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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that border regimes reorganise the social reproduction of labour. Drawing on Brazilian domestic workers in Portugal, it shows how collective infrastructures of care, bureaucratic navigation and mutual support have become an emerging terrain of labour politics.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary border regimes do not simply regulate mobility or labour markets. They increasingly organise the conditions through which labour itself is socially reproduced. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research with Brazilian domestic workers in Portugal, including life-history interviews and participant observation in the Grupo Acolhida organised by Casa do Brasil de Lisboa, this paper asks what changes when border regimes are analysed through the lens of Social Reproduction Theory rather than through citizenship, deportability or migration control alone.

I argue that border regimes govern access not only to legal status but also to work, time, care, bureaucratic navigation and future-making. Following the border into everyday life reveals how waiting, documentation, administrative uncertainty and precarious domestic work become mechanisms through which labour is governed beyond the workplace.

The paper examines the collective practices through which migrant workers sustain everyday life under these conditions. It shows how sharing bureaucratic knowledge, circulating information, providing emotional support and collectively navigating administrative uncertainty constitute infrastructures of social reproduction. These practices reproduce not only everyday life but also the conditions through which migrant labour remains possible.

Rather than treating such practices as informal solidarity or survival strategies, I argue that they have become an important terrain of labour politics under contemporary border regimes. Where border regimes destabilise the traditional objects of labour politics—the worker, the workplace and the employment relation—labour politics increasingly emerges through the collective organisation of the everyday conditions that make work and life possible.