Beyond migration criminalisation: Religion, legal consciousness and moral personhood among undocumented domestic workers

Socio-legal scholarship has shown that criminalisation produces stigmatised identities for undocumented migrants. Against the backdrop of increasingly restrictive migration control in Belgium, this article examines how undocumented domestic workers resist the stigma generated by migrant criminalisation through making sense of life circumstances from Christian moral frameworks rather than from immigration law. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research – including interviews and participant observation with two collectives of undocumented women – we show how religion functions as a normative order that displaces the law's authority to define deservingness. Through narratives of divine witnessing and grace, religious practice enables forms of ‘counter-recognition’ in contexts where legal recognition is denied. These religious narratives, in turn, cast the state migration regime as one of ‘abandonment’, as undocumented women seek to name and critique governance practices that institutionalise indifference while simultaneously extracting care labour from them.