In Aravind Adiga’s novel Amnesty (2020), Sydney’s complex histories come into sharp relief as urban nemesis to Danny (Dhananjaya Rajaratnam), an undocumented migrant and house cleaner who has fled violence in his home country of Sri Lanka. Originally drawn to Australia as a fee-paying foreign university student (a lucrative industry that uses Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: 2 as a marketing tool), Danny is faced with the dilemma of either maintaining his illicit existence or informing the authorities about a murder to which he holds vital clues. Reading the novel as part crime novel and part migrant flaneur’s tale, this essay examines the way Danny’s meandering journey through Sydney collates the various transnational migrant tales that lie within the cracks of the gleaming city. Set against the backdrop of both Australia’s brutal refugee detention regime and the region’s unevenly “rising Asia,” Amnesty provides an acute portrayal of the intersecting hierarchies and contradictions that constitute the migrant ecology of today’s global city. As such, Amnesty offers a vernacular theory of migrant spatiality by articulating refugee “illegality” with the regional contours of neoliberal development.