When the Carceral Web Slips: Digital Moral Labour Among Migrants in Legal Precarity

Across Europe, migrants in legal precarity experience forms of carcerality that extend beyond prison walls. This carceral continuum operates through migration controls, policing, bureaucratic scrutiny, stigma, and, increasingly, digital infrastructures. Drawing on two multi‐sited fieldworks and digital ethnographies in Europe, this article explores how two formerly incarcerated migrant men navigate this continuum through digital practices. Bridging migration studies, border criminology, and digital anthropology, we extend Gurusami’s (2019) concept of the carceral web by introducing carceral slippages to capture a form of control that is pervasive without being seamless: Articulations across penal, migration, administrative, and digital systems remain partial, opaque, and difficult to anticipate. These slippages generate uncertainty while leaving limited room for manoeuvre. We then show how migrants negotiate this condition through digital moral labour: selectively disclosing or concealing incarceration, managing stigma, and sustaining obligations of care across geographically dispersed relationships. Rather than treating digital technologies primarily as deterministic instruments of state surveillance or merely emancipation, we explore how they also become infrastructures through which migrants negotiate personhood, care, and obligation under conditions of legal precarity. By foregrounding migrants’ retrospective experiences and (digital) practices, we show how carceral slippages shape both the uncertainty individuals endure and the limited possibilities through which they negotiate who they are and who they can become. This article complicates accounts of carcerality as seamless or totalising, showing how the carceral web can remain pervasive precisely through its fragmented and uncertain articulation.