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

Abstract

This article investigates the intersections of immobility and informal work among unsheltered Ghanaians and how these interplay with their multilingual practices. The data include personal-life narratives and informal conversations recorded over a twoyear ethnography in a public-transport bench in the post-industrial Catalan town of Igualada in the outskirts of Barcelona. The study shows that informants practice immobility to gate-keep survival resources; inhabit identities dispossessed of employment and welfare, silencing unregistered economic tasks; and establish nonlegitimised peripheral language hierarchies for intercultural communication yet engage in 'integration-through-national-language' orders. This reveals how undocumented migrants challenge and subvert, while simultaneously perpetuating, the neoliberal exclusionary work/legality conditions and linguistic regimes to which they are subject, which positions them as 'illegal', 'de-killed' and 'languageless' personas, in late capitalism.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…Particularly amid waves of aggressive xenophobia and hate mongering that have burst out all across the world in 2018 targeting refugees, immigrants, and undocumented workers, many scholars have highlighted the way discourse can be a crucial site where relations of inclusion and exclusion are worked out (Nichols and Wortham ; Perrino ). Contributors to a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication (Moyer ) emphasize how effects of language‐based exclusion are produced by the changing political economic conditions of mobility, such as the expansion of the tourism‐based service industry (Sassi ; Schneider ; Sharma ), decline of the local economy that traps migrants in unemployment and homelessness (Sabaté‐Dalmau ), precarity of the job market that both pushes and constrains the flow of labor migration (Codó ; Moyer ), and growth of lifestyle migration associated with volunteer work (Garrido ). A powerful example of this line of research is Lorente's () critical analysis of the role of language in the construction of Filipino domestic workers in the transnational labor market that links the Philippines and Singapore.…”