Invisible Struggles: Migrant Women, Everyday Vulnerability and EU Law

In this contribution, the author develops a feminist account of an EU Law of the everyday by examining how European migration and labour law structurally produce the invisibility of migrant women. Drawing on the story of Nazneen, an Afghan migrant featured in Ben Judah’s This is Europe, the author argues that her experiences of restricted mobility, informal labour, and gender-based vulnerability are not marginal to the law but shaped by it. The analysis shows how legal regimes, particularly the Common European Asylum System and labour markets structures, generate “everyday borders” and sustain precarious forms of work on which sectors of the European economy depend. These regimes operate through a logic of selective visibility. They recognise certain individuals as having rights while rendering others legally and institutionally invisible. This is further reinforced by the gender-blindness of asylum and labour law, which fails to account for the specific risks women face on migration routes. By proposing a feminist approach to the law of the everyday, this paper calls for a reorientation of EU law away from abstract, market-oriented subjectivities and towards the lived experiences of those on the margins of society. Such a reorientation exposes the extent to which European legal and economic orders rely on, and reproduce, the invisibility of vulnerable individuals.