Bordering Social Reproduction: Care Circulations and Immobilities in the Shadows

In this paper, we build on the notion of care circulation offered by Baldassar and Merla to consider what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain caring lives. We draw on rich ethnographic insights to explore the everyday lives of mothers who come from Britain's former colonies, their children, and their often-spectral transnational family members. Due to their insecure migration status in the UK, they are subject to ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF). The NRPF immigration condition prohibits access to housing assistance and most welfare benefits even for the most impoverished. This welfare bordering produces enforced destitution and debt alongside other technologies of migration control by the racial state. We argue that while social reproduction is thus bordered, and strategies of care are fractured and often immobilised geographically, materially and psychically, a narrative of depletion and victimhood or care-less lives does not speak the complexities of these family’s efforts of sustenance and concern. Instead, we advance the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mothers’ and children’s caring practices under duress: the navigating, calculating, strategizing, hiding, and dreaming that animate daily life as well as the time, energy, and labour required to sustain it. We argue that these practices are neither solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable nor acts of heroic resilience, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, the refusal to accept their terms of existence through continual reassertions of careful and caring lives.