This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; instead, we seek a more finely grained framework of interpretion. The chapters that follow contain new ideas, based on close empirical observation in various societies across the vast continent of Asia.

Thinking Mobile

Two critical points of departure shape our approach. First, we consider mobility to be an integral part of social life rather than its exception (Urry 2007). Second, we acknowledge that the existence of mobile communities preceded the formation of states (Ludden 2003). Thus, we think of the state as a political organisation keen to regulate existing or emergent patterns of mobility. States are of interest to us because they exert themselves in controlling and moulding mobilities within and across their national borders. Our contributions empirically explore the effects of such exertions. How do they affect, contain, increase, deflect or bypass mobile practices?

From this perspective, the state often appears as reactive rather than proactive: it has to run after the facts. In doing so, it is never a neatly coordinated machine with all its agents acting in unison. The real-life states that we have studied bear little resemblance to the ‘model state’ used in much social theory. Looked at from the vantage point of people participating in (illegal) transnational flows, these states turn out to be far less tightly structured and much less governed by uniform, impersonal rules. Our studies demonstrate that these states suffer from a persistent ‘implementation deficiency’ – an inability to put their policies into practice. There are two dimensions to this. On the one hand, policies are often overambitious and the state lacks the manpower and legitimacy to push them through. On the other hand, officials may actively obstruct policies handed down from higher levels within the state.

This chapter explores the immigration of Chinese migrant workers to Israel in light of the ‘illegal but licit’ analytical framework as advanced by Van Schendel and Abraham (2005). The ‘illegal but licit’ analytical framework conceptualises a useful distinction between the il/legal and the il/licit, in order to enable us to grasp better, and talk about, what really happens on the ground – in, across and under the formal authority of nation-states. The ‘illegal but licit’ framework broadens and forces our analysis to include flows and actions that are located in a zone where a mismatch exists between the state's formal political authority and non-formal social authority.

The first aim of this chapter is to examine the immigration flow from the viewpoint of Chinese migrant workers, who must go through numerous informal and illegal stages in the process of recruitment and employment. Migrants regularly perceive their own actions as well as those of recruitment companies and employers to be licit. Yet, the licitness in this case is often the product of a culturally infused confusion or plain ignorance regarding the obliging legal systems in China and Israel. Notably, instead of there being an institutional attempt to offset the confusion of migrant workers, this confusion is being systematically compounded by deliberate manipulations of Chinese and Israeli recruitment companies and employers.

The second aim of the chapter is to examine closely the work of the formal authorities in China and Israel. As I shall demonstrate, the two states choose to accommodate and turn a blind eye to the informal and illegal dealings of private and public companies involved in the recruitment and employment of Chinese workers. At times, states also act against migrant workers using illegal methods. I therefore argue that our understanding of the role of the state within the ‘illegal but licit’ framework should not be confined to policymaking and the fixing of legal boundaries but instead should include a treatment of the executive powers of states within the field of immigration.