This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. 1 Strategies of Navigation: Migrants' Everyday Encounters with Italian Immigration Bureaucracy AbstractSuccessful encounters with bureaucratic systems require users to be familiar with 'insider' rules, attitudes and behaviour. This article examines migrants' everyday efforts to become and stay 'legal' in Italy, and shows how they need to develop particular strategies in order to do so. While these strategies help migrants in the short term, I argue that ultimately they enable the Italian state to reconcile its conflicting interests and reproduce migrants' marginal and insecure status in Italian society. Examining everyday mundane interactions with the state and its bureaucracy reveals the various ways in which state practices produce insecurity.

In increasingly bureaucratised immigration regimes, experts who can assist migrants in their navigation of immigration law are in high demand. This article examines the role of community brokers -migrants who are self-styled immigration adviserswithin the Italian immigration regime. Contributing to recent anthropological work which challenges the common characterisation of brokers as immoral or amoral, Ishow how becoming a migration broker is rooted in ethical projects of self-betterment that enable migrants to challenge their legally and economically marginalised position in Italian society.

Stories of those who were victims of the Windrush scandal are characterised by tales of long-lost documents and urgent quests to procure paperwork – maternity certificates, payslips, dental records, school reports – that would attest to a lifetime spent in the United Kingdom. The so-called Windrush generation came to need this paperwork because, although unbeknown to most, the 1971 Immigration Act demanded that from 1973, all migrants must document their ‘legal’ presence in the UK. It was, however, only from 2014 – because of changes in legislation – that now retirement-age Commonwealth citizens, most of whom had migrated to the United Kingdom as children, found themselves facing deportation back to countries that many had not visited for decades (for a historical account of the legislation and politics that led to the Windrush scandal, see Olusoga 2019). The 2014 Immigration Act deleted a key clause of the 1999 legislation that had provided long-standing Commonwealth residents with protection from enforced removal (Taylor 2018). Some of those affected by this updated legislation report that they believed themselves to be legitimate citizens of the British state and therefore did not need to prove their right to be resident through such documentation (for case studies, see Gentleman 2019). In this case, as well as in common-sense thought more generally, documents and paperwork are understood to hold the ‘truth’. Uncover it and their holder’s rightful status will be triumphantly revealed. As such, documents are imagined to act as unambiguous mechanisms of inclusion, their absence therefore denoting the exact opposite.

In the lead up to, and aftermath of, the UK referendum on its membership of the European Union, issues relating to migration and entitlement dominated public debates. In a ruthless campaign, the ‘Leave’ camp exploited the implementation of years of austerity policies by explicitly correlating their negative effects with supposedly high migrant numbers. Examining the discourses of scarcity, austerity and deservingness which prevailed during the referendum campaign, this article discusses the way in which UK citizenship classes act as spaces for both the reproduction and subversion of these narratives. On the one hand, migrants in the classes reproduce discourses which scapegoat other migrants for the effects of austerity. On the other, however, powerful messages about the fundamental human right to migrate are also championed.

This article explores the role of two different types of organisations which act as brokers on behalf of the British state in the citizenship test process. Situating these organisations' emergence within a neoliberal British state characterised by its 'dispersal', it shows that contemporary configurations of the state, market and third sector mean that new and sometimes unexpected actors take on state-like roles. The ambiguous position of these different organisations means that while the reach of the neoliberal state is more diffuse and opaque than ever, clear boundaries between state and non-state realms do continue to exist. Paradoxically, therefore, the blurring of boundaries which characterises the neoliberal state is also accompanied by the hardening of borders between state and non-state realms. This reinforcement of boundaries can appear both to increase state power and to challenge it.