Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how spaces of informality which emerge through the illegibility of the state – in which rules and rumours intersect – enhance the state’s power and reproduce official narratives of the generosity of mobility and entitlement rules in Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines the spaces of informality produced by the illegibility of mobility and entitlement rules in Portugal, often viewed as progressive within the EU. Changes in the law constitute a constant challenge, not only to migrants but also to state officials. The state regularly breaks its own rules by failing to regulate laws within ninety days leaving officials high and dry at the interface with migrants. Officials’ knowledge and interpretation of mobility and entitlement rules is also inconsistent across the state system, resulting in the circulation of misinformation and speculative rumours. Rules and rumours intersect, rendering the state illegible, creating a climate of mistrust. Refugees brought to Portugal through European Union relocation and resettlement programmes also accuse the Portuguese state of breaking promises made in first asylum countries, since local policies fail to deliver and correspond to their imaginaries of mobility. Refugees, in turn, do not match up to the projections of third sector institutions hosting them through these programmes of the figure of the deserving, grateful refugee. They view their demands as excessive and their secondary movement to other European countries as breaking the rules of hospitality. However, the illegibility of the state also generates spaces for good will, creative manoeuvre and serendipity, helping to forge social relationships across unexpected terrains that bridge some of these divides to produce the state’s sought after success stories of the integrated refugee. The intersection of illegibility and informality enhances state power and reproduces official narratives of the generosity of its policies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how using the Italian passports they “inherit” from their ancestors thanks to jus sanguinis, Chileans and Argentinians of Italian descent are able to bypass European restrictive migratory rules, entering Italy as nationals and Europe as citizens.

Paper long abstract:

The European approach to mobility is dominated by restrictive migration policies preventing immigration coming from extra-European countries. Italy, in particular, has adopted prohibiting migration legislations based on the closure of its frontiers. Though, thousands of Latin American citizens have found a way to bypass these policies, using the passports they can “inherit” from their Italian ancestors, to enter Italy as nationals and Europe as citizens. Indeed, thanks to jus sanguinis, Italian nationality law allows emigrants’ descendants to maintain or acquire nationality without generation limits. Promulged in 1992 to foster the right for Italians living overseas to vote, this law generated massive immigration from Latin America to Italy as an expected outcome. Yet, this migration is mostly invisible in the public sphere, as it has an unquestioned juridical legitimacy, which inscribes it in a favoured regime of mobility.

Based on a fieldwork I carried out with Argentinian and Chilean citizens of Italian descent in Northern Italy, this paper aims at assessing how they use the Italian passport they “inherit” from their ancestors in order to get around EU restrictive migratory rules. Along with passports, a migratory capital, encompassing knowledge of the legislations and public aid available, is passed on from one generation to the next within these families of emigrant descent, who use their “right to mobility” as a resource. This paper will examine how access to and uses of Italian passports vary according to emigrant descendants’ generations, which type of mobilities they entail, and which is their relationship with belonging.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tacit and non-coordinate acts of resistance that immigrants from different origins perform as contestation to various mobility regimes within the EU.

Paper long abstract:

Racialize and portrayed as illegal, undocumented immigrants in the EU have little agency to oppose, resist, or take part in collective political action. EU mobility regimes are not only set out to avoid ‘unwanted’ migrants to enter the EU but to frighten those who are already in Europe. Deportability is their main concern and living threatened of expulsion produces a cheap and docile labor force at market disposal. This article explores how immigrants from different origins perform non-coordinated thousands of minor acts of resistance to institutional pressures, defined by Scott as infrapolitics. Some forms of resistance react against discourses and images of migration, religion, and race, while others respond to specific political actions and policies. To explore how infrapolitical resistance is produced as a response to the multilayered (im)mobility rules of the internal and external European mobility regimes, we take examples from different research projects conducted among precarious migrants (refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants) across Europe.

Paper short abstract:

Migrant entrepreneurs conducting business across borders have unequal access to mobility and must navigate mobility regimes to develop entrepreneurial activities. We aim to explore how informality can be used as a resource to face structural constraints and enhance upward social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Research on the informality-migration nexus usually explores migrants’ incorporation assuming that informal practices are a default option for marginalized workers. However, it has neglected the diversity of business strategies displayed by migrant entrepreneurs with different socio-economic backgrounds, and in multiple geographic and normative contexts. As recent academic literature shows, migrant entrepreneurs conducting business across borders have unequal access to mobility and must navigate mobility regimes to develop entrepreneurial activities. In this context, informality can be used as a resource to face structural constraints and enhance upward social mobility. We argue that the interplay of mobility regimes and migrants’ strategies is a crucial aspect to understand (1) which migrants resort to informality as a resource, and (2) who is able to draw on informality to thrive with their business and convert their spatial mobility into social mobility.

Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with migrant entrepreneurs who conduct diverse business activities in four locations (Barcelona, Sao Paulo, and Zurich), we provide a global and comparative perspective on business strategies relying on informal practices. By looking at informality as a continuum of context-dependent social practices, we challenge dichotomous understandings of this notion that oppose it to formal/legal economic arrangements and restrict it to a mechanism of labor market inclusion. Our aim is to explore under what circumstances informality can be deployed as a resource for income improvement and the achievement of personal aspirations, and how it enables some migrant entrepreneurs to move upward socially.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the experience of Carla, a 12-year-old girl leading an apparent immobile life in a working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona. It shows that, by engaging in imagined/virtual mobility through storytelling and social media, children navigate adult-made, unwritten (im)mobility rules.

Paper long abstract:

Carla is twelve years old. Her life in a working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona is marked by adult-made, unwritten rules about moving and staying put. She lives with her dad and grandparents in a small flat that hardly ever leaves. Once a year, she visits her relatives in a rural village in northern Spain. Although she goes to school every day, she rarely plays on the street, let alone goes to the city centre. Most of Carla’s life occurs between the four walls of her room. There she challenges her apparent immobile situation by imagining luxurious trips to exotic places – about which she writes books and blog posts – and by exploring the word virtually through social media.

Carla is one of the participants in an ethnographic research on child (im)mobility in low-income areas in Barcelona, which incorporated a series of child-centred techniques. Drawing on her experience, this paper shows that informal (im)mobility rules toward children work as forms of domestic discipline and reveal underlying social inequalities. Yet children, conceived as active cultural producers, transgress such rules by engaging in imagined and virtual mobility. Their narratives and storytelling, as well as the increasingly digital lives they lead, illuminate their imaginaries of mobility, characterized by aspirations of upward social mobility and cosmopolitanism. Do these children really break the (im)mobility rules imposed on them or simply play with their grey zones? Are they empowered agents of change or just vulnerable subjects falling into a creative compliance with the social order?