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This article applies a feminist bordering lens to examine the legal and administrative procedures through which an estimated 1.9 million residents of India's northeastern state of Assam have been excluded from the 2019 National Registry of Citizens (NRC). Since India's independence from Great Brittan, the colonial legacy of borders and national belonging have fuelled heated conflicts among the Assamese ethnic majority, Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims whose ancestors originated in what is now Bangladesh, Adivasi communities, (i.e., the region's original inhabitants), and the Indian government's authority to expel 'foreigners'. While the convergence of Hindu nationalism and Assamese ethnonationalism contributes to a citizenship crisis among people of Bengali heritage in Assam, we consider how bureaucratic requirements to verify citizenship reinforce racial, class, and patriarchal inequality for women and children from low-income communities who are at risk of de factostatelessness because they are not 'legible' as citizens in India.

In this paper, we conceptualise migrant legibility as a bordering practice where migrants seeking to maintain status or transition to permanent residency in Canada must negotiate the dynamic milieu of: 1) laws and regulations governing immigrant inclusion; 2) bureaucratic processes for verifying eligibility and admissibility; 3) informal social networks which can expand or restrict access to information and resources. Using two case studies from empirical research with migrants in Canada, we attend to the legal, bureaucratic, and social processes through which migrants must prove their humanity (i.e., biopolitical life) in the context of unpredictable, heterogeneous, multi-scalar, and often hidden forms of legal and bureaucratic violence. Through theorising the legal and bureaucratic violence of legibility, this paper illustrates the historical, political, and economic conditions through which migrant illegality and patterns of imperial/colonial/racial/gendered ordering operate in tandem with neoliberal multicultural constructions of equality and inclusion of autonomous and self-sufficient individuals.

ABSTRACTAs part of a national survey on social workers’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration (N=4,499), we collected information on respondents’ perceptions of immigrants as threats and respondents’ views on structural inequality as it pertains to immigrants’ opportunities for success. Contrary to the Council on Social Work Education’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards stating the need for social workers to understand the existence and functioning of structural forces of inequality, nearly a third of our respondents denied that immigrants are disadvantaged compared to U.S.-born citizens, and more than a third denied that disadvantage is related to race, ethnicity, or national origin. Those who denied disadvantage were more likely than those who did not to see immigrants as threats. We provide interpretations for these findings and offer some recommendations for social work research and education geared toward deepening practitioners’ knowledge of the structural barriers faced by immigrants.

Drawing on interviews with service providers and legal advocates in Canada, this article explores how bordering practices shape front-line service delivery with immigrant women seeking safety from domestic violence. Our research examines the implementation of ‘conditional permanent residence’ (conditional PR) between 2012 and 2017. Conditional PR applied to some newly sponsored spouses and partners who were required to cohabit with their sponsoring spouse/partner for two years following their arrival in Canada in order to retain their permanent resident status. We illustrate how conditional PR exacerbated the vulnerabilities already facing spousal immigrants by linking deportation to the failure to cohabit with their spouse. In particular, we examine the implementation of an ‘exception for abuse and neglect’, whereby victims of domestic violence could apply to remove the condition on their permanent resident status. We argue that when service providers mobilized their ‘ways of knowing’ about domestic violence to verify a sponsored spouse’s claims of abuse, they inadvertently took part in regulating ‘deserving’ versus deportable immigrants. This research develops a gendered analysis of deportability towards theorizing how bordering practices operate through the shadow state to regulate racialized immigrant women.

This article presents the results of a study with providers of domestic violence and sexual assault services in Kansas. In recent years, the changing demographics of the U.S. Midwest have required community-based organizations to adapt their services quickly to “new” immigrant populations, many of whom are Spanish speaking and perceived as “illegal” and thus face numerous barriers to accessing services. We examine how intersecting and interlocking oppressions shape the delivery of services to immigrant women who are facing violence and discuss what strategies advocates use to support women’s safety and self-determination in an intense and at times hostile anti-immigrant environment.