Making home at the borders of citizenship: Migrants, home, and (il)legality

A growing literature at the intersection of citizenship and border studies have theorized borders as filters drawing distinctions through socio-cultural, legal and administrative constructs of deservingness extending from the territorial “entry gates” into the “soft inside” of citizenship (Bonizzoni 2016, 2020; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012, 2014; Gargiulo 2017, 2021; Horton and Heyman 2020; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019). These socio-legal constructs produce a wide array of categories – EU-citizen/TCN, legal/illegal; refugee/economic/family migrants – stratifying migrants’ access to citizenship rights, including the right to housing (Andersen, Turner and Søholt 2013; Jacobsen 2006; Morris 2002). As migrants’ access to (private and public) housing is heavily mediated by the possess (or the lack) of a certain status, the latter can heavily constraint migrants’ housing choices regarding where to live, for how long and with whom. This includes both vulnerable and especially protected groups hosted in reception centres (e.g. unaccompanied minors, asylum seekers and refugees, trafficked women…) as well as undocumented migrants pushed to live in camps, squats or in the informal housing market (Agier 2011; Campesi 2018). At the same time, the possess (or the lack) of “adequate” and “proper” housing represents a key element informing policies and bureaucrats’ decisions that can bear relevant consequences for migrant’s (il)legality and citizenship rights, more broadly. In other terms, homelessness, precarious and informal housing can turn into a key trait of the “deserving” (un)citizen, jeopardizing a wide array of status-related assessments and procedures, including naturalization, family reunification and legalization opportunities. As argued by Walters (2004) under domopolitics, migrants are “guests”, who must be monitored and disciplined to ensure “good” behaviour. This chapter, drawing on an extended and cross-national review of studies on immigration, home and (il)legality, aims to show how this efforts extend into the private space of home to produce inclusionary/exclusionary public outcomes in terms of bordered (un)citizenship.