‘Bad parents’, deportable subjects: borders and deportability in the everyday lives of undocumented families in Belgium

ABSTRACT

While research has addressed the multiplication of borders inside and across the nation-state and the threat of deportation in the lives of undocumented migrants, little analysis has been dedicated to the particularities of families’ experiences. Based on participatory ethnographic research, this article examines how undocumented families experience and contest exclusionary bordering practices that interfere in the privacy of their family lives in Belgium. I argue that, in order to naturalise and legitimize these families’ ‘deportability’, the state mobilises normative logics about parenthood and childhood that construct undocumented parents as ‘bad parents’, while designating their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘at risk’. Going against these dominant logics, the undocumented parents at the heart of this ethnography contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’ by reconfirming their role as ‘good’ parents and, instead, problematise repressive migration policies that push them into marginality and misappropriate the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how these insights open new avenues for understanding more broadly the dynamics between the family and contemporary migration regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• deportability
• family life
• parenthood
• undocumented migrants

Introduction

On a rainy morning in November 2016, a group of undocumented parents with different ethnic origins gathered at a metro station in Brussels-West. I had had the privilege of ethnographically documenting the everyday experiences of this group for fourteen months and today I was witnessing a milestone in their political work: they had arranged a meeting with the Commissioner for the Rights of the Child¹ to discuss manifestations of repressive migration law and practice in their everyday lives. This meeting demonstrated a deliberate step out of invisibility, a strategy to negotiate assistance and a collective effort to challenge narrow representations of undocumented families as ‘undeserving illegals’. Fatoumata², a single mother from Guinea with two children, paints how the condition of ‘illegality’ overflows the boundaries of the public sphere, intrusively disrupting their private lives:

The situation without papers and in extreme poverty has destroyed the biggest part of our lives. Everything is broken, we have no work, no house, no family life. The children are the only reason why we maintain strength, why we still have hope. […] We are afraid that one day they will bring us to the border. It is not normal that my children grow up in shelters and on the street. (meeting with Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, 9-11-2016)³

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a self-organised group of undocumented families living in Brussels, this article examines how families experience and contest the exclusionary workings of the border and the threat of deportation in the daily reality of their family life. State power enters their everyday experiences in multiple dimensions, shaping care relations, living arrangements, educational opportunities and access to rights and benefits for various family members. Seeking to explore the dynamics between the family and migration regimes, I argue that, in its exclusionary practices and rhetoric towards undocumented families, the state draws upon normative logics about the family – about ‘good’ parenthood (Heidbrink 2017; Longman, Graeve, and Brouckaert 2013) and universalised images of childhood as ‘innocent’ and ‘stable’ (Kohli 2006; Laoire, Carpena-méndez, and White 2010). These normative logics become entangled with law and notions of sovereignty and citizenship in order to legitimize the designation of undocumented families as ‘deportable’, a process I account through the political work of a group of undocumented parents.

I argue that families navigate and negotiate these normative logics about the family through multiple efforts: firstly, by anticipating and strategically engaging with state interference in the private sphere in order to secure access to rights and benefits and, secondly, through their political work aiming to contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’, highlighting markers of ‘good’ parenthood and challenging the state-propagated image of childhood as ‘innocent’ and ‘stable’ in the context of coercive bordering practices and global inequalities. Theoretically, these contestations can be understood as (re)negotiations of the boundaries between the public and private sphere; parents strategically move their private experiences of the multiple entanglements between their family life and their status as ‘deportable’ into the public sphere, in order to unpack bordering practices and, instead, problematise how repressive state practices manifest themselves in their everyday reality.

Recently, scholars studying the ways in which border control practices are effectuated, have explored the multiplication of borders inside and across the nation-state (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012) and the disciplinary techniques that shape the lived condition of ‘deportability’ – ‘the protracted possibility of being deported’ (Peutz and De Genova 2010, 14), which renders undocumented migrants vulnerable and exploitable in myriad dimensions. While research has addressed the manifestations of these in the lives of migrants with precarious legal status (Calavita 2005; Chavez 2013; Menjívar 2006), little analysis has been dedicated to the particularities of families’ experiences, particularly in the European context (however, see: Ambrosini 2012; Bonizzoni 2017). Scholarly work in this area tends to approach ‘deportability’ as confined to the public realm, focusing on either exploitation of migrants as precarious labour forces (De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) or their interaction with state actors (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). This article transcends this focus on the public sphere by foregrounding the ways in which bordering practices that exclude and construct subjects as ‘deportable’ overflow from public spaces and profoundly interfere in family life. In so doing, this article contributes to the body of research that addresses the dynamics between the family and migration (Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak 2020), focussing in particular on deportability.

Combining theoretical approaches to ‘deportability’ with scholarly literature on the role played by family norms in shaping processes of migration and citizenship, I seek to bridge two realms of literature. Firstly, I build upon ethnographic work on families’ experiences of ‘deportability’, most notably undertaken in the context of migration to the U.S. (Castañeda 2019; Dreby 2012; Hagan, Eschbach, and Rodriguez 2008). Secondly, I engage with research that addresses how family norms construct national, cultural and racialized boundaries between those who do family ‘properly’, as ‘We’ do it, and ‘Others’ with ‘deviant’ family practices (Bonjour and de Hart 2021). I demonstrate how the state mobilises normative logics about parenthood and childhood in order to construct undocumented parents as ‘bad parents’, while designating their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘at risk’, analytically highlighting how gendered and racialized constructions of ‘improper family practices’ play a crucial role in discursively positioning the ‘migrant family’ as not belonging to the Western nation (Bonjour and de Hart 2013; Strasser et al. 2009; Wray 2009). While these works are predominantly conducted from a policy or state-perspective, this ethnographic analysis foregrounds the lived reality of migrant families as they are confronted with state power in the domestic sphere. Moreover, these contributions predominantly engage with family reunification policies (Pellander 2015; Kofman et al. 2012). This analytical approach opens up these debates to include the interplay between family norms and migration regimes more broadly, including in the realm of deportability. Besides some pioneering work on the state’s (de)legitimisation of kinship ties in the context of legal precarity (Boehm 2012; Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens 2018), the role played by family norms in reinforcing constructions of ‘deportability’ remains largely unexplored.

Methodologically, the experiences of undocumented families are grasped through fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork centred on a self-led platform⁴ of undocumented families in Brussels, supported by two local non-governmental organisations [NGOs]. This platform – which was led by approximately twenty families – managed the weekly distribution of grocery packages and bi-weekly group meetings to organise platform activities, including political action, emotional support sessions and leisure activities. As an ethnographer, I had the privilege to participate, observe and sometimes provide support, in these group activities, as well as engage with several of the parents on an individual basis. Employing a participatory methodological approach, my research design followed the platform’s empowering and emancipatory principles, providing the participants with a proactive role in both collective activities and group discussions. Ethnographic knowledge has been derived from the reflective, intertwined process of participant observations, group work and in-depth interviewing.

To clarify terminology, I start from an epistemological position that considers being ‘undocumented’ as a socio-political condition that only acquires meaning in relation to the state and law (De Genova 2002, 422; Malkki 1995). Throughout this article I use the term ‘undocumented families’ when referring to families living in Belgium without legal migration status, including families who applied for asylum but were rejected. This is in line with the group’s self-description (familles sans-papiers). I refer to ‘illegality’ – consistently employing brackets to denaturalise and deconstruct its meaning – when referring to the process by which states categorise and frame persons as ‘illegal’. Undocumented families in Belgium are highly heterogeneous; they vary in their roots, routes, social (transnational) networks and prospects of legal inclusion (Rea et al. 2002; Van Meeteren, Engbersen, and Van San 2009; Platform Kinderen op de Vlucht n.d.). Moreover, legal status is fluid in both directions; families may over time move in and out of legality through various administrative-legal procedures. Although this heterogeneity signals the need to acknowledge that there is no uniform experience of being undocumented, the knowledge created by my participants reveals that undocumented families – regardless of their backgrounds – share similar affective and subjective understandings of the ways in which legal codes and exclusionary state practices manifest themselves in the everyday, evoking the socio-political condition of ‘illegality’ (De Genova 2002).

This article proceeds with a theoretical discussion of ‘deportability’, bordering practices and their interplay with family norms. This is followed by a description of the legal-political context in which undocumented families in Belgium manoeuvre, and a methodological section on ethnographic research within the self-organised platform of undocumented families. The ethnographic part is three-fold, starting with a description of how families’ everyday experiences of ‘deportability’ cut across the boundaries of public and private. The second part explains their understandings of state interference in the private sphere, which polices ‘proper’ care-taking practices, in order to construct the individuals as ‘bad parents’. The third ethnographic part analyses how, through the political work of the platform, these parents contest and reshape the normative logics about parenthood and childhood that the state uses in rendering them ‘deportable’. Finally, the conclusion reflects more broadly on dynamics between the family and contemporary migration regimes.

Family norms in a context of borders and deportability

Several scholars have demonstrated the dispersed, fragmented functioning of the border in regulating, framing and categorising mobility and, in so doing, producing multiple borders of inclusion/exclusion inside and across the nation-state (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012). According to Peutz and De Genova (2010), the state’s sociolegal production of multiple borders creates subjects caught up in the everyday experience of ‘deportability’ – ‘the protracted possibility of being deported’ (p.14), anywhere, at any time. They continue to argue that the ideological power of the border, which seeks to justify the binary (legal/illegal) outcomes of migration procedures, has led to the normalisation of deportation as the ‘proper’, legitimate state retribution for undocumented migration (Coutin 2015; Peutz and De Genova 2010). I build upon these approaches to explain how undocumented families experience the border as an ideological force that seeks to normalise their ‘illegalization’ through an ‘apparently uniform application of its rules and procedures’ (De Genova 2002, 424).

Yet, deportation also functions to reaffirm the (gendered, racialized) normative-ideological boundaries of the national community (Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti 2011; Peutz and De Genova 2010; Walters 2002). As such, the condition of ‘deportability’ becomes dislocated from its production by the state and resonates in multiple everyday bordering practices, constructing ‘new social-cultural boundaries and borders’ based on the intersection of racial, gendered and classed axes of differentiation (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018, 229; see also: Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davis 2018). A focus on everyday bordering provides the opportunity to analyze the ways in which normative logics about the family become entangled with notions of belonging and citizenship, in order to construct certain populations as ‘Others’, ‘undeserving’ and, thus, ‘deportable’.

Moreover, I engage with a scholarly body of feminist approaches that address family norms in the context of migration and citizenship. This field builds on the assumption that the representation of the family as ‘natural’ masks the political nature and impact of dominant ideologies about the family (Lister 2007; Plummer 2001; Roseneil et al. 2013). It underlines how, by governing mobility and belonging, the state tacitly constructs who belongs to the family by (de)legitimising certain kinship ties, as well as what roles and performances consist of ‘proper’ family behaviour (Bonjour and de Hart 2013; Strasser et al. 2009). Thereby, they argue that gender and family norms – often represented as the ‘essence of cultures’ (Yuval-Davis 2008 [1997], 43–45) – play a fundamental part in everyday bordering practices, shaping ethnocultural, gendered, classed and racial boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ (Bonjour and de Hart 2021). Analyzing marriage migration policies, D’Aoust argued that ‘less tangible dimensions such as emotions, including attachment and love, […] become embedded in legal as well as surveillance practices’ (2013, 259). Drawing inspiration from these approaches, I unravel how highly sophisticated assemblages of power at work in contemporary migration regimes make possible this entanglement of these less tangible dimensions – including parent–child intimacies – with law and legal practices; this is precisely what the families at the heart of my research seek to unpack in order to contest and negotiate the terms upon which their ‘deportability’ is constructed.

In this article I employ the analytical notion of ‘logics’ to refer to series of normative assumptions underlying discourses, policies and practices in the context of migration and sovereignty (e.g. Heidbrink 2017, 57 on ‘institutional logics’; Mountz and Hiemstra 2014, 383). These logics are neither stable, nor uncontested. When applied to family-life and parenthood, they reflect tacit assumptions based on ethnocultural, gendered, classed and racial boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ (Bonjour and de Hart 2021). I argue that parenthood works as a contested, normative-ideological site that various actors fill with different meanings and connotations: while the state constructs particular normative logics about ‘parenthood’ to reinforce the status of these families as ‘deportable’ and ‘non-belonging’, parents, on the other hand, renegotiate these logics by highlighting their everyday carework, and, instead, situating their parental struggles in a context of legal precarity.

Belgium: migration law and practices towards undocumented families

Overall approaches towards undocumented families in migration law and practice in Belgium are characterised by a tension between coercive exclusionary policies – part of wider deterrence strategies against undocumented migrants – and basic humanitarian guarantees. While adults are approached as ‘illegalized’ subjects who are only guaranteed ‘urgent’ medical care, minors enjoy additional legal entitlements that flow from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child [CRC] (e.g. the right to education). As stated by law, undocumented families have access to ‘material assistance’, including housing, medical care and socio-legal support, laid down in a Royal Decree from 2004. This Decree speaks of ‘a minor foreign national who is illegally staying in the Kingdom with his parents’, a phrasing that is similar to the common state terminology of ‘accompanied migrant children’ (Brittle and Desmet 2020). The Decree was drafted as a consequence of a 2003 court ruling which stated that the Belgian government was not fulfilling its obligations under the CRC by withholding ‘material assistance’ from undocumented families (Platform Kinderen op de Vlucht n.d.). To resolve this, assistance had to be provided to the extent ‘necessary for the development of the child’. Both the language and the rationale of this Decree demonstrate the complex, triangular relationship between the state, the child and the family in the context of migration (Heidbrink 2014); positioning the minor as an isolated, right-bearing subject through which state interaction with the family is mediated.

Under this Decree, the Federal Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers [Fedasil] is responsible for providing assistance to undocumented families. However, a cooperation agreement from 2013 transferred this responsibility to the Immigration Office, the body also in charge of detention and deportation. Lack of transparency, harmful practices and coercion in voluntary return procedures have often been reported since (Kinderrechtencommissariaat 2016, 72). Since 2015, families invoking the right to assistance through this Decree are transferred to special ‘housing units’, also used by the Immigration Office as ‘detention facilities’ for families with children. Because the risk of administrative detention and deportation is high, very few families actually make use of this housing scheme. Although legally existing, the right to shelter is in practice inaccessible.

Another important development in the governmental approach is the resumption of detention of families in specially designated ‘family units’ at Centre 127bis in Steenokkerzeel, close to the airport. This was announced on August 1, 2018, despite several rulings of the European Court for Human Rights, which had condemned Belgium for unlawfully detaining migrant children (Myria 2018). The move was even more controversial because it ended a ten-year period of not detaining families, as a result of years of advocacy by a coalition of NGOs (Myria 2018). During the summer of 2018, the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration created a media spectacle around this re-initiation of the detention of families (De Morgen 2018), framing these parents as engaging in ‘illegal’ practices, ‘stubbornly refusing to leave’ (Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Theo Francken, on Twitter, 4 September 2018). Although small numbers of families have actually been deported since, this spectacle pervasively reinforces the protracted experiences of ‘deportability’ of countless families.

Methodology: participatory methods and group work

This analysis is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, starting in October 2015, when two local NGOs initiated the first meeting of a group of undocumented families. The rationale was to bring together numerous families facing comparable obstacles as a consequence of their precarious legal status, in order to collectively work towards structural solutions. This first meeting resulted in the formation of a self-led platform: a safe space for sharing personal stories, organising material assistance, and preparing political actions, based on the principles of collective empowerment and emancipation.

While the platform was led by a relatively stable core of around twenty families, I encountered approximately fifty families that occasionally participated in demonstrations or events. The platform included a variety of family compositions – ‘traditional’ nuclear families, single parents and newly formed families – and of ethnocultural, religious backgrounds and countries of origin (e.g. Congo, West Africa, Maghreb countries, Eastern Europe). Some parents had left their country of origin with their children, some had to leave one or more children behind, and others became a parent in Belgium. Because Belgium has a nationality policy based on jus sanguine – transmitting the most favourable legal status and nationalities of the parents to the new-born – many children who had never been outside Belgium had no right of residency, nor a passport. All participating parents spoke at least a basic level of French, which influences their everyday experiences in Brussels to a considerable extent.

The legal trajectories of the families I encountered demonstrate how legal status is fluid in both directions; families, over time, moved in and out of legality through various administrative-legal procedures, including (repeated) asylum procedures, regularisation requests or family reunification procedures. Most importantly, a considerable number of families had gone through an – often protracted – asylum procedure and thus enjoyed certain rights and protective guarantees throughout the handling of their claims. While most families spent these periods in collective reception centres or social housing outside of the capital, they moved to Brussels when their asylum claims were rejected, in search of opportunities for (informal) shelter, ethnocultural support networks and the informal economy.

The process of co-creating ethnographic knowledge included participant observation, creative, political group work, informal dialogues and in-depth interviewing.⁵ As I employed a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006; Glaser and Strauss 2006) combined with a thematic analysis in NVIVO, these methods were intertwined and used reflectively, filling in gaps or thickening descriptions as themes emerged. The platform’s activities were at the centre of my ethnographic fieldwork and consisted of two important pillars. Firstly, the parents arranged a weekly distribution of food packages, which I was able to assist with by driving to the stores donating products, providing me with the opportunity to engage in openhearted conversation en route. Secondly, the platform organised a bi-weekly meeting that was both of social importance for sharing stories and finding support, and a forum for work towards political action. This political work included discussions about how to frame the group, its message and objectives, organising information sessions on accessing rights, and demonstrations or public speaking events. The platform formed a site on which families developed shared knowledge, that they related to their direct experiences with law, policy and interactions with (non-)state actors. Drawing upon these collective knowledges, the group was able to enter into more horizontal dialogues with key figures in political and public debates, about their complex, lived experiences.

Moreover, to deepen themes and descriptions that derived from participant observation and group work, I conducted 10 in-depth interviews with individual parents in the last four months of my fieldwork. All interviews were conducted in French, the language usually spoken in group activities. Among those I interviewed were two fathers and eight mothers. Out of ethical considerations, I did not interview any children. Taking as a methodological lens the parents’ experiences, I acknowledge that the insights obtained about their family life are partial and mediated through their narrations. Nonetheless, epistemologically, I precisely seek to demonstrate that these parents are not isolated individuals, which necessitates a move beyond assumptions of methodological individualism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) and, instead, to reconceptualise experiences of in/exclusion, citizenship and deportability within the family as a whole, within webs of meaningful kinship relations.

Everyday borders and ‘deportability’ in the domestic sphere

On 31 August, I accompanied Victoria, a Congolese single mother of three, and her 16-year-old son Barry, to register him in a school in Brussels. I had come to know Victoria as a proactive woman who was a regular participant in the platform. After having fled Congo five years ago, she had spent several years in a reception centre in a rural area in Flanders, during which their asylum claim had been investigated. When receiving a negative asylum decision, the family had to leave the centre and had since been moving around. Victoria decided to go to Brussels in search of informal employment and support from a broader ethno-linguistic network. Because of the repeated moving, Barry had been to various schools. Last year, he commuted forty minutes by public transport to his old school. This year, he would attend a new one closer to the apartment they recently moved into with the help of their church community. Victoria felt guilty that, because of the constant moving, she was not able to provide her children with a stable school trajectory, a topic that was often discussed in group sessions. Today I was asked by Victoria to come to ‘speak Dutch’ with the teacher. Nonetheless, the actual goal of my presence was much more strategic: negotiating registration when difficult questions would be asked regarding their legal status, that this mother would not feel comfortable answering. With an expired document from their asylum procedure and his school records, Barry was able to ‘pass’ as someone with at least some form of official identification, eased by the head-master’s lack of knowledge of the legal value of these expired documents. We completed the registration formalities and Victoria and Barry seemed relieved. Upon leaving, Barry received a list of school materials that had to be purchased by the next day, which caused a worried expression on both Barry’s and Victoria’s face. (field notes, 31 August 2016)

This vignette points to multiple struggles that families encounter as a consequence of their legal status, various of which intersect in the act of seeking education. In the platform’s group discussions, the parents often explained that, although schools cannot legally refuse their children, they are unable to effectively enjoy the right to education because other basic living conditions are not fulfilled, such as access to stable housing, meals, and financial resources to pay for school materials. The unstable educational trajectory is a source of guilt in the parental relationship and a barrier to participation in the local school community. Besides describing how families experience the dialectics between basic rights and everyday, substantive exclusion, this vignette is exemplary in demonstrating the ways in which bordering practices carry on beyond the legal sphere, into the fragility of homes and intimate relationships.

In this section, I argue that undocumented families experience exclusionary state practices and the threat of deportation as fiercely interfering in the domestic sphere. While scholars have demonstrated that undocumented status results in very real struggles in the everyday – extreme poverty, precarious housing conditions and lack of access to full schooling opportunities and medical care (Castañeda 2019; Gonzales 2011; Menjívar 2006) – the stories of my participants account that the condition of ‘deportability’ enters their everyday lives in even more pervasive ways, shaping parental decisions, custody or living arrangements, reproductive choices, and the psychosocial wellbeing of all family members. While previously considering these experiences as private and individual, the parents become aware, through the sharing of intimate experiences in the platform, of the political nature of these manifestations of state power in their family lives.

In many discussions, parents expressed distress about the ways in which their legal status – and consequently, living conditions – were used to designate them as ‘bad parents’. As a consequence of exclusionary laws and regulations that prevent undocumented persons from accessing formal employment, housing and social benefits, they experience their efforts to care for their family as undermined by their ‘illegalized’ status, which pushes them into marginalised living conditions. ‘We have a responsibility as parents, but we cannot exercise our parenthood as we should. We are blocked by the state’ (preparation notes meeting politicians, 09-08-2016). Consequently, in their encounters with 0state and various non-state actors, such as social workers, schools or doctors, parents feel judged as not taking ‘proper care’ of their children. As Mariama, a single-mother from Guinea with a three-year old son, explains in a meeting:

We cannot even go to the school to talk about the living conditions in the squats, because we are afraid that people will say that you’re a bad parent for putting your child in this situation. They say we are not good parents, because we choose to live in these conditions. But it is not a choice, it’s a necessity, a way of surviving. (meeting with Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, 9-11-2016)

The parents articulated frustration over this attack on their parenting practices. Normative judgements about the complex everyday decisions they are confronted with completely disregard the larger legal-political structures that marginalise them and, instead, locate the vulnerable situation of their children solely in their ‘bad’ parental decision ‘to choose an ‘illegal’ life in Belgium’.

In this context, taking care of one’s family becomes a daily struggle; parents often expressed feeling unable to adequately provide for their children and ensure a sense of control and normality in their lives. Working is reduced to accessing precarious and unstable shifts in the informal economy; the lack of official documentation signifies an ineligibility for financial assistance, such as child benefits; visiting a doctor turns into a complex negotiation involving scrutiny of both a family’s financial situation and the medical ‘urgency’ of the symptoms (PICUM, 2015). Yet, by strategically negotiating access to rights, benefits and resources, parents seek to subvert exclusionary bordering practices. Mounir, an Algerian father with four children who regularly works night shifts in a bakery, describes how his involvement in the informal economy is out of concern for his children:

With this so-called ‘illegal’ work, I am only fighting for my children. So that they can have a normal life, so that they can have a day out, have enough food to eat, get clothes, new clothes once in a while, because – why not – that is a normal life. (interview, 26-08-2016)

This shows how parents’ mundane manoeuvres to take care of their families – such as working to financially provide for them – are often transformed into illicit acts as a consequence of their legal status (De Genova 2002; Yoshikawa 2011), rendering them vulnerable to being ‘criminalized’ as well as exploited. Moreover, these everyday strategies to secure family resources are especially framed as ‘inappropriate’ when involving parents, as they go against dominant conceptualizations of care activities as involving the moral responsibility to transmit values and principles in raising ‘good citizens’ (Erel et al. 2018; Longman, Graeve, and Brouckaert 2013). By constructing these parents as ‘morally deviant’, not fulfilling dominant childrearing ideologies, the state is at the same time constructing these families as ‘non-deserving’ of belonging (Bonjour and de Hart 2021) and, thus, deportable.

De Genova’s has conceptualised the ‘border spectacle’ as: ‘[…] work[ing] its magic trick of displacing ‘illegality’ from its point of production (in the law) to the proverbial ‘scene of the crime’’ (2013, 1189), which is often the ‘scene’ of border-crossings, but in this case, becomes the very intimate ‘scene’ of parenthood of undocumented families. While it is the – apparently neutral application of – law that is producing borders of in/exclusion in the everyday lives of these families and positioning them as ‘illegal’, the state is effectively able to naturalise and legitimize its coercive exclusion on the basis of normative logics that construct them as morally-deviant parents. In so doing, it transposes the condition of ‘illegality’ from its production in law, towards the private sphere of parenthood: framing the hardship suffered by these families as the mere result of ‘bad’ parenting practices.

Another important theme in group discussions was the dynamic between the threat of deportation and family life. As Boehm (2012) has demonstrated in her ethnographic research with families on either side of the Mexican-U.S. border, the very fact that undocumented family members can be deported at any instant marks the state’s presence in their daily reality. My participants’ stories demonstrate that the condition of ‘deportability’ is understood through their children, driven by concerns as to how experiences of detention or deportation to a country they hardly know would traumatise them. Rashid, an Algerian single father with three teenage children explained:

I know I can be expelled anytime, any day. […] If my children were to be expelled, it would be even more disastrous. Because for them, they know nothing about ‘their’ country. (interview, 08-09-2016)

These fears were often shared in the platform’s group session, as they were an ever-present source of worry that confronted parents with difficult childrearing dilemmas: whether or not to explain their deportability to their children, and if so, how and when? Parenting strategies differed in this regard and sometimes changed over time. In group meetings, parents found a safe space to share emotional coping mechanisms for discussing these sensitive issues and thus felt strengthened in their role as parents. The condition of deportability, which penetrates the domestic sphere by manifesting itself within the intimacy of the parent–child relationship, adds a political dimension to carework: it forces parents to incorporate and anticipate the pervasive consequences of the state’s bordering practices in their childrearing strategies, challenging the notion of the private sphere as an intimate, exclusive domain (Bourdieu 1996).

The state intruding in private domains

As a consequence of their legal status, the undocumented families’ relationship towards the state and its institutions is contradictory: the authorities can police or deport them on the one hand, and provide care, assistance and rights, on the other (Yoshikawa 2011). While previous work on bordering practices towards undocumented migrants has demonstrated the contradictory approaches of humanitarianism and repression following Fassin (2011) and Ticktin (2011), I seek to demonstrate how the interplay of these logics becomes entangled with normative ideas about ‘good parenthood’, and how they consequently manifest themselves as fiercely interfering in the private of lives of undocumented families.

Assumptions about the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘at risk’ situation of undocumented children have invoked a heightened attention to the private life and living circumstances of undocumented families, resulting in the state ‘policing’ proper care practices and a priori constructing undocumented parents as ‘bad’ for ‘choosing’ to stay in this country undocumented. While they need to engage with the state, for example to access health care or various semi-official documents, undocumented parents experience their private lives and care-taking being made more visible than that of heteronormative, white ‘citizen’ families. Here, family norms and legal status moreover intersect with race: the racialized position of undocumented families creates a more general ‘suspicion’ in the context of welfare regimes (e.g. Ocen 2012), and thus, a motive for zooming in on their private lives because of assumptions of ‘morally deviant’ family practices.

For undocumented families, opening up about their private lives, firstly, enhances their visibility and, thus, their ‘deportability’. Secondly, it holds the risk of triggering a response from child services. Through the increased attention to the ‘proper’ care taking practices of undocumented families, normative logics about parenthood become entangled in the reconfiguration of ‘deportable’ subjects, thereby reaffirming the normative-discursive boundaries of the national community (Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti 2011; Walters 2002) by setting the terms of who is (and should be) rendered ‘deportable’.

In various group sessions over coffee and Belgian speculoos biscuits, emotions would run high when parents described with frustration how their requests for state assistance are always met with suspicion, because they are based on institutional assumptions of undocumented parents as ‘putting their children ‘at risk’ or even as ‘abusing their children to get benefits’ (field notes, 15-09-2016). Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018) also describe this in research with undocumented mothers in the U.S., where, through the withholding of health care from their citizen-children, their deportability becomes constituted through intimate ties. Access to rights and benefits is increasingly subject to conditions, such as sharing information (detailed financial statements, information about kinship ties, personal relationships or living arrangements) and complying with ‘appropriate’ behavioural norms or life choices (including in the realm of the family) to demonstrate ‘good citizenship’. This makes it difficult for families to escape state interference in their private life.

While increased attention to their private lives is experienced as intrusive and humiliating, many narratives demonstrate an ability to strategically navigate the spaces for negotiation that open up. An iconic example of this is what families in one of the sessions referred to as the ‘paradox of the refrigerator’: when they receive a visit from the public welfare centre to qualify for free health care under a law for undocumented migrants, they have to demonstrate financial hardship and thus, they would empty the fridge. When child services visit, they would fill up the fridge with food and treats to show that their children did not lack anything. This and many more accounts demonstrate that, by strategically deciding what information to share, which elements to highlight and how to adjust their performances, parents seek to secure access to rights and benefits. Moreover, they also demonstrate strategies to keep the state ‘outside’ and shield their children from harmful interferences. While parenting and carework have often been conceptualised as confined to the private sphere, these parents’ experiences with the state’s ‘policing’ of their family life, and their resistance against this through carework, demonstrate that private practices of care and parenting are in fact intensely intertwined with the public domain (Bonjour and de Hart 2021; Longman, Graeve, and Brouckaert 2013).

The logics that construct parents as ‘bad’ go even further in the experiences of the parents; by designating their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘at risk’, they pose the threat of placing children in custody (which did happen to one of the mothers). These interferences demonstrate ‘child-saving’ assumptions (Heidbrink 2017, 40) that position undocumented children as a priori ‘at risk’, because of institutional standards of a ‘good childhood’ that are inherently incompatible with the instability of legal precarity. To pre-empt involvement of child services, the group organised a session with an NGO to gain information about their legal rights if they were placed ‘under supervision’. During this session, Karima, an Algerian mother of three, stated: ‘instead of helping us, there is the fear that the school will inform the authorities about our living situation and that the government will take away your child’ (field notes, 23-02-2016). Parents refer to this as ‘going to court’, where they have to defend their right to custody before a juvenile judge, by demonstrating their ability to provide a stable and nurturing environment (e.g. housing, income); requirements that are not only impossible to prove with non-legal means, but also clash with the unsteady, lived reality of undocumentedness.

The child-saving assumptions that underlie state interference in their private lives are understood as contradictory. Fatoumata explains how she was sent away multiple times from the public welfare centre when she needed a doctor’s appointment for her son, and goes on to reflect:

They would say, ‘this mother, she cannot take care of her children, because she has problems’. So, when you, you had problems, you went to see them [the authorities] to seek help. It is when the drama has already happened, that they come to you with the police. People need to be helped before the police comes. (interview, 22-09-2016)

She aptly points out the circularity of this logic; while the state is strategically withholding access to rights and benefits as a deterrence strategy, it is simultaneously constructing them as ‘bad parents’ and threatening to take away their parental responsibility to ‘save’ their ‘innocent’ children. Moreover, in the group’s experience, this circular logic is an expulsion strategy: the authorities threaten to place their children in custody while positioning voluntary return as the ‘proper’ parental decision and the only option to avoid this:

The state does not take our children into consideration, ONLY to threaten the parents with the living conditions, followed by the threat of placement [into custody]. (written group statement, 07-06-2016; capitals in original)

Through the platform, the families became aware of these implicit ‘expulsion strategies’ that they came to understand as coercive means to construct them as ‘more’ deportable on the grounds of their intimate relations. By constructing them as ‘bad parents’ for putting their children in a situation of ‘risk’, while simultaneously positioning their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘vulnerable’, the state discursively breaks up the family along intergenerational lines, placing the border of the nation-state in the midst of family life. Yet, through the collective knowledge created in the platform, the participants felt emboldened to counter the ways in which the state constructed particular normative logics about ‘parenthood’, a process I will elaborate on in the following section.

Contesting normative logics about ‘bad’ parenthood and a ‘good’ childhood

One morning in June, I met three mothers of the group in the NGO’s kitchen. I was preparing coffee with Pascaline, while we waited for the others to arrive after having dropped their children off at school. We had arranged this small meeting to write a draft of the letters of support the group wanted to send to politicians and practitioners. This idea originated in the last group session, when we had been brainstorming about the group’s message and objectives, and what political actions they would want to take. Somebody had come up with the idea of writing letters to the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration (Theo Francken, at that time) to explain their situation and advocate for change. At first, the idea was received with loud support. Yet, through the discussion, it became clear that strategically this was not beneficial: there was no space to manoeuvre with a public figure who openly profiled himself as a fierce proponent of deportation. One of the mothers explained: ‘He doesn’t see persons, but just files that knock on his door. For him, we don’t even exist’. After this painful remark, the group concluded that it would be more fruitful to build alliances with people who are ‘already on their side’ and who are likely to publicly support their claim. So today, these three mothers decided to take action and start writing a draft of the letters they would send out to these ‘persons on their side’. (field notes, 13-06-2016)

An important pillar of the platforms’ work was political action, including brainstorming sessions about the group’s objectives, the preparation of meetings with politicians, and the organisation of demonstrations. Key achievements were the writing of a group statement and the letters mentioned in the vignette above. Based on these parents’ political work, I argue in this final section that the group negotiated normative ideas about ‘good’ parenthood, while strategically untangling the blurring of these ideas with legal-discursive notions of ‘the best interest’ and the ‘innocence’ of the child. Through openly contesting dominant discourses, the group reshapes the terms upon which the state constructs them as ‘deportable’. Moreover, these contestations can be understood as a (re)negotiation of the boundaries between public and private sphere; these parents strategically move their private experiences of family life into the public sphere in order to problematise repressive migration practices.

‘A child is still a child’ – this phrase was a common sentence in discussions, a slogan in demonstrations and a repeated call for equality in the letters sent by the group. It appeals to the universalised image of the child as non-political and morally innocent and was often uttered in combination with the legal concept of the ‘best interests of the child’ – a cornerstone of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. By framing their children as innocent, the group speaks to dominant Westernised, middle-class imaginaries of childhood (Engebrigtsen 2003) as stable and ‘fixed’, which have been more widely analyzed in the context of migrant children (De Graeve and Bex 2017; Kohli 2006; Laoire, Carpena-méndez, and White 2010). Through these hegemonic imaginaries of childhood, parents seek to claim rights for their children and exclusionary state practices that disregard the ‘best interests’ of their children, or even ‘traumatize them’, as worded by the group (written group statement, 07-06-2016).

In one of the group discussions, Marie, a Congolese single mother with two teenagers, explains that she feels the state employs the notion of the ‘best interests of the child’ in order to leverage them into ‘voluntary’ return:

This law to protect the child is used by the state as an instrument for expulsion. They tell us: take responsibility for your children, protect them. So go, return to your country!. (field notes, 11-01-2016)

Later on, in the writing of a statement, the group elaborated on this remark. The parents argued that the ‘best interests of the child’ was misappropriated by the state: instead of using it as a source of rights, the authorities reinforced normative logics that construct undocumented parents a priori as ‘bad’ for not choosing to return ‘voluntarily’.

Multiple group efforts were dedicated to challenging the reductionist discourse about their motives for fleeing as well as their incapacity to decide on the ‘best interests’ of their children: ‘We want what is best for our children. As parents, we can assess what that means. And it is not return’ (field notes, 11-01-2016). The universalised image of childhood as ‘safe’ and ‘stable’ propagated by the state, clashes with these parents’ understandings of socio-economic global inequality, as well as with their children’s rootedness and feelings of belonging in Belgium. The rationale for their move – ultimately aimed at securing a better future for their children – and their refusal to return ‘home’ can be perceived as a confrontational bid to dominant notions of mobility, belonging and citizenship. These examples demonstrate how, through the collective knowledge created in the platform, families became aware of the ways in which normative ideas about the family – about both parenthood and childhood – become entangled with notions of law – e.g. the best interests of the child – in state efforts that seek to normalise their exclusion and deportability.

Conclusion

Based on ethnographic research that accesses intimate experiences of families living undocumented in Brussels, this article explores the dynamics between the family and migration regimes in a context of legal precarity and deportability. I argue that, in its exclusionary practices towards undocumented families, the state draws upon normative imaginaries about the family – based on norms about ‘good’ parenthood and universalised images of childhood as ‘innocent’ and ‘stable. These normative logics are mobilised in addition to other sovereign-power techniques, and become entangled with law and notions of citizenship in order to naturalise and legitimize the designation of undocumented families as ‘deportable’, a process I account through the political work of this group of undocumented parents. In so doing, the condition of ‘illegality’ is transposed from its origin in law towards the private sphere of parenthood, framing the hardships suffered by these families as the mere result of ‘bad’ parenting (e.g. ‘choosing’ to raise their children in ‘illegality’).

I argue that families navigate and negotiate these normative logics about the family through multiple efforts: firstly, by anticipating and strategically engaging with state interference in the private sphere in order to secure access to rights and benefits and, secondly, through their political work aiming to contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’, highlighting markers of ‘good’ parenthood and problematising the state-propagated image of childhood as ‘innocent’ and ‘stable’ in the context of coercive bordering practices and global inequalities. Parenthood works as a contested, normative-ideological site that various actors fill with different meanings and connotations: while the state constructs particular normative logics about ‘parenthood’ to reinforce the status of these families as ‘deportable’ and ‘non-belonging’, parents, on the other hand, renegotiate these logics by highlighting their everyday carework, and, instead, situating their parental struggles in a context of legal precarity.

In countless instances of public speaking and political action – but most importantly in everyday carework – the families at the heart of this ethnography navigate and negotiate borders in the midst of their family-life. While their narratives describe the fierce, discursive enactment of dominant notions of parenthood and childhood in their everyday private lives, they also contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’. The collective practices through which they reaffirm their role as ‘good’ parents – demonstrating a strong commitment to taking care of their family despite challenging circumstances – can be understood as strategic acts that repoliticize private sphere activities in the context of legal precarity. By moving their family life into the public debate, they counter normative logics about ‘illegality’ that legitimize their deportability by constructing them as ‘bad’ families. In so doing, they problematise dominant understandings of citizenship, sovereignty and belonging, placing their intimate stories at the heart of political discourses on the boundaries of the normative, national community. On a theoretical level, the repoliticization of their private lives demonstrates how migrant families are simultaneously confronted with, and co-constituting, the complex, fluid boundaries between public and private sphere; this, moreover, uncovers the fundamental ways in which power is forged through the production of these boundaries in the context of migration regimes.

In conclusion, I point to two avenues that merit further inquiry. Firstly, the central role which my research participants ascribe to their families – for support and protection, but also as an important driving force in their everyday routines and migratory trajectories – underlines the need to conceptualise the family as a fundamental unit of analysis fromwhich to complicate and reconceptualise notions of in/exclusion, citizenship and belonging. Secondly, it points to the role played by ideologies about the family within and beyond contemporary migration regimes more broadly, where they shape dominant understandings of the family as ‘vulnerable’, ‘deserving of protection’ or ‘integrated’. This raises urgent questions: How do family norms shape law and legal procedures, access to rights and benefits, and care interventions in the lives of migrant families? How do these family norms clash not only with emic, ethnocultural understandings about family, but also with the increasingly complex, dynamic and often disrupted nature of family life on the move?

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the courageous families at the heart of this research for sharing their political and intimate struggles with me. I am indebted to Laura Cleton, prof. Dr. Karel Arnaut, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful, challenging comments on previous versions. I also thank the participants in the panel ‘New Perspective on the European Return Regime Part I – Governing deportable subjects in the Member States’ on the online IMISCOE Conference 1–2 July 2020, for their comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders [FWO] under grant number 11G5320N.

Notes

1 Belgium has two Commissioners for the Rights of the Child. They have an ombudsperson mandate to flag up breaches of the application of the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child (1989).

2 All persons are anonymized to protect their privacy.

3 All quotes have been translated from French by the author.

4 Although the term ‘platform’ is often used to describe online spaces, I use the term to refer to an actual, collaborative, meeting space where undocumented families meet each other. For more on the activities organised in this platform, please see the section ‘Methodology: participatory methods and group work’.

5 I developed an on-going, oral conversation – in both collective and individual settings – around informed consent and ethical guarantees (confidentiality, anonymization, voluntary participation, right to withdraw).