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In the last two decades, social scientists have advanced the concept of immigrant ‘illegality’to signify governmental-administrative systems that dehumanize millions of international migrants marking them as law-breakers and the effects of such systems on individuals and communities (Chavez 1997; De Genova 2002; Ngai 2004; Willen 2007). For those targeted, deportability becomes thus the context for social life (De Genova and Peutz 2010). This first wave of immigrant illegality studies explains much of the increase in restrictions of immigrants with a national political economy rationale: immigrants’ otherness is exploited as they work in jobs that are considered non-native while immigration laws and social practices hold their social vulnerability and precariousness in place (Calavita 2005). The four books reviewed here capture a more nuanced picture of how variation in experiences of illegality, both in terms of …