Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
9 - The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter draws on the experience of Bangladeshi men in Belgium to argue that integration should be conceptualized not as the outcome of ideal-type national models of citizenship and integration, but as the product of the intersection of migrant aspirations and strategies with regulatory frameworks. It argues that a comprehensive engagement with identity theft and new forms of paperwork that straddles South Asia and Europe offers insights into what integration entails, and how it materializes through everyday practices and dilemmas. The struggles for paper documents and processes that establish the paper identities and civic participation that are foundational to integration provokes us to rethink what such processes and policies entail. In other words, integration is also about the struggle to integrate. Such struggles include troubled border-crossings and anxious arrivals, and moral claim-making, civic participation, and collective protests in the re-settled context. The chapter suggests that the everyday aspirations and prolonged disappointments of people in resettled contexts are foundational to comprehending what integration implies. The processes and dilemmas that enable and disable people to integrate in Europe rely on ‘paperwork’.
Keywords: citizenship, belonging, undocumented migration, civic participation, deservingness
In the twenty-first century, undocumented border-crossings have made historical anxieties surrounding nations and citizenship resurface. They have also generated new humanitarian dilemmas. While contemporary humanitarian efforts resonate with old nationalist agendas in ways that reinforce the distinctions between refugees and migrants – fixing the former in narratives of persecution and needing asylum, and the latter in rational economic choices –, the precarious circumstances in which people continue to be displaced and move across borders make these categories porous. Given the diversity of contemporary displacement and resettlement, Nicholas De Genova's reminder that the study of undocumented migration has been lost in the struggles between demography, policy studies, and criminology holds true. In showing how undocumented migrants do not live in isolation, but in proximity to and engaged with citizens and documented migrants, De Genova illuminates the intellectual paucity of migration studies. He compellingly argues that such investigations on international migration seldom treat the migrant as a subject of ethnographic enquiry, and instead remain content to frame migrants as either ‘illegal’ or ‘immigrants’ (De Genova 2002).
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- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond , pp. 207 - 228Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018
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