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.