Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens 45 for protection. It includes someone who has travelled with cash from illicit trade to continue such trade in a new country, alongside a mother or father who has spent months travelling dangerously to a more affluent State to earn money from menial labour to send home. It also includes the American gap-year backpackers who, allowing their visas to expire in Australia, float into what, in 2013/14, continued to be one of Australia’s largest irregular immigrant groups.9 It has been found that people migrate irregularly for similar reasons to those for which people migrate more generally. The activity is rendered irregular by the administrative institutions rather than the people who move.10 In examining irregularity, it is useful to consider who it is that migration regulations are intended to exclude, and so whose movement and whose presence it is intended to delegitimise. Consider the American backpackers in Australia mentioned above. Australian government data show that US citizens have persistently made up the third-largest group of ‘unlawful non-citizens’ in Australia, comprising 8 per cent of Australia’s irregular immigrants in 2012, 2013 and 2014, just below the numbers of Malaysian and Chinese citizens respectively. Indeed, migrants from OECD countries comprise well over a third of all Australia’s ‘unlawful non-citizens’ for all three years (38.1 per cent in 2012, 37.8 per cent in 2013, 37.5 per cent in 2014).11 And yet no OECD citizens were recorded to have been in Australian immigration detention facilities in the period 31 January 2013 to 31 December 2014 (the period overlapping the above statistics for which data was available at the time of writing).12 During this period, the detained immigrant population in Australia was recorded to have been made up, to different extents over time, of citizens of: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, as well as stateless persons. For the period after this until July 2016, two additional nationalities started to appear in Australian immigration detention. From March 2015, New Zealanders were recorded to be held in detention, rising quickly to be the second-largest group, and from October 2015, UK citizens also began to be recorded.13 US citizens 9 Data taken from Australian Government (2014) Australia’s Migration Trends 2013–14, Commonwealth of Australia, p. 137. This also provides the data for Chart 2.1. At the time of writing, this is the most recent data available. I first came across this phenomenon in Catherine Dauvergne (2008) Making People Illegal: What Globalisation Means for Migration and Law, Cambridge University Press, p. 16, n. 43. 10 For example, see discussions in: Bimal Ghosh (ed.) (1998) Huddled Masses and Uncertain Shores: Insights Into Irregular Migration, Kluwer Law International; Khalid Koser (2007) International Migration: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, p. 54; see also discussion in Vicki Squire (2016) ‘Unauthorised migration beyond structure/agency? Acts, interventions, effects’, Politics, online view 1 December 2016. 11 Australian Government 2014 ibid. 12 Australian Border Agency Immigration Detention Statistics monthly reports, available from: www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/ immigration-detention (accessed 31 August 2016). 13 Malaysian detainees were recorded in April 2016, but not before or since.