Informality and Transnational (Im)Mobilities in Europe – Introduction
People worldwide rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care, and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of states and formal institutions. This blog series introduces a recently published special issue of Migration Letters that ethnographically explores how mobilities and informality are entangled in responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities produced by borders and mobility regimes.
Humanity’s ever-increasing mobilities around the globe are commonly dichotomized between the free movement of the privileged global citizens and the migration of the unwanted, stigmatized, undeserving “others”, documented or not. In this context, informality can become a resistance strategy performed by those who are excluded from formal migration regimes and lack access to services, capital, and opportunities.
Informalities on the Move
Informality englobes a vast array of practices that exploit, manipulate and circumvent formal rules. Polese (2016: 26) defines it as the “space between two formal rules,” while Ledeneva (2018: 7) tells us that informal practices “hide behind paradoxes, unwritten rules and open secrets.” This phenomenon exists in all societies to varying degrees. As the Global Encyclopedia of Informality shows, it is not limited to economic activities but also inherently attached to daily living and political governance. A recent report of the International Labour Organization (2020) states that 60% of total employment worldwide is informal, reaching 90% in some low-income countries and 5% in high-income countries.
In the past few months, the COVID-19 lockdowns have made the dialectic relation between informality and mobility particularly visible. Many migrants (documented or not), who normally perform essential work as informal laborers in the Global North in agriculture, distribution, transportation, cleaning and care, have faced the dilemma of risking contagion by exposing themselves to the virus, or remaining immobile at home and losing their ability to sustain their livelihood. The dependence on their informal practices of mobility became a major source of vulnerability.
Contributions of the Blog Series
This blog series introduces a diverse range of contributions on how people on the move within the EU circumvent mobility regimes at multiple scales. The articles illustrate how mobility and informality are entangled when it comes to responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities produced by national borders and regulations. They provide empirical evidence of the existence, performance, and persistence of informal practices in Europe, and contribute to the still incipient post-structuralist research field questioning how informality is produced through geographical and social (im)mobilities.
Three of the articles in this collection demonstrate the connections between the inequalities of transnational mobilities and the informal practices that people carry out in making a living. Laure Sandoz critically explores the concepts of informality and entrepreneurship in a situation of unequal access to formal resources through ethnographic fieldwork in Barcelona among entrepreneurs of diverse origins and social backgrounds. Based on multi-sited research among low-wage transnational Romanian migrants in Spain, Ignacio Fradejas-García defines informal automobilities as a set of livelihood strategies and infrapolitical activities that use cars to confront the constraints of geographical and social mobility regimes to make a living. Also drawing on transnational and translocal strategies, Pihla Maria Siim examines the persistent inequalities of mobilities and informal practices as she explains how informal, gendered, translocal care affects the everyday lives of Estonian family members, when they migrate to Finland.
A second set of articles analyzes the links between border regimes, bureaucracies, and informal practices. Romm Lewkowicz’s article demonstrates how “unauthorized” migrants on the move evaluate passports and legal papers in terms of their efficacy to cross borders. Fazila Bhimji and Nelly Wernet show how refugees in Germany go “beyond the state” to find ways to reside in Berlin, where they strive for social mobility by networking with informal associations that assist them with housing. Hilal Alkan then analyzes how refugees cross border regimes with the help of human smugglers whom they refer to as simsars. Finally, Caroline Blunt shows the importance of informalities for refugees in a resettlement program in the UK.
The main contributions of this collection are threefold. First, they move beyond post-socialist countries and the Global South to provide empirical evidence about informality in high-income countries. Second, they shed light on how national and supra-national mobility regimes within Europe generate illegal apparatuses and push some people to rely on informal practices to survive. Third, they highlight the relationship between social and spatial mobility by asking how and in which contexts informal practices may contribute to improving individuals’ and groups’ socio-economic situation.
Laure Sandoz works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Neuchâtel and she is a member of the nccr – on the move. Her research focuses on the spatial mobility capital of transnational entrepreneurs in Europe and Latin America. She obtained her PhD from the University of Basel in May 2018 for her project on the mobility of the “highly skilled” towards Switzerland.
Ignacio Fradejas-García currently works at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. With extensive fieldwork experience in The Gambia, Chile, Morocco, Haiti, RD Congo, Turkey, Romania and Spain, he does research in migration, transnationalism, (im)mobilities, humanitarianism and informality.
– ILO (2020). COVID-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Immediate Responses and Policy Challenges.
– Ledeneva, Alena (2018). The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality: Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity. Volume 1 & 2. London: UCL Press.
– Polese, Abel (2016). Limits of a Post-Soviet State: How Informality Replaces, Renegotiates and Reshapes Governance in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag
