(In)security, silencing and hindered parenting: how the Europeanization of Swiss migration policy perpetuates reproductive and epistemic injustices

This article questions the prevailing narrative that Swiss migration policy underwent a ‘dramatic change’ with its Europeanization over the last three decades. Certainly, the move towards EU compatibility (Free movement of people, Schengen) has represented a deep break with Switzerland’s traditionally defensive approach to European migration. Looking at Swiss migration policy from the perspective of its effects on migrants reveals, however, remarkable continuities from the post-WWII period to this day. The article highlights the persistence of reproductive harm inflicted upon marginalized migrant women who are continuously silenced as speaking exposes them to further oppressions. Far from being contingent, these reproductive abuses form a structural feature of an exploitative migration regime whereby security, economic and gender logics act in synergic ways to attract migrants for their labour while preventing settlement. Such migration regime relies on a politics of obstructing family life, which disproportionally targets and affects women. The article centres migrant women’s voices and introduces the notion of ‘hindered parenting’. The latter serves as an epistemic framework that bridges the experiences of (European) seasonal workers’ wives in the 20th century and those of (non-EUropean) ‘undocumented’ domestic workers today, revealing how both have resisted and adapted to coercions affecting their reproductive autonomy.