This article aims to detect socio-legal knowledge gaps within migration studies. The questions of ‘what we do not know’, and how these knowledge gaps come into being, allow us to reflect on the relationship between knowledge on the one side and societal practices (of domination and control) on the other. We hence proceed to claim the necessity of ongoing inquiry into the (implicit) theoretical positions of the administration and control of migration processes and migrants. As a second endeavour we begin to search for ‘the nescience that we don’t know of’. Such an undertaking turns its back on theories promoting a conception of migrants as objects of control, rather to perceive migrants as producers of internal security and actors in processes of conflict resolution.