“We have to separate so we can be together again”: Eritrean mothers’ gendered racialisation and family separation within the Israeli and UK asylum regimes

Abstract

This article explores how two asylum-seeking women from Eritrea attempt to secure safety and legal status for their children–born and unborn–and themselves by leaving them behind in the settler colonial state of Israel and taking on forged Ethiopian Israeli identities to travel to the UK to facilitate a process of family reunification. Situating the Israeli asylum regime in the settler colonial state and drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research collected between 2016–2018 in Israel and the UK, the article argues that by engaging in acts of refusing militarised border regimes, migration enforcement, and their racialised orderings, the women shape a future for themselves and their children. The article then sheds light on the women’s experience of waiting while faced with protracted uncertainty and separation from their children. It also analyses how gendered and racialised legal precarity and motherhood are experienced.