"The notion that humans regularly and effortfully scrutinize signs in settings of surveillance introduces the notion of a cynegetic semiotics. Semiotics: the study of semiosis or meaning-making through signs. Cynegetic: of or relating to hunting. In this talk, I ask: what materially meaningful sign-processes undergird and animate hunting, policing, and surveillance? More precisely, how are conceptions of migrant ‘illegality’ voiced, adjudicated, or made (meta)semiotically manifest in the intersubjective fold of life in the surveillance state? I pursue these issues with an ethnographic eye (and ear) to the East Malaysia borderlands, a scene of some of the largest clandestine cross-border flows of people and goods across the globe, and a place where so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ are conventionally imagined to look, talk, and otherwise act like local Malaysian citizens. I conclude by considering the cosmographically comparative implications of these ethnographic observations from Southeast Asia, while critiquing the hemispheric parochialisms that continue to haunt theory and method in mainstream migration studies."