(In)Visibility Paradox: Irregular Migrants as Urban Citizens in Barcelona

Many cities adopt an urban citizenship approach as an inclusion mechanism for irregular migrants, often in direct defiance of restrictive immigration and migrant incorporation policies at the national level. While nascent research on urban citizenship has already shown how urban policies can craft local membership, this article, drawing on interviews I carried out with irregular migrants in Barcelona in 2021–2022, grounds the theoretical debate on urban citizenship with empirical evidence. Collected data illustrates that although the Municipality of Barcelona, together with civil society, provides the same services for all irregular migrants, their experience in the city depends on their ethnicity and race. In other words, irregular migrants’ combination of administrative/legal invisibility and racial/ethnic hypervisibility creates a paradox that shows how their precarious legal status is entwined with their identities and how marginality is reproduced in their everyday life through discrimination, microaggression, and racial profiling.