Informal Solidarity, Reciprocity and Resistance as Social Mechanisms against Migration-related Discrimination in Host Societies

This paper engages the notion that immigrants’ interactions with formal and informal practices and institutions in host societies are influenced by a combination of individual heterogeneities (education, language, migration legal status, gender, length of stay, etc) as well as various other social mechanisms (acculturation, solidarity, reciprocity, resistance etc). Often in mitigating migration-related discrimination and exclusion in these migration destinations and/or routes, socially-arranged informal practices of solidarity, reciprocity and resistance are adopted as counter-strategy or rebellion. In this paper, I demonstrate that individual and collective agency manifested as a form of invisible power drawn to out-manoeuvre the state and societal power imbalances which infringed on minorities’ rights and well-being during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The paper offers empirical evidence of this structure-agency interface in close reference to James Scott’s "Everyday Forms of Resistance" as well as the Pan-African solidarity ethos of "Ubuthu".