(In)Visibility Paradox: Irregular Migrants as Urban Citizens in Barcelona

Many cities adopt urban citizenship as an inclusion mechanism for irregular migrants, often in direct defiance of restrictive immigration and migrant incorporation policies at the national level. Whereas nascent research on urban citizenship already showed how urban policies can craft local membership, drawing on interviews I carried out with irregular migrants in Barcelona, in 2021-2022, this article grounds the theoretical debate on urban citizenship with empirical evidence. Collected data illustrated that although the Municipality of Barcelona, together with the civil society, provides the same services for all irregular migrants, their experience in the city is dependent on their ethnicity, and race. In other words, a combination of administrative/legal invisibility and racial/ethnic visibility creates a paradox by showing how their precarious legal status is intervened with their identities, and how marginality is reproduced in their everyday life through discrimination, microaggression, as well as racial profiling.