What sort of political actors are international migrants? This article approaches this question by studying how migrants move between legality and illegality. We have struggled to understand the political content of this behaviour, because they have viewed it as either an attempt to gain the state’s acceptance as quasi-citizens or an attempt to autonomously subvert the state. However, migrants are more ambivalent political actors than either of these perspectives suggest. We argue that the political content of migrants’ efforts to move between legality and illegality can be better understood as a form of ‘hacking’: the ‘repurposing’ of institutionalized forms of political status in ways that compel the ‘reprogramming’ of systems of control. In order to develop this argument empirically, we draw on ethnographic research on the governance of migration between Myanmar and Malaysia.

国际移民是什么样的政治角色？本文通过研究移民如何在合法与非法之间流动来解决这个问题。我们一直在努力理解这种行为的政治内容，因为他们将其视为试图使国家接受准公民的企图或试图颠覆国家的企图。但是，移民是比这些观点所暗示的更加矛盾的政治参与者。我们认为，移徙者在合法与非法之间转换的努力的政治内容可以更好地理解为一种“黑客”形式：以强制控制系统“重新编程”的方式对政治地位的制度化形式进行“重新利用” 。为了从经验上发展这一论点，