By proposing a feminist reading of the simmelian stranger, the article calls into question the gender neutrality of migration studies and interrogates the sexual nature of human mobility and its regimes of containment and segregation. The thesis presented upholds that we need to rethink ‘the stranger’ as a female stranger, in order to shed light on how the division between productive and reproductive space —i. e., the social and political construction of gender— conditions the governance of migration. Rather than the usual emphasis on migrant women in the supply chain of reproductive labour, the article places the notion of social reproduction at the centre of the argument with the aim to investigate, from a critical legal approach, the crucial role that social reproduction plays in mobility control.