Abstract Evidence is notoriously scarce in refugee status determination procedures. Digital traces from social media arise as a new form of evidence used by migration authorities and asylum claimants alike to support decision-making. Yet how exactly these traces factor into the evidentiary assessment of claims remains largely unaccounted for, especially in light of minimal precedence and procedural guidelines. With an empirical grounding in cases from the Danish Immigration Service and Refugee Appeals Board, this article’s contribution is two-fold. First, it identifies the evidentiary purposes of digital trace data from asylum claimants’ social media by developing a classification with four distinct clusters. These clusters identify four areas where digital traces from social media factor into the procedure: Establishing baseline information about the claimant, approximating exposure, corroborating or challenging claims about identity or past events, and identifying external conditions in the country of origin. Our classification reveals that digital traces from social media inform the evidentiary assessment of claims in ways that extend toward assessments of credibility and risk of persecution. Second, it contributes to the literature on the use of digital traces as evidence in asylum decision-making by placing the findings in the context of refugee law’s “fact-finding crisis.” We conclude that social media frequently arises as 'silent evidence' that remains available to inform the background knowledge of decision-makers without explicitly being accounted for as evidence.
Abstract Drawing on empirical data from collaborative collage workshops with participants who have diverse migratory experiences in Sweden, this article explores the generative potential of shared vulnerability in migration research. Rather than framing vulnerability as a group-specific deficit or an ethical risk to be managed, I conceptualize it, following Judith Butler, as both a shared condition of precariousness and a politically distributed condition of precarity, in which certain groups are differentially exposed to harm, loss, and violence. Through the analysis of verbal dialogues and one participant-created collage, the findings show that shared vulnerability functions in three ways: as a generative force that fosters trust, reciprocity, and recognition; as a site of contention that links personal fragility to the political production of precarity; and as a collective voice of solidarity that contests normative frames that produce hierarchies of belonging and grievability. I conclude that shared vulnerability may foster recognition, but without frames that render the lives of those positioned as ‘other’ grievable, it remains insufficient to generate solidarity. By shifting the analytical lens from ethnicity-centred epistemologies to a shared yet unequally distributed political condition, this article offers empirical and methodological contributions to the reflexive turn in migration research and to postmigration studies.
Abstract Between 1994 and 2022, its investor visa offered the global wealthy a straightforward way to live in or visit the United Kingdom (UK). Drawing on stakeholder interviews and policy documents, this article maps the evolution of investor visa policy and identifies three phases of policymaking: inactivity (1994–2003), liberalization (2004–13), and hesitant tightening (2012–22). Using Culpepper’s ‘quiet politics’ framework, the article then analyses the influence of private sector stakeholders on policymaking under changing political salience. It finds policymaking in phase 2 politically motivated by a wish to attract more applicants and marked by significant private sector influence. This was partly enabled by framing the investor visa as a policy encouraging foreign direct investment and economic growth and thus avoiding the ‘noisy politics’ of migration. In phase 3, however, civil society and political campaigning brought the investor visa into the arena of ‘noisy politics’ by framing it as enabling elite corruption and threatening national security. Against this backdrop, private sector influence reduced and a hesitant and not necessarily successful tightening of visa rules ensued, ending in the route’s eventual closure. The article advances our understanding of how professionals working for international wealth elites shape migration policy and act as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ driving the commodification of elite migration, especially under conditions of ‘quiet politics’. It further shows the success of civil society actors in raising political salience, including through shifting the framing, which supports arguments that political salience is not an inherent feature of certain policy areas, but the outcome of socio-political processes and struggles.
Abstract European residence-by-investment programmes have attracted large numbers of Chinese applicants, yet little is known about how middle-class households, most of which do not relocate to Europe, are recruited into these schemes. Drawing on observations at industry conferences, marketing events, and webinars, as well as interviews with stakeholders, we analyse how the brokerage system linking Chinese agents, project companies, and European developers generates systematic mis-selling. Chinese clients with limited experience in foreign property markets and immigration law encounter information asymmetries that are exploited through emotional marketing narratives. The low barriers to entry, combined with high commissions and insufficient consumer protections, have fuelled mispricing strategies that inflate property costs and present deceptive rental guarantees and financing models; misrepresentation of visa benefits, including marketing conditional permits as permanent residence and exaggerating EU mobility and educational advantages; and the omission of critical information that undermines informed consent. By foregrounding middle-class consumers rather than elite wealth strategies or labour migration, the article contributes to scholarship on migration industries and brokerage, showing how commercial advisory structures shape mobility before movement occurs and bringing economic concepts, especially consumer protection, into debates on the commodification of citizenship.
Abstract This article examines how US birthright citizenship enforcement operates as a regulatory apparatus that enforces heteronormative and biologically reductionist definitions of family and kinship across national borders. Focusing on the case Dvash-Banks v. Pompeo (2018)—in which twin boys born abroad to a binational same-sex couple through assisted reproductive technology (ART) were granted unequal citizenship status—I examine how citizenship policy has privileged genetic lineage over legal and social parentage. Drawing on legal documents, media coverage, and secondary legal literature, I trace how US immigration law produces a narrow vision of family and belonging. What I find is that edge cases (such as in the Dvash-Banks family) force queer and transnational families to justify their legitimacy within homonationalistic norms, ultimately reinforcing both the external and internal boundaries of reproductive nationalism and intimate citizenship in the United States. This article identifies four mechanisms by which birthright citizenship has reinscribed reproductive and nationalist norms: by defining citizenship as a biological right; treating ART as suspect and potentially fraudulent; extending invasive forms of biopolitical surveillance to queer and trans families; and selectively legitimizing same-sex families within a homonationalism framework. I argue that despite shifts in family-making practices and legal recognition of LGBTQ+ rights, birthright citizenship remains tethered to settler-colonial logics of blood, biology, and inheritance. This case study highlights how reproductive technologies can intensify exclusion when deployed within restrictive national imaginaries. By foregrounding the entanglement of reproduction, migration, and state power, this article offers insight into how citizenship regimes adapt to and resist the transformations of kinship.
