Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

‘Legal residence seeker’ is employed as a relational analytic that resists state-imposed categories, foregrounds migrant agency in struggles over legitimacy and recognition in Portugal, underscores a relationship with the state, and destabilises citizen/noncitizen lived experiences and distinctions.

Paper long abstract

The statement “I am no longer a refugee,” made by a rejected asylum-seeker in Portugal, encapsulates the struggles over legitimacy and recognition that characterise migration governance, and foregrounds the intricate interplay between normative and analytical categories in migration scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2024 in Portugal, the paper elucidates the strategies migrants employ - sometimes in partnership with, and sometimes in opposition to, legal and bureaucratic recommendations - as they navigate the shifting terrain of normative categorisation. Doing ethnographic justice to these processes requires careful navigation of analytical tensions: steering between a focus on the dynamic relationship between individuals and the state, and a focus on the analytical category of collective migrant identity - whether as noncitizens, illegalised or racialised migrants. While both approaches enable critique of migration governance practices that deny individuals legal and social recognition, the paper argues that privileging relationships allows for greater analytical manoeuvre between normative and analytical categories, blurring boundaries between citizen and noncitizen experiences. Yet how to avoid reproducing state logics when categories cannot be dispensed with altogether? As one scholar remarked about race as a social construct, “I still wake up Black every morning.” What light does the equivalent of waking up undocumented shed on the use of our analytical categories? The paper proposes the ‘legal residence seeker’ as a relational analytic that resists state-imposed categories, foregrounds migrant agency in struggles over legitimacy and recognition, underscores a relationship with the state, and destabilises citizen/noncitizen lived experiences and distinctions.