Ongoing research by Nathalia Christina Cordeiro, PhD student in Political Science at the University of Campinas
The research investigates how formally undocumented Brazilian women engaged in paid care work in the United States narrate and interpret the relationships between migratory status, labor, and belonging.
The study builds upon a critical diagnosis established in the literature: the ethics of migration has predominantly operated at a high level of abstraction, privileging debates on border control over lived experiences and socially produced forms of exclusion and recognition.
To shift this framework, the research mobilizes the analytical distinction between citizenship as a politico-legal status and belonging as a relational process of social insertion and recognition, arguing that these dimensions are non-coincidental and empirically dissociable.
The central hypothesis is that these women experience configurations of subordinated inclusion, in which effective social contribution and interpersonal recognition coexist with legal vulnerability, relational dependence, and a limited claim-making capacity.
The research adopts a qualitative approach based on in-depth semi-structured interviews, utilizing purposeful snowball sampling. This is followed by an empirical-interpretative analysis through thematic coding and an analytical-normative reflection on the limits of conceptions of migration justice centered on formal citizenship.
By articulating situated empirical evidence and normative political theory, the study aims to render visible an analytically under-explored zone: one where social presence, essential labor, and lived belonging coexist without corresponding legal-institutional recognition, thereby contributing to a more situated understanding of the intersections between migration, gender, labor, inequalities, and injustice.
This research is part of the INCT-INEU program and of the broader “Crossing Borders” project program, empirically operationalizing its normative agenda.