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

This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeless Ghanaian migrants and how these interplay with their multilingual practices. By analysing personal-life narratives and conversations recorded over a two-year ethnography in a bench in Catalonia, it shows that informants practice immobility to gatekeep subsistence resources. They present themselves as dispossessed of welfare rights and belie unregistered economic tasks. They establish non-legitimised translinguistic normativities for intercultural communication yet engage in linguistic regimes demanding 'integration' through the nation-state language. This reveals how undocumented migrants challenge but simultaneously perpetuate the neoliberal work/legality conditions and sociolinguistic orders to which they are subjected, which positions them as 'illegal', 'de-skilled' and 'languageless' non-citizens.This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness; under grant FFI2016-76383-P and grant FFI2011-26964; and the Catalan Ministry of Economy and Knowledge under grant 2014 SGR 1061 and grant 2017 SGR 1522