Within, beyond, and after citizenship: the interplay between visibility and invisibility among migrants in Patras

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon empirical research conducted in Patras in 2015, this paper investigates the multiplicity of visible and invisible practices migrants have employed to challenge, negotiate, or evade the pervasive border regime and (attempt to) claim their freedom of settlement and movement. The paper will make two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it will critically explore the concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘imperceptible politics’ through the lens of visibility to analyse the nuances and differences between them and reinstate their importance in capturing the vitality of migrants’ agency. Empirically, the paper will investigate the interplay of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the European and national border regimes and in the fragmented formation process of a migrant political subjectivity. In capturing and analysing the ever-changing development of migrants’ movements and struggles, as well as their multiple ways of being political through visibility and invisibility within, beyond, and after citizenship, the paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue between two broader bodies of work: Critical Citizenship Studies and Autonomy of Migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical citizenship studies
• Autonomy of Migration
• acts of citizenship
• imperceptible politics
• visibility
• migrants
• Greece

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of migrants¹ have traversed the city of Patras in south-western Greece by infiltrating the bustling logistical networks around its port. While their number, composition, and location have changed over the years, their willingness to escape the city and reach other European countries has remained the same. Whether employing more visible practices to claim their presence in the city (such as the establishment of a self-organised camp in one of the wealthiest areas of the city) or less visible tactics of daily escape and evasion (such as the surreptitious attempts to sneak under lorries), their demands for freedom of settlement and movement have inevitably clashed with the border regime, which constantly attempts to regulate their presence and mobility.

Drawing upon empirical research conducted in Patras between January and September 2015, the paper investigates the multiplicity of visible and invisible practices migrants have employed to challenge, negotiate, or evade the pervasive border regime and (attempt to) claim their freedom of settlement and movement. The paper will make two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it will critically explore the concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘imperceptible politics’ through the lens of visibility. This lens, the paper argues, allows us to achieve a threefold purpose: 1) to analyse more in depth the main tenets of, nuances within, and differences between the two concepts; 2) to reinstate their importance in capturing the vitality of migration movements and struggles; and 3) to contribute to the ongoing dialogue between the two broader fields of Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS) and Autonomy of Migration (AoM). While this dialogue has often centred on how visibility and invisibility shape migrants’ struggles and constitute them as a political subjectivity (Ataç et al. 2015; Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016; De Genova and Tazzioli 2022), visibility as a concept has never been laid out in depth. The first section will, therefore, define visibility and critically revisit the two concepts through such a prism in an attempt to provide a stronger basis for such a dialogue.

Empirically, the paper will investigate the interplay of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the Greek border regime and in the fragmented formation process of a migrant political subjectivity. In this respect, the second part will explore, on the one hand, the development of the border regime in Greece, which has combined visible practices of exclusion with less visible mechanisms of inclusion to regulate the circulation of migrants according to labour market needs, and, on the other, the multiple tactics that migrants have employed to escape, resist, and negotiate the border regime, alternating visibility and invisibility to (try to) obtain their freedom of movement. The paper will eventually advocate the importance of visibility both as a theoretical concept and as a social practice in understanding migrants’ movements and struggles within, beyond, and after citizenship.

Acts of citizenship and escape through the lens of visibility

Whether we look at top-down strategies of social control or bottom-up tactics of recognition and resistance, visibility and power are intimately connected (Brighenti 2010; Rancière 2004, 2010). Visibility is associated with subjugation, discipline, and social control – in other words, with the disempowerment of the many. When subjects access the public domain, they become visible and potentially exposed to the governmental ‘technologies of power’ (Foucault 1995). This process, however, is never predetermined but is always dependent on the relative position of the subject in the social arena and on its relationship with the socio-material structures. According to Brighenti (2010, 126), the multiple relations of and between subjects contribute to the configuration of the territorial boundaries of the public domain² and to the establishment of different visibility thresholds, which ‘concur in the definition and management of power, representations, public opinion, conflict and social control’.

In this sense, Brighenti argues that visibility is not just an aesthetic and political relation but also a territorial and ‘evental’ process (2010, 39). It is territorial because the multiple configurations, connections, and strategies performed by different subjects constantly create and disrupt territorial boundaries, form and deform thresholds, and wind and unwind social bonds. In this sense, boundaries can be conceived not as static territorial demarcations but as ever-changing socio-spatial relations that shape, and are shaped by, visibility thresholds. Visibility is also evental because social and territorial effects are always unpredictable and contingent on the interplay of sites, subjects, events, and rhythms in the field. Through these different and continuously changing configurations of visibility, Brighenti continues (ibid.), ‘social relationships are stabilised and power effects are determined’.

Visibility thresholds confer different degrees of visibility upon specific subjects and shape power relations within a society according to specific social and political needs. While some subjects are purposely underexposed, deprived of social recognition, and therefore excluded from the public space (such as marginalised groups and social minorities), others are pushed into a zone of super-visibility where their actions and even social presence are brought to light and contested (as is the case in the media representations of migrants as criminals). In other words, the deliberate positioning of a subject below or above the correct visibility threshold generates not only distortions in visibility but also distortions through visibility, i.e. distortions in their social representation (Brighenti 2010, 47).

On the other hand and simultaneously, visibility is synonymous with recognition, liberation, and resistance. Subjects under scrutiny are never passive but can always ‘look back’. By adopting their own politics of visibility, they can reconfigure the management of visibility thresholds and obtain social recognition. Intuitively, one would think that more visibility is associated with more recognition; in fact, ‘contemporary “struggles for recognition” often take the form of struggles for visibility’ (Brighenti 2010, 40). The concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) seems a perfect example of what Brighenti (2010) calls forms of ‘resistance through visibility’. Emerging from the materiality of everyday life, acts of citizenship are collective practices of citizenship – performed by citizens and non-citizens alike – that ‘disrupt habitus, create new possibilities, claim rights and impose obligations [and] shift established practices, status and order’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008, 10). Whether demanding legal, socio-economic, participatory, or sexual rights (Nyers 2010; Inda 2011; Johns 2014; Andrijasevic 2013), acts of citizenship allow the emergence of a new political subjectivity that negotiates its presence within the society, challenges the redistribution of rights, and creates new spaces of participation and representation. In this respect, acts of citizenship are profoundly aesthetic: they open visible fractures within the government of the community and challenge the policing of its subjects, reconfiguring the existing relations of power (Rancière 2004) by bringing to light the hidden, the unheard, and the invisible. Acts of citizenship (re)define the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the polity – what Brighenti (2010) calls the ‘visibility thresholds’ – laying bare the contradictions within the community and disclosing new subjects in the political scene.

The relationship between visibility and recognition, however, is not always linear. In some cases, more visibility does not necessarily translate into more social recognition. This happens when the dominant class exerts its hegemonic power through the co-optation or the accommodation of dissent without substantially changing the visibility thresholds in the society. In other cases, social struggles must adopt forms of ‘resistance to visibility’ (Brighenti 2010) to avoid open confrontation and evade the totalising gaze of the state. Drawing from the theoretical strand of AoM, the idea of ‘imperceptible politics’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) captures how invisible subjects adopt invisibility to escape the regime of rights and representation and claim their right to freedom of movement. If sovereign power always attempts to make certain subjects visible in order to control their mobility and entrap them in the ‘individualising, quantifying, policing and representational pressures of the settled liminal porocratic institutions’ (ibid., 217), invisibility allows these subjects to escape policing and avoid subsumption into the regime of citizenship. Instead of making themselves visible in the socio-political community, these subjects consciously refute representational politics – conceived as a form of policing that regulates everyday life and alleviates social struggles – and escape the tentacular policing mechanisms of the state.

Both acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics valorise the social and political agency of migrant subjectivities and their conflictual encounter with the border regime. These practices, however, not only operate on different ‘thresholds of visibility’, as Brighenti would call them, but they also draw upon a distinct conception of (doing) politics. At first glance, acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics differ in their use of visibility to obtain or escape recognition, respectively: While acts of citizenship employ visibility to advance political claims, making subjects visible and heard within the political community, imperceptible politics constitutes everyday acts of evasion, escape, and flight that are often unstructured, ephemeral, and ungraspable.

As Brighenti (2010) argues, however, visibility is not simply synonymous with the visual (i.e. what can be seen with the eyes); rather, it is a socio-spatial relation that reconfigures the territorial boundaries of power, recognition, representation, and resistance. When looking at visibility in this way, the differences between the two concepts emerge more prominently. Through acts of citizenship, invisible subjects become activist citizens that, irrespective of their legal status, constitute themselves as a political subjectivity, emerge in society, and raise political claims, redrawing the boundaries of the polity more inclusively (Isin 2008). The act itself constitutes the subject; it is in and through the act that a political collectivity emerges and claims rights, producing a fracture in the socio-political order. Imperceptible politics, on the other hand, does not claim rights or social recognition, nor does it demand inclusion into the ‘citizenship-nation-sovereignty triptych’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008, 14). Rather, it operates beyond, before, and independently of the dominant regime of rights and representation. It is precisely through escape and dis-identification from state power that imperceptible politics challenges and disrupts such power, forcing it to provide responses and reorganise itself (Martignoni and Papadopoulos 2019).

Despite their ontological differences, CCS and AoM scholars have engaged in a dialogue to investigate both conceptually and empirically the (often fuzzy) boundaries of visibility and invisibility within and between acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics. Drawing from the insights and tensions of both bodies of literature, Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl (2016, 535) adopt a ‘contentious politics’ approach to explore migrants’ ‘variety of tactics and ways of acting that often fold into scripts of both (imperceptible) escape and (public) right claims’. Through multiple empirical accounts of migrant resistance within and beyond imperceptibility, Stierl (2020, 7) similarly reconsiders the importance of both approaches in analysing the multiple articulations of migrants’ struggles and forms of resistance, which ‘cannot be categorised into neat oppositions between the visible and invisible’. In fact, while some acts of citizenship might open up spaces of contestation and right-claiming ‘from below’ (Nyers and Rygiel 2012) and ‘from the margins’ (Turner 2016) without taking centre stage, some forms of imperceptible politics, such as the migrants’ march across Europe in the summer of 2015, might acquire more visibility.

My contribution inserts itself along these lines, contributing to the dialogue between CCS and AoM by revisiting acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics through the lens of visibility, which the two approaches have often discussed but never clearly laid out as a socio-spatial relation. By looking at the act of citizenship and imperceptible politics through this lens, I do not mean to compartmentalise migration movements and struggles according to their prominence in the political community. As Brighenti reminds us (2007; 2010), visibility is not just a mere experience of the senses but a social and relational practice that is continuously reconfigured and dis/articulated in everyday life. This definition allows us to ‘emphasize the political hierarchies of visibility that make something appear more or less visible or invisible within the dominant sociopolitical imagination, and not to insinuate that these struggles are truly “visible” or “invisible” in any simple sense’ (De Genova and Tazzioli 2022, 798).

Similarly, I avoid any dichotomous relation between the act of citizenship and imperceptible politics that, to put it bluntly, assigns a political voice only to politically visible or invisible manifestations, respectively. As Brighenti explains (2011, 65), ‘Neither as recognition nor as control is visibility linearly associated with empowerment or disempowerment’. This does not mean rejecting the political meaning of visibility, but rather exploring ‘the ways in which forms of visible and invisible migration struggles fold into one another, inter-relate and become constitutive of one another’ (Ataç et al. 2015, 7). In this respect, I argue, the lens of visibility allows for the investigation of the ever-changing relations and entanglements between the border regime and migrants’ everyday tactics of settlement and escape.

Whether successful in claiming their right to freedom of settlement and movement or caught in the entanglements of the border patterns, migrants’ visible and invisible struggles continuously reconfigure the boundaries of the polity, disclosing the emergence of a social fracture and forcing social and political authorities to intervene. By employing visibility to investigate migration movements and struggles, this article analyses how visibility and invisibility are produced and negotiated, investigating their interrelations and developments through time while capturing their situated and relational manifestations. In doing so, I argue, it is possible to provide a more grounded account of the multiplicity of migrants’ practices, tactics, and acts performed (sometimes simultaneously) within, beyond, and after citizenship (see Turner 2016; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). The following section will be precisely dedicated to the analysis of such processes.

The interplay between visibility and invisibility in Patras

Drawing from a nine-month field study conducted in the port city of Patras in 2015, this section will investigate how visibility and invisibility intertwine, overlap, and even clash on the ground, thus providing a more nuanced understanding of migration movements and struggles. It will do so by looking at the interplay between visibility and invisibility both in the development of the European border regime and among migrant subjectivities. Before delving into the empirical analysis, however, I will briefly outline the methodology employed.

Notes on methodology

During the fieldwork, I interviewed 28 security and technical experts, police and port police officers, social workers, and local authorities; conducted 38 semi-structured and informal interviews with migrants; and collected many field notes through everyday encounters and personal reflections. Exploring the interplay between visibility and invisibility on the ground, however, does not simply mean getting in touch with a number of informants and extracting as much information as possible from them. It also involves, first, adopting a methodological gaze capable of capturing the dynamics, relations, and processes occurring at and across different levels and, second, continuously reflecting on the power relations at stake in the field as well as their influence on research developments and outcomes.

I employed desk research, expert interviews, and policy analysis to retrace the historical developments of the city, outline the slow but inexorable process of capitalist appropriation of public spaces, and examine the European and national policies regulating migrant mobilities across the country. These methods, however, did not always allow me to capture the myriad of everyday experiences, relations, and networks that make every place a ‘meeting place’ (Massey 2005). Only by walking down the street, especially in a place that represented neither a postcolonial location nor what could be called, however problematically, ‘home’ (Sultana 2015), could I start experiencing the field, getting a sense of the different processes criss-crossing it, and drawing multiple connections between them.

The simple act of walking has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […]; it is a spatial acting-out of the place […]; and it implies relations among differentiated positions (De Certeau 1984, 97–8, his emphasis). Through ‘walkscapes’, that is, the act of walking as a methodological tool to ‘transform space into ever-changing places, which are appropriated, given meaning, and represented by their inhabitants’ (Brambilla 2015, 146), I could get a sense of the events unfolding around the port area from the first days of fieldwork: the hundreds of lorries gradually approaching the security checks and waiting to board the ferryboats, the numerous police officers enforcing security controls in and around the port area, and the dozens of migrants gathering outside the port waiting for the most propitious moment to run towards the port fences and sneak under the lorries. Walkscapes, however, also allowed me to make my appearance in the field and become visible to the various agents on the ground.

My presence in the field prompted me to critically reflect on the ‘self’ as well as on the ‘other’, its meaning, and my relationship with it. On the one hand, I was aware of my class, ethnic, and national privileges: As a white person, not only could I walk inside and around the port area without being considered a suspect, but I could also get away with creating security issues. Merely revealing my hometown to migrants would sometimes generate a scornful laugh among them, as they were aware that I would have only needed a ticket to go there. On the other hand, power relations are not one-sided: The knowledge of mobility (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos 2015) that migrants accumulate through time, the numerous stratagems they employ to evade the law or use it to their own advantage, and the use of their own language so as not to be understood represent only some examples of how the power relations between the researcher and the researched are often blurred.

Power relations were also visible when accessing, or trying to access, the different spaces of the field. As I interacted with both police officers and migrants, I sometimes felt belittled by both sides. Not only did my presence in institutional offices need to be mediated through red tape, (often unanswered) emails and phone calls, and long waits but, even when I obtained access, some subjects appeared unwilling to talk to or share information with the researcher, who was seen as an intruder in highly sensitive matters. Conversely, migrants would often enquire about the potential benefits of the research for their situation, and sometimes, they would even develop a sense of mistrust when spotting the researcher inside the premises of the port. Transparency and openness became, therefore, fundamental to ensure trust from the people involved. While bureaucratic delays or local gatekeepers were necessary to open the doors of institutional offices and migrants’ squats, respectively, it was inside those offices and squats that trust was built and negotiated. After gaining access to the factories and slowly building mutual trust, I employed participant observation to interact with the migrants in the factories, observe and converse with them, and participate in their gatherings.

Although more than eight years have passed since the fieldwork, I believe that the interviews conducted with experts, officers, residents, and migrants, as well as the information and field notes collected in those nine months, still constitute relevant data to sustain my theoretical argument. The next two sections draw upon the results of the fieldwork to analyse the multiple configurations of visibility and invisibility on the ground, both in the development of the European and national border regimes and in the everyday tactics that migrants adopt – more or less successfully – to challenge or escape them.

The production of migrant visibility

In the analysis of the European border regime, visibility is generally conceived as a form of power: The possibility of seeing without being seen constitutes a tremendous advantage in military and security strategies (Brighenti 2010). As Brighenti reminds us (2007, 326), visibility is certainly relational but also highly asymmetric: seeing and being seen are intimately connected but ‘always exercised in the form of “from/to few/many”’, since the observer and the observed are often placed in different positions and relations of power. In this unequal field of visibility, the act of seeing the other without being seen is not just a voyeuristic performance but a deeply political process in which the subject that sees defines who can be seen – even if the latter wants to remain invisible – and brings them to light at the right time (Rancière 2004; Brighenti 2007).

Throughout its development since the arrival of the first migrants in the early 1990s, the Greek border regime has undergone multiple and differentiated patterns of visibility and invisibility, generating different visibility thresholds that alternatively under- or over-exposed migrants according to specific labour market needs (see Brighenti 2010). On the one hand, the first migration and asylum policies regulated the initial incoming of migrants – mostly from the Balkans and the Middle East – by increasingly restricting the possibility of entering and staying in the country legally. This inevitably created masses of socially invisible migrants without any form of social recognition, forced to join the expanding reserve army of (informal) labour under constant threat of detention and deportation (Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini 2011; Cheliotis 2017). On the other hand, the illegalisation and ‘invisibilisation’ of migrants have been accompanied by a parallel process of spectacularisation of the border through which ‘the spectre of migrant “illegality” is rendered spectacularly visible’ (De Genova 2011, 103), either through policing or policy.

With regard to policing, the first immigration laws enforced a capillary apparatus of control along the country’s external borders and in the streets in order ‘to prevent the entrance of undocumented immigrants and facilitate the expulsion of those already present in Greek territory’ (Triandafyllidou 2009, 160). The border materialised everywhere, with its spectacle of pervasive militarisation, strengthened security mechanisms, and widespread stop-and-search operations that led to the apprehension and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of illegalised migrants (Antonopoulos and Winterdyk 2006).

On the policy side, regularisation procedures attempted to render illegalised migrants more socially visible, enlarging the visibility thresholds within society with the aim of including migrants – although in a subordinate position – in the ‘regime of rights and representation’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008). However, the complicated and costly bureaucratic procedures, the delays in their implementation, and employers’ unwillingness to regularise their workers often hindered the social emersion of migrants (Fakiolas 2003). Besides, such procedures operated under a political-economic framework that de facto restricted the possibility of regularly accessing or staying in the Greek territory, feeding one of the largest informal sectors in Europe (Cheliotis 2017). Undocumented migration, purposefully produced through increasingly restrictive policies, thus remained high throughout the 2000s, constantly supplementing the country’s reserve army of labour.

Visibility, Brighenti argues (2007), is a ‘double-edged sword’ that can empower or disempower subjects according to different contexts and needs. In a disciplinary society, he continues, visibility is associated with subjugation and control, disempowering subjects and dominating their conduct. The increasing spectacularisation of the border and the parallel forcible emergence of migrants’ presence in the country testify to the disempowering effect of visibility regimes. With the advent of the economic crisis, the repressive apparatus of policing and policy intensified, exacerbating the crackdown on irregular migration (Triandafyllidou 2009). A violent shift in the public discourse accompanied this process: The government started to depict irregular migrants not only as scapegoats for the crisis but as national threats to be identified and deported in order to show that action was being taken (Lafazani 2018). The destruction of thousands of jobs in the agricultural and construction sectors led to the systematic employment of ‘sweep operations’ to detect, identify, and expel the excess of irregular migrants, pushing migrants into a zone of super-visibility where their social presence was disclosed and disputed. In August 2012, Greek authorities launched the operation Xenios Zeus, which led to the arrest of thousands of migrants during stop-and-search operations. The visibility of and the impossibility of concealing their ethnic features became the pretext for the identification and interrogation of thousands of migrants ‘not belonging to EUrope’s “transnational white ethnicity”’ (Stierl 2020, 88), conveying bordering practices onto their bodies by virtue of a perverse equation that associates criminality with skin colour (Dimitriadi 2018). The legitimisation and reproduction of racist discourses among mainstream politics and mass media, until then relatively latent and covert, provided a further justification for the apprehension and deportation of migrants (Lafazani 2018).

The crisis also led to substantial changes in the asylum system. With its extremely low recognition rates and lengthy response times, the old asylum system, controlled by the Hellenic Police, was designed to produce exploitable and docile subjects for the informal economy (Cheliotis 2017). The bureaucratic limbo which asylum seekers fell into after submitting their claims compelled them either to try to leave the country or to stay in the shadows, fomenting what Rozakou (2012, 563) defined as a ‘“politics of invisibility” towards asylum seekers and refugees’. When it became clear that the Greek labour market could not absorb the excess of migration generated by the economic crisis and the structural fallacies of the asylum system, an independent system stepped in. Operating under the aegis of the Common European Asylum System, the new Asylum Service contained some of this excess by increasing recognition rates and reducing response times, thus ensuring the informal exploitability of migrants, and expediting their expulsion in the case of non-compliance with the rules.

The implementation of border and migration policies has generated a complex system of laws to regulate the access, identification, reception, detention, and deportation of migrants across the Greek and European territories. Such policies, which conceive migrants either as a cheap workforce or as security threats, have produced alternating patterns of visibility and invisibility, making migrants more or less socially visible according to the changing needs of the labour market. Among the multiple fractures of the spatiotemporal regime that governs migrant mobilities, however, something always escapes domination and subjection through the careful adoption of visible and invisible tactics, constantly reconfiguring the visibility thresholds within society. The following section will precisely explore how visibility and invisibility have continuously intermingled among migrants in Patras, compelling them to adapt their survival strategies constantly or to adopt new practices of negotiation and escape.

Visibility and invisibility among migrants

As previously discussed, visibility is related not only to discipline and social control but also to liberation and resistance (Brighenti 2010). However, struggles for social recognition can materialise in different forms, from more socially visible ‘acts of citizenship’ that employ social visibility to expand social and territorial boundaries to the ‘imperceptible politics’ of migrant subjectivities that evades the regime of rights and representation by enacting ‘resistance through visibility’, as well as any other form of more or less visible resistance between these.

In the port area of Patras, visibility and invisibility have continuously intertwined, generating varied socio-political outcomes across multiple scales. At the urban level, the spectacularisation of security measures and the multiplication of border controls have collided with the unwanted visibility of migrants’ settlements, whose occupants are periodically evicted in response to the opposition of local citizens and authorities. At the individual or group level, the laws, which often compel migrants to remain invisible in view of their forcible inclusion in the labour market, have intermingled with the coveted invisibility of some migrants, who have developed their own tactics to leave Greece without leaving traces. Visibility and invisibility have also intertwined within the settlements, with some migrants more prone to ask for asylum despite the risk of being sent back to Greece if caught in other European countries, while others are more determined to remain invisible and escape the country.

The examination of migrants’ presence in Patras, I argue, allows for exploring and analysing the continuous interplay between visibility and invisibility at the urban level. The first migrants – coming mostly from Kurdistan – appeared in Patras in the early 1990s, and their presence gradually expanded over the years; at the turn of the century, about 500 migrants were living around the port area and other 1,500 were dispersed in the city, although many probably avoided the formal registration procedures (Papadopoulou 2003). After the 9/11 attacks and the following war in Afghanistan, the presence of Kurds started to diminish, while Afghan migrants gradually increased in number, occupying abandoned buildings near the port. After eviction by local authorities, migrants moved to an open green space at the northern end of the port area, surrounded by wealthy residential blocks of flats overlooking the beach and the marina.

The position of the settlement and its gradual expansion increased its socio-political visibility, generating contacts and conflicts at the local and international levels. In 2007, during the attempts to redefine the boundaries of the polity in an exclusionary way, the anti-migrant association Pòlis Eàlo³ was created. Established by local citizens with the support of local authorities (Kalaitzidou 2013), the association denounced the perceived lack of security and order in the city, legitimising the necessity of cleansing interventions. In the same period, the birth of Kìnisi – Movement for the Defence of Refugees’ and Migrants’ Rights disrupted the socially constructed boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, producing an antagonistic fracture within the community. The presence of solidarity networks increased the socio-political visibility of the settlement itself, allowing migrants to emerge as politically active subjects, negotiate their presence in the city, and claim their rights to freedom of settlement and mobility through acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen 2008).

Turning the settlement into a site of contentious politics, however, disclosed migrants’ desired – and at times necessary – invisibility, jeopardising their precarious presence in the country (Hole 2012). Besides, conflicts were not confined to the local level but reverberated at a larger scale, reconfiguring the ‘visibility thresholds’ (Brighenti 2010) within the community. With the upcoming Olympic Games (2004) and the European Capital of Culture (2006) celebrations, Patras was indeed in the spotlight and called upon to govern ‘the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein’ (Panagia 2009, 299). The visibility of the city clashed with the undesired visibility of the camp (which between 2007 and 2008 reached its peak of about 1,500 occupants) and the parallel, coveted invisibility of migrants, whose intention was to leave the country unseen, concealed inside ferryboats (Hole 2012). The harshness of the asylum system at that time would indeed compel migrants either to wait indefinitely for an answer to their claim or to remain illegally in the country, exploiting their social under-exposure to surreptitiously sneak inside the ferryboats and reach other European countries without leaving traces.

After increasing tensions between migrants, citizens, and local authorities, on 12 July 2009, the police entered the camp, evacuated or arrested its occupiers, and eventually set it on fire. The destruction of the camp constituted the highest and most visible moment of the border spectacle (De Genova 2011). As the spotlights on the camp turned off, migrants re-articulated their presence in the city and in the whole country. While some moved to the northern port of Igoumenitsa or to the border with Albania in an attempt to leave the country through other routes (Lafazani 2013), others remained invisible in Patras, spreading through other smaller settlements around the port area or occupying abandoned houses around the city (Hole 2012). In the same period, the first Sudanese and Somali migrants arrived in the city, settling in empty places and parks around the port area (ibid.).

The inauguration of the new port in the southern periphery of the city in July 2011 reconfigured the patterns of visibility and invisibility at the urban level, already discomposed by the advent of the economic crisis. Unlike the old port in the city centre, separated from the urban area by a rusty fence, the new port represents a state-of-the-art construction that reconciles market efficiency with security needs, allowing the seamless circulation of goods, workers, and passengers while efficiently preventing threats. The distinct sets of fences delimiting the new port create three well-defined areas of jurisdiction where potential threats are brought to light and captured or sent away by the responsible authorities. As Stierl puts it (2020, 79), Patras still represents ‘one of several possible escape routes, but a rather desperate one’. The blatant violence of the border spectacle now manifests through more subtle practices of control, raids, and daily apprehensions.

The substantial reduction in the number of migrants, their relegation to the southern periphery of the city, and the now scarce presence of solidarity organisations have simultaneously placed migrants in a zone of social invisibility and made them more exposed to practices of social control. As a fragmented, marginalised, and contained subjectivity, migrants cannot rely on acts of citizenship to make their claims visible within the urban context – nor does this seem to be their intention. Yet, they make use of imperceptible politics to try to take advantage of the failures of migration and asylum policies as well as of the invisible fractures in the intricate web of border controls in the attempt to continue their journey to other European destinations.

As the border materialises in the streets, migrants develop and hone their ‘world of knowledge, of information, of tricks for survival, of mutual care, of social relations, of services exchange, of solidarity and sociability’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, 190) to escape its grip. The first step in this direction consists of acquiring familiarity with the maze of streets, shortcuts, and hideouts surrounding the factories, allowing migrants to escape police intrusions or pursuits. When ‘sweep operations’ unexpectedly penetrate the settlements, staying concealed within buildings, taking refuge in some impenetrable recesses, or dashing off quickly through back exits might avoid capture and inconveniences. As a migrant recounted, when the police once came to inspect the factories, ‘I immediately went upstairs where they usually don’t go’.⁴

The daily chases between police forces and migrants constitute the most iconic scene in the port of Patras, reminiscent of Andersson’s account of hunters and preys (Andersson 2014). ‘It’s like the cartoon, Tom and Jerry’,⁵ an Afghan migrant once told me, with the police ‘cat’ running after the migrant ‘mice’. Like in the cartoon, migrants manage to escape by leveraging their knowledge of the myriad alleys and side streets surrounding the port area and finding shelter in places that police cars cannot access. During one of my daily walks around the port area, I noticed two migrants turning into a side street, followed by a police car. When they realised that they were being chased, they stepped up the pace until they reached the abandoned railway line snaking behind the factories, inaccessible for the police car.⁶ Although projecting an image of invulnerability and strength, the police seem less prone to arrest undocumented migrants than to prevent them from crossing the border, therefore delaying their differential inclusion in the European informal labour market (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013).

In the everyday attempts of border crossing, the invisibility of the body acquires a crucial importance. As Khosravi (2008, 330) reminds us, ‘Border crossing is […] a matter of performance’, which requires the concealment of uncertainties and imperfections, the physical and mental domination of one’s own body, and the capability to hide it from the alert gaze of the officer. The darkness of their clothes constitutes a deceptive subterfuge that makes migrants less visible when hiding inside lorries or during their night infiltrations of the port area (Hole 2012). One hot summer day, after lunching together in one of the settlements, a group of migrants suddenly spread out, in preparation to approach the port area. One of them walked away to change his clothes, putting a dark grey sweater on top of his t-shirt and a pair of greasy tracksuit trousers over his short ones to better disguise himself under the dingy belly of a lorry.⁷

While migrants’ everyday attempts to escape the border regime and its grounded manifestations constitute forms of imperceptible politics that allow them to escape the liminal porocratic institutions’ regime of mobility control (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008), a deeper examination of migrants’ everyday life shows that migrants employ different forms of visibility and invisibility alternately in the attempt to obtain freedom of settlement and movement. The intertwining of visibility and invisibility emerges not only through migrants’ knowledge of the surrounding space but also through their numerous attempts to negotiate and extricate themselves from the complex system of migration and asylum policies. Within a legal framework that deliberately produces illegality and social invisibility to exploit their living labour (Cheliotis 2017), some migrants have consciously adopted illegality and invisibility as survival tactics to claim their freedom of movement across Europe, while others have chosen to comply with migration and asylum regulations to negotiate their precarious presence in the city, but always in view of a potential escape towards other destinations. Either way, such tactics have enabled some migrants to elude, negotiate, or overtly challenge the assemblage of border controls and migration policies and proceed with their journey.

The deliberate refusal to apply for asylum represents a pondered decision that allows migrants to remain invisible and concentrate their efforts on crossing the border. For some migrants, asylum was indeed just one of the alternatives being offered – and certainly not the most appealing. Despite the risks of arrest and deportation after the expiry of the one-month registration paper, invisibility shapes mobility patterns, accelerating migrants’ relatively immobile everyday lives. During the summer of 2015, with the borders through the Balkans partially opened, an Afghan migrant said that, although he refused to claim asylum in Greece, he decided to come to Patras and try crossing the Adriatic Sea without leaving traces, instead of reaching Hungary and being potentially fingerprinted (and thus returned) there.⁸ From this perspective, non-compliance with the asylum requirements can be conceived not merely as a stratagem to avoid frustrating and time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, but rather as a silent demand for freedom of movement across the European space.

Looking at the intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the cracks of the asylum system, however, can also reveal the excessive violence of the European border regime (see Stierl 2017). The establishment of the Asylum Service, for example, did not entail the complete transfer of responsibilities from one system to the other but rather the creation of two separate systems: the former still managed by the police in charge of the huge backlog of asylum applications, and the latter managed by independent officers responsible for claims submitted from June 2013 onwards. The presence of two different systems with different procedures for examining asylum claims engendered temporally differentiated accesses to the protection system, forcing ‘migrants into specific (bureaucratic and administrative) channels by fundamentally restricting their autonomy of movement’ (Tazzioli 2020, 64). During one of my first visits to the squats, a Sudanese asylum seeker complained about the fact that he had been living in limbo for five years, waiting for a response to his asylum application, which had fallen within the old system, while newcomers could have their claims processed in few months.⁹

The problems of the Asylum Service can have repercussions on migrants’ decision to apply for asylum, engendering further stress on their economic situation. Despite a small donation from his family, an Afghan migrant stated that he did not apply for asylum because ‘you have to queue for three or four days, and I don’t have money to sleep or eat there [in Athens]’.¹⁰ Already highly visible and always under suspicion of illegal border crossing, undocumented migrants are therefore constantly at risk of arbitrary arrest and deportation during the ‘sweep operations’ that periodically occur in and around the factories. Even if one has already obtained protection in the country, the renewal of the asylum card and the wait for travel documents represent an economic and temporal burden, putting migrants’ lives on hold. According to a Sudanese asylum seeker, whose demand fell under the old system, the asylum procedure is a frustrating process, because ‘they always tell you to wait for some time, but when the time comes nothing is ready, they only renew your chartia¹¹ for another four months, so you have to come back after some other time, spending more money for the travel’.¹²

If asylum is part and parcel of the politics of control regulating the reception, identification, circulation, and acceptance or exclusion of migrants within Europe, it can also be used by migrants to negotiate their precarious presence in the city, avoid arrest or deportation, and eventually find an escape route (Tazzioli 2020). The choice of applying constitutes, therefore, not only an important stratagem for migrants to obtain precarious social visibility but also a practical example of the multiple ways in which visibility and invisibility interact among migrants and within the city. In the constant wait for a reply to their asylum claims, some Sudanese migrants would gather in the car parks of two nearby supermarkets, helping customers with their trolleys or wiping the cars’ windscreens at the traffic light to collect some money for their everyday survival. Within the regime of differential inclusion in the informal labour market (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), migrants’ visibility also represents a way to get in direct contact with locals in search of a replaceable and exploitable workforce in the agricultural or construction sector. Too old to sneak under a lorry or to work in the fields, a Sudanese man profited from the bureaucratic lengthiness of the asylum procedures to reinvent himself as a scrap merchant, navigating the border through his basic Greek knowledge and negotiating his permanent temporariness in the city. Escape, however, remains the most desired option for many documented migrants and an occasion that will eventually occur. ‘No chance today’, another Sudanese migrant told me on returning to the factory after his daily attempt to sneak under a lorry, ‘Tomorrow will be better, inshallah’.¹³

Concluding reflections

The complex and ever-changing interplay between visibility and invisibility both among migrants and in their relationship with other urban actors or with the technologies of control, I argue, blurs the boundaries between acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics, hinders the incorporation of migrants’ actions within such definitions, and opens up new ways of looking at their everyday claims for freedom of settlement and escape. In some instances, specific events seem to be easily distinguishable as either acts of citizenship or imperceptible politics. The daily struggles of migrants’ groups before the dismantlement of the camp, often with the support of local activists and civic associations, made their presence increasingly visible within the city and beyond, generating a fracture in the community for the redistribution of rights – in other words, acts of citizenship were coming into being. On the other hand, after their substantial decrease in number and their relegation to an abandoned industrial area on the outskirts of the city, migrants have resorted to imperceptible acts of refusal and escape, from deliberate non-compliance with migration and asylum policies to everyday attempts to sneak surreptitiously into the port area underneath lorries.

The everyday reality, however, discloses a continuous interplay between visibility and invisibility on the ground that the concepts of acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics cannot always capture. On the one hand, the analysis of the development of the border regime has shown how visibility regimes can disempower subjects, under- exposing some and over-exposing others according to specific socio-political and economic needs. Conceiving migrants either as cheap workforce or as security threats, migration policies and security measures have spectacularised border controls to spot and capture illegalised migrants while relegating others into invisibility to govern their restless character and subsume their labour into the informal economy.

On the other hand, the analysis of the multiple and variable tactics that migrants have employed to escape, resist, or negotiate the border regime has shown how the boundaries between visibility and invisibility are often blurred, making migrants’ movements and struggles difficult to categorise clearly. Trapped between the stringent mechanisms of the border regime, migrants have used visibility and invisibility to navigate, negotiate, or evade migration policies and border controls on a daily basis. While some have adopted invisibility and illegality as survival tactics to avoid leaving traces and escape to other European destinations, others have complied with the law to negotiate their precarious presence in the city, nevertheless, without renouncing their attempts to cross the border.

By exploring the multiple, blurred, and ever-changing relations of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the border regime and in the everyday life of migrants, I have argued that the concept of visibility as a socio-spatial relation can represent a useful lens to look at acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics on the ground, contributing to the dialogue between CCS and AoM. The concepts of acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics represent powerful means to theoretically capture and empirically investigate the movements and struggles of migrant subjectivities as well as their different ways of being political. While both concepts acknowledge the agency of migrants as well as their strength in raising socio-political claims, they differ significantly in the way migrants constitute themselves as a political subjectivity and consequently raise those claims – in other words, they mobilise different thresholds of visibility, which are continuously reconfigured and contested in practice. In their attempt to open a dialogue between CCS and AoM, some scholars have recognised the importance of visibility and invisibility in forming migrant subjectivity and investigated the blurred boundaries between the two on the ground. However, the concept of visibility has often been taken for granted and never clearly defined.

Drawing from the work of Brighenti, this article has defined the concept of visibility as an aesthetic, social, and territorial relation, and explored its relevance for the analysis of migrants’ movements and struggles. In doing so, the article has aimed to achieve a twofold purpose: first, to provide a more grounded empirical analysis of such movements and struggles through time, migrants’ successes and failures in developing a uniform political subjectivity, and their more or less manifest tactics to negotiate, challenge, or escape the dispositions that regulate their presence across Europe; second, to reinstate the importance of acts of citizenship and imperceptible politics in capturing migrants’ agency, contributing to the dialogue between CCS and AoM. By employing the lens of visibility, the paper has shown how the thresholds of visibility have been continuously shifted and contested through the more or less visible struggles of migrants, generating ruptures within, beyond, and after citizenship.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ilker Ataç for his valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this paper, the editors of the journal for their support and comments throughout the process, and the three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions have undoubtedly improved the quality paper. Any errors and omissions are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use the term ‘migrant’ to define individuals that are ‘racialised, labelled and governed as migrants’ (Tazzioli 2020, 2) through the violence of the border regime, without nevertheless flattening the complexity and multiplicity of migration experiences. Regardless of their varied legal status, the people I met in Patras shared a personal struggle with the border regime and a burning desire to continue their journey.

2. Unlike Brighenti, I explore the interplay of visibility and invisibility in the political community – which I conceive, following Balibar’s elaboration on the historical development of the concept of politeia/polis/polity (2015), as a place of intersection, negotiation, and conflict of different political interests – rather than more broadly as the ‘public domain’.

3. Translated as ‘The Fall of the City’, the name refers to the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 to the Ottoman Empire (Kalaitzidou 2013).

4. Informal conversation with A., from Sudan, 25/05/2015.

5. Informal conversation with H., from Afghanistan, 01/08/2015.

6. Field notes, 17/04/2015.

7. Field notes, 18/07/2015.

8. Informal conversation, 27/07/2015.

9. Informal interview with A., from Sudan, 15/02/2015.

10. Semi-structured interview with A. H., from Afghanistan, 26/06/2015.

11. A one-month paper, informally called a ‘chartia’, is released upon irregular entry into the country, allowing migrants to ask for asylum or to abandon the country before its expiry.

12. Informal conversation with a Sudanese migrant, 18/07/2015.

13. Informal conversation with a Sudanese migrant, 06/08/2015.