Dead papers: migrant ‘illegality’, city brokers, and the dilemma of exit for unauthorised African migrants in Delhi

Bani Gill

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2021.1940891

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through the empirical optic of ‘dead papers’, this article highlights the lived complexities of documentary regimes in Global South contexts by exploring strategies and responses to the agency of migration documentation that are past their expiry date. Drawing upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with African migrants and city-based actors such as property brokers conducted in two unplanned settlements of Delhi between 2015 and 2017, it focusses on the intersections between paperwork, im/mobility, and emergent ‘migration infrastructures’ (Xiang, Biao, and Johan Lindquist. 2014. “Migration Infrastructure.” International Migration Review 48 (1): 122–148) mediating the impermanent trajectories of racialised and legally precarious African migrants in Delhi. It argues that colonial era laws that criminalise visa transgressions necessitate flexible strategies of urban navigation for unauthorised migrants and substantially complicate their capacity to return to home contexts. In this way, the article highlights the role played by property brokers as situated intermediaries critical to urban transformations, whose entrepreneurial ‘connections’ are often instrumental in the facilitation of mobility within the city and beyond. In tracing the ways in which the mediations of such localised migration infrastructures regulate broader processes of transnational migration, the article considers ‘new’ entanglements between migrants and city actors as integral to a conceptualisation of exit practices for unauthorised migrants, beyond binary oppositions of forced/voluntary movement.

Highlights

Through the empirical optic of ‘dead papers’, this article highlights the lived complexities of documentary regimes in Global South contexts by exploring strategies and responses to the agency of migration documentation that are past their expiry date
While Kim was getting her hair braided, we had engaged in conversation about her experiences in Delhi, the difficulties she encountered in her garment trade business, and the hostility she often faced from her neighbours as a single, young, African woman
How do migrants with ‘dead papers’ navigate everyday life in the city, and what are the various negotiations that mark their afterlife in relation to dwelling and mobility practices? What happens to migrants with ‘dead papers’ who want to leave but are unable to due to the criminalisation of migrant ‘illegality’? how do we synthesise the varied exit practices emerging from such legal stipulations in terms of the localised ‘migration infrastructures’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) mediating them, and how do these disrupt conventional binary oppositions such as return migration /deportation and forced/voluntary movement?

Summary

Conclusion

Building on insights of migrant ‘illegality’ as historically, politically, and socially constructed (De Genova 2002) and as mediated through ‘bureaucratic artefacts’ of paperwork (Horton 2020), this article has analysed when and how dead papers acquire critical resonance for racialized African migrants in Delhi. Such migration infrastructures facilitate migrant negotiations of precarity with regard to dwelling and im/mobility within the city, as well as conditions of transnational immobility vis a vis return to home contexts. Literature has explored how normative dichotomies such as state/market, legal/illegal, forced/voluntary materialise as unstable configurations that are co-constitutive rather than oppositional in the charting of migrant trajectories as in the praxis of migration regulation (Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013) Such an instability is often mediated by the emergence of new relationalities between diverse actors that are predicated upon city dynamics and intracity mobility. It is by attending to the granular realities of mutable urbanisms and the various brokerage networks through which emergent conditions of precarity are negotiated by migrant populations that we can better grasp the contestations and collaborations through which ‘dead papers’ acquire a dynamic afterlife

Notes on contributor

Findings

23. London