With Nina Amelung, Sociologist and Research Fellow at CIES-Iscte, University Institute of Lisbon, and Susana de Sousa Ferreira, Lecturer of International Relations at the Complutense University of Madrid.

To be confirmed | online | 3:30-5:00 PM (CET) | Registration form will be available in due course.

In this paper we engage with contemporary manifestations and practices of institutional racism as part of an increasingly securitized migration management regime in Portugal. We focus on differential legal, bureaucratic, and data management treatments to which some non-citizens are exposed when they want to claim their rights. We aim to attend to the slippery modes of doing differences in society that criminalize and marginalize migrant populations and have multiple racializing effects, thus to the slippery politics of race.
The paper relies on an analysis of interviews conducted with civil society actors, legal and policy documents and media coverage of the migration management and public discourse on migration in Portugal. First, the EU wide turn towards stricter anti-migration and surveillance policies manifested in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum constraints Portugal. Together with national dysfunctional structures of migration bureaucracy this creates a drastic precarious panorama for racialized and marginalized migrants to access their rights. Second, differential legal treatments to define protection, residential status and access to rights across different national population groups adds to the experience of racism of migrants. Third, the criminalization of migration in public discourse driven by the Far Right creates a legitimizing ecology for institutional racism.