Self-Il/legalisation and political subjecthood: Syrian migrant women in the EU

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how kinship in its intersection with the law shapes female migrants’ gendered vulnerabilities, but also their political subjecthood. My ethnographic fieldwork in Athens from 2017–2020 with young adult Syrian women shows that female migrants prefer to remain undocumented in Greece, because so-called ‘illegal’ smuggling routes remain their best bet for reaching Central/Northern Europe. I read their strategies of ‘self-il/legalisation’ as ‘ambivalent’ yet ‘generative’ political acts. By selectively and simultaneously working with and against the EU’s border regime and kin-related legal and socio-cultural structures, acts of self-il/legalisation oppose the infantilisation of women as secondary to male citizens, and of non-citizens as outsider, non-political subjects. I argue that in doing so, female migrants enact an ambiguous political subjecthood that defies classic binaries of the personal/political, citizen/refugee, law/culture and legal/illegal, and also unmask the false claims to rationality, modernity and neutrality upheld in the EUs migration and asylum regime, exposing instead its racialised and heteropatriarchal foundations.

KEYWORDS:

• Illegality
• gender
• citizenship
• migration
• political subjecthood

Introduction

‘Awraq la kul al-muhajireen’ [papers for all migrants] reads a piece of graffiti in Arabic on the walls of Athens. Not far away, another tag declares, in English, ‘no borders’ and ‘open the borders’. These writings remind us of the essence of what it means to be in limbo, stuck with nowhere to go – a situation in which many migrants find themselves in Greece. They are waiting: waiting for their papers (for asylum, family reunification, residency, marriage, the birth of a child, etc.), waiting to move to another location (usually Central/Northern Europe, the US or Canada), and waiting for the borders to open. The world of papers, or awraq in Arabic, including the legal and bureaucratic inscriptions they engender (Horton 2020), thus are at the heart of people’s lived experience of migration. It is awraq that enable migrants to settle down and build a life, and it is also awraq that allow them to be mobile and reach family, friends and loved ones settled elsewhere. For migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers,¹ skilfully ‘navigating’ (Vigh 2009) the law and bureaucracy is a necessary part of their migration and asylum trajectory.

In Greece too, hartià (papers) are central pillars in migration. Yet, as Cabot (2012) highlights, hartià might take on several meanings – they have a life of their own. Furthermore Rozakou, studying bureaucratic nonrecording on the island of Lesvos in 2015, stresses that ‘states are far from the guarantors and promoters of idealised regularity, but projects in the making that are actualised through irregularity and disorder’ (2017, 45). In fact, many migrants in Athens avoid registration, and remain outside the law without papers. However, in contrast to the ‘self-irregularisation’ of more organised collective action by migrant activists (Nyers 2011), the choice by migrants to stay undocumented is not aimed at making public political claims.² Rather, migrants in Athens adopt quiet, invisible strategies of what I term ‘self-il/legalisation’ – an ‘imperceptible politics’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) through which they maintain their ability to move on to their destination country. Self-il/legalisation while on the move is of course not without risks, as it renders migrants without access to basic rights. However, it does, as I will show, offer them greater chances of mobility across borders. Therefore hartià, the bureaucratic encounters in which they are generated and transactioned, and the law are not neutral, rational or safe spaces for migrants. Rather, they are characterised by ‘uncertainty’ (Tuckett 2015, 114), ‘ambiguity’ (Rozakou 2017, 40) and ‘indeterminacy’ (Cabot 2012, 16).

Indeed, as De Genova (2002) shows, the law and legal documentation practices function not to prevent, but to legally construct migrant ‘illegality’. This highlights that taken-for-granted dichotomous categories of ‘legal’ vs. ‘illegal’ need to be destabilised, revealing instead a blurred context of il/legality and processes of il/legalisation through which the state legalises some individuals (citizens, ‘authorised’ migrants) and illegalises others (‘unauthorised’ migrants), thereby keeping them in a state of protracted vulnerability.³ Yet, migrants’ own practices of self-il/legalisation also speak to the ‘autonomy of migration’⁴: although migrants’ agency takes place within systems and technologies of border control and the law, their strategy to self-il/legalise while on the move points to a creative political agency that actively ‘navigates’, rather than simply reacts, to structural controls governing borders, migration and citizenship. I read migrants’ agency, with Vigh, as a form of navigation, i.e. as a ‘flexible and adaptive practice constantly attuned to the movement of the environment people’s lives are set in’ (2009, 423).⁵ Acknowledging this ‘radical interactivity’ (ibid: 420) between agency and social forces, it is not my primary aim to classify the agency of illegalised migrants (as resilience, adaptation, resistance, etc.).⁶ Rather, in line with the literature on the autonomy of migration, I am interested in tracing what migrants’ navigation through the hostile and quickly changing EU border regime reveals about their political subject formation.

With this focus on political subjecthood, my paper engages the critical migration and citizenship literature through two innovative angles. First, I focus on illegalised migrants’ individual, everyday and often spontaneous navigation, rather than their organised collective mobilisation for political rights or recognition.⁷ Second, I trace how family, kin and gender intersect with migration/citizenship law and processes of il/legalisation.⁸ Relying on ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian migrants in Athens from 2017–2020,⁹ I ask the following questions: How do processes of il/legalisation intersect with family and kin systems in shaping migrants’ gendered, generational and racialised vulnerabilities? How do young Syrian women in Athens mobilise or reject kin structures, practices and language when navigating through the European border regime? And how do their strategies of self-il/legalisation speak to formations and conceptualisations of political subjecthood?

My paper relies in particular on one long-term ethnographic interaction with and in-depth testimony from Aida, a young adult Syrian woman I met in Athens. The choice of building the paper around one personal narrative and the lived experience of one person stems from my aim to reveal the ways in which the EU border and asylum regime functions at the very personal and intimate level. The life story of one ordinary person maneuvering through and against this regime is, of course, valuable in and of itself, but this ethnographic perspective from the ground up also reveals how the state operates and comes to direct people’s lives (Trouillot 2003, see also Farinha and Suerbaum 2022). In order to widen and contextualise this frame on the individual, but without making any claims to generalisability, I also complement Aida’s story with interview data and participant observation with other young female migrants.

Aida’s experience, although marked by her own personal trajectory, reveals the specific vulnerabilities that young female migrants face in the intertwined system of EU migration, citizenship and asylum law, and kin-related legal, social and cultural structures. However, her story also highlights their skilful navigation through these intersecting forms of legal and kin control. I read female migrants’ strategies of self-il/legalization as an ‘ambivalent’, yet ‘generative’ form of political agency and claim-making (McNevin 2013),¹⁰ that simultaneously and selectively works both with and against law and kin. These ambivalent everyday acts challenge entrenched binaries of the so-called ‘legal’/‘illegal’, but also of the personal/political, citizen/refugee and law/culture. In doing so, they function as a diagnostic, unmasking the false claims to rationality, modernity and neutrality upheld in the EU’s migration and citizenship regime, and exposing instead this regime’s racialised and heteropatriarchal foundations. Moreover, I argue that the ambivalence inherent in the political agency of self-il/legalization invites us to move beyond a ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003; Malkii 1995) as it gives rise to an ambiguous political subjecthood that cannot be captured by the classic Westphalian political figure of the citizen-subject in the territorialised nation-state.

AIDA

Right at the start of our conversations Aida stressed her fear of the sea: ‘I would have much preferred to go via the land border in Evros’, she said. In the end, she took a small, crowded dinghy from the shores of Turkey to reach Chios, one of the Greek islands in the Aegean. From there, she continued to Athens, where we met in the summer of 2019. At that time, Aida was in her mid-20s and had been, together with her sister Karima, on the move for four years. Her journey took her across many borders, from Aleppo to Beirut, then back to Syria, then from Idlib to Turkey, where she was caught and sent back to Syria several times. And finally, after two failed attempts, she crossed the Aegean to Greece.

When I met her in Athens during voluntary work at a community organisation in summer 2019 she struck me as particularly energetic and positive: someone who does not let a chance go to improve herself, learn something new, and move her life forward. Always dressed immaculately in bright colours, Aida had established strong connections with Syrian and Iraqi women in the centre, but she had also gained the trust, respect and admiration of the young men working there. At the time we met, Aida had been in Athens for 9 months. While she was an active community member who knew her way around Athens, she and her sister were ultimately hoping to relocate to Germany, where their mother and father had started to establish a new life with her younger siblings. Indeed, later that same year, she managed to board a plane with a forged passport, and through this route reunited with her parents and siblings in Germany.

Aida is one of the many Syrians who follow the route via Turkey and Greece to reach their ultimate destination: Central or Northern Europe. In 2019, for the seventh consecutive year, Syria was the main country of origin of applicants for international protection in the EU, with 77,287 applications in total. In Greece, Syrians constituted the second-largest group of asylum applications, numbering 10,856 in 2019 (AIDA, 2019). However, the actual number of Syrians who arrived in Greece that year is probably much higher. Numbers are hard to track because migrants – historically and still today – consider Greece a transit country (see Cabot 2014) and many self-il/legalise, i.e. do not register their stay, while in Greece. This is due to a set of interconnected factors.

Aside from the devastating economic situation resulting from austerity measures, the election of Nea Democratia in 2019 shifted the Greek government agenda to the right and resulted in a spate of racist and anti-immigrant policies. Migrant issues were securitised and illegal pushbacks enforced (Amnesty 2021). The new government also, in coordination with the EU, started to phase out cash assistance, social security and housing programmes for refugees, which essentially meant abandoning, on the streets of Athens, people with recognised refugee status and the right to asylum (Smith 2021; France 24 2020). In 2021 Greece, in a continuation of the EU-Turkey deal, declared Turkey a ‘safe third country’ for Syrians, effectively cancelling their right to seek asylum (see also Kouzinopoulou 2021). Moreover, the 2003/2013 Dublin Regulation II/III, which regulate migration in the EU,¹¹ allow countries to send migrants back to the first point of entry to the EU where they registered. Consequently, there is little incentive for migrants to register in Greece. To avoid immobilisation and ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009) in a context that offers them little in terms of a future, or indeed avoid being sent back to Turkey, most migrants prefer to remain undocumented and il/legalised. Staying outside the bureaucratic and legal realm of the state provides them with more options for mobility through smuggling routes. Aida, too, never registered her asylum claim in Greece, knowing that while her ‘illegal’ status certainly rendered her vulnerable and without access to basic rights or support, it nevertheless remained her best bet for moving onward to Germany.

Aida’s and other migrants’ trajectories confirm De Genova’s (2002) finding that what is presented as ‘official’ or ‘legal’ (e.g. immigration laws, bureaucratic encounters, documentation practices, etc.) creates so-called ‘illegality’. Heyman and Smart (1999) have also convincingly shown that state ‘legality’ and ‘illegal’ practices are not opposites, but rather interact and mutually constitute each other. The state is not a unitary actor, but rather ‘a dispersed ensemble of institutional practices and techniques of governance’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 14) with multiple actors, whose interests might be diverging and/or even competing (see also Sharma and Gupta 2006). Indeed in Greece, as Rozakou (2017) argues, it is through migrants’ and bureaucrats’ official and irregular everyday interactions that the co-construction of so-called ‘legality’ (of the state) and ‘illegality’ (of migrants/smugglers) takes place (see also Tuckett 2015; ; Farinha 2022; Ferreri 2022). Rather than being outside the law or the state, ‘illegal’ practices (by both state and illegalised actors) thus create the ‘state effect’ (Mitchell 2006).

De Genova (2002, 439) describes the ‘legal production of “illegality” as a distinctly spatialised and typically racialised social condition for [the] undocumented’. Indeed, il/legalisation processes are racialised, but due to the intersections of law and kin, they also are strongly gendered, policing especially women’s adherence to socially expected and legally enshrined norms. While other actors, of course, also face discrimination, I focus here on the vulnerability of young migrant women in particular. Two specific episodes of Aida’s migration story will serve to illustrate these gendered aspects: her interaction with so-called ‘illegal’ regimes of smugglers in Syria and Turkey, and her encounters with so-called ‘legal’ regimes of the Greek, German and EU bureaucracy and borders.

Sheikh and smuggler

Once Aida and Karima had managed to get back into Syria from Lebanon, they travelled to Idlib, from where they planned to cross tahreeb (lit. escape, i.e. go ‘illegally’) into Turkey with the help of a smuggler. But before any border crossing could take place, their papers needed to be checked. In our conversation, Aida explained that a sheikh, who acted as the administrative governor of the faction (jabhat al-nusra) governing Idlib, had to inspect their documents before they could join the smuggler and cross to Turkey. She recalled how nervous she was at having to meet him.

Aida’s anxiety when meeting the sheikh stemmed from her gendered and religious positioning as a young Syrian Muslim woman migrating alone with her sister. The sheikh, as she explained, was known for his strict religious conservatism, always careful checking that migrants were adhering to (what he considered) Islamic principles and law. Aida remembered that on their first meeting, he asked her and her sister: ‘with these clothes you want to travel to Turkey?’ implying that their dress did not comply with Islamic modesty codes. The two sisters therefore went to buy long wide garments, abayas. When they returned to him dressed more conservatively, the sheikh asked to speak to their father, their mahram (male guardian), on the phone. After the call, he gave them permission to cross the border with a smuggler.

The negotiations with the sheikh over morals and dress highlight that paper checks and bureaucratic encounters are impacted by gender, kin and generation. Aida and Karima needed not only to provide the correct papers to pass, they also had to show additional proofs of modesty, both through bureaucratic material culture (e.g. documents that prove kin relations to a mahram) and through their appearance and behaviour (such as dress). This incident demonstrates that two young unmarried women travelling alone have to abide by gendered codes of piety and modesty, and their political and legal subjecthood is mediated and becomes legitimate only through a male guardian relative, in this case their father. Patrilineal kin structures therefore combine with gendered patriarchal notions of women’s modesty to restrict women’s access to citizenship (Joseph 2000) and mobility rights.

Aida’s and Karima’s crossings into Turkey failed four times. They were caught either at the Turkish-Syrian border or further inland in Turkey, and sent back to Idlib. Aida explained that throughout all their attempts as they passed from one smuggler to the next, she would stay in contact with their first smuggler in Idlib to maintain his support. At the same time, she started to suspect that this smuggler might be behind their multiple failures. ‘Maybe the smuggler fell in love with me’, she recalled with a cautious smile. She thinks that he might have alerted the police so that she would be returned to Idlib multiple times, and through these experiences and repeated meetings would become more attached and dependent on him.

Rather than rejecting the smuggler’s advances outright, Aida tried to negotiate them carefully. She stayed in touch with him and asked for advice throughout their journey, not only in Turkey, but also during the next stages of their migration route, when the motor of their small inflatable dinghy stopped in the middle of the Aegean, or when they could not find accommodation on the island of Chios. Contrary to common depoliticised media and state representation of smugglers as abject exploitative criminals who victimise helpless migrants (see e.g. Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008), Aida portrayed the smuggler more as a friend, even family, whom she trusts and relies on, and through whom she gains the ability to navigate border regimes.

In her account of her relationship with this and other male smugglers, Aida often mobilised the language of kin, stating for example that the smuggler is ‘like a brother’ to her. She recalled that smugglers also frequently framed and legitimated their presence and interactions with the two young unmarried women through kin idioms. In one of their repeated attempts to cross the Turkish-Syrian borders, Aida and Karima were again required to see the sheikh in Idlib. Before giving his permission, he asked about their mahram. At this point the smuggler claimed that he is Aida’s brother and thus their mahram, to which the sheikh replied knowingly: ‘So, your brother came back from Germany?’ He remembered the two young women and their family’s migration trajectory, and now reproached them for lying to him. Other smugglers too, as Aida remembered, claimed kin relations to her – as brothers, fiancés or husbands. For example, when Turkish police asked her and a smuggler about their relationship and why they were alone together in a car, the smuggler replied that they were engaged.

Aida’s and the smugglers’ mobilisation of kin language seems to confirm the argument that ‘the relationship between the smugglers and the migrants appear[s] to be rich in solidarity and reciprocity, and grounded in local notions of morality’ (Achilli 2018, 77; see also Bilger, Hofmann, and Jandl 2006). Yet, Achilli also points out that ‘the existence of a moral universe equally inhabited by both smugglers and migrants does not prevent ties of reciprocity and mutuality from quickly turning into deception or even exploitation’ (Achilli 2018, 92). Indeed, for a young woman like Aida, these ties are fragile, because notions of morality and reciprocity have specific gendered connotations and restrictions. Young unmarried women cannot ‘equally inhabit’ the moral universe of smugglers and migrants; they occupy the most vulnerable position in its social hierarchy. They might utilise discourses of family and kin to legitimise their presence among male smugglers, retain and convey a certain familiarity and trust, and even hold smugglers accountable within the frameworks of kin, morality and ethics. However, while kin language might safeguard them from accusations of ‘immoral’ or ‘shameful’ behaviour, this same discourse upholds a patriarchal framework, elevating men as protectors and reducing women to symbolic vessels of their family’s, community’s and even nation’s honour (see Abu-Lughod 2000; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002).

Il/legal encounters in migration and border regimes thus take place within the moral and structural universe of kin. Consequently, they are governed by gendered and generational dynamics: the two women’s relationship to the sheikh, police, or smugglers, and thus their access to mobility and movement across borders, is compromised by their age, personal status and gender. It is only with the permission of their mahram, by adhering to conservative modesty and piety codes, and by mobilising potentially restrictive kin idioms and codes, that they can move. Kin language and structures might function as a legitimating framework in these encounters, and can indeed facilitate passage and movement for young unmarried female migrants, but kinship’s ‘dark side’ of ‘exploitation, abuse and distrust’ (Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak 2020, 309–310) also binds the young women to restrictive and discriminatory norms and power structures.

The same structural patrilineal and patriarchal discrimination also exists, as the next stage of Aida’s migration process will show, in the EU’s so-called ‘legal’ migration, citizenship and asylum regime. This is therefore not, as the EU discourse likes to proclaim, a question of the ‘illegal’ or ‘pre-modern’ taking place on the periphery of or outside ‘ethical’ Europe; nor is it a question of non-Western ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’. Rather, it is one of kin-based heteropatriarchy institutionalised through the law in both ‘Islamic’ personal status laws and ‘secular’ EU migration/citizenship laws. In fact, as the following section will show, it was in the ‘legal’, supposedly ‘rational’ and ‘gender-neutral’ context of European law and bureaucracy, rather than the ‘illegal’ smuggling system, that these intersections of law and kin heightened Aida’s vulnerability and led her to adopt a strategy of self-il/legalisation.

Bureaucrats and officials

Next, Aida and Karima had to cross the Turkish-Greek/EU border. They travelled to Izmir, from where they planned to take a dinghy via the Aegean Sea to a Greek island. Two attempts at crossing failed but on their third try, they arrived on the Greek island of Chios in winter 2018.¹² Aida told me that Vial camp in Chios was overcrowded with no place for them, but in any case, the sisters wanted to avoid staying and registering in the camp. Instead, they chose informal routes, hoping that these would yield more chances for them to make their way to Germany. In terms of help, the young women relied on family advice and support from the smuggler from Idlib. Eventually, the latter found them a temporary place to stay in Chios, and provided guidance on further steps for how to reach Athens.

Once in Athens, Aida and Karima quickly connected with the Syrian community, establishing strong friendships and support networks. It was during this time, in summer 2019, that Aida and I met in the community centre. After a few weeks when we had got to know each other, she asked me to teach her some basic phrases in German – asking for directions, asking the price of a bus ticket, asking where one can buy basic provisions, etc. Even if never directly articulated, we both understood that Aida wanted to learn German because she was planning to go tahreeb (i.e. lit. ‘escape’) to Germany soon. The sisters’ first attempt to get on a plane to Germany from Athens airport, with forged passports which cost them around 4,000 Euros each, failed. I had asked Aida whether she was afraid to be arrested at the airport. She answered matter-of-factly that for her, tahreeb was now the only option. On her second attempt, Aida managed to fly out of Athens. She is now in Germany, reunited with her family and processing her papers for asylum.

It was thus only by staying outside the bureaucratic and legal realm of the state, by self-il/legalising, that Aida was able to complete her migration route to Germany. While all migrants, male and female, risk remaining stuck in Greece if they become ‘legal’, the ways in which the Dublin Regulations, citizenship/residency regulations and refugee/asylum law construct and categorise people into desirable and undesirable subjects (cf. Foucault 2003), and, in doing so, naturalise false binaries between ‘citizen’ and ‘refugee’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ (Isin 2002), are strongly gendered. Women are particularly vulnerable in the EU migration/citizenship regime – a regime that, contrary to its proclaimed gender neutrality, reinforces and capitalises on kin-based patriarchal norms and structures.

Aida’s first ‘legal’ option to reach Germany could have been through family reunification. However, citizenship (and, as its negative other, refugee and asylum) law privileges the nuclear over the extended family, in an attempt to break sub-national affiliations and ensure a direct contract (and loyalty) between citizen and state. Through the law, modern nation-states have reconstructed society towards the nuclear heteronormative family, and defined the male, heterosexual, (supposedly autonomous and bounded) individual as primary citizen (Joseph 2000; Charrad 2000; Pateman 1988; Lister 1997; Yuval-Davis 1999; Bonjour and de Hart 2021; Volpp 2017). The male citizen was further defined through his ‘other’, the refugee/non-citizen, who also was constituted primarily as an individual male (Crawley 2001; Crawley and Lester 2004; Freedman 2015). In this vein, EU state law and its migration directives (Dublin Regulations, the EU’s Family Reunification Directive, the Union Citizens Directive) also define the family – in particular if involving non-EU nationals – narrowly as a nuclear heteronormative unit of spouses and dependent underage children (Kofman 2004). As adult children, Aida and Karima were not eligible. While family reunification previously included cases of brothers and sisters, or parents and their adult children, most EU countries now interpret the laws more conservatively to cover only marital spouses, and parents and minors.¹³ For Syrian female migrants like Aida, this narrow interpretation implies a legalist transition from the extended to the nuclear family, denying them their family rights (see also Richter-Devroe and Buffon 2019, Alkan 2022).¹⁴

Yet, even those who remain eligible on paper are regularly denied their rights in practice. In Athens, I spoke to several young married migrant women, some with young children, whose applications for family reunification with spouses settled in Central or Northern Europe had been rejected or suspended. Lawyers and case workers confirmed that since around spring 2019, if not earlier, most family reunification applications, especially to Germany, have been on hold (see also Tometten 2018).¹⁵ Reasons for rejection range from the technical/bureaucratic (missing stamps, affidavits, signatures, documents) to the moralistic. Reunification of mothers with their under-age children who have already reached their destination country, for example, are regularly denied on normative grounds. Both lawyers and migrant mothers in Greece recounted how German officials rejected the mothers’ applications with the narrative that a mother who ‘allows’ or even ‘sends’ her child as unaccompanied minor to Germany cannot be considered fit for mothering and act as a legal guardian. Moralistic kin and gender constructions are therefore mobilised not only in the so-called ‘illegal’ smuggling system to police women’s behaviour and mobility, but also in the ‘legal’ practices of migration officials in Fortress Europe.

This highlights that the law regulates who counts as ‘family’, but also how family should be performed and function (Strasser et al. 2009, 167–68; Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak 2020, 309). Through its laws, the EU and EU states construct certain kin relations as ‘legal’ and ‘progressive’, while others, for example polygamous marriages, non-heteronormative and/or extended families, are assigned a ‘pre-modern’ or even ‘illegal’ status. Furthermore, female migrants like Aida have to prove their eligibility and ‘deservingness’ for family reunification in gendered terms: as a ‘good mother’ or, indeed, as a ‘proper wife’ (Bonjour and de Hart 2013) to avoid charges of ‘marriages of convenience’ (De Hart 2017). Such governmental ‘technologies of love’ regulate migration flows in/to Fortress Europe (D’Aoust 2013). Migrants, through their performances of family, love and intimacy, have to prove their adherence to Eurocentric modernist normative values of love, intimacy and family in order to access mobility, residence or citizenship rights.

The gender construction of women as reproducers (‘good wives’, ‘good mothers’) is coupled with a normative masculinity model of men as producers and providers (see Kofman 2004). This gender regime is further enforced through a neoliberal immigration control model that requires migrants to prove their entrepreneurship and economic independence. Germany might have framed its initial welcoming policy towards refugees as humanitarian, but its economy also requires young skilled migrant labour, given the country’s ageing population (Kolodziej 2012; Fassin and Windels 2016). Those who can qualify for this economic model of the ‘good migrant/citizen-to be’ (cf. Anderson 2013, see also Suerbaum 2022) are largely younger migrant men. It is not only that for them travelling alone is easier; they also have received the necessary education or training back home and with this are able to ‘pull’ their spouses through patrilocal marriage arrangements and family reunification schemes to destination countries such as Germany. Neoliberal migration management, by legalising patriarchal gender constructions (men as producers/providers, women as reproducers) and kin institutions (patrilocal marriages) effectively privilege men as first migrants and endow them with a position of power vis-à-vis their (future) spouses.

Marriage, however, is no safe haven for women, especially in contexts of migration where the structural and gendered violence of this institution often increases (see Brettell 2017). Several migrant women in Athens confirmed this risk, speaking of severe problems, including prospects of divorce, with their (future) husbands settled elsewhere. Aida, too, talked about several marriage proposals from Syrian men who had already secured their asylum and residency in Germany. But she rejected entering such engagements, arguing that this could bind her into new structures of control and dependency. Her refusal to get married to gain ‘legal’ mobility thus also constitutes a refusal of the EU’s patriarchal nuclear family and patrilocal ‘pull-marriages’ as a migration model (see also Mezzadra 2004, 274).

Aida’s last ‘legal’ option – to stay and seek asylum in Greece – also posed specific gendered risks. The difficult political and economic situation in the country has dramatically reduced the employment opportunities for everyone, including migrant women. Additionally, staying in Greece alone might mark young women as being outside of accepted social norms, since patrilineal institutions, such as guardianship, link them to male relatives. Indeed, Karima swiftly got engaged to a Syrian migrant in Athens after her sister had left for Germany, and some of the women who had broken their arrangements with Syrian men in destination countries told me that they now faced reprisal and exclusion from their family networks. While young Syrian men can secure their residency, and eventually citizenship, through marriage to Greek or international women, such ‘outmarriages’ tend not to be condoned for women. Aida herself, and indeed most of the female migrants I spoke to, stressed that it is unfair that ‘men can just marry a Greek girl’. Since women are seen as the social, cultural and biological reproducers of the nation (Yuval-Davis 1997), their bodies and behaviour are policed through notions of honour and shame. ‘Outmarriage’ – i.e. marrying outside of socio-cultural, religious or indeed national collective boundaries – is therefore hardly ever an option for young Syrian migrant women.

This patrilineal structure, which prioritises male over female blood, is reinforced through familial institutions such as marriage or guardianship, but also, as the context of female migrants in the EU highlights, citizenship and migration regimes. Patrilineal, patrilocal and heteropatriarchal kin norms are enshrined, legalised and institutionalised in the law,¹⁶ and, in this intersection, they regulate women’s access to political rights and mobility. Family and kin can certainly offer safety and support to migrants (Kofman 2004) because ‘money, family or contacts [are] essential [for migrants] in order to take advantage of the flexibility in the [legal/bureaucratic] system and effectively exploit its loopholes’ (Tuckett 2015, 123, emphasis added). Yet, as the stories of Aida and other female migrants confirm, ‘negative consequences of sociality are not anomalies of kinship, but rather part and parcel of what kinship is and does’ – also in the migration context (Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak 2020, 311). This ‘dark side’ (ibid. 309–312) of kinship discriminates, orders and disciplines, in particular along the lines of gender, and as such, shapes men’s and women’s migration trajectories in quite different ways.

However, the law makes kin connections a requirement for migration. Affinal or parental kin relations are a precondition for ‘legal’ movement under the EU’s family reunification directives, making decisions on so-called ‘personal’ status issues (such as marriage) highly political.¹⁷ Migrants are forced to follow and abide by the highly gendered logics, structures and lingua of (predominantly nuclear) kin to gain mobility, and have to strategize their private lives within and vis-à-vis this politico-legal framework (see also Strasser et al. 2009). Complying with the law and qualifying for family reunification, however, can force migrant women to keep alive (or enter into new) potentially abusive or violent kin relations. The state and its laws, although touted as modern, ethical and emancipatory, are therefore neither separate from nor superior to kinship (Thelen and Alber 2017). Rather, by defining women socially and legally as addenda to men, the supposedly ‘secular’, ‘rational’ and ‘gender-neutral’ EU migration/citizenship law capitalises on and reinforces restrictive patriarchal gender norms and institutions, thereby controlling the scope for young migrant women’s agency and movement.¹⁸

The migrant women I spoke to were all well aware of this hypocrisy.¹⁹ They knew all too well that the institutionalisation of patriarchy in the EU migration regime creates specific vulnerabilities for them. Faced with mutually reinforcing legal and socio-cultural restrictions, the option that remains most feasible for them is the one that Aida chose: to refuse both the legal categorisations of ‘asylum-seeker’, ‘refugee’ or ‘citizen’ (Isin 2002; McNevin 2013, 185), and the kin inscriptions of ‘wife’ or ‘spouse’, and, instead, opt for tahreeb – a strategy of self-il/legalisation that escapes this gendered, generational and racialised regime.

Conclusion: tahreeb, Self-Il/legalisation and migrants’ ambiguous political subjecthood

I opened this paper by mentioning a graffiti tag written in Arabic in the streets of Athens, demanding ‘papers for all migrants’. Indeed, documentary materials are essential in migrants’ trajectories. Yet, as I have demonstrated through the detailed description of one young Syrian woman’s quest to reach her parents and siblings in Germany, papers in no way guarantee safety or success in migration. Migrant women like Aida in fact often avoid official papers and instead cross borders through tahreeb (lit. escape), because this strategy of self-il/legalisation while on the move provides more chances of personal and migratory success. The two sisters’ careful decisions regarding which documents to obtain, present, or avoid are drawn from and marked by their specific precarious and disadvantaged positioning in a wider network of personal and political structures, as well as family, kin and state/border structures. In this way, young female migrants face specific gendered, racialised and generational vulnerabilities at the intersection of law and kin.

Heteronormative marital bonds and the nuclear, patrilineal family are incorporated in the EU’s migration and citizenship regulations. These legalised kin institutions can, however, put young women at risk. Consequently, female migrants seek alternative, so-called ‘illegal’ paths to mobility and, eventually, rights. Self-il/legalisation is certainly not a stable option for young migrant women; it is a temporary strategy they adopt while on the move. With this strategy, women do not directly challenge discriminatory legal and bureaucratic state and border systems, but rather find quiet, individual, everyday ways to circumvent and navigate around shifting and intersecting legal and kin structures of control. Indeed, it seems that the strategy to self-il/legalise while on the move – i.e. to temporarily remain outside of legal and kin inscriptions, rather than adopt or radically confront them – remains the best bet for young migrant women in a system that is so skewed against them.

What does this strategy of self-il/legalisation mean for approaching and conceptualising migrants’ political subjecthood? Women’s acts of tahreeb, of crossing borders using smuggler routes, and their informed decisions to remain undocumented, certainly confirm them as active, capable and skilled political agents who know how to ‘navigate’ (Vigh 2009) the state’s il/legalisation regime. They perform and enact citizenship and political subjecthood even though they do not hold the legal status of citizens (Isin and Nielsen 2008). However, they also consciously ‘appropriate’ and ‘escape’ this same citizenship regime (Squire 2010, 535; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008), thus confirming migrant agency and positionality as a valid autonomous starting point prior to, yet in negotiation with, citizenship and migration regimes.

Aida’s (and other young migrant women’s) strategies to navigate intersecting structures of kin and law through self-il/legalisation, however, also qualify the literature on acts of citizenship and autonomy of migration. Theirs are everyday, silent, non-collective projects, not necessarily conceived of by female migrants as political, let alone citizenship, acts. Yet, the ways in which female migrants ‘do (or indeed do not do) family’ is not simply a ‘personal’ or an ‘apolitical’ struggle. Given that the state and law heavily define, police and discipline the boundaries of what/who counts as family, migrants’ own de/kinning practices as they carefully navigate the state’s prescriptive kin and citizenship models must be conceptualised as political acts. The fact that these acts are silent, individual, and hidden does not make them less political (than, for example, confrontational, contentious, collective politics, such as demonstrations or protest). Indeed, as undocumented ‘non-citizens’, migrants opt very consciously and with clear intent for an ‘imperceptible politics’ (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) of self-il/legalisation that quietly navigates and circumvents, rather than openly confronts, border control. As the Arabic term captures poignantly, the aim of tahreeb is precisely not to emulate or integrate into, nor to publicly oppose, but rather to escape, silently and unnoticed, the logics and confines of the EU’s kin-based patriarchal citizenship, migration and border regime. This strategy is pragmatic in that it promises to be more effective in reaching migratory and personal goals. However, its meaning goes beyond pragmatism: it constitutes a deliberate refusal of the restrictive and binding subjecthood (‘refugee’, ‘asylum-seeker’, ‘wife’, etc.) that the state prescribes to legitimise, and constitute its own citizens as primary political subjects. As such, tahreeb, or self-il/legalization, is a political act that escapes the state’s logic and control.

However, in other contexts female migrants might also abide by this same logic. For example, once they reach their destination country, migrants mostly end their self-il/legalisation and shift from a strategy of escape to one of integration, hoping to obtain asylum, citizenship and related rights (see also Alkan 2022; Suerbaum 2022). Similarly, in their encounters with smugglers, female migrants might selectively adopt normative kin models to gain access to movement. Hence, their strategies are neither solely integral to, nor entirely autonomous from, these regimes of control and they ‘both resist and reinscribe the power relations associated with contemporary hierarchies of mobility’ (McNevin 2013, 183). As such, female migrants’ strategies of self-il/legalisation constitute an ‘ambivalent’ (McNevin 2013) political agency that is conditioned by, but also pushes beyond, a regime which, owing to its intersecting legal and kin structures, casts them as racialised, non-political outsiders, while also infantilising them as secondary to the male political subjects.

Self-il/legalisation is an ‘ambivalent’, but also ‘generative’ political agency (McNevin 2013). It gives rise to an ambiguous political subjecthood that cannot be captured by neat binaries between the ‘legal/illegal’, the ‘migrant/refugee/citizen’, ‘law/culture’, ‘agency/structure’ and the ‘personal’ and ‘political’, and thus defies the classic Westphalian political model of the citizen-subject in the territorialized nation-state. As such, it urges us to think beyond ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003) and question the ‘national order of things’ (Malkii 1995) – an order that builds on these binaries to claim moral and ethical superiority, but in reality naturalises the nation-state and its racialised, gendered citizenship and migration regime by drawing territorial, social and legal boundaries between ‘citizens’ and ‘others’ based on and operating through women’s bodies. Modelled on the heterosexual, productive, territorialised male as primary political subject, this system leaves young female migrants little scope. Perhaps it is then not so paradoxical after all that migrant women navigate this system in ambivalent ways. Beyond the confines of law and kin, it is in the strategy of self-il/legalisation that migrant women claim and enact their ambiguous political subjecthood.

Acknowledgments

I thank all research participants, especially Aida, for their insights, help and time. I learnt so much from you. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their generous, valuable and constructive feedback. Finally my thanks are due to my family, Yiannis and Vangelis, who with their patience and love, provided endless support during this busy time of writing the paper and editing the Special Issue.

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This publication was made possible by an OSRA research grant OSRA2-0208-17018 from the Doha International Family Institute (a member of Qatar Foundation). The findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the author. 

Notes on contributors

Sophie Richter-Devroe

Sophie Richter-Devroe is Associate Professor in the Women, Society and Development Program at the College of Humanities and Social Science, Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an Honorary Fellow at European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. Sophie's broad research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women's activism in the Middle East.She is the author of “Women's Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance and Survival” (University of Illinois Press, 2018) which won the National Women's Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. The book analyzes Palestinian women’s creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism after the Oslo Accords. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/35ghr7wd9780252041860.html Sophie also conducted research on the oral histories, memories and narratives of women from the often forgotten Palestinian Naqab Bedouin population, and has worked with Dr Ruba Salih (SOAS) on a joint research on Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank. More recently, she has led a research project on Syrian refugees in Italy and Greece. The project investigates the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the family and family-making practices in a transnational context. Sophie’s research is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Greece.

Notes

1. This paper questions legal categories. I therefore use the term ‘migrant’ throughout to refer to people on the move who have different state-assigned legal statuses.

2. For an insightful discussion of the collective claim-making of irregular migrants as a way to enact political subjecthood, (see McNevin 2006).

3. I adopt the term il/legal throughout this paper to denote and highlight this false dichotomy. There is, of course, the option to frame illegalised migration as ‘irregular(ised)’ (see e.g. Squire 2010, 4). I chose the term il/legal to highlight and question the ‘legality’ of the law vis-à-vis the ‘illegality’ of unauthorised or undocumented migration. When I refer to state categorisations of migrant or state acts as being inside or outside the law (i.e. as ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate’), I use illegalised, and/or add quotes to ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ to denote my distance from these normative terms.

4. See, among others, Nyers (2011, 2015); Nyers and Rygiel (2012); Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008); Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013), and De Genova (2002, 2017).

5. The notion of ‘navigation’ has gained currency in migration research. See e.g. Triandafyllidou (2019), Tuckett (2015) and Rozakou (2017).

6. For discussions on illegalised migrants’ agency more broadly which engage with the various positions taken in the agency/structure debate, see Squire (2017), Strange, Squire and Lundberg (2017) and Mainwaring (2016).

7. See Ataç, Rygiel and Stierl (2016) for an excellent overview of the literature on migrant collective action.

8. There is a growing body of literature on gender and kinship in migration/asylum law. See, among others, Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak (2020), Strasser et al. (2009), Crawley (2001), Crawley and Lester (2004), Freedman (2015). Also the feminist literature on gender and citizenship has by now a long tradition; for example, see Joseph (2000), Pateman (1988), Lister (1997), Yuval-Davis (1999), Volpp (2017), Bonjour and de Hart (2021). However, the ways in which specific academic insights – of critical citizenship studies and in the autonomy of migration literature on il/legalisation and political subjecthood – relate to and are influenced by gender, kin and family remain under-studied.

9. I spent a total of ca. 10 months on fieldwork in Athens, conducting around 50 interviews and guided informal conversations with migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers (mainly from Syria), as well as with lawyers and development/humanitarian and case workers. Interviews were conducted either in Arabic or English, were not recorded, and all interviewees’ names are anonymised.

10. The notion of ambivalence, in the same way as agency, has proliferated in migration studies referring to, e.g. the relationship between illegalised migration and (state) power (Mainwaring 2016), the condition of ‘illegality’ or irregularity itself (Squire 2010). Here I follow McNevin, engaging the ‘generative potential of ambivalence’ (2013, 186) to research illegalised migrants’ ambivalent political subjecthood.

11. These are supported by several other instruments, such as the Eurodac Regulation on fingerprints, several EU Council Directives, such as the Qualification Directive, the Procedures Directive, the Family Reunification Directive or the Union Citizens Directive, as well as guidelines such as those issued by EASO (see ECRE 2013, 2016; Freedman 2015, 138–141). More recently, the Migration Asylum Pact claims to propose new solutions, but effectively continues previous policies (see Odysseus Network 2020).

12. Migrant arrivals in Europe, while having peaked from 2014–2016, happened long before and continued after this timeframe. See Cabot (2014) for a more detailed history of migration to and through Greece.

13. Individual country regulations further determine who qualifies for family reunification (see Strasser et al. 2009, 168). For more details on the EU family reunification process, see Kofman (2004), Groenendijk et al. (2007), Groenendijk (2006), Tometten (2018) and Ruffer (2011).

14. These rights are enshrined in international conventions, but it remains up to countries to interpret and implement them (see Kofman 2004, 253).

15. Although there have been calls for the Dublin Regulations to be reformed, no tangible progress has been made (see Danish Refugee Council 2018; European Parliament 2016, 2019; ECRE 2016).

16. See the feminist citizenship literature cited above. Citizenship was built in Middle Eastern countries on a kin-based patriarchy, prioritising men as fathers (Joseph 2000) and in Europe on fraternal patriarchy, privileging men as brothers (Pateman 1988). While some Arab countries retain patrilineal nationality laws, most European countries also only quite recently, after WWII, gave women the right to pass on their citizenship (Bonjour and de Hart 2021, 4).

17. For further feminist interrogations highlighting that ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch 1970) see, among others, Butler and Scott (1992) or Lasslett, Brenner, and Arat (1995).

18. The ways in which the EU’s claim to gender-neutrality and progress contrasts with the actual racist and heteropatriarchal functioning of the law is reminiscent of Farris’ (2012) ‘femonationalism’ and/or Puar’s (2007) ‘homonationalism’. My focus and argument here, however, centres less on the ways in which the EU discursively constructs itself, but rather on how its migration regime materialises and comes to matter for migrant women.

19. See also Squire et al. (2021, 207–215) for an account of how migrants question the EU’s self-proclaimed adherence to humanitarian principles and human rights.