Promises to control, limit or altogether put an end to low-skilled labour migration from Eastern Europe were at the heart of the Brexit vote of 2016. The anti-immigration controversies around ‘uncontrolled’ migration, however, can be traced back to the 2007 EU enlargement and most recently to the year 2014 when the political debates around the future of free movement boiled up with new fervour. The removal of the seven-year-long transitional controls on EU 2 citizens’ labour market participation led to fearmongering campaigns and the saturation of political and media debates with images of uncontrolled ‘floods’, depleted state budgets and job shortages. The result was a shift of meaning and re-valorisation in which free mobility – originally a fundamental right equally distributed amongst members of a supra-national community of citizens – was recast as yet another form of ‘(im)migration’ allegedly threatening to burden state economies and traditional understandings of national identity if not subjected to stringent controls and regulations (Barbulescu and Favell 2020).

Apart from being a constant topic of media scandalisation campaigns and political frenzy, post-2008 crisis intra-EU migration has presented an issue for migrants’ rights activists, social movements, and academics. This sustained interest has so far generated only limited insights on the changing politics and practices of free movement management, on the one hand, and on migrants’ experiences of settlement and incorporation, on the other. One possible explanation for these persisting lacunas, particularly in migration studies scholarship, is the ongoing framing of such movements within ‘liquid migration’, ‘open-borders’, and ‘mobility’ frameworks that emphasise their voluntaristic, unregulated, and beneficial-for-all nature. Such ‘benign concepts’ (Bermudez and Laura 2020) have served to reinforce the distinction of intra-EU migration from more precarious forms of movement such as third-country labour migrations or undocumented mobilities.

In this article, I suggest that zooming in on EU labour migrants’ pathways of incorporation can generate important insights on the recent transformations of the intra-EU migration regime and transcend the analytical delineation between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ mobilities. By exploring the concrete case of post-crisis labour migration from Bulgaria to the UK, this article moves beyond a formalistic analysis that fetishises EU citizenship as defining a ‘stable’ legal status, guaranteeing uncontested access to equally distributed rights and entitlements. Instead, it traces the existence of an active process of inclusion of migrant workers through irregularisation¹ that enfolds over the course of the actualisation of their legal status through formalised and ‘ad hoc’ administrative procedures. By teasing out a process of bureaucratic bordering that unfolds within the post-arrival regularisation of free mobility, this article presents the case of mobile EU citizens who are being deprived of their practical rights in different aspects and degrees and whose ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) into the sphere of rights and work exposes them to levels of informality and ‘permanent temporariness’ (Bailey et al. 2010) that are most commonly designated to ‘illegal’ migrants. This way, I demonstrate that the current post-Brexit enforcement of bordering practices around ‘settled status’, had their no less consequential precursors in the hostile environment consolidating already after the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing contexts of austerity.

Research that problematises the post-2008 economic crisis mobilities within Europe has been scarce but extremely insightful on the complex and multidimensional dynamics of governing and control technologies spreading within west European states and their effects in channelling ‘unruly’ EU mobilities into ‘managed’ arrivals. Scholars use the prism of migration, border and welfare regimes and the ever-shifting constellations between them to unpack the politics of intra-EU migration and more specifically the politico-legalistic dilemma underlying them, namely, how to ‘migrantise’ both discursively and in terms of practical governance populations that are increasingly perceived as ‘unwanted’ but continue to hold a legitimate right to movement (Tervonen and Enache 2017; Burrell and Schweyher 2020; Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). Arguing against the continuous treatment of EU migrants as a privileged status category, they have spotlighted on several important trends related to the erosion of EU citizenship rights, namely, the stringent nationally-imposed limitations and conditionalities on access to welfare benefits (Burrell and Schweyher 2020; Alberti 2017); the proliferation of localised control technologies that prevent access to public services (Tervonen and Enache 2017), and the emergence of contradictory state responses that simultaneously encourage and restrict migrants’ participation (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018).

This article augments the scope of these perspectives in several important aspects: first, by uncovering a specific form of micro-scale bordering that often remains undetected as it unfolds in ‘routine’ and non-spectacular (see De Genova 2002) bureaucratic procedures; secondly, by tracing the spread of everyday bordering in the interrelated practices of state authorities, private agents, and migrant entrepreneurs that form part of an arrival infrastructure; and thirdly, by interrogating the way in which the convergence between such regulatory technologies and migrants’ strategies for managing these (re)enforces specific patterns of unequal settlement rather than exclusion.

This article is based on an extensive ethnography between 2013 and 2014 that followed the trajectories of labour migrants originating from different Bulgarian localities to their arrival points in the UK (mostly London and its environs). It draws on a large pool of primary data collected through the methods of participant observation, informal conversations, and life-story narrations and triangulates these with observations of digital communities of Bulgarian migrants in different online settings and various documentary sources. The immersion in the field developed in accordance with the situational openings and closures that presented themselves and involved simultaneous embedding across ‘multiple sites of activity’ (Marcus 1995, 96). To build up rapport, trust and a level of camaraderie with research participants, I established an equitable two-way exchange by readily sharing details about my own work, life and settlement situation which revealed a migration positionality and socio-cultural background that was similar to that of most people I talked to.

We know that the target populations of these new forms of bordering have been those already struggling with high degrees of ‘vulnerability’ by virtue of complex constellations between economic status, racialised and ethnicised identities or less-desirable nationality (Burrell and Schweyher 2020).² By taking the case of the so-called ‘average’ migrants – single, middle-aged, and mostly male workers – carrying the uncomfortable stamps of ‘temporariness’ and ‘poverty’ (Manolova 2020), this article attempts to stretch the category of the ‘precarious’ EU citizen by demonstrating how mechanisms of subordinated incorporation affect a much wider pool of newcomers. It also turns attention to one of the two nationality groups (along with Romanians) confined to the bottom of West European deservingness and value scale, the experiences of which are still largely side-lined in scholarly accounts. The productivity of internal borders and differential inclusion beyond legal status.

Since the 2015 arrival of displaced people at the doorsteps of Europe, scholars of migration have increasingly used borders to talk about processes of population governance and transformations of state sovereignty and citizenship (Rumford 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Balibar points out that the institutional form of the border as we know it is transforming into something that cannot be ‘materialised on the ground’, or ‘inscribed on the map’ but is nevertheless as pervasive and as violent in its consequences as ever (2002, 85). In the wake of the ‘practical’ turn in border studies (Côté-Boucher, Infantino, and Salter 2014), this proposition has gained traction in the common agendas developed by newly emerged transnational networks of migrants, activists and scholars and their attempts to re-conceptualise border technologies and practices in line with broader rationales of population management and the regulation of movement (Cobarrubias, Casas-Cortes, and Pickles 2011). Their interventions have advanced valuable insights in two important directions: firstly, they redress the focus on the material, ‘wall’-like manifestation of borders and track their ‘deterritorialisation’ in practices of internal control and, secondly, they identify the need to re-think their functions beyond conception of ‘negative power’ by revealing complex productivity with regards to migrant subjectivities and statuses.

Some of these advancements have been taken up as departure points to outline an EU-wide process of dismantling of EU citizenship as a stable and protected status through the passing of national immigration and welfare legislation that targets the erosion of residence rights and access to public services and support for mobile Europeans. Against the background of post-crisis austerity conditionalities and the extreme politisation of free mobility, scholars have identified a turn to authoritarian immigration policies, most notably operationalised as stringent welfare and citizenship conditionalities and contradictory regimes of administrative coordination of residence and social security rights (see Alberti 2017; Burrell and Schweyher 2020; Lafleur and Mescoli 2018; Recchi and Salamonska 2015; King and Pratsinakis 2020). Burrell and Schweyher, among others, have scrutinised the mechanisms through which increased welfare conditionality, the shrinking definition of working status and the enforcement of workfarist policies, turn into ‘border tools’ for the everyday ‘managing’ of Polish migrants that the British hostile environment progressively delineates as racialised and undeserving ‘others’ (2020). Lafleur and Mescoli focus on the case of Belgium and the way in which the bureaucratic management of such borders often produces paradoxical situations in which migrants making welfare claims risk having their residence rights revoked, while at the same time those with issued deportation orders continue to participate in healthcare and social protection systems (2018). Institutional contradictions are also echoed in Tervonen and Enache’s report from Finland where the gap left by absent national policies on marginalised East Europeans and their hard to implement ‘deportability’ had resulted in a plethora of ad hoc ‘disincentivation’ policies conducted by municipal ‘gatekeepers’ and police authorities (2017). These developments attest to a growing trend towards diversification and intensification of internal ‘managing’ and control technologies, following a rational of austerity and a governmental effort to shift the burden of social reproduction off the state and on the back of individual migrants (see Apostolova 2021; Manolova 2017). And while conditionality is by design embedded in the institution of EU citizenship, what we have witnessed in recent years is its mobilisation in the hands of low-level actors counting on broad discretionary powers for much stricter implementation, extension and (re-)invention of disenfranchising technologies of regulation.

In taking these insights further, this article brings forward an understanding of borders as key devices for determining the conditions under which migrants negotiate their presence and participation within ‘receiving’ states, and not only for regulating their movements across external borders (Könönen 2018). It underscores the more invisible and mundane ways in which borders permeate the social and political spaces of the everyday forming a diversified and multidirectional apparatus of governance that intertwines the institutions responsible for the organisation of migrants’ settlement in complex and multifarious ways (Lebuhn 2013; Balibar 2002). The bordering reviewed here functions through seemingly routine administrative procedures carried out in relation to formal registrations in national taxation systems: opening of bank accounts, the procurement of proof of address, or a rental contract. It is through the confluence of hard to fulfil documentational requirements, misguided procedural steps, unforeseen delays and the penalising conditionalities of regular housing and employment markets that the process of what I call ‘bureaucratic bordering’ materialises during the transitory period in which struggles for actualising one’s legal position take place in parallel to efforts of ‘getting settled’. Bureaucratic state systems are known for their functions of classification and labelling through which anonymous populations are rendered countable. Behind their formalistic rationality, however, scholars have discerned a fundamental power for ‘creating social structures’ through the granting and withdrawal of rights, statuses and access to available resources (Humphris and Sigona 2019, 4). In the context of migration management, bureaucracies have become highly effective apparatuses for the enforcement of internal borders, not least as a result of the loopholes created by their ‘ambiguous’ operation between ‘official’ and practical rules through which they can (i) (re-)interpret policy legislation (Tuckett 2015, 2); (ii)‘test out’ laws without specific implementation guidelines (Borelli 2019), or (iii) mobilise piecemeal ‘target’ measures in the absence of coherent policies (Tervonen and Enache 2017). All of the above open up avenues for serving political objectives that divert from publicly declared commitments and legal obligations.

Furthermore, by drawing on Kearney’s formulation of the functioning of border controls as ‘productive’ rather than ‘repressive’ (2004), I scrutinise how migrants’ incomplete and instable incorporation in certain spheres of rights and entitlements is not a shortcut for their exclusion or deterral, but rather a way to ensure a pattern of subordinated inclusion in increasingly flexibilised and informalised labour markets (see Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). The concept of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) is used to demonstrate the persistent overlapping between multiple lines of inclusion and exclusion for the establishment of particular relations of power control that discipline arrivals by stratifying their status positions and by circumscribing the spaces of membership and participation that they can access. Despite its analytical potential ‘differential inclusion’ has only rarely been applied to exploration of the changing intra-European borderscapes, particularly when it comes to the hardening of ‘internal’ forms of control and the restructuring of migrants’ statuses and rights in lines with particular economic needs (Könönen 2018). This article aims to fill this lacuna by empirically tracing the operation of differential inclusion with respect to the stretching of micro-scale bureaucratic border devises within EU member states, their re-inscription into pathways of post-arrival regularisation and the ways in which they intertwine with employment practice and private sector conditionalities.

Administrative regulation of free mobility rights

This section presents a brief overview of the regulatory-legalistic dimensions of EU citizens residence and free mobility rights as provisioned in EU frameworks and translated into national legislations and local bureaucratic procedures. Furthermore, it sheds light on the most important registration steps that newcomers must go through on their settlement trajectory in the UK. Beyond an initial three-months period of unconditional residence, EU citizens’ resident rights are administered along four main categories: (1) worker/self-employed/jobseeker; (2) student; (3) self-sufficient individual; (4) family member of EU citizens. EU law defines the administrative formalities that insitutionalise each of these legal trajectories in a way that leaves a significant discretionary margin for (re-)interpretation to nation state authorities. They are provided with the possibility to further concretise the administrative and procedural parameters under which EU citizens can regularise their residency by introducing additional criteria and documentary evidence for registration, as long as the latter are clearly specified and pose no obstructions to the status regularisation process. As opposed to countries like Finland and Belgium where EU newcomers are obligated to obtain registration certificates, or Germany where they need to abide by the rules of compulsory address registration (valid for locals as well), UK authorities do not foresee any registration requirement for EU citizens residing and working on their territory. Yet, as I demonstrate below this does not reduce the administrative burden for new arrivals who are entangled in hard to navigate bureaucratic labyrinths (Tuckett 2015) of regularisation procedures based on rigid and often unfulfillable conditionalities.

The obtainment of National Insurance number (NINo), used in administering national insurance and social security contributions, is a legal precondition for all working or intending to work in the UK that can be acquired only through successful application by non-citizens with a right to work or study. The formalised application procedure stipulates the scheduling of an ‘evidence of identity’ interview – subsequent to a phone application request – and the presentation of an identity proof documentation. In addition to this, Bulgarian arrivals were often obligated to provide a proof of address (rental contract, utility bill on one’s name, bank account statement) and additional papers that determine their free movement rights as practiced under the differently specified status categories, i.e. employed persons were asked to produce a contract of employment, job seekers – job rejection letters, and self-employed people – invoices, receipts for revenues and expenditures and more. The issuing of a bank account is the other substantial requisite on the path to administrative regularisation and labour market entry. Newcomers pursued it simultaneously to their NINo application and in most cases amidst negotiating informal work and accommodation arrangements. Under general instructions banks demand an identity proof and an address verification, the form of which varies greatly with individual branch policies but usually refers to utility bills, tenancy agreements, landlord confirmation letters, council tax bills, and, most notably a NINo confirmation letter which holds greatest weight and can act as an universally accepted address verification.

Thus, it is member states and regional authorities that set and coordinate the concrete parameters of free mobility regularisation and local level bureaucracies that are tasked with managing its practical implementation and its unobstructed functioning on a day-to-day basis. Migrants’ knowledge of these requirements is at best incomplete and only fragmentarily reflected in their strategies of arrival and settlement. Most of those I spoke to interpreted the dropping of labour market restriction in 2014 as opening up quick and uncomplicated avenues to regular and stable incorporation. Upon arrival, they were quick to find out that ‘administrative formalities’ turn into a spiderweb of dependencies affecting their interrelated statuses as residents, workers, claimants of social rights and economic agents and drastically challenging the pursuit of their long-term settlement aspirations. The next section illustrates migrants’ practical experiences of navigating distinctive pathways of regularisation to illustrate the unexpected and relentless nature of bureaucratic bordering as an internally operating mechanism of incorporation with long-lasting consequences for individual immigration trajectories.

Arriving in the bureaucratic quagmire

In order to understand how administrative preconditions for status regularisation pull migrants into entrapping dependencies we need to examine the material and social constellations in which their arrival trajectories unfold. There are two main avenues for securing access to the British labour market: agency and subcontracted recruitment and mobilisation of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ social ties. These ‘points of entry’ are important because they determine wider arrangements of settlement and condition newcomers’ differential positioning vis-à-vis place-specific forms of ‘arrival infrastructures’ within and in relation to which they navigate their bureaucratic inclusion.

Those little familiar with the post-arrival administrative procedures often prefer the services of Bulgarian-registered employment agencies and informal subcontractors. The combination between ‘contracted’ employment and ‘settlement’ services such as transport, accommodation and administrative ‘setting up’ that such forms of mediated recruitment offer are considered vital for first-time migrants and those lacking support networks. And while well aware that the sectors for which they are recruited – agriculture, farming, food processing and packaging – demand hard work for low pay and dire working conditions many are ready to temporarily ‘endure’ (Grill 2016) such jobs as they offer an opportunity for ‘sorting documents’. Those who are unable to cover the costs for migration intermediaries or mistrust their services altogether mobilise previously acquired migration know-how and established networks to find jobs and secure accommodation. In this case, migrants are strongly reliant on the provisions and knowledge offered by kin members, friends and acquaintances that are expected to smoothen the initial process of settling down.

Upon arrival, ‘contracted’ workers often experience ‘recruited’ migration as an exploitative dependency rather than as offering a secure footing into the socio-economic and administrative structures of British society. Unrealised promises related to fast-track administrative ‘plug in’ are more the norm than the exception in such migration arrangements. The issuing of a NINo and a bank account – services for which agencies and subcontracors incur unlawful ‘taxes’ – is either indefinitely postponed or workers are led to believe that they are in regular employment for the purpose of extracting bogus national insurance contributions. Such was the case of Rado³ who was recruited by a licensed Bulgarian agency as chicken catcher in a farm north of London. Before departure he was charged a flat fee of 800 BGN (360 GBP) for ‘transport and administrative’ costs and an extra payment of 108 BGN (49 GBP) for opening a bank account. He signed an employment offer letter, misrepresented to him as an employment contract, which ensured the provision of suitable accommodation at additional charge. During his time on the job, Rado’s recruiter continued to extract ‘transportation fees’ and ‘work fines’ from his minimal wage paycheck. In order to recover his initial investment, Rado decided to languish on the job until he receives the ‘documents’ that would allow him to move on to a regular and secure employment. The only ‘administrative’ support that his employer and the agency intermediaries provided him with in the five weeks on this job was the issuing of a prepaid debit card with monthly deductions that ‘ate away’ a significant part of his savings and brought punitive contractual obligations for the months to come.

At first sight, employers’ strive for an incessant turnover of low-skilled workers – a strategy that limits labour costs and increases productivity – appears to coincide with migrants’ plans for short-term ‘springboard’ employment (Anderson 2010) that provides a ‘secure’ income flow and a basic administrative footing which in turn enables future social mobility. As the case of Rado demonstrates, however, ‘recruited’ employment can very rarely if ever be a route to more permanent and secured ‘plug in’. It is precisely the ‘full package’ arrangements that migrants value most – a contract, on-site accommodation and help with documents preparation – that recruiters use to entrap labourers in jobs that are highly unstable, physically demanding and reliant on high levels of exploitation. The reasons why migrants endure such adverse conditions for long periods of time are complex but an important one has to do with their sustained expectation that even if unable to save up or recover the initial monetary investment they can still use the time for securing their administrative regularisation, i.e. getting a NINo, a bank account, finding accommodation, etc.

Migrants who deploy network-based routes into the labour market embark on more guided and less lengthy paths, but these can be also paved with unforeseen difficulties that need to be navigated at a high personal cost. Most newcomers rely on the mobilisation of ‘weak’ ties for obtaining accommodation, employment, and initial orientation in the administrative procedures of settlement. Such support is usually pre-negotiated as temporary and is reflected in relationships of mutually beneficial exchange of information, services and money. In these reciprocal relationships the benefits between former neighbours, colleagues, childhood friends and distant acquaintances are, however, not evenly distributed and promises of mutuality and assistance often turn out as patron-client connections, similar to the ones observed in recruited employment. Many new migrants experience the ‘help’ they receive upon arrival as taking advantage of their vulnerability and capitalising on their limited local knowledge and resources. There are many instances in which a promised place to stay comes at a price, ‘guaranteed’ jobs dissipate, or advice and information turn out to be partial or misleading. The story of Assen is exemplary in this case. He was ‘called’ to England by a long-time friend, a well-settled member of the Northern London’ s Bulgarian diaspora who owned a cleaning business and who promised to set him up with a job and a place to stay. Upon arrival, Assen complained that his friend started charging him much higher rent than initially agreed for a tiny room in a crowded house share while at the same time cancelling his cleaning job and only reluctantly providing him with information and advice on how to go about procuring the necessary documents. Like most shared accommodation in ‘Bulgarian’ houses, the room Assen rented came with no contract and with no utility bills on his name which prompted him to seek alternative paths for obtaining a proof of address. As a first step he resorted to a tactic widely used in the Bulgarian community of arrivals – at the cost of 50 GBP he substituted his Bulgarian driving license with a British one and used the postal receipt as a proof of address. As his long hours labouring in the informal migrant economy did not qualify him as a ‘worker’ in the eyes of the state, his only option was to pursue a ‘job-seekers’ trajectory which in turn required him to present job applications, interview proofs and rejection letters from employers. To resolve this, migrants have no chance but resorting to fellow Bulgarian company owners who extract high fees for providing such documentation, or as in the case of Assen and his friend – payment comes in the form of free work in carrying out household or other unpleasant tasks.

For both categories of migrant workers, the process of actualising one’s status with regard to employment and residence often amounts to a passage through a ‘filtering’ mechanism (filtrirane). In this way, the multi-leveled and heterogenous arrival infrastructures that migrants get entangled in become sites for engaging with bordering processes carried out daily by the various local state agents, private service providers and migrant entrepreneurs. This specific form of bureaucratic bordering is activated by the convergence between a multitude of decentralised and differently formalised control, regulation and profit-oriented mechanisms that structure the sites within which migrants navigate their arrival and settlement. New arrivals do not pursue their administrative regularisation in a vacuum but in parallel to finding or changing employment, opening a bank account, and arranging a place to stay. Their attempts to organise their daily lives within these different areas reinforce interdependencies, overlapping configurations and conflating demands that they experience as ‘hidden’ but intense forms of everyday bordering. In the process, they are forced to learn the unwritten rules of the bureaucratic game: for instance, a NINo can be obtained only with a proof of address; migrant landlords do not issue rental contracts for reasons of tax evasion and others; registered rentals require high deposits and a job contract; regular employment can be arranged only with a NINo and a bank account; which in turn cannot be issued without a proof of address.

These bordering processes that I take as a manifestation of the ‘downsising’ of internal migration controls (Van der Leun and Kloosterman 2006) and the ‘colonisation of migrants’ everyday (Lebuhn 2013) by different governing technologies are not a direct function of EU legislation. Instead, they parasitise on the multiple ‘loopholes’ that emerge in the process of its bureaucratic implementation: it is both public and private border agents that introduce new and more stringent conditionalities; significantly delay the provision of services; reject applications; interpret regulations in a limiting manner or outrightly change them. Such ‘street-level’ decision making processes are driven by a high concentration of discretionary power in the hands of local agents and often take place on the ‘edge’ of the law (cf. Van der Woude, Barket, and van der Leun 2017). And despite the fact that such ‘reactive’ technologies of processing statuses usually follow diverse (even conflicting) ‘logics of operation’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, 124) in certain instances they can come together as a fine-tuning mechanism of governing that channels arrivals along specific pathways. In the case presented here, the tightening of the bureaucratic procedures was interpreted as a reaction to the changing ‘reception politics’ of 2013/14 and the corresponding intensification of the public-political hostility targeting Bulgarians. Those I spoke to noted on the paradoxical situation wherein settelment was much less complicated when free mobility was subjected to strict regulations (prior to 2014) than in the present conditions of lifted barriers. They claimed this was a ‘piecemeal’ state approach for disenfranchising EU migrants, ‘pushing’ them underground and thus invisibilising them in official statistics, as in the words of Rada, the mother of one of my interviewees: ‘ … people come because they believe they can get stable jobs but they end up in debts and nothing can stop them from falling into the black market pit’. Such experiences of ‘creeping’ everyday borders have been contextualised as part of broader ‘hostile environment encounters’ preconditioned by the British government in the aftermath of post-2008 financial crash (Burrell and Schweyher 2020). Clearly, Bulgarian nationals were not their sole targets, Poles report quite similar experiences, especially with regards to the opening of bank accounts and renting procedures, albeit with apparently much lower intensity and within manageable bounds (Burrell and Schweyher 2020).

The next section unpacks further the trajectory outlined by Rada by delving into the temporal dimensions of bureaucratic bordering and the setting of temporal rhythms that channel flows along decelerated, prolonged and sometimes blocked pathways of settlement.

‘Britain is the country of time’

When preparing their journeys and contemplating their expected ‘new becomings’ (Carling and Collins 2018) migrants imagine their trajectories as a multi-stage process of ‘settling in’ that is set off at the moment of arrival. The proliferation of bordering processes into the various spheres of the early migrant lives and the points of friction that newcomers need to navigate on the path to becoming ‘regular’ indicate that arrival is not always a platform for smooth and gradual advancement towards permanence. On the contrary, it can be marked with dead ends and circumscribed alleys that are part of circular rather than forward movement. The perspective on the border as ‘an important mechanism of temporal management’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 134) can yield illuminating insights on the governing modes through which migrants whose movements are formally fully legal are being enforced into a position of temporariness, uncertainty and never-complete regularity.

Scholarly work on the temporal dimensions through which border technologies impose their effects of sorting, channelling and processing mobilities has analysed the dynamic reconfigurations of the EU migration regime and the new tactics for managing the pressure on its external borders (Tazzioli 2019; Andersson 2014). In her exploration of the case of ‘Dublin’ migrants’ intra-European movements, Tazzioli argues that ‘time’ as a mechanism of control puts in disarray migrants’ ‘autonomous temporalities’ and imposes on them differential rhythms of control that can manifest in quickly alternating conditions of slowing down, protraction and waiting, among others (2019). In his ethnography of migration ‘reception’ centres, Andersson provides further insights on ‘waiting’ as a time-management device through which authorities usurp migrants’ time ‘for control purposes’ (2014). As a fundamental technology of the bureaucratic repertoire, long waiting times have been said to instil feelings of ‘anxiety’, ‘chaos’ and ‘instability’ in migrants who are subject to the processing of faceless administrators (Tuckett 2015).

Time assumes a new significance upon migration and starts to be valued differently by newcomers whose chances to get settled and pursue their long-term goals are highly dependent on the speed with which they manage to pass through the bureaucratic quagmire of regularisation. Concurrently, what they think of as ‘their’ time stops being a resource they can freely dispose of and becomes appropriated by nameless employees that set upon them temporal rhythms and paces of movement that contradict not only individual notions of forward advancement but also widely shared normative perceptions of integration trajectories. ‘Britain is the country of time’. ‘Here you always need to wait’. ‘It all takes time’, were some of the commonly repeated phrases through which migrants’ attempted to capture the regime of temporal control which they inhabited and through which they tried to make sense of their own modified experiences of time. NINo applications, for instance, were always marked by weeks and months of apprehension, waiting and insecurity as migrants always feared unjustified rejections and painstaking re-applications. Instead of the officially stipulated four-week processing period, for many the issuing of a NINo took anywhere between 6 weeks and few months. Such was the case with Assen who called in one day to ask me for a ‘huge favour’. He was extremely distressed by the fact that five weeks after his interview he still had not received his NINo card and was thus unable to look for a regular job. He wanted me to call in and inquire on the status of his application as he feared his ‘broken’ English would incur further delays. After hearing that his insurance card might take another four weeks’ time or more he remarked his exasperation in drawing an analogue between the impunity with which authorities navigated his trajectory, the feelings of anguish that this produced and the fate of those awaiting a death sentence: ‘They don’t seem to care what we are going through, they just throw you around like a rag. Even death sentences have a fixed date and take less to be implemented’.

Procedures related to the issuing of a bank account raised another set of temporal barriers that instituted prolonged waiting, exhaustion of time and economic resources and wasted back and forth movements for newcomers who desperately tried to keep themselves afloat. Emil was a 24-years-old glazier and window installer who arrived in London to reunite with his mother – a cleaner and child sitter who had taken on the task to procure all the necessary documents, so that he could get a regular contract in the construction company of one of her British employers. To accommodate her son she had stopped subletting the sofa in her one bedroom flat, but her single ‘migrant’ salary was not enough to cover the rent in the costly South borough which meant that both her and Emil were running against the clock when it came to regularising his stay. In a weeks’ time both of them visited more than eight bank branches, armed with a folder full of all sorts of documentation, only to find out that not a single employee would agree to file Emil’s application. Rejections were justified with requests for additional proofs of address, a British driving licence, a visa confirming his right to stay in the country, or polite excuses that stated branches’ exceeded capacity for processing new account applications. The founder of one of the numerous Bulgarian migrant consultancies in London confirmed to me that from 2013 onwards authorities started introducing new conditionalities turning the application process into a ‘giant slalom’ that most newcomers maneuvered to no avail for months on end before turning to paid service which in his words could ‘significantly speed up’ the process.

During my fieldwork migrant online support communities proliferated with requests from new arrivals who had fallen into the ‘paper trap’ (kapana na dokumentite) and who were looking for practical knowledge on how to speed up their regularisation. In observed online conversations and personal interactions with migrants I encountered a plethora of analogous idiomatic expressions that communicated a feeling of ‘being in a closed circle’, ‘going round and round’, ‘catch 22’, ‘the labyrinth of time’, ‘falling into a pit’ – that all invoked temporal categories for denoting arrival experiences of stasis and extremely slowed down or altogether suspended movement. Such evocations of arrival as waiting highlight the importance of understanding a key characteristic in the workings of the regime of bureaucratic bordering, namely its ability to institute modes of ‘asynchronious, fragmented and elongated experiences of time’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 158). Migrants occupied a temporality of what Hage has termed ‘stuckedness’ (2009) that, in this case, translates as inability to carry out pre-set strategies of arrival and settlement – an imposed state of being which many tend to interpret as causing an aberration in the ‘natural’ succession of stages in the migratory process. For prospective migrants, arrival is when one learns the ropes of migration and gets ‘plugged in’ by gradually administering one’s status as a worker, a resident and socio-economic subject, thus laying the grounds for further advancement on the settlement trajectory. Such a perspective construes migration trajectories as a telelological process of settlement in which arrival is the in-between space marking a starting point in the transition from chaos, uncertainty and hardship to stability, security and ordinariness. Or as echoed in the words of Nasko, one of the post-1989 pioneers of Bulgarian migration to the UK: ‘It’s like the historical development of forms of state organisation: from feudalism to socialism, then capitalism. Same is with migration – you cannot skip through stages; you come and go through it all – one step at a time’. From an imagined condition of ‘fixed temporariness’ that spans between clearly demarcated points of beginning and end, arrival turns into ‘non-temporary’, ‘lasting’ or ‘permanent’ temporariness that has no expiration date and holds no promises for restored forward advancement.

On the surface, arrival as waiting might appear as a standstill, for those kept in a ‘state of transition’, however, arrival is experienced as an extreme urgency of maximising the present moment while constantly navigating in-between positions and statuses. In the next section, I demonstrate how the consolidation of such ‘zones of temporal suspension’ – a tool of EU migration governance (see Tsianos and Karakayali 2010) that clearly applies to EU as well as third country migrants, turns arrivals into hyper-productive subjects (Ahmad 2008) in what are largely informalised and segmented labour markets.

Sinking into the informal economy

Existing research on processes of labour market insertion indicates the significance of densely knit ethnic networks in providing access to material and social resources through which arrivals negotiate their settlement (Ahmad 2008). Such processes have been conceptualised as characteristic to the trajectories of people whose migrations take place within conditions of formal ‘illegality’ and the specific set of constraints that they are exposed to (Kloosterman, Van Der Leun, and Rath 1999). The analysis of post-accession East European migrants’ participation in host labour markets, on the other hand, sees the role of co-ethnic support networks and niches as ‘ports of first entry’ but not as constituting long-term trajectory of ‘alternative’ settlement outside of regular societal structures (see Shubin and Dickey 2013; Iglicka 2001).

The regime of temporal suspension that regulates migrants’ movements within pathways of incorporation opens up a vacuum between formal and actual regularity where a process similar to what de Genova calls ‘inclusion through illegalisation’ (2002, 439) unfolds. The major difference between the case of undocumented Mexican migrants in the US discussed by him and the post-2014 Bulgarian arrivals in the UK is that the latter are not in direct danger of deportation (although see Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). However, their efforts to navigate a temporal state of ‘stuckedness’, the pressures to ‘stay put’ and their inability to exit a downward spiral of ‘irregularity’ all come together in pushing them into informal labour arrangements and a general descent into the underground in a manner very similar to what de Genova observes as a reaction to the vulnerability created by legally produced ‘illegality’ (2002).

Thus, Bulgarians with juridically fully legal status who depart attracted to the promise of ‘decent’ and ‘stable’ employment get quickly merged in the ranks of the undocumented workforce, filling in the gaps in the secondary labour market where they acquiesce to physically crushing work, long hours, and non-guaranteed and sub-minimum wages. A closer look at the realities of irregularisation and labour market absorption reveals that the sectors in which new arrivals prevail are dominated by subcontractors and small and middle-sized businesses run by co-ethnics which to a great extent operate outside the orbs of state regulation and thus make up part of the larger ‘informal economy’. The migrant businesses where newcomers get inserted in upon arrival exhibit a diverse and highly stratified structure: the top layer is occupied by larger firms servicing and formally integrated into the wider economy; below them are mid-range companies within migrant communities that cater mainly to the needs of the Bulgarian and other minority groups; and lastly, individual intermediaries and job fixers that connect precarious migrants with larger subcontractors and small enterprises owned by locals or members of another minority. Unsurprisingly, the accounts of those suspended in protracted arrival suggest that their initial insertions into the migrant economy take place within its bottom segments where they are exposed to both exploitation and deceit. Such was the experience of Boncho who after being refused payment for his subcontracted job as a packer in a DHL warehouse near London moved to North-East London in an area that was well-known for its high concentration of Bulgarian immigrant housing and businesses. Worried at first about not having any friends or distant contacts in the community to draw on, in a week’s time he was astounded with how little time and efforts it took him to find a place in shared house and a job as a painter in a nearby flat that his landlord arranged for him. The job wasn’t too heavy and paid well: 60 GBP for around nine hours a day but only lasted for three days and as he later realised was a rare find. In the next month and a half, Boncho had to change back and forth between one to two days of strenuous construction work arranged through the local Bulgarian and East European immigrant networks, one-off gigs on the day labour market where he was picked up by British and migrant ‘employers’ who paid below the minimum, and longer spell of work in an Albanian-owned carwash where he toiled 12 hours in the open and permanently soaked in water for 35 GBP a day.

If ‘precarity’ is the quintessential term that most aptly captures the spirit of the ‘new economy’ in terms of its commandment of a heightened sense of insecurity and vulnerability and the resulting loss of workers’ autonomy in long-term planning and controlling of their time, then ethnic economies dominated by informal service sector jobs have been said to exhibit one of its most unpleasant faces (Ahmad 2008). The migrants who took part in this research understood their informal work as a temporary strategy that would keep them afloat while trying to navigate the closed circle of their bureaucratic regularisation and graduate from the stage of ‘arrival’ to ‘settlement’. Caught in a ruthless race against the clock in an effort to manage the daily grind of the administrative ‘plug in’ along with the added pressures of overdue migration debts and the high living expenses in London, their sense of being imprisoned in a ‘monetarized time’ (Ahmad 2008, 315) grew by the day and was usually illustrated in statements like ‘a day without a job is a wasted day’ or ‘here, even when you sleep you lose money’. The balance sheets kept by my interviewees were so shaky that it was not uncommon for them to request financial injections from their families and friends back home to repay liabilities or cover emergencies: Ivan came to London with 500 GBP cash savings. In the first month his expenses amounted to 500 GBP (320 for a single room, 80 for food, around 50 for transportation, and the rest for phone cards and other contingencies), while his total earnings were a bit more than 450 GBP: he got only 12 days of work – two as a mover for 50 a day, two on a construction site for 40 a day, one day helping an acquaintance clear his flat for 30 GBP and the remaining seven days as a helper in an Indian car shop for 35 GBP a day.

One of the most common strategies that newcomers used in order to reduce losses while keeping on waiting for regularisation was to alternate between a couple of weeks stays in Bulgaria that allowed them to save rent when there was no prospect for well-paid employment, and short-term labor-intensive stays in London which they also used to advance paperwork for their bureaucratic inclusion. Thus, in an ironic turn of fate, one way for carrying out plans for permanent migration was through incessant back and forth travelling whilst staying on the track of regularisation. Another way depended on newcomers’ ability to go underground and cope with different degrees of irregularity. Resignation to either or both of these practices was not a recipe for success, however, especially for those who had no language competency, little knowledge of administrative procedures and limited economic capital and thus felt like players in a zero-sum game.

The labour market is but one of the institutions constituting the ethnic economy on which newcomers depend whilst managing their ‘arriving’ in the UK. There exists a whole informal industry that has grown to cater for the needs of the newly arrived and irregular but also longer-term migrants who for years maneuver between regimes of regularity and irregularity offering housing, transportation, accountancy, legal, medical and logistic services. For Sarah Mahler the germination of such ‘parallel’ institutions is a testimony to migrants’ exclusion from official societal spheres and the openning up of a multiplicity of ‘niches’ that offer ‘affordable prices and … convenience’ (1995, 216). In the Bulgarian community such informal or semi-formalised enterprises parasitise on the regime of bureaucratic bordering which keeps newcomers in a legal limbo and serves to exclude them from the regular labour and housing markets and various health and social welfare services. Rather than offering provisions that can help migrants cut costs these parallel economy follows a logic of extractive profiteering through overpricing rental and other services and undercutting wages to eventually accelerate their decent into informality and pull them further back on their trajectories of settelment.

Conclusion

This article explored EU migrants’ post-arrival experiences of incorporation with a specific focus on pathways of administrative regularisation and how these intertwine with broader processes of settlement. I have sought to bring the perspectives of a group of Bulgarian newcomers whose individual migratory projects and trajectories have been doubly circumscribed by the 2008 global crisis and the 2014 labour market liberalisation. The latter they interpreted as opening opportunities for permanency, regularity and full realisation of EU citizenship rights, which gave them hope for a new start in the UK. However, far from being welcomed as fellow Europeans with equal rights, migrants were draw into a whirlwind of administrative procedures and requirements, which precarised their social positioning and diminished chances of achieving regularity beyond the formal. I have outlined the workings of a mechanism of bureaucratic bordering that is set in motion once newcomers step on the path to status regularisation and start procuring the various documents and proofs required for practicing their rights as residents, workers, claimants of services and economic agents. They come to enter a complex landscape of often unfulfillable administrative formalities, unforeseen delays and re-applications in which they negotiate conflicting demands, interdependencies and overlapping configurations. Their inability to transcend the limitations posed by the rigid bureaucratic system profoundly alters existing conceptualisations of arrival and settlement as a stage-wise process of teleological advancement towards permanency and stability. I have thus argued that bureaucratic borders assume control over migrants’ temporalities and by imposing rhythms of ‘slowed down’ or ‘suspended’ movement entrap them into a state of continuous ‘waiting’. For many, the urgency to maximally capitalise on existing opportunities, no matter how effervescent and confining they might be, is further reinforced. The constant shifting between regimes of regularity and irregularity puts migrants in the trap of informal labour and an ‘underground’ existence: the reliance on established migrant economies opens ‘relational’ (Portes 1981) channels of incorporation through quick access to jobs and services, while at the same time creates lasting dependencies and exploitation that circumscribes routes to ‘structural’ embeddedness (Ahmad 2008).

The hardening of procedures of administrative regularisation after the opening of labour markets for Bulgarian and Romanian workers in 2014 is one aspect of the domestically operating bordering regime that has come to mark present day politics and realities of EUropean migration (Lebuhn 2013). The rationales of differentiation, classification and subordination that have guided immigration controls at external borders have been downshifted to ‘inside’ spaces and to interactions and proceedings related to the administrative organisation of everyday life. So far, critical intra-EU scholarship has detected the unfolding of such ‘everyday bordering’ on the level of (supra)national legislation, and more specifically as stringent conditionalities that pose limits on migrants’ welfare rights and access to social protection. To further expand on these findings, I have pointed to another, less visible layer of migration control that takes place immediately after arrival and often makes use of infra-legal and ad hoc technologies of delay and rejection to preclude the administrative activation of legal statuses. The concept of ‘bureaucratic bordering’ demonstrates precisely these mundane, non-spectacular and unnoticeable ways in which techniques of migration management encapsulate migrants’ existence. Yet their material, almost ‘thing’-like essence (Balibar 2002) comes to the surface when considering the challenges their present to migrants’ trajectories of settlement. Such a perspective is especially pertinent when unwrapping the patterns of inequality and subordination that mark the labour market inclusion of East European migrants who are seemingly exempt from legally sanctioned restrictions and yet remain overrepresented in the most rigged labour sectors. By problematising the regime of intra-EU mobility, in respect to the productivity of internal bordering this article has been a step towards complicating and nuancing the picture of EU migration governance that is still cultivated in the ‘fortress Europe’ metaphor: pointing to a harsh and violent closure from without and a borderless mobility from within.

Returning to the initial context of (pre-)Brexit and the UK, the conclusions drawn here come to challenge the intimations stemming from the main motto of the Brexiteers’ campaign – ‘taking back control’ – that has quickly turned from a discourse on political independence to an attack against internal migration and the closing of borders (see Burrell and Hopkins 2020). Controls have never been released, rather than operating through policies and laws and manifesting in violent ways through detentions and deportations as per de Genova’s ‘spectacles’ of borders and security (2011) they have shifted ‘into the middle of the political space’ where in the hands of ‘street-level’ bureaucrats they have taken over the ‘ordinary’. Stalking EU migrants into their interactions with state agencies, banks, and landlords, and penetrating into their workplaces and homes, borders have been there before and beyond 2014 to remind newcomers of their ‘in-between’ legitimacy and not quite European belonging. Migrants’ lay understandings expose – even if somewhat controversially – how the current system of free mobility system is more deceptive and damaging for their livelihoods that was before and what they anticipate replacing it. Rada put this most succinctly: ‘This current approach [to migration] is creating chaos and panic … it is an enchanted circle – people are told “come and work, you have all rights”, but in reality they are just playing with people’s lives … You come here and you apply for some number [NINo] and they don’t even give it to you because you are no one … The visa system can be much fairer – you know what the rules are and if you abide by them you come and you work’.