Undocumented migration, informal economic work and peripheral multilingualism: challenges to neoliberal regimes?

Abstract

This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeless Ghanaian migrants and how these interplay with their multilingual practices. By analysing personal-life narratives and conversations recorded over a two-year ethnography in a bench in Catalonia, it shows that informants practice immobility to gatekeep subsistence resources. They present themselves as dispossessed of welfare rights and belie unregistered economic tasks. They establish non-legitimised translinguistic normativities for intercultural communication yet engage in linguistic regimes demanding 'integration' through the nation-state language. This reveals how undocumented migrants challenge but simultaneously perpetuate the neoliberal work/legality conditions and sociolinguistic orders to which they are subjected, which positions them as 'illegal', 'de-skilled' and 'languageless' non-citizens.

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness; under grant FFI2016-76383-P and grant FFI2011-26964; and the Catalan Ministry of Economy and Knowledge under grant 2014 SGR 1061 and grant 2017 SGR 1522.