Paper short abstract:

I will investigate and compare four different positions of illegality in two different national contexts. Legal and institutional practices on the one hand produce the conditions for migrant illegality as such, but are also decisive for both the lived experience as irregular migrant and the opportunities for agency and strategizing among migrants.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on my ethnografic research in Denmark and Spain, I will in this paper investigate and compare four different positions of migrant illegality in two different national and legal contexts.

1. the transition from invisible irregular migrant to visible deportee (rejected asylumseeker in Denmark),

2. the position and everyday life as irregular migrant and visible ethnic minority (rejected asylum seeker in Denmark)

3. the position caused by transition from legal resident to irregular migrant (withdrawal of permitted family unification in Denmark)

4. the transition from legal resident (au pair in Denmark) to the position as irregular migrant (domestic worker in Spain)

Legal and institutional practices on the one hand produce the conditions for migrant illegality as such, but are also decisive elements in both the lived experience as irregular migrant and the opportunities for agency and strategizing. Differences in migration regimes and rationalities of government become visible comparing lived experiences in the Danish and the Spanish context of migrant illegality, given that the former produces a high degree of uncertainty and exclusion from human and social rigths, whereas the latter produces a relatively lower degree of uncertainty through access to some social rights and the possibility of regularisation. Different regimes or governmentalities creates different levels of experienced deportability which is important in order to understand different forms of agency and resistance.

However also gender, age, ethnicity, labour market opportunities, family relations and transnational networks influence the way the actual position of migrant illegality is lived and performed by the migrant.

Paper short abstract:

The lives of African immigrants in Italy are shaped by legal constraints, economic realities, and the active construction of public perceptions. Each of these act as frontiers turning migrants into aliens while offering shards of participation thereby fulfilling the needs of global markets through this disposable labor force.

Paper long abstract:

Undocumented workers play and have played a central role in the restructuring of work and profit that received a forward jolt after the 1973 recession. Such restructuring has produced much of the immiseration encountered by anthropologists in the field as well as has opened the door for "major shifts in systems of representation, cultural forms, and philosophical sentiment," in David Harvey's words. In this paper I will look at the construction of identity for African immigrants in Italy as window onto these processes. Two different strands in Italian law, defining boundaries of citizenship ever more restrictively and universalizing health care, have created a paradoxical situation for undocumented migrant workers in Italy: They are excluded from official belonging so thoroughly that their very presence is criminalized, yet their right to health care services is formally recognized and protected from judicial intrusion. This gives rise to a double bind of absence and presence for many migrants, and to a wide area of social ambiguity within which they flounder with deteriorating health and uncertain prospects. It also confronts Italians with a quandary regarding the relative value of ethnic identity and democracy; values whose mutual validity is challenged by such exclusionary and inclusionary moves. Finally, it veils reality in favor of ideology, as concerns with identity obscure the political and economic forces that give rise to its manipulations in the first place.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which welfare services play a role as internal mechanisms for immigration control in Norway through state efforts to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate receivers of welfare state benefits.

Paper long abstract:

In public discourses, irregular migration is often described as constituting a threat to state sovereignty, and has in Europe been accompanied by progressively more restrictive admission policies. The actual presence of irregular migrants within these nation-states however, reveals the limits of border policing strategies, and presents the different states with a fundamental dilemma concerning questions of social rights, cohesion and solidarity that supposedly underpin European welfare states and the exclusion and marginalization of territorial present individuals.

While it can be argued that globalization and increased transnational movement somehow has diluted the concept of national citizenship by according rights on the ground of "territorial hereness" ("denizenship"), irregular migrants remain largely outside the framework of rights. The precise boundary of exclusion can however be seen to be tested and negotiated through shifting laws and policies, institutional practises and different conceptualizations of irregular migrants in public discourses that both promote and are influenced by broader organizational and conceptual changes in the welfare state.

Through the case of irregular migration in Norway this paper explores the ways in which welfare services come to play a role as internal mechanisms for immigration control and deterrence through state efforts to distinguish more tightly between legitimate and illegitimate receivers of welfare state benefits. The debates surrounding the elaboration of a new health regulation regarding irregular migrants implemented in June 2011 will serve as a point of reference. How notions such as vulnerability, responsibility, moral and agency are framed and contested will be central themes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the experiences of undocumented Latin American labor migrants in Germany, focusing on their perspectives on illegality, deportability and uncertainty in their everyday lives in Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the embodiment of illegality as experienced by undocumented Latin American labor migrants in Berlin. I understand 'migrant illegality' as a social and political construct which nevertheless profoundly shapes the everyday lives of undocumented migrants . The paper is based on my doctoral fieldwork with undocumented Latin American migrants in Berlin (2008-2011).

Most of the research participants came to Germany on a 3-months-tourist visa, hoping to prolong their stay by finding employment. While most found work within a few months, virtually no possibilities exist to legalize their presence as labor migrants. Being categorized as 'illegal immigrants' came as a shock to many of the research participants, due to limited or distorted information on working in Europe, as well as differing conceptualizations of illegality and informality.

In the second part of the paper, I show how undocumented Latin Americans embody their illegality and deportability (e.g. De Genova 2002; De Genova and Peutz 2010) during the first months of their stay. By providing case examples from my research, I show that their (i)legal status alters their movements within Berlin, influences their physical and emotional wellbeing (cf. Willen 2007), and introduces mistrust, fear, and suspicion into their social relationships.

Despite these adverse circumstances, many of the research participants managed to get along, and to recover from disillusion, abuse, and illness. As I will show in the last part of the paper, religious communities and spirituality as well as transnational responsibilities play an important role for limiting or enduring uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explain the diversity with which recently Afghan migrant and asylum seekers who have recently arrived in Turkey view and negotiate their structural positions of irregularity within the framework of social and cultural theories of risk.

Paper long abstract:

Pursuant to the institution of restrictive policies towards Afghan migrants and refugees in Pakistan and Iran, as well as continuing insecurity in Afghanistan, Turkey has become a significant country of transit and the closest country asylum in the region. When in Turkey, however, Afghans are subject to policies designed to legally marginalize and prevent integration. Furthermore, anti-smuggling measures and tighter controls on the EU border appear to have increased the financial cost of irregular travel and possibility of apprehension. This paper seeks to explain how recent Afghan arrivals view and negotiate their "structural position of irregularity" whilst in Turkey within framework of social and cultural theory of risk perception and acceptability.

The migratory options for Afghanis in Turkey, such as irregular travel or asylum, expose migrants to uncertainties and vulnerabilities. Typically Afghans pursue a combination of these options. Current migration theory on decision making fails to capture the diversity of intra-group variation as witnessed among Afghans in Turkey, because of its focus on macroeconomic and political factors. Based on ethnographic research since December 2010, including 65 in-depth interviews with Afghans across several cities in Turkey, it is argued that the heterogeneity of Afghani migratory trajectories arises from their subjective evaluation of risks in the broader cultural and social context of their decision making. This paper goes towards challenging the common perception of migrants "risk-averse actors" while demonstrating the discrepancy between the impact of "migration controls" as viewed by the states versus individual migrants.

Paper short abstract:

By a “multi sited” fieldwork in Northeast Italy and Senegal, this proposal aims to explore gendered practices, tactics and “sojourn strategies” (Engbersen, 1999) of Senegalese undocumented or irregular migrants who are living or have been living in Italy.

Paper long abstract:

The data used in this paper have been gathered through an ethnography, carried out mostly in Padoua (Italy) and Dakar (Senegal), dealing with the experiences of Senegalese men who are at risk of repatriation and the ones which have been repatriated. Those two locations allowing us to consider different positioning with respect to the European system of governance of migration.

Through a participant observation in Padoua and through in-depth interviews in Senegal, we sought to grasp which kinds of solidarity links, moral economies, gender representations are at stake in the efforts to gain the stay in Italy.

Moreover, the fact of collecting both the voices of the ones which are "risking", and the ones which stopped to do it because they have been "caught", let us gain a more complex understanding of the irregular migrants being-in-the-world. First of all because it gives us the opportunity to historicize the tactics and the resistances in relation to the mutations in European governmentalities. But also because it allows us to perceive more in depth which kind of social sufferings are endured in being irregular migrants in Europe. In attempting to account for irregular migrants' agencies, we should also take into consideration the gazes of the one "left home" (in Senegal) which structure migrants practices. Gazes which increase their moral weight when is the risk of deportation which is faced.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic data from an ongoing research project (PROVIR), we look at how irregular migrants in Norway question the current order and ideas of who should be protected, and who should be listened to. How, if at all, do they in this process reconfigure the political?

Paper long abstract:

As Norway was still recovering from the shocks of the 22 of July terror attacks, around 25 so-called irregular migrants marched from Oslo to Trondheim along the St. Olav pilgrim way. The march was attended by Ethiopian, Iranian, Afghan and Kurdish migrants, and co-organized by political activists on the radical left. It followed a series of church occupations, hunger strikes, demonstrations and petitions that in the last year has made the presence and living condition of irregulars a pressing challenge to deal with for the Norwegian social-democratic welfare-regime.

In this paper, we examine the asylum march alongside other public interventions as moments of "becoming political". Drawing on ethnographic data from an ongoing research project on the provision of welfare to irregularized migrants (PROVIR), we look at how they question the current order and ideas of who should be protected, and who should be listened to. How, if at all, do they in this process reconfigure 'the political'?

Drawing on the works of, among others, Engin F. Isin and Aihwa Ong on citizenship, we discuss how irregularized migrants resist the reduction of them to "human detruits" and "criminals" - attempting to constitute themselves as in need of protection and worthy of citizenship. By examining the performative side of their citizenship struggle, we ask whether they in this process contribute to transforming the meaning of citizenship - or whether they, in the process of mobilizing against the system which defines them as noncitizens - simultaneously enforce established presumptions of what a potential and worthy citizen is?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which recent debates over Israel’s citizenship regime have been projected onto and experienced within the bodies undocumented women. Specifically accusations of strategic pregnancies cast women’s bodies as entities that are simultaneously criminal and humanitarian.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2009, amidst a public debate over the deportation of 1,200 Israeli-born children of undocumented migrants, Eli Yishai, Israel's Minister of Interior and ardent supporter of ridding the country of its "illegal" residents, stated that undocumented migrant women (from South and South East Asia, Africa and South America) were using their children as "a talisman" to secure their continued stay in Israel. In making this accusation Yishai was articulating a moral panic that had developed around this population and around the feminization of non-Jewish labour migration to Israel more generally. Migrant women, according to the narrative, were conceiving and raising children in Israel as a strategy through which they could obtain citizenship, otherwise unavailable to them in the Jewish state. Although neither the women nor their Israeli-born children were automatically eligible for citizenship under Israel's system of jus sanguinis, Yishai and others warned that migrant women were using their pregnancies and their children as an attempt to root themselves in society and claim citizenship on humanitarian grounds.

In this paper I examine the ways in which recent debates over Israel's carefully crafted citizenship regime have been projected onto and experienced within the bodies of undocumented women. Far from simply a discursive process, the configuration of these women's bodies as criminal entities on the one hand and humanitarian subjects on the other has taken form through institutional practices, legal enforcement, and the social relations and political engagements of migrant women themselves.

Paper short abstract:

The paper highlights the State (canton and municipality of Geneva) thinking, practices and mechanisms which transform the Roma from legal European citizens into exogenous criminals that fill the common imaginary of the dangerous stranger. It also looks on how Roma/Gypsies from Romania seem to resist by their bodies which draw new social and symbolical territories in public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Roma/Gypsies live in Geneva as dwellers in cloth markets - Swiss or French national citizens, as refugees or asylum seekers (from Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina), as recent immigrants coming from Romania. Only the last category is fully visible in public places in present times. They systematically challenge the Calvin's city's representation of these spaces by the begging practices, even if few of them are self-employed as street musicians. The canton of Geneva adopted a law punishing the beggars in 2009. My paper highlights the State (canton and municipality) thinking, practices and mechanisms which transform the Roma from legal European citizens into exogenous criminals that fill the common imaginary of the dangerous stranger.The anti-begging law, the politicians official declarations, the legal procedures that exchange unpaid amends in time to spend in jail, the police representations and harassment action by inscribing "beggar" in passports , the daily tracking of road- maintenance and garbage collection services for uninstall improvised beds are such rules and practices that systematically neglect the citizenship to these persons. Exposed to high precarity and health damages, earning small amounts of money compared to other places where they lived as migrants previously, Roma/Gypsies from Romania seem also to resist by their bodies which draw new social and symbolical territories in public spaces such squares or supermarkets entrances. My ethnographical study explores in details the Roma/Gypsy art of occupy space in De Certeau's term (1980) in its gendered, aged and kinship determined ways.