In the past decade, constructivist understandings of migration have gained
momentum in migration studies. Scholars have shown how (some) people
are enacted as ›migrants‹ when human mobility clashes with nation-states’
claimed prerogative to control »the legitimate means of movement« (Torpey).
Another body of scholarship has highlighted the crucial role played by
knowledge practices in the enactment of migration as an intelligible object of
government. However, these two lines of inquiry have largely been conducted
independently of each other. To better account for how practices of border
control affect the production of knowledge about migration and how the
latter, in turn, informs practices and rationales of migration management,
this article asks: How can we conceptualize and empirically investigate the
relationship between enacting migration through knowledge practices and
enacting migrants through practices of bordering? In response to this question,
I propose a sociology of translation and treason in the tradition of the
Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which enables tracing how records produced
in border encounters are translated into not only ›migration facts‹ but also
various forms of nonknowledge. To demonstrate the analytical potential of
this approach, I show how statistical knowledge about the ›deportation gap‹
– often invoked to justify ever-more restrictive measures in the field of return
policy – is, to a significant extent, a result of the mistranslation of returned
migrants in administrative records used for migration statistics.