Border control is usually imagined as spatial: entry versus exclusion. In practice, governance is temporal. People are managed through waiting, re-application, renewals, and conditional legality.
The infrastructure model
Think of migration systems as infrastructures: distributed networks of offices, forms, databases, and discretionary decisions. Their power is not only to block movement but to reorder life chances.
Empirical markers
- Processing time volatility
- Appeals and “administrative error” rates
- Conditional permits that restrict work and housing
Suggested citation: Vasquez, E. (2025). Migration as infrastructure. Public Sociology Notes.