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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.