Making and Unmaking Migrants’ Family Relationships in Finland: A Study of Nordic Welfare State Population Registration and Statistics Production

Abstract

This article explores how Nordic welfare states produce knowledge about migrant family ties through registration and the register-based production of statistics. States govern migrants through this knowledge: their eligibility for social rights is based on register entries, and migration and foreign policies are based on register-derived statistics. By analysing how familial relationships are made and unmade in the registration of and production of statistics about foreign nationals, we show how migrant (family) lives are made ‘legible’. Drawing on multi-sited state ethnographic fieldwork conducted at service locations of the Finnish government’s registration agency and at Statistics Finland, we show that documents, DNA tests and personal narratives play different roles as ‘evidence’ in registration decision-making processes that endorse the (heteronormative/homonormative) nuclear family model. Registration relies heavily on documents provided by ‘reliable’ public authorities. In the move from registration to statistics, family relationships that are missing from the register are suddenly made visible and reorganised according to nuclear family norms. We conclude that the process of state knowledge production about migrant populations is contingent and arbitrary, but also strategic: a (bio)politics that aims to know all and a form of border control and care for some more than others.

Keywords

• population registration
• statistics production
• migrant family relations
• state knowledge production
• governance
• social rights