Diaspora, mobility and bureaucracy in contemporary African immigration to Brazil

• In Event: Migración, Inseguridad, Resistencia y Africanía / Migration, Risk, Resistance and Africanía

Abstract

Human mobility is not exempt from evaluative procedures in which there is cautious focus on the institutional legitimation of values and truths vis à vis the Brazilian nation-state’s ecology of territorialization. Territory, space and migration are bureaucratic constructs. They do not arise merely out of economic and political scenarios, natural disasters, force majeure and physical ecology. Human trajectories are not only caught between or within the complexities of the latter but they are also positioned or situated through binary bureaucracies and settlement. This study focuses on institutional life for recent African immigrants in Brazil through a small textual corpus with a view to understanding the relation between control, discipline, agency and the immigrant’s institutional trajectory given that mobility does not imply a mere dislocation from one place to another as human flows provoke the problematization of mobility vis `a vis securitization and criminalization. The study provides statistical as well as discursive data on how African immigrants (Ghanians, Congolese, Nigerians, South Africans) are constructed in news and notifications published on the Brazilian Federal Police website, dating principally from the 2000s and since the 2017 New Migrations Law. In short, this study looks at public sphere communication and the paper trails constructed on or around African immigrants in the 2000s in Brazil (Horton & Heyman, 2020; Wodak & Koller, 2008).

Author

• Rachael A Radhay, Universidade De Brasília