Gatekeepers or agents of change? The political agency of lawyers in the Dutch family migration regime

Migration lawyers exercise political agency: in choosing which clients to represent and how to present their claims to bureaucrats and judges, lawyers shape what the governance of migration looks like in practice. In 2022, we interviewed 16 lawyers specialised in Dutch family migration law, inquiring how they see their own roles vis-à-vis the state, how they address cultural differences in what counts as ‘family’, and how they handle suspicions of fraud. The variety in approaches we observed clearly reveals that family migration lawyers are far from neutral, apolitical actors. Personal convictions informed professional practice, even among lawyers who eschewed activist ‘cause lawyering’. While our respondents all believed some or many elements of the migration regime should change and sought to exercise pressure through their legal practices, they all also acted as gatekeepers of the current migration regime – partly out of conviction, partly because they believed they can best (or only) support their clients by playing by the rules of the game. Building on the scholarship on lawyers’ professional ethics, I argue that everyday migration lawyering involves a form of moral activism oriented towards social change that – perhaps inevitably and often reluctantly – also involves gatekeeping.