ABSTRACT
Whereas literature on migrant family reunification primarily examined the relationship between migrants and policies of destination states, typically located in the Global North, this chapter investigates the process of applying for family reunification through a transnational lens. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography among Eritrean refugees, this chapter focuses on the case of family members who await reunification in the first country of asylum and show their limited capabilities to perform what we term ‘administrative citizenship’. This concept sheds light on the material processes of identification and documentation that shape legal membership. As this chapter illustrates, refugees’ life circumstances compel them to interact with different state systems, administrations and identification systems. Their interactions are often marked by limited opportunities to perform their administrative identity due to deficient or discriminatory registration systems at home and in exile. As we show, lack of documentation – or accepted documentation – by the assessing state emerges from refugees’ unique social, political and administrative position of outsiders in relation to their country of origin, their often precarious status in their first countries of asylum, as well as from the limited capacity of their bureaucratic dossier ‘to travel’ across borders.
