We Are Here! Claim-making and Claim-placing of Undocumented Migrants in Amsterdam

Through everyday practices, excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants struggle for citizenship, question bordering practices, and can achieve forms of inclusion incrementally. Based on an ethnographic case study in Amsterdam, this article evidences and theorises these piecemeal struggles of undocumented migrants. We show how undocumented migrants—discursively and spatially—claim ‘the right to have rights’. We demonstrate how forms of inclusion emerge as the result of ‘claim-making’: by making appeals to human rights, the use of (limited) legal rights, and identity claims. We combine the analysis of claim-making with research into an understudied but highly relevant process of ‘claim-placing’, which refers to how the use (public) spaces and places can add weight to discursive claim-making. We demonstrate that an incremental process of ‘claim-making’ and ‘claim-placing’ leads to a slightly increased recognition as political subjects and forms of inclusion.