Expelling, Discussing, and Throwing Values Out

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the parliamentary deliberation on the Citizen Security Act of 2015 regarding the legalisation of so-called ‘push-backs’ at the Moroccan-Spanish borders in Ceuta and Melilla. The insufficiency of the reasons MPs adduced in defence of this measure, in my view, makes it very hard to say that these legislative debates were a reasonable source of justification in legisprudential terms: they provide, rather, a ‘non-justification’ of the measure upon discussion. To substantiate this thesis, I shall combine legisprudence with a critical discourse analysis approach, and address a key question in this type of legislative scenario, namely: To what extent does the process of legislative production justify, correct or reproduce the existing gaps between the wording of a law and its actual impact (i.e. between its stated purposes and its latent goals)? Following this extended approach, I will discuss: the context of the parliamentary discourse on this measure, ranging from geopolitical issues to mass media spectacle; the institutional liturgy shared by all involved actors; the conditions of ‘veridiction’ in which this discourse operates; the nature of the power it sets in motion; and the legal-moral duality affecting the (non-)justification of ‘push-backs’. It could be said that at the heart of this legislative problem, in the end, we can just find a dialectical impoverishment and an empty polarisation, which are in turn functional to the ‘legal’ coverage of ‘illegal’ practices and, therefore, to the reproduction of immigration policies based more on state racism than on any notion of human rights effectiveness.