Conclusion

Summary

The phenomenon of the shifting border, in which the temporal border is one of the key features, reaffirms precisely the double-edged, or Janus-faced, role of time in the control of the presence of migrants within a certain territory that is at the heart of this book. On the one hand, the temporal border is the demonstration of the seemingly endless possibilities of this form of temporal governance of the process of the presence of migrants within a given territory by means of legal time. On the other hand, precisely these frenetic attempts to prevent migrants from reaching the territory and the endless efforts to cut down to the bone the entitlement of those present on the territory by means of temporal differentiation demonstrate in a rather cynical way the normative force of the jus temporis that I have argued for in this book. It is because we acknowledge that generally the presence of migrants within a territory matters that we try to prevent people from reaching our territory and that we develop measures that limit those entitlements for the undesired aliens. The argument of jus temporis is stating the obvious: human time has value.