Brazilian migration into London: Mobility and Contemporary Borders

My research addresses the relations between migrants, mobility, tactics, negotiation, and the definition of borders after 9/11. The empirical focus of the thesis analyses how Brazilians from Alto Paranaiba perform mobility through airports located in the Schengen area including British territory in moving to London; and how, after becoming undocumented, they deal with the UK’s inner borders. I use the notion of journey and routes to explore how migration is a negotiation, where actions and skills remain an important link between the migrant and the social spaces through which s/he moves. Thus I contribute to migration and border studies by moving beyond a perspective focused exclusively on migration policies. I question to what degree the fact that borders have proliferated and discriminately filtered migrants can be understood without empirical data focused on the daily actions of these mobile people. Indeed migrants deal with and struggle against border regimes, but they are not powerless social actors. My study argues that migrants are important social actors and a key to understanding how migration takes place through border regimes. Migrants employ cunning tactics to reinvent their journey in negotiation with institutions and structures of power, which manage and delimit their movement with targets and threats. In this process, I explore migration as a process of skilled manoeuvres developed through practical knowledge and exchanges of life experiences by Brazilians in order to journey through the external and internal porosities of EU border regimes