In the current geopolitical landscape, undocumented migrants are increasingly illegalised and excluded from rights, policies, and services aimed at guaranteeing an acceptable standard of living for legal residents (Ataç & Rosenberger, Journal of Immigrant& Refugee Studies 17(1): 1–10, 2019). At heart, this implies that undocumented people are cast out of the ‘common humanity’ to whom a dignified life is owed. Not only is this fundamentally at odds with the promise of — presumably — universal and inalienable human rights (Noll, European Journal of Migration and Law 12(2): 241–272, 2010), but it also challenges the national basis of social work (Bartley & Beddoe, Transnational social work, 2018). Within this repressive context, others have previously warned that social work can become complicit in migration control and the logic of the nation-state to identify, manage, and deport those without citizenship (Farmer, The British Journal of Social Work 51(8): 3301–3318, 2021; Humphries, British Journal of Social Work 34(1): 93–107, 2004; Jönsson, British Journal of Social Work 44(suppl 1): i35–i52, 2014). In this chapter, I consequently aim to shed light on what it can mean for social work to be a human rights profession vis-à-vis those whose ‘right to have rights’ is revoked (Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism (first edition), 1973; Kmak,The International Journal of Human Rights 24(8): 1201–1217,2020). Based on extensive ethnographic research in the medical humanitarian praxis of Médecins Du Monde in Antwerp, it will be illustrated how social workers resist rather than comply with the necropolitical dehumanization of undocumented people. Concretely by expressing their ‘right to exist’, which will further be substantiated and conceptualized by ‘resisting illegality’, ‘reclaiming humanity’, and ‘reinforcing belonging’, the arguments echo and strengthen how commentators on social work have previously underscored the necessity of ‘bringing the human back to human rights’ (Ife, 2016, p. 6).
