of detention in Lesvos, it is exactly through the system of the 'white paper' that the regime of Dublin II ends up fostering a pattern of circularity in the trajectories that migrants undertake back and forth between the South and the North of Europe, and sometimes back to their countries. In Lesvos the conditions are set up for the migrants to become illegal, that is, as soon as they do not return 'voluntarily' to their country withinthe established period of 30 days. They will try to negotiate the limbo of their precarious status, through the narrow space of the brief concession of one month of 'legality' and the long journey that separates them from the capital and other stations of their unpredictable journey. This is a movement that reproduces and expands across time and space, with migrants' status becoming a continuous condition of detainment and 'deportability' (De Génova, 2002). This condition of high uncertainty is recognized as a factor making migrants particularly exploitable in the labour markets of the EU. Comparable to other critical points of transit and 'borderzones' such as Lampedusa in the Mediterranean, detention centres like Lesvos therefore do not simply pose humanitarian concerns, but are fundamental players in the ongoing process of stratification of the rights of migrants in the European space, differentiating their access to labour and citizenship (Andrijasevic, 2006). In the specific instance encountered in Pagani, the 'production' and distribution of the status of illegality for migrants is achieved through a 'management of detention' that, by selecting a particular (gendered) group of detainees, allows the regime to claim to be concerned with the ethics of its practice in a moment of major crisis. At the same time, by 'freeing' the selected group of migrants on the basis of their greater vulnerability, this regime also constructs women as victimized rather than political subjects, exactly when they are expressing a straightforward political demand, reclaiming their freedom of movement. excessive voices and encounters Yet, the migrant women in Pagani refused the offer of freedom when it came with conditions, namely separation from their partners. Their gesture also resists the way in which migration controls can intimately enter the definition of affects and ties in migrants' communities and families. Following the argument that state immigration controls are expanding to include the 'channelling of affects' (Luibhéid and Anderson, 2008), these women, by deciding to stay in Pagani, in fact opposed the state's intrusion in detecting their personal ties and deciding upon them, by reclaiming with a different voice, the unity of their families or simply their preference to remain with their companions. Therefore moments of 'excess' (Andrijasevic, 2008b; Papadopoulos et al., 2008) emerge against this Gabriella Alberti fe m i η i st This content downloaded from 163.1.255.60 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:57:53 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions review 94 2010 143