Dead papers

Migrant 'illegality', city brokers, and the dilemma of exit for unauthorised African migrants in Delhi

Bibliographic Data

ID3663282
AuthorsBali Gill (0000-0003-0678-2667)
Year2022
Volume48
Issue9
Pages1961-1979
Publication date2022-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2021.1940891
OpenAlexW3173313115
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited44

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

Agency (philosophy · Business · Dilemma · Ethnography · Geography · Global city · Human settlement · Intermediary · Migration studies · Political economy · Political science · Settlement (finance · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · China's Global Influence and Migration · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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