The success of legal time in migration law is exemplified by the multitude of possibilities to differentiate, categorize, and calculate human life by means of time. This is based on an intricate play between two complementing and contradicting forms of time: human time and clock time. The success of clock time in law can be related to its objective character, which allows for quantification and calculation. It is this quantification that provides a clarity and logic to processes that are otherwise rather intangible. It is the transformation from an individual process of human time into quantifiable, calculable chunks of clock time that enables the simple, general application in law. An extra value of this generality is its visibility, it is easy to demonstrate that a certain policy has changed based on clock time. However, legal time cannot be equated with clock time, the reference to time in law is always the time of someone, and therefore it is characterized by temporality. The virtues of legal time can be seen at work in several temporal differentiations in migration law: differentiation based on temporality, deadlines, qualification of time, and procedural differentiation.

The phenomenon of the shifting border, in which the temporal border is one of the key features, reaffirms precisely the double-edged, or Janus-faced, role of time in the control of the presence of migrants within a certain territory that is at the heart of this book. On the one hand, the temporal border is the demonstration of the seemingly endless possibilities of this form of temporal governance of the process of the presence of migrants within a given territory by means of legal time. On the other hand, precisely these frenetic attempts to prevent migrants from reaching the territory and the endless efforts to cut down to the bone the entitlement of those present on the territory by means of temporal differentiation demonstrate in a rather cynical way the normative force of the jus temporis that I have argued for in this book. It is because we acknowledge that generally the presence of migrants within a territory matters that we try to prevent people from reaching our territory and that we develop measures that limit those entitlements for the undesired aliens. The argument of jus temporis is stating the obvious: human time has value.