark's asylum regime as well as interviews with street-level workers and people who sought asylum in Denmark, I trace how the Danish deterrence approach operates through the production of poverty and precarity among people seeking protection in asylum reception camps, deportation-oriented integration programmes, and finally, deportation camps. I show how the Danish welfare state, as a result of the merging of external and internal bordering practices, produces a condition of precarity and (non)deportability that extends from the asylum camps to those awarded temporary protection status. Hence, while the deterrence-oriented Danish policy regime has not proven 'effective' from the point of view of immigration control, it has served to reinforced a dualised, hierarchically ordered welfare rights' regime that gradually erodes the rights and life opportunities of unwanted noncitizen 'others'.

Deportation regimes mobilise coercive state powers, but also entail extensive paperwork, the latter of which remains underexplored in deportation studies. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in border police units and a migration-related detention centre in Sweden, this article explores how bureaucratic practices of detecting, detaining and ultimately deporting people whose presence has been illegalised are enforced and legitimated through the use of paperwork. Paperwork, we argue, becomes the 'signature of the state' that enables state agencies to assert themselves as 'rational' actors, even when their own practices are ridden by dilemmas, inconsistency and sometimes arbitrariness. We show how the same documents that are meant to ensure fairness and accountability in bureaucratic processes may render state actions even more unreadable, and further serve to rationalise and legitimise intrusive, violent and discriminatory state actions. The article thus highlights the importance of considering the often-tedious paperwork as essential to the operation of coercive state powers, such as the detainment and deportation of illegalised persons.

Homelessness and other forms of destitution among asylum-seeking migrants are currently on the rise across Europe, as migrants' access to social rights, including housing, has been restricted through repressive migration policies, fuelled by the welfare nationalism and chauvinism that surge among European states. This article explores the largely overlooked homelessness experienced by migrants seeking asylum in two different geographic and political contexts: Italy and Sweden. Building on research conducted over six years, including interviews with state officials, social and NGO workers, and testimonies of asylum-seeking migrants, we trace the logics and effects of policies that not only fail to deliver minimum welfare provisions to asylum-seeking migrants, but which produce and use homelessness as a way of controlling this group. The implications for asylum-seeking migrants include racialised discrimination, class-based and poverty-related health issues, and other harms, which are the direct result of policies that render access to fundamental social rights, including housing, into instruments of migration control.

This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants' journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. Tobias Eule is Professor for the Sociology of Law at the Faculty Law, University of Bern, Switzerland. Lisa Marie Borrelli is Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern, Switzerland. Annika Lindberg is Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern, Switzerland. Anna Wyss is Researcher at Maison d'Analyse Processus Sociaux, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Hunderttausende Geflüchtete erreichen jährlich die »Festung Europa«. Doch was geschieht nach ihrer Ankunft? Hinter der Grenze, vor dem Gesetz ist ein rechtssoziologischer Beitrag zur Debatte um Migrationssteuerung und Zugehörigkeit. Die Studie beschreibt den Umgang mit und die Kontrolle von »unerwünschter« Zuwanderung, aber auch wie das Aufenthaltsrecht angewandt, ignoriert, umgedeutet und idealisiert wird, und wie Recht und Rechtsanwendung Handlungsspielräume von Migrant*innen gleichermaßen ermöglichen und begrenzen. Verantwortlichkeit lässt sich dabei im dichten Regime von Kontrollinstanzen häufig nur schwer verorten. Die Autor*innen beleuchten die Perspektiven von staatlichen Akteuren, NGOs, Menschen mit prekärem Rechtsstatus und verschiedenen Institutionen in acht europäischen Nationen und kommen zu dem wichtigen Ergebnis, dass alle involvierten Akteur*innen immer wieder in kafkaesken Zeitschlaufen gefangen sind und Formalität und Informalität auch in Westeuropa keine Gegenpole sind.