In search of a normal life : an ethnography of migrant irregularity in Northern Europe

(1)

DISSERTATIONS | MERVI LEPPÄKORPI | IN SEARCH OF A NORMAL LIFE | No 264

Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies

PUBLICATIONS OF

THE UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND

MERVI LEPPÄKORPI

In search of

a normal life

(2)

(3)

IN SEARCH OF A NORMAL LIFE

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF MIGRANT IRREGULARITY IN NORTHERN EUROPE

(4)

(5)

PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND DISSERTATIONS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND BUSINESS STUDIES

N:o 264

Mervi Leppäkorpi

IN SEARCH OF A NORMAL LIFE

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF MIGRANT IRREGULARITY IN NORTHERN EUROPE

ACADEMIC DISSERTATION

Public defence in auditiorium M100, in Metria building Yliopistokatu 7, Joensuu Campus

On Thursday 17 February 2022 at 12 pm

University of Eastern Finland

Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies Joensuu 2021

(6)

PunaMusta Oy Joensuu, 2022

Editor in-Chief: Markus Mättö Editor: Anna Karttunen

Sales: University of Eastern Finland Library ISBN: 978-952-61-4435-1 (print)

ISBN: 978-952-61-4436-8 (PDF) ISSNL: 1798-5749

ISSN: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

(7)

Author’s address: Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies University of Eastern Finland

JOENSUU FINLAND

Doctoral programme: Social and Cultural Encounters

Supervisors: Professor Laura Assmuth Department of Social Sciences University of Eastern Finland JOENSUU

FINLAND

Professor Reetta Toivanen Department of Cultures University of Helsinki HELSINKI

FINLAND

Professor Ilpo Helén

Department of Social Sciences University of Eastern Finland JOENSUU

FINLAND

Reviewers: Professor Laura Huttunen Faculty of Social Sciences Tampere University TAMPERE

FINLAND

Docent Lena Näre

Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki HELSINKI

(8)

Opponent: Professor Michi Knecht

Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research Faculty for Cultural Studies

University of Bremen BREMEN

GERMANY

(9)

Leppäkorpi, Mervi

In search of a normal life: An ethnography of migrant irregularity in Northern Europe.

Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland, 2022 Publications of the University of Eastern Finland Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies ISBN: 978-952-61-4435-1 (print)

ISSNL: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5749

ISBN: 978-952-61-4436-8 (PDF) ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

ABSTRACT

This research targets interactions between irregularized migrants and their various civil society supporters in “Marenburg”, a merged city that combines the settings of Hamburg, Stockholm, and Helsinki. The empirical research took place between 2014 and 2016. The dissertation focuses mainly on the situation before “the long summer of migration”, which began in 2015. The research question is how the representations of migrant irregularity are constructed in interactions between migrants and the local civil society. I focus on the tension between migrants aspiring to “normal life” and the contradictory expectations of their vulnerability, which materialize as criteria to be a “deserving” migrant in three specific contexts: first, when migrants demand their rights (the Lampedusa in Hamburg group as a part of the refugee movement); secondly, when migrants meet supportive civil society organizations in the context of services; and, lastly, when civil society organizations participate in customary consultations of legislation processes. The main research methods were participant observation and walking together with a person seeking for solution for their irregularity.

The theoretical framework of my research relies on Engin F. Isin’s work on acts of citizenship, particularly the idea of citizenship beyond formal belonging, as a process where outsiders challenge the existing idea of citizenship of

(10)

citizen-insiders by demanding rights which belong to citizens. This offers a frame to analyse relations between the city, its migrant-outsiders, and civil society actors as supporters of migrants. The interactions where different actors demand rights for migrants reveal negotiations between the normal that is aspired to and expectations of vulnerability. These negotiations challenge citizenship but also reproduce unwanted features of citizenship, such as neoliberal worker-citizenship, or civil society actors’ role as professionals, which positions migrants as objects of care.

Keywords: Citizenship, Civil society, Migration, Immigrants, Illegal aliens, Participant observation

(11)

Leppäkorpi, Mervi

Tavallisen elämän jäljillä: Etnografia epävirallisesta muuttoliikkeestä pohjoi- sessa Euroopassa.

Joensuu: Itä-Suomen yliopisto, 2022

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies ISBN: 978-952-61-4435-1 (print)

ISSNL: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5749

ISBN: 978-952-61-4436-8 (PDF) ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

TIIVISTELMÄ

Tässä tutkimuksessa käsittelen ilman oleskelulupaa elävien siirtolaisten ja heitä tukevien kansalaisyhteiskunnan toimijoiden kohtaamisia. Tutkimus sijoittuu “Marenburgiin”, joka yhdistää paikkoina Hampurin, Tukholman ja Helsingin. Empiirinen tutkimus ajoittuu vuosille 2014–2016. Väitöstutkimus tarkastelee lähinnä tilannetta ennen vuonna 2015 alkanutta “maahanmuuton pitkää kesää”. Kysyn tutkimuksessani, miten epävirallisen maahanmuuton representaatiot rakentuvat siirtolaisten ja paikallisen kansalaisyhteiskunnan kanssakäymisissä. Keskityn jännitteeseen tavallisen elämän tavoittelun ja haavoittuvuusolettaman välillä. Siirtolaiset itse painottavat “normaalin”

tavoittelua, mutta heidän oletetaan osoittavan haavoittuvuutta avun ansaitsemisen kriteerinä.

Ensiksi tarkastelen tilannetta, jossa siirtolaiset vaativat oikeuksiaan, esimerkkinä Lampedusa in Hamburg osana pakolaisten ja siirtolaisten poliittista liikettä. Toiseksi keskityn kohtaamisiin kansalaisyhteiskunnan tuottamien palveluiden kontekstissa. Viimeiseksi perehdyn siihen, kuinka järjestöt osallistuvat lainsäädäntöhankkeiden asiantuntijakuulemisiin. Pääasialliset tutkimusmenetelmäni olivat osallistuva havainnointi ja kanssakulkeminen sellaisen henkilön rinnalla, joka etsi ratkaisua oleskeluluvattomuuteensa.

(12)

Tutkimuksen teoreettinen viitekehys rakentuu Engin F. Isinin työhön kansalaisuuden teoista ja erityisesti kansalaisuudesta. Isin käsitteellistää kansalaisuuden idean juridisesta kansalaisuudesta poiketen. Kansalaisuus on prosessi, jossa ulkopuoliset haastavat kansalaisuuden konseptin vaatimalla oikeuksia, joiden katsotaan kuuluvan ainoastaan kansalaisten sisäpiirille.

Tarkastelen tässä viitekehyksessä kaupungin, sen ulkopuolelle jätettyjen siirtolaisten ja heitä tukevan kansalaisyhteiskunnan suhteita. Kohtaamiset, joissa eri toimijat vaativat oikeuksia siirtolaisille valottavat sitä, miten toivottu tavallinen elämä ja oletettu haavoittuvuus tasapainoilevat.

Tällaisissa määrittelyissä haastetaan kansalaisuutta, mutta samalla siinä uusinnetaan kansalaisuuden ei-toivottuja muotoja kuten työntekijäkansalaisuutta tai kansalaisyhteiskunnan toimijoiden roolia ammattilaisina, joiden huolenpidon kohteina siirtolaiset näyttäytyvät.

Avainsanat: kansalaisuus, kansalaisyhteiskunta, siirtolaisuus, laiton maahanmuutto, paperittomat henkilöt, empiirinen tutkimus, lainsäädäntöprosessi

(13)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It has been a privilege to learn in different cities from the groups and individuals who have made this work possible. First and foremost, I want to thank the individuals who offered their time and explained their views, the organizations that opened their doors, and the Lampedusa in Hamburg, who allowed me to follow their actions. I would especially like to highlight the contribution of “Robin”, who gave me their time and shared their perspective as a migrant client. I also want to thank Archiv der Bewegungen, as well as Arbetets Museum for opening their archives for my research.

I have had the possibility to focus on research with grants from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. In addition, I have had support from the Academy of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie), funding decision number 1312431. I thank the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki for the possibility to extend my stay. I am grateful to the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland for the funding, which allowed me to bring this work to completion.

The combined support of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Centre for International Mobility (CIMO), and Saastamoinen Foundation facilitated my stay in 2016–2017 at the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (CISAN) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). It was a valuable opportunity to observe migration research in a setting that is very distinct from Northern Europe. I thank especially Silvia Núñez García for her guidance during this experience. Esta tesis corresponde a los estudios realizados con una beca de excelencia otorgada por el Gobierno de México, a través de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. I also want to thank the Migration Institute of Finland for my very first grant and your trust in my project.

I am grateful to Michi Knecht for her willingness to be the opponent for my defence. The preliminary examiners Lena Näre and Laura Huttunen provided insightful comments that improved my writing and helped me to express certain issues more precisely. The guidance from my custos and main supervisor Laura Assmuth was essential for this work to find its form.

(14)

I also thank my other supervisors Reetta Toivanen and Ilpo Helén. Reetta’s practical guidance was particularly valuable at the moments where I wanted to give up. While Ilpo’s comments forced me to improve the work and further develop the analysis.

I am thankful to Eeva Jokinen for many valuable comments over the years, in addition to the support she has offered me in her role as my work supervisor at the Department of Social Sciences. There are many other researchers at the University of Eastern Finland who have supported the development of this work. For example, the comments from Leena Koski and Päivi Armila in the research seminar in sociology and social policy have been important for solving problems over the years. In addition, the other PhD researchers, like Laura Kumpuniemi and Talvikki Ahonen, have helped in developing the research in a meaningful way.

I would like to thank Kaius Tuori, Magdalena Kmak, Pamela Slott, and Timo Miettinen for providing me the opportunity to stay as a visiting scholar for an extended period at EuroStorie. The truly interdisciplinary exchanges with all the scholars within EuroStorie have offered important insights that have helped me to understand the possibilities of researching legal processes as a part of ethnography. I appreciate the collegial comments and peer support of Elisa Pascucci, Jukka Könönen, Laura Sumari, Mehrnoosh Farzamfar, and Ali Ali. In the last phase of my doctorate, my office companions Ville Suuronen and Tuukka Brunila have been great mental support. I want to thank the project coordinators, as well as Nora Fabritius, Tuomas Heikkilä, and the other research assistants for their support.

Throughout the years, I have had important conversations with activists from the Free Movement Network, including Katja Tuominen, Mohammed Javid, Harri Simolin, and Amir Jan, among many others. Their insights have led me to reconsider how to analyse what I thought I saw in the field. From this connection a research peer group developed so-called, “kriisiryhmä” or the “crises group” of PhD researchers who focused their work on migration and race/racism. Comments from Markus Himanen, Aino Korvensyrjä, Olivia Maury, Minna Seikkula, and Niina Vuolajärvi have helped me turn perpetual crises of undertaking a doctorate into a means of empowerment.

(15)

I have needed others’ knowledges in many ways throughout this research.

Pia Lundbom, Riikka Taavetti, Jonas Mithiku and Dan Koivulaakso have shared their better understanding of issues that were not in the core of my expertise.

In Stockholm, Shahram Khosravi, Erika Sigvardsdotter, as well as the late Heidi Moksnes shared their knowledge. In Hamburg, Norbert Cyrus and Conni Gunsser helped me to gain an overview of the migrant irregularity in the city.

In addition, the multilingual writing processes have required others’ skills on multiple occasions. I would like to thank Albion M. Butters for proofreading the text of my dissertation. Also, David Blum, Johan Ehrstedt, Mariko Sato, Sophia Hagolani-Albov, and Utu Förbom were of great help. I want to mention Silke Trommer and Ina Juva, who offered me their support in the early stages of this research. In addition, the support from Teppo Eskelinen and Matti Ylönen has buoyed me more than once while overcoming obstacles.

Of course, this work would not have reached its goal without the support of friends and my extended family, in particular my mother. My grandparents have also given me their unconditional support, although they often had no understanding at all about what I was doing. I extend my deepest thanks to the living community in Hamburg, Iris Lågwall, and the late Helmer Lågwall for their support. Since my son Emil made his joy-filled appearance, I have needed you all more than ever to be able to bring this project to its conclusion.

I would like to thank my partner Cristian for his eternal patience and taking on so many responsibilities in our everyday lives.

(16)

(17)

INTRODUCTION

During the spring of 2013, a group of migrants gathered on the streets of Hamburg. They had arrived in Italy after fleeing from Libya in 2011 but then demanded the right to stay in Hamburg. I had come to the city in the summer of 2013 to plan for my forthcoming fieldwork there. I first met some activists of the group that summer at St Pauli Church, where they had found a shelter. The dual relationship between organizations and migrants caught my attention. Migrant activists demanded their rights in collaboration with (other) local activists, who acted as co-activists. Their demands reached far beyond merely asking for access to services; they demanded the right to stay as well, including the right to work. Simultaneously, I met representatives of different civil society groups, which were also identified as service providers and/or advocacy organizations. While the migrants on the street were speaking on their own behalf in the media with their own names and faces, the services targeted irregularity through vulnerability, and advocacy organizations presented an image of irregularized migrants as people without possibilities to demand their rights. This controversy began to shape the core of this research.

This study is about the complicated relationship between civil society organizations and migrants without rights to reside in Hamburg, Stockholm, and Helsinki. I focus on interactions between migrants and their supporters and the acts of citizenship which result from those. Acts of citizenship refer to citizenship as practices and actions, which take place beyond the juridical- administrative frame, where citizenship is understood as a container (Isin 2002, 2009). In this study, these are moments where different actors demand – or implement – rights for those who formally do not exist in the city. In this work, I analyse citizenship inspired by the work of Engin F. Isin, Peter Nyers (2003, 2008), Anne McNevin (2011), and others. I focus on three sites where migrants and their supporters engage in acts of citizenship: first, services, where migrants are clients of civil society organizations; second, self- organized protests, where migrants take a role as political activists; and third, advocacy in parliamentary processes. My overarching research question

(20)

for this doctoral dissertation is the following: how are the representations of migrant irregularity constructed in interactions between migrants and the local civil society?

The foundation for this research was laid during the year 2011 in Helsinki.

After a seminar and book launch for the non-fiction Undocumented Lives (Viitanen and Tähjä 2010), different civil society organizations united to discuss a newly recognized phenomenon: migrant irregularity. They had a shared interest in understanding the phenomenon and supporting those who were sans-papiers.¹ After a group of migrants demanding their rights in France in 1996 chose to name themselves with this description (Cissé 2002), the term came to be used in Sweden (papperslösa) and was also translated into Finnish (paperittomat). Some civil society organizations had used it earlier, and now it was being promoted in non-fiction books (Leppäkorpi 2011; Viitanen and Tähjä 2010), as well as in the first master’s thesis about migrants’ right to health (Heikinheimo 2011). NGOs, religious communities, and other civil society groups that met migrants in their activities had gained experiences with migrant irregularity. But the overall understanding was still vague: Who were these people, and how did they survive in a country as regulated as Finland? What could we do together?

I participated in the meetings of this loose network as a member of an activist group, Vapaa liikkuvuus (Free Movement Network). Some organizations presented project proposals related to health and legal counselling. Lawyers and medical professionals aimed to support sans-papiers with their professional skills. After a few meetings, I wondered if these services would meet the needs of the target group or if migrants would have possibilities to improve on the offer from their perspective.

While I was developing my research project, Sweden introduced an act² concerning health care for “certain foreigners staying in the country without a permit”. The process had started as a civil society campaign in 2008 (Nordling

1 The name origins from the movement of migrants living in irregularity in France, which organized themselves in 1996 to a group called “Sans-Papiers”

2 Lag om om hälso- och sjukvård till vissa utlänningar som vistas i Sverige utan nödvändiga tillstånd (Svensk författningssamling [SFS] 2013:407. [Swed.] Further:

[SFS] 2013:407).

(21)

2017, 52), in which a self-organized group of sans-papiers, Papperslösa Stockholm, participated (Hellgren 2014).³ This engendered further questions about the roles of migrants and the civil society in advocating for migrants’

rights. The right to health care had been a practical project at the clinics, but also a political project in which the civil society organizations engaged in advocating for migrants’ right to health. I asked also, how would this look in Hamburg, a city that is culturally close to the Nordic countries but with a longer history of migrant irregularity. This long history manifests in a quantity of services for migrants as well as a history of self-organized migrant protests (Heck 2008, 115–55). Would the histories be similar? And how would migrants themselves be involved in actions concerning them in Hamburg, Stockholm, and Helsinki?

I primarily conducted the field research in 2014. The temporal focus of this research is on the time before the “long summer of migration”⁴ in 2015 and its aftermath. In all three cities, there had been awareness for a while about the existence of migrants without resident permits (Diakonisches Werk Hamburg 2009; Karakayali 2008; Khosravi 2006; Leppäkorpi 2011). The civil society organizations provided services for irregularized migrants in each.

Churches, established NGOs, activist groups, and informal professionals had organized support in the form of drop-in cafés, legal aid clinics, health care, and more. I conducted the main empirical part of this research among those civil society organizations which meet (among others) irregularized migrants.

This offered a window into the everyday encounters between those who provided services and those who sought them. I also had the chance to follow a self-organized group of irregularized migrants in Hamburg. Lampedusa in

3 The supporters are listed on the campaign website (http://vardforpapperslosa.se/;

accessed 24.11.2021).

4 Bernd Kasparek and Marc Speer (2015) have suggested the term “long summer of migration” to describe the movements from early 2015 onwards, which in public discourse were established as “refugee crises” or “migration crises”. The “long summer” in the case of Finland extended to the following winter. The “summer of migration” has also been later used as a term (Hess et al. 2016), which shifts the focus from individuals and migrants as “crises” towards structural conditions (Fleischmann and Steinhelper 2017). In this shift, the “crises” refers to the crises of refugee protection, the borders of “Europe” (Schwiertz and Ratfisch 2016), or even

“Europe” as a project (New Keywords Collective 2016).

(22)

Hamburg was not the first self-organized migrant protest in the city,⁵ and there had been earlier, similar protests in Stockholm (Sigvardsdotter 2012).

In Helsinki, the most visible earlier protest had been a hunger strike in 2012 (Pellander and Horsti 2018).

This research spatially combines the fields from three real cities into one, an imaginary city named “Marenburg”. Although comparing cities might seem logical, given the setting of different places under different legislations, there are more similarities than differences when the civil society meets a migrant in a precarious situation. These similarities justify merging the cities as transparent foils on top of each other, which facilitates an understanding of the nuances of the infrastructure for the migrants. There is also a risk for those working with irregularized migrants in Germany to be criminalized (Aufenthaltsgesetz [AufenthG] [Residence Act], § 95 [Ger.])⁶ My desire to create an exact image of times and places must bend under the need of anonymity of the people and locations. Therefore, this is not a work about Hamburg, Stockholm, and Helsinki, but Marenburg and the people in it. Marenburg is located in three countries with three legislations. When I focus on advocacy as part of the field, I will move from the anonymous, merged Marenburg to presenting specific characters in different legislation processes.

In retrospect, 2014 was the moment before the long summer of migration, and subsequently “welcome culture” (Fleischmann and Steinhilper 2017;

Karakayali 2018) changed the field. In 2015, there was a record number of first asylum applications in Europe (1,323,000, compared to 627,000 one year earlier) (Eurostat 2021). The arrivals of new asylum seekers made headlines on all the research sites. Migrants sought their place in European states, and cities failed in receiving the newcomers adequately. Although formally newly arrived migrants were mainly (prospective) asylum seekers, the public discourse soon focused on their assumed irregularity. At first the attention

5 Among others in Germany, The Voice Refugee Forum and Karawane (Caravan for the rights of refugees and migrants) are national networks (Heck 2008, 118–19) with a significant presence in Hamburg in 2014 (Niess 2018).

6 Gesetz über den Aufenthalt, die Erwerbstätigkeit und die Integration von Ausländern im Bundesgebiet [AufenthG] [Act on the Residence, Economic Activity and Integration of Foreigners in the Federal Territory], 30.7.2004. (Ger.). https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_aufenthg/index.html. Further: “Residence Act”.

(23)

was on the irregular arrivals, but soon it shifted towards the predicted scenario of people staying in Europe after negative decisions regarding their asylum processes. The irregularity gained attention in public discourse and in parliamentary politics. In Finland, the estimated prognosis of 10,000 new undocumented migrants made headlines, and in Sweden there was a concern about missing children possibly ending up as victims of human trafficking.

When I returned to the field in late 2015 and early 2016, a lot had changed.

Most drop-ins were even more chaotic than before, not because of the irregular residing of the people but because the cities and states were unprepared for a scenario in which migrants would arrive in such high numbers. The Dublin Regulation and national practices failed from the Balkan region to the Nordic countries. Civil society partially replaced the absent state. In addition to those who had been involved for longer periods of time in supporting migrants, new helpers, supporters, volunteers, and activists came to the newcomers’

aid (Karakayali and Hamann 2016; Näre 2020a; Povrzanović Frykman and Mäkelä 2020).

The long summer of migration changed the field, but it also reinforced dynamics which were already there. Intentions to manage migration produce migrant irregularities, and the more people there are in different administrative-juridical limbos, the more desire there is for the civil society to act – and finally for the public institutions to contribute to their work. The civil society organizations offer services (partially with public resources), support migrants’ protests, and speak on behalf of migrants in different arenas.

Therefore, the complicated relationship between irregularized migrants and their supporters deserves more attention. With this research, I seek to bring together acts of citizenship as a continuity, which deconstruct and reconstruct the political citizenship of migrants but also those who act together and on behalf of them.

The field of interactions between migrants and the supporting civil society is broad and complex. Often the analysis about the acts of citizenship focuses on one specific series of actions, which can be analysed as an act of citizenship (Isin and Saward 2013), such as a single, self-organized migrant protest (McNevin 2011; Nyers 2008), like Lampedusa in Hamburg specifically (Benigni and Pierdicca 2014; Niess 2018), or even theorizing migrant protests

(24)

as acts of citizenship generally (Olivieri 2016). Equally, scholars have analysed solidarity actions in the context of citizenship, when civil society organizations provide support in the absence or failing of public offers (Nordling, Sager, and Söderman 2017; Squire 2018). In addition, actions which challenge the citizenship in the supranational juridical context (Faure Atger 2013) and in the political and juridical fields (Rajaram and Arendas 2013) have been framed as acts of citizenship. Isin (2013, 26) describes acts of citizenship as a continuity, acts that stretch across boundaries and involve multiple scales of contestation, belonging, identification, and struggle. The sites for acts of citizenship overlap in several studies and are not restricted to a specific, easily limitable sphere. Still, there is a lack of research, which would set parallel and sometimes contradictory acts of citizenship with different goals into one frame. I intend to answer to this gap with my empirical contribution.

Characteristically for ethnographic research, the research process took its form during the fieldwork. Originally, my interest rose from doubts about the needs and priorities of the service users, but the research question found its very last shape during the fieldwork. I had located possible spaces for observations during early visits to the cities in 2013. The variety of organizations and spaces the service users worked in brought some new questions about the differences in the character of the organizations themselves. After beginning the field research in 2014, I had to reformulate the original questions about the needs and offers, in order to answer the relevant issues that arose in the encounters.

I reorientated my focus after some specific episodes in the field. First, somewhat unexpectedly, Lampedusa in Hamburg was still strongly present.

Secondly, this was the context where I initially became aware of migrants accusing the supporting organizations of victimizing and colonialist behaviour.

Later I learned that the criticism was also expressed in the context of services.

Thirdly, I observed a discrepancy between a drop-in and the report by the same organization at the end of their funding period: the majority of the clients were male, from young to middle age, in very different legal limbos, while the advocacy focused on the difficulties of female migrants who lacked any residence permit. The fourth concrete episodes were two legislation processes within one year in Finland, one which targeted the structural

(25)

conditions that cause migrant irregularity, while the other could have granted some irregularized migrants’ access to health care. They received very different levels of attention from the organizations of the civil society (Könönen 2015). These four controversial episodes widened my focus to the representations.

I argue that understanding nuances requires observing interactions from various perspectives. To answer my research question, I work with a variety of data, which is interwoven in this book throughout the chapters. I work particularly with two sub questions:

First, I go after the question of what kinds of citizenship, political subjects, and representations the acts of citizenship reproduce. Earlier analysis about the acts of citizenship emphasize the ambiguous, paradoxical, and sometimes unexpected results of those acts (Isin 2013). Besides the intended effects, the acts may also produce countereffects. Acts of citizenship constitute subjects who claim rights and enact themselves as activist citizens, but in the process they simultaneously differentiate others who are strangers, outsiders, and aliens (Isin 2013, 41), or reproduce “perhaps the worst symbols of the dominant narrative” of citizenship (Isin 2012, 59).

Secondly, I follow the constant conflict between the narrative of vulnerability and aspirations to normal to see how these conform. During the fieldwork, the omnipresent use of “vulnerability” as a working concept caught my attention. Organizations talked about their clients as vulnerable, and vulnerability is an argumentation in legislation processes. Simultaneously, migrants neglected their vulnerability but performed it for organizations.

This was an obvious contradiction with the political actions which had taken place in these contexts. There had been individual protest actions, such as hunger strikes and sabotage of workplaces, but also visible protests, including manifestations in front of the Parliament House and squatting in buildings.

Another controversy is related to migrants’ constant desires to have a normal life. Since I am interested in the civil society promoting migrants’ rights, two of those representations are most present in this research: the representations of a vulnerable migrant and the protests around one’s own irregularity.

Representations of migrants as contributing members of the society in which they show their own faces (Cissé 2002) differ widely from the pictures of

(26)

exemplary deserving victims in NGO publications (Cabot 2016a). My focus throughout the analysis is on these representations and their reconstruction.

The acts of citizenship link to each other in a process which has a circular dynamic. In this work, I observe the acts of citizenship as a process where they enable one another (Isin 2013, 25). The everyday encounters between migrants and the supporting and advocating organizations shape the understanding about the migrant irregularity. Besides the protests, services are the contexts where civil society organizations gather knowledge. The understanding of migrant irregularity is the base for representing the people in advocacy. One part of advocacy is participation in parliamentary processes, such as committee hearings and serving as experts in legislation processes.

I seek to analyse how the everyday encounters translate into representations of irregularity. Customary hearings in parliamentary processes are, of course, only one form of advocacy. The organizations answer specific questions or promote a specific right. These are not situations where stakeholders would freely position themselves and critically discuss irregularity or representations.

Instead, the documents offer a window onto organizations’ understanding about an effective way of advocating and representing those who regularly receive no invitations to represent their own positions.

My research interest and the research question of this study arise from earlier activism related to migrants’ rights. I have participated in the Free Movement Network and the advisory work of the group. Collaboration with migrants in their struggles has brought possibilities to see the consequences of politics which aim to manage and control the mobility through legal and administrative restrictions. But I have also observed a variety of strategies of negotiations about one’s own position in the society. Activism is not separate from the position as a researcher: my research questions arise from the realities I could only observe as an activist. This position also enabled access to the field during this research.

The academic orientation of this work is positioned in the tradition of sociological and anthropological research. This research contributes to the field of critical migration studies in Europe. Consequently, I distance myself as a researcher from methodological nationalism, the idea of nation-state-centric research, which understands borders between the states as “natural” limits.

(27)

This challenges the understanding of the society and the state as synonymous concepts, as a container (Beck 2000, 23). This reduces the movement of the people to something that would happen within the legal framework of the

“receiving” region. There are also intentions to categorize people according to their reasons to move, although the line between forced and voluntary migration may be very thin or mixed (Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2014; Erdal and Oeppen 2018). In addition, war, persecutions, and economic deprivation frequently interact and undermine attempts to distinguish voluntary from forced migration (Crawley and Skleparis 2018). Migration is often analysed as a problem in the context of a nation-state, or “migrants appear as threatening outsiders, knocking at the gates, or sneaking through the gates into societies richer than those from which the immigrants came” (Sassen 1999, 1). Stephen Castles (2010) argues that the idea of neutrality in the research might cover this presumption.

Irregular statuses exist as a contrast to legality-related juridical- administrative categories and practices (Dauvergne 2008; Düvell 2008; Ngai 2004). The public and political debates around people living in a country without a residence permit vary between stigmatizing them as criminals – and victimizing them as hiding or, even more passively, “hidden” (Sw.

gömda), vulnerable persons (Holgersson 2011). Part of the positioning as a critical researcher in the field of migration derives from Yann Moulier- Boutang’s (1993) idea on emigration as an autonomous fact. This includes accepting migration as an autonomous process, which can and should not be reduced to a simplistic result of push and pull factors. I consider the people I interviewed for this research as individuals, who have been and can make the best possible decisions for their own lives within the limits of varying realities.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

This book consists of nine chapters. In the first three, I introduce and conceptualize the research project. I will begin with contextualizing the research and Marenburg as an imaginary city where irregularized migrants meet their supporters. I will offer background and context for this research.

(28)

I discuss key concepts and present Marenburg and different actors within the city.

I will present the methodological basis for the research as well as the methods and main features of the data in Chapter 2. Since the subject of the research is controversial and there are ethical issues in researching people who lack a formal status in the society, I will discuss the ethical challenges and decisions I made to avoid harming any people or organizations. In Chapter 3, I present the theoretical framework for this work. I focus particularly on borders which manifest in the city and citizenship. I will discuss citizenship beyond formal belonging, as an ongoing process of defining the insiders in relation to the outsiders.

The second part of this research (Chapters 4 to 8) focuses on empirically analysing the negotiations about migrant irregularity in Marenburg and national level. In Chapter 4, I investigate migrants’ descriptions of everyday life and their personal goals for living in Marenburg. I ask how personal desires translate into an act of citizenship. I reflect on the interviews with irregularized migrants, discuss their wishes, and examine those in the context of challenging citizenship in the form of self-organized protests. I contextualize Lampedusa in Hamburg, which was active during my time in the city (see also Benigni and Pierdicca 2014; Niess 2018; Sparke and Mitchell 2018) in a continuum of earlier self-organized protests as acts of citizenship (Isin 2012; Nyers 2008; McNevin 2011).

In the following two chapters, I focus particularly on the services. In this dissertation, everyday bordering (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018), the alienating strategies of citizenship in everyday life, become tangible in public services where individuals do not pass as clients, due to their status or a lack of status. I argue that the mere existence of services for migrants, who face everyday bordering at the public institutions, is an act of citizenship.

In Chapter 5, I ask what kinds of structures are constructed to challenge the mechanisms of everyday bordering, when the civil society organizations construct an infrastructure for the excluded, that is, the outsiders. I will present the actors of civil society, asking how the organizations meet their client and negotiate what they offer in relation to what clients need.

(29)

In Chapter 6, I will then focus deeper on the interactions between migrants and the service providers. Services provide more than infrastructure. My third sub-question focuses on these encounters. I want to see what kinds of roles participants take, and what kinds of understanding they reproduce about migrant irregularity as a phenomenon. In these interactions, I am interested in the reproduction of roles and representations, and how the participants perform their roles. I will focus on migrants acting as clients to find the support they need within the offered framework of services. Equally, actors within the organizations take their role as service providers. The organizations lack resources and consequently are under pressure when allocating their time and available material support among more people in need than they could serve. In Chapter 7, I will look which features a deserving client should have.

In Chapter 8, I ask what kind of citizenship the organizations reproduce when they demand rights for irregularized migrants. I analyse organizations as stakeholders in the legislation process. I focus on professionalism in these processes, where gained knowledge positions civil society organizations as experts in migrant irregularity.

In the concluding chapter I discuss controversial citizenship as well as the dichotomy between the desired normal life and ambiguous vulnerability. I draw the findings of the earlier chapters together to analyse how much these two concepts can or should co-exist.

(30)

(31)

1 IRREGULARITY IN MARENBURG

In this chapter, I contextualize migrant irregularity in Marenburg as intertwined with empirical material. I offer background and context for understanding irregularity in the city and encounters between irregularized migrants and civil society, with the latter supporting the former through material aid, professional advice, and advocacy for their rights. First, I will investigate the heterogeneous irregularity as it appeared through the experiences of individuals whom I encountered during the fieldwork (1.1). I then present the imaginary, merged city of Marenburg as a stage where the encounters between migrants and civil society take place (1.2).

I contextualize actions for migrants’ rights through two distinct examples of demands (1.3). First, I present a self-organized migrant protest: Lampedusa in Hamburg. As an ongoing protest, it will exemplify in this research a longer history of interactions between migrant activists and local activists who promote their rights. After that, I offer a view of Marenburg’s civil society organizations. I raise the complex term of vulnerability and tensions, on which this research is constructed.

1.1 Heterogeneous irregularity

Crossing geographical borders

Marlo was one of the individuals whom I met in Marenburg but was then lost from my sight. Marlo’s history of migration to and within Europe characterizes the movement between “legal” and “illegal”.

Marlo had originally arrived in Europe more than a decade ago, crossing the European external border without required travel documents. They⁷ had followed a sibling to a southern European country. After years of irregular stay, Marlo got a residence permit through an amnesty. Due

7 In this work I use the pronoun “they/their”, which I will further discuss in Chapter 2.

(32)

to the financial crisis of 2008, the opportunities to work in construction got ever fewer, and the social welfare system failed to provide the basic necessities. Marlo found leaving the country for new opportunities to be the only solution. They had arrived in Marenburg expecting to find basic services, such as low-threshold accommodation, before finding opportunities of their own. The plan was to establish an independent life based on work as soon as possible. Marlo had imagined Marenburg as a city within a country with a vivid economy, which would provide enough working opportunities for all. After finding out that (as they put it) “even migrants with European citizenship” were begging and sleeping rough, Marlo started re-evaluating the situation.

They found a possibility to live in a shared apartment together with several other migrants, some of them without any residence status, some in in-between situations. Marlo’s own status was about to change from

“having a status elsewhere” to “no permit at all”, as the residence permit in the other country would soon expire, and there were no grounds for renewing it.

(Field notes from informal discussions with Marlo, 2014)⁸

Marlo’s irregularity is a complicated journey, which has more aspects than a series of personal decisions. Marlo was one of the migrants who narrated their personal motivations to migrate. Within these discussions, the motivations to leave the country of origin varied. People left to escape persecution, for financial motives, because of existing networks in Europe or in the specific cities, to seek adventure, or for a mix of several reasons. The mixed motives behind migration are also known in earlier research (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2011, 2014; Castles and Davidson 2000; Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2014).

Even more than others, group members of Lampedusa in Hamburg often told their very complex migration histories. They had different motivations for migrating to and residing in Libya, but they had found means for living. The group members shared experiences of fleeing after the Gaddafi regime fell.

Seeking and finding refuge after earlier successful history as migrant workers

8 Details on data in Chapter 2.

(33)

was part of their identity as a political group.⁹ When the Italian government granted protection to those arriving from Libya, the temporary reception program ended and those who had formerly lived in reception facilities found themselves on the street. They made the decision to leave Italy under

“direct or indirect orders”, as Finley, one of the group speakers, described.

The authorities encouraged migrants to leave Italy without explaining the administrative consequences or lack of rights in other European countries (Fontanari 2017, 39). This brought the group together in Hamburg, where they confronted problems of European migration management, particularly the Dublin Regulation.¹⁰ Following Nandita Sharma (2003), Helma Lutz (2004), and Nicholas De Genova (2013a), who write about “illegalized” migrants, in this work I use the term “irregularized migrant” to underline the process through which a person moves between the ambiguous categories of legal/

illegal or regular/irregular as a consequence of policies and practices which irregularize individuals.

Migrants’ travel routes to Marenburg varied from years of journeying (as for Marlo) to a direct flight to the local airport. Indeed, Hein de Haas (2007) estimates an airplane flight to be the most common method of arrival for those who later remain in irregularity, contrary to the spectacular images from external borders and disproportionate focus on border spectacles (De Genova 2013a). Some had planned to travel to the respective city or country, while others arrived after a series of coincidences and a long migration process. Besides speaking English with migrants as the lingua franca, I spoke Swedish in Hamburg, Finnish in Stockholm, German in Finland, and Spanish with Italian speakers, since people had already been elsewhere in Europe and learned those local languages. In most interviews, the narrative of coming to

9 The Italian government responded to the increase in arrivals from North Africa in 2011 with the North Africa Emergency program, a combination of humanitarian and security-oriented approaches. The Italian government issued one-year humanitarian protection to all who escaped the war in Libya in December 2012 (Fontanari 2017, 39).

10 The experiences of flight as well as conditions in Italy were documented, and they found the form of a physical exhibition with the title “We want our life back”

(inauguration in July 2013) (Sparke and Mitchell 2018, 225–26) as well as a weblog (http://lampedusaausstellung.blogspot.com/p/exhibition-we-want-our-life-back.

html).

(34)

live in Marenburg had the character of ending up. Shahram Khosravi (2007) describes the arbitrary manner of ending up in his autoethnography “The

‘illegal’ traveller”. Negotiating his destination in Europe with a smuggler, Khosravi had the possibility to choose between the Netherlands and Sweden.

He chose the Netherlands since he had heard more about that country.

Before leaving, the route to the Netherlands became unavailable and he ended up in Sweden. Socio-economic possibilities are known to shape the migration process (Van Hear 2014). Khosravi (2007) describes ending up as a result of several factors, including rumours, performances, or coincidences, as do others who came to live in Marenburg. Rumours of available jobs (or imagined ones), Marenburg being the biggest available city close to a reception centre, a recommendation, or cheap tickets affected the choices which had brought migrants to the city.

Marenburg was not necessarily the end of the journey either. Interviewees, as well as migrants I met through organizations, talked about their plans to leave the city or the country. For some, any city but Marenburg would be an opportunity; others had a concrete destination in mind. There were three ways of talking about the planned, future destination. One was with a reference to networks, family members, or friends who would receive them and help them to find a place to stay and a means to live. This related to specific places. For Marlo, it was Cologne; for others it was, for example, Canada, Germany, Malmö in Sweden, or France.

The second motive for planning to leave was based on information or rumours about less restrictive migration policies somewhere else. In one concrete case, I heard a rumour that migrants with a “Lampedusa past”

would automatically receive a residence permit in Finland. I interpreted the Lampedusa past as a fixed category for migrants who had to flee the specific war in Libya and became stranded in Europe within a certain period. I explained the Finnish Aliens’ Act and the probability of an unwanted negative decision. About six months later, I received an e-mail about the same issue, since more people were convinced that Finland would be a good destination. I never heard of anyone trying their luck, though. These rumours had a similar character as the factors that lead people to end up in Marenburg in the first place.

(35)

The third possible destination was the place of origin, due to experiences of humiliation through poorness, institutional and direct racism, and a lack of dignity. The return to the place of origin, however, was often a demonstrative statement, pointing out that it is better to die in an area of conflict than to have failed in Europe after trusting in the ideals of human rights and humanity. Migrants turned the imagined local identity against the community of the receiving country. I interpreted the expressed plans of leaving mostly as criticism towards the migration regime rather than necessarily as an expression of their actual will. In the case of the Sans-Papiers protest in France, Anne McNevin (2006, 144) discusses this kind of rhetoric as an appeal to a specific discourse about French nationalism.

Between regular and irregular

Movement is not only geographical. Besides of having originally arrived and stayed irregularly, Marlo moved between regular and irregular statuses as well as countries with different legal settings. Liza Schuster (2005) analyses migration status as a dynamic and continuing process instead of an end-state condition. Irregularity is often a moment in the migration path (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2014). People end up in irregularity – as they end up in Marenburg or any other place – often after moments of a regular sojourn (including the asylum process). They might live without regular status in a city and end up legalizing their stay there or elsewhere through an amnesty, asylum process, work, family ties, studies, or individual grounds. The paths to irregularity might be mixed due to different periods of time, where one can end up in irregularity through different mechanisms and then legalize their stay again (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2014).

The geographical perspective alone is insufficient in explaining the character of irregularity. There are several paths into and out of it (see Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2014; Düvell 2011; Vogel and Jandl 2008). In line with earlier research (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010; Kraler and Reicher 2011), among the irregularized migrants I met, the most common path was status-related, overstaying after a visa or residence permit – or an asylum process ending in a negative decision. Some planned for overstaying already before arrival;

some decided to stay more spontaneously. I also observed geographic paths

(36)

into irregularity, travelling irregularly into the country and staying irregularly, as Marlo did. A demographic path – namely, being born into irregularity – was rare, even though I also met families whose children were born during their irregular stay in Europe. Later, Malo legalized their stay through amnesty.

In other words, their temporary exit from irregularity was status-related.

Others ended their irregularity after leaving the continent independently,

“voluntarily”¹¹ through return programs, or in a forced manner through deportation to the region of origin (geographic). In one case, Lampedusa in Hamburg published the death of a member of the group (demographic) (see Kraler and Reichel 2011).

Robin, whose experiences I will describe throughout this work, was between regular and irregular when we met. I had the possibility to walk through the services of Marenburg with Robin and in this way their experiences became central for my research.¹² I will describe the method further in Chapter 2.

Understanding Robin’s situation opens some views into the unclear switches between clear, administrative-juridical regular and irregular moments.

Robin had arrived in Marenburg with their partner as tourists. After the 90 allowed days to stay had passed, they were still in the city. Robin worked underpaid, and with the money they subleased an overpriced room in a shared apartment in the outer margins of Marenburg. For family reasons, their partner later had to return to their country of origin. Robin had found a way to legalize their stay, for which an asylum application was necessary. During the process, the conditions changed, and Robin found themselves in a situation with an expiring work contract, a hopeless asylum case, and Robin lost hope. When we met, the flight back to the country of origin was about to be booked by the immigration office, but their individual condition had changed...

Robin visited the same drop-in service several times. They were unsu- re about their current legal status. Different workers estimated their

11 About the “voluntary” character of voluntary returns, see Webber 2011.

12 The experiences with Robin have been analysed earlier in the Journal Kansalaisyhteiskunta (Leppäkorpi 2015).

(37)

situation differently during that time, from “you are undocumented” to

“you are not really undocumented”.

(Field notes from walking with Robin, 2014)

Robin’s ir/regularity was related to the time and implementation of their removal from Marenburg. To be exact, their history of migration consisted of varying grade of regularity, to which Robin referred when they narrated their experiences in Marenburg. Martin Ruhs and Bridget Anderson (2010) analyse this by using the concept of compliance. A person could be compliant (have the right to reside and work), semi-compliant (have the right to reside but with or without restricted rights to work), or non-compliant (without the right to reside and consequently without the right to work) (see also Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010). In terms of Ruhs and Anderson, Robin was between non-compliant and semi-compliant, in a grey area which Cecilia Menjívar (2006) has conceptualized as liminal legality. The categories are blurry, statuses overlapping, and the rights vary accordingly (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010; Düvell 2008, 2011; Sager and Öberg 2017).

For Marlo, the in-between – as we met in Marenburg – was geographical.

In theory, Marlo could have returned to live in the country where they had a residence permit. Marlo and Robin had, in theory, some access to some social welfare somewhere in Europe. Factually, Marlo had not received support in southern Europe, and Robin assumed they had no right to receive the asylum seekers’ allowance. Both had a history of irregularity in Europe and assumed they were heading towards it again.

The living conditions resulted from a variety of factors. The same conditions which would make formal housing arrangements inaccessible for a person without the right to stay limited the access for Marlo and Robin, too. A lack of a social security number as a symbol of belonging complicated life in Marenburg (Holgersson 2011; Leppäkorpi 2011; Sigvardsdotter 2012). Marlo shared their livelihood with other people, whose statuses, according to Marlo, varied. Some had no right to stay and Marlo searched for material aid for all of them.

Migrants experienced their irregularity differently, which among other things related to the grade of compliance. Against my expectations, though,

(38)

those who had the right to stay in the city often experienced encounters similarly as migrants under an acute threat of deportation:

I was walking with Marlo and Robin towards the metro station, between them in a three-person row. I translated, since they did not share a common language. Two private security guards in uniforms appeared slowly with the escalator. Suddenly, I was heading alone towards the stairs, talking to myself instead of Marlo. Robin and Marlo were behind me. They kept walking slowly and re-evaluated the situation. When the guards kept going without paying interest to them, Marlo came to walk by my side and explained: “They had uniforms, you know. It’s a reac- tion.”

(Field notes from the traveling between two services in Marenburg, 2014)

Marlo had no acute reason to fear deportation. Their stay as a tourist was legal and a deportation to another EU country would have been inconvenient, but not (yet) disastrous. Motivations of migration as well as conditions in the country of origin may affect how migrants experience irregularity (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2014). Interviewees emphasized financial and other dependencies as factors which affect the experienced irregularity. To my surprise, I observed more similarities than differences in the everyday living conditions, the emotions people described, and the fear of deportation (or trust in a god to organize the situation somehow).

One relevant factor in defining a person’s ir/regularity is work. When a person crosses a border, the set of rights for them may change even if the original residence status does not. Marlo, for instance, had a permit to work in one European country and possibilities to move within Europe, but only as a tourist. A third-country citizen with a long-term residence permit in the EU could legally work in Sweden without an extra permit during my fieldwork interval, but Finland and Germany required a local residence permit. Residence permits based on work made migrants dependent on their employers and sponsors (B. Anderson 2010; Könönen 2014). The threat of irregularity may motivate migrants to accept exploitative conditions (Könönen 2012). Niina

(39)

Vuolajärvi (2018) shows in the case of sex workers in Finland how gradient insecurity due to different rights or a lack of them creates dependencies on clients, husbands, and lovers.

Working without a permit usually takes place in the informal economy, which as such is legal, but the taxes and social security payments are not paid. Employment may appear to be formal, although it is not.

After an interview, we left the fast food restaurant and walked towards the railway station. Suddenly we met Honor on the street! None of us had been in contact for more than a year. We started talking and [the interviewee]¹³ asked how Honor was doing. Apparently, everything was as usual: still nothing formal – except for a job. After the summer, new reception facilities had opened in and around Marenburg. Cleaning and other supporting tasks had been outsourced and the cleaning company had hired many new workers. Honor showed their passport during the recruiting interview and the employer had taken that as a guarantee for – something. Somehow, Honor had been able to get the first payment without more questions – but now for the second payment they should have a working permit. To get the money Honor was looking for a way to get that permit within the next week to clarify the situation.

(Field notes from an informal discussion, 2015)

The ambiguity of regular/irregular and employers’ vague understanding of irregularity may sometimes open possibilities for semi-regular employment, as possibly in the case of Honor. I also observed a situation where an irregularized migrant, with whom I was in contact, found “formal” employment.

Based on the documents I saw, I concluded that the employer had registered the migrant worker in the tax system with the nationality of their EU residence permit instead of their formal, third-country nationality. The administrative practices materialized in grey zones of (il)legal employment. In Sweden, several interviewees mentioned the possibility to keep working in irregularity with a former contract, dating from the time they were asylum seekers, although

13 In this work, I use brackets in quotes to emphasis my own remarks and clarifications.

(40)

controls had since been tightened. In Finland, the main newspaper published a case of seemingly regular but actually irregular work: the employer and employee had thought the employment would be formal, since all taxes and fees were paid and the employee had a residence permit in the EU, until one day the police knocked on the door (Boxberg 2014).

Irregular work

Since the possibility to work dominated interviews as well as observed interactions between migrants and their supporters, I will offer further outlook on irregular work in Marenburg. Robin, like others who described their experiences in the grey economy, spoke of working conditions that were similar to earlier studies: working contracts are informal and short term, and there are no guarantees for the next working period. Irregularized migrants categorically earn less than others (Alt 2003; Könönen 2014; Sager 2011).

The interviewed migrants reported their salaries as varying from 1 €/h to the equivalent of the minimum wage standard for the type of work, without taxes.

Jörg Alt (2003, 126) has shown the differences in salaries based on irregular workers’ nationalities in care and cleaning jobs in German households.

The differences have been explained, for example, on the basis of ethnic stratification (Alho 2015, 93). In Stockholm, Heidi Moksnes (2016) explained the rather good position of irregularized Latin American workers through the integration of Latin American refugees during the 1970s. Ethnic stratification can be an explanatory factor, but it is not the only one. The interviewees report that their salaries depend on their residence status: the worse the status, the less the salary (see also Alho 2015, 93–94). Landing in different low-paid jobs is based on a complex hierarchy, which is influenced by gender, ethnicity, race, and networks within community (Bernhardt, McGrath, and DeFilippis 2008). Within this hierarchy, those who lack bargaining power are the most abused in terms of minimum wage violations (Bernhardt, Spiller, and Polson 2013). Moksnes (2016) argues that organizing as a union can also have a positive effect on salary, but on the other hand it may make finding a job difficult in the first place.

Interviewees worked primarily for small companies, which sometimes had subcontracts for bigger companies or the public sector. Working in a

(41)

household was a rare case among the interviewees, as well as during the observations, if employment was a topic, although the importance of care work as an irregular field of work has been recognized, especially in Germany (Alt 2003; B. Anderson 2000; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010; Shinozaki 2015; for Hamburg, see Mitrovic 2009, 187). Working irregularly often falls in the category of the 3 Ds (dangerous, difficult, dirty), and the safety of the workers is categorically not guaranteed. Robin was at one point seeking new shoes, since their sneakers were unpractical at the construction site. Another person changed the lamps of streetlights without any gear that would prevent falling. Those whose work included lifting heavy objects did it regardless of safety regulations for maximum weight. Those who laboured to clear out apartments or constructions were often unaware of the materials or possible harmful substances they were working with. On one occasion, I walked by when a group of people I knew was clearing a cellar after demolition. They wore their personal clothing. One had a rag on their face, which looked like the sleeve of an old t-shirt. Based on the area of the city and the condition of the house facade, I suspected they could be working with dry rot. For cleaners in offices or institutions, there are no instructions for using chemicals; in gardening, some mention that they have heard safety instructions.

The possibilities for challenging malpractices were limited. Justin, a migrant with a long experience in a variety of types of work, feared the possibility of not finding work anymore if they were to challenge their employers in order to receive the unpaid salaries. Justin was afraid of possibly getting a reputation as a difficult worker and, consequently, losing work opportunities.

Reported experiences of abuse, mostly unpaid salaries, are known in earlier research (Bloch 2014; Sager 2011; Bernhardt, Spiller, and Polson 2013). Robin, who rushed to work from the hospital after treatment, kept working anyway.

If one’s absence could threaten income, working even when ill might be the most viable option (Alt 2003, 126; Moksnes 2016; Könönen 2014).

Alejandro Portes suggested already in 1978 that there is a crucial connection between migrant irregularity and the demand for cheap, flexible labour.

Scholars have more recently paid attention to this connection in a US and European context (Calavita 2005; De Genova 2005; Karakayali 2008; Könönen 2014). Bridget Anderson (2010) discusses the protection of the labour

(42)

market and “British work” as a mechanism that produces the conditions for undocumented labour. In the Nordic context, Düvell (2010, 4) argues that

“highly regulated welfare states”, where an identity number is a tool to access about everything needed to construct an existence, make the Scandinavian countries possibly less interesting for those seeking possibilities to live – and work – in an undocumented manner. Care work may exemplify the bureaucracy and control as a hindrance for irregular labour. In Germany, scholars have identified work in households as a significant sector to offer informal work for female migrants (see Alt 2003; Lutz 2007, 2008). The state pays directly to the person in need of care, who can then pay tax-free members of their family or persons who are similarly close to the recipient of such support. In Sweden and Finland, institutionalized care and voucher payments for services, as well as payments for family members whose absence of labour is controlled, make the field more difficult to access for those without a right to work. Single examples of people working in households are mentioned in ethnographic studies, however (Khosravi 2010).

For the three cities that comprise Marenburg, the experiences of irregularized migrants point to different conditions for accessing labour. One of these central differences in the data are found in the commentaries about access to work. There is a gradient variation between the cities: in Hamburg, interviewees focus on working conditions and difficulties in receiving the salary more than difficulties in finding possibilities to work. In Stockholm, interviewees more often mention difficulties in finding jobs, and even those who do work report periods of no access to any financial activities and, consequently, periods of hunger and sometimes homelessness. In Helsinki, access to work as such was a constant issue. Although in every city there are employers who benefit from informal work, the contexts of regulations, controls, and acceptance of the employment of irregularized migrant workers vary.

The range of difficulties between the cities for irregularized migrants does not indicate the varied nature of the “fairer” conditions between them. As Jukka Könönen (2014) has shown, Helsinki, as well as other cities in Nordic countries, does have a labour market that requires a cheap, flexible work force without real possibilities for negotiating their working conditions (see

In search of a normal life : an ethnography of migrant irregularity in Northern Europe

Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies

MERVI LEPPÄKORPI

In search of

a normal life

IN SEARCH OF A NORMAL LIFE

Mervi Leppäkorpi

IN SEARCH OF A NORMAL LIFE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 IRREGULARITY IN MARENBURG