Imperceptible Politics: Illegalized Migrants and Their Struggles for Work and Unionization
Lebenswissenschaftliche Fakultät
This article argues that illegalized migrants carry the potential for social change not only through their acts of resistance but
also in their everyday practices. This is the case despite illegalized migrants being the most disenfranchised subjects produced
by the European border regime. In line with Jacques Rancière (1999) these practices can be understood as ‘politics’.
For Rancière, becoming a political subject requires visibility, while other scholars (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2007; Rygiel,
2011) stress that this is not necessarily the case. They argue that political subjectivity can also be achieved via invisible
means; important in this discussion as invisibility is an essential strategy of illegalized migrants. The aim of this article is
to resolve this binary and demonstrate, via empirical examples, that the two concepts of visibility and imperceptibility are
often intertwined in the messy realities of everyday life. In the first case study, an intervention at the ver.di trade union
conference in 2003, analysis reveals that illegalized migrants transformed society in their fight for union membership, but
also that their visible campaigning simultaneously comprised strategies of imperceptibility. The second empirical section,
which examines the employment stories of illegalized migrants, demonstrates that the everyday practices of illegal work
can be understood as ‘imperceptible politics’. The discussion demonstrates that despite the exclusionary mechanisms of
the existing social order, illegalized migrants are often able to find work. Thus, they routinely undermine the very foundations
of the order that produces their exclusions. I argue that this disruption can be analyzed as migrants’ ‘imperceptible
politics’, which in turn can be recognized as migrants’ transformative power.
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