Beyond migration criminalisation

Religion, legal consciousness and moral personhood among undocumented domestic workers

Bibliographic Data

ID24215403
AuthorsLaura Victoria Rakotomalala (0009-0006-4888-1961, Université Libre de Bruxelles), Wanjing Jiang (0000-0002-2391-5997, KU Leuven Faculty of Social Sciences)
Year2026
Publication date2026-09-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Legal Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0964-6639 • E-ISSN: 1461-7390
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/09646639261492692
OpenAlexW7214921028
LanguageEN
References cited47

Socio-legal scholarship has shown that criminalisation produces stigmatised identities for undocumented migrants. Against the backdrop of increasingly restrictive migration control in Belgium, this article examines how undocumented domestic workers resist the stigma generated by migrant criminalisation through making sense of life circumstances from Christian moral frameworks rather than from immigration law. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research – including interviews and participant observation with two collectives of undocumented women – we show how religion functions as a normative order that displaces the law's authority to define deservingness. Through narratives of divine witnessing and grace, religious practice enables forms of ‘counter-recognition’ in contexts where legal recognition is denied. These religious narratives, in turn, cast the state migration regime as one of ‘abandonment’, as undocumented women seek to name and critique governance practices that institutionalise indifference while simultaneously extracting care labour from them.

Care work · grace · Legal consciousness · legal recognition · migration control · moral personhood · Religion · state indifference · Stigma · undocumented women · Immigration Law and Human Rights · Migration, Racism, and Human Rights · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Tools

Open DOI