In a sense, it’s always an emergency”: Infrastructuring for migrant citizenship in-between slow emergencies and the covid-19 crisis

Covid-19 pandemic has had widely differential impacts on different populations around the globe, including diverse migrant populations. In Denmark it had been in particular those without an official registration (CPR) number - albeit not necessarily without a legal basis to reside - that have been most severely impacted. Unlike asylum seekers, whom the state has enrolled, if increasingly repressively, into the basic service provision, those without CPR numbers have no official access to resources channeled almost exclusively through the thoroughly regulated welfare system. Often precariously housed or homeless, they rely on mostly small-scale, often migrant-driven or -staffed non-profit organizations and charities to access basic resources like warm shelter, shower, basic care or individual legal or administrative support. This paper draws on ethnographic research and interviews with such migrant service providers in Copenhagen, conducted in fall 2021, as a part of wider research examining impacts of the pandemic on work of such providers. We approach these providers, their practices and spaces as a crucial component of urban infrastructure of migrants’ citizenship; with citizenship understood here as a socio-political relation between a subject and the political community, regardless of that subject’s formal legal status. In this paper we analyze these providers’ responses to the wider framings of covid-19 as a “crisis” vis-à-vis what many of them understand as a perpetually re-emerging crisis-like landscape of their work. We attend here also to their everyday, tactical and more long-term, strategic navigations of openings and closures for practical interventions and political reframings afforded by the fluctuating crisis-ness of the pandemic. Theoretically we draw on the recent work on slow emergencies (Anderson et al 2020; Grove et al 2021) to make sense of these responses and navigations.