Brexit has been a process of re-bordering and therefore migrantisation – re-classifying movement between the UK and the EU from ‘intra-EU mobility’ to ‘migration’. This change creates particular challenges for bi-national couples and families seeking to move or reunite across the UK-EU border after Brexit. In this paper, we draw on semi-structured interviews with the first cohort of UK-EU couples to confront the post-Brexit UK family immigration regime, to reveal how they narrate and respond to their ‘categorical’ and ‘experiential’ migrantisation, drawing on our understanding of migrantisation as a contextual, dynamic, multi-domain and intersectional process (Charsley and Hoellerer Citation2025). Migrantisation in this highly restrictive immigration regime is often narrated as a shock, and many ‘bargain with migrantisation’, drawing in ambivalent ways on dominant discourses on migration and uneven migrantisation between domains, to contest or reframe their new position. For some migrantisation provokes reflexivity, redefining their understandings of migration and migrants. Experiences of and outcome from migrantisation are, however, also underpinned by varying access to resources; positionalities including ethnicity, nationality, class and gender and prior histories of mobility.
Hoellerer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.