Labour, social reproduction, and refugee politics: 'women's work' amongst Hungarian Romani families in Canada

This article analyses the intersections of labour, social reproduction, and refugee politics through an ethnographic case study of Hungarian Romani families living in Canada. Building off of recent anthropological debates on surplus populations, the article frames the life activities of asylum-seekers as a form of labour, paying particular attention to gender and the dynamics of 'women's work.' The main question explored is: what sort of life-sustaining strategies do refugees engage in when they are excluded from both wage labour and citizenship regimes? The key argument put forward is that Hungarian Romani asylum-seeking to Canada should be understood as a social reproduction strategy and a type of gendered work that has emerged in the contemporary conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the asylum-seeking activities of Romani families are embedded in gendered divisions of work in which gaining access to refugee status and state social support in Canada is regarded as an extension of domestic labour and familial care work, typically done by the maternal figures of the family. Moreover, the 'women's work' of securing refugee support is recognized by Romani families as a legitimate form of paid work, a kind of 'bread winning'. Reflecting on these fieldwork findings, I propose an expanded approach to social reproduction theory that is attentive to the unwaged, informal, and life-making work of refugees and surplus populations, ultimately arguing for a breakdown of the dichotomy between the 'economic migrant' and the 'political refugee' in light of the social totality of capitalism.