‘Bad parents’, deportable subjects: borders and deportability in the everyday lives of undocumented families in Belgium

Abstract

While research has addressed the multiplication of borders inside and across the nation-state and the threat of deportation in the lives of undocumented migrants, little analysis has been dedicated to the particularities of families’ experiences. Based on participatory ethnographic research, this article examines how undocumented families experience and contest exclusionary bordering practices that interfere in the privacy of their family lives in Belgium. I argue that, in order to naturalise and legitimize these families’ ‘deportability’, the state mobilises normative logics about parenthood and childhood that construct undocumented parents as ‘bad parents’, while designating their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘at risk’. Going against these dominant logics, the undocumented parents at the heart of this ethnography contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’ by reconfirming their role as ‘good’ parents and, instead, problematise repressive migration policies that push them into marginality and misappropriate the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how these insights open new avenues for understanding more broadly the dynamics between the family and contemporary migration regimes.