THE LEGAL INTERPRETATION AND SEMANTIC INDETERMINACY OF MIGRANT VULNERABILITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTUAL AND ARGUMENTATION PROBLEMS

In recent years, there has been a legal philosophical doctrinal debate on the taxonomy of vulnerability from both the ontological and "group approach" angles, as well as from critical relational and intersectional perspectives. However, this broad theoretical reflection has failed to fully encompass a much-needed semantic revision of the concepts of vulnerability and migrant, particularly the legal interpretation of one of their emerging collocations, migrant vulnerability. Specifically, the definitions provided to date lead to problems in legal interpretation, including ambiguity and vagueness. They also facilitate the construction of fallacious arguments or assumptions about how those considered vulnerable or non-vulnerable are identified in migration contexts. This paper reviews these conceptual problems and explores the limitations of the legal interpretation of the phrase migrant vulnerability. The aim is to show that conceptual ambiguity and vagueness have legal and political implications in terms of how exclusive categories are used to identify vulnerable people in the European immigration and asylum system.