Ambiguous borders. Legal intermediaries between political goals and professional commitment

The increased political saliency of migration and the growing complexity of the legal framework regulating it are changing structurally the field of legal intermediation, as well as its relation to politics. The aim of this article is to explore these transformations by answering the following questions: What is the role of legal intermediaries in this new scenario? How is the relationship between intermediation and politics being transformed? In answering, we focus on two types of intermediaries, public and private, and on two levels of analysis, national and subnational. The paper is based on a vast body of data covering a long time frame, collected using a variety of techniques (among others, in-depth interviews with key informants and intermediaries; analysis of legal and political actions aimed at countering discrimination or exclusionary innovations). Based on these ample empirical sources, we show how legal intermediation exhibits complex, nuanced and ambiguous dynamics of politicisation, concealed behind apparent depoliticisation