I met Fatima* during my first week on the job. I had just been hired as a legal executive for an immigration solicitor in Ireland. It had been explained to me that one of my primary responsibilities would be to meet new clients, gather details about their stories, backgrounds, legal cases, and claims, and begin building cases grounded in their lived realities. Fatima was my first meeting of this nature. Having studied migration and asylum processes in university, and hearing the discourse about it so often in the media, I expected the meeting to be filled with legal terminology and procedural language so often associated with discussions of migration.

Instead, I was met by a woman eager to tell me about her children. She painted a picture for me of her experience in Somalia and of her primary motivation: to secure a life of safety for her two young daughters, whom she had left behind. They were being cared for by their grandmother at that time, but she feared the instability surrounding them, and the threat posed by militant group Al-Shabaab, would eventually reach their doorstep as it had hers.

As she spoke, it became increasingly clear that her story was woven together by a network of family members doing everything they could to keep one another afloat.

She described the situation in which her mother was now raising and caring for her two young daughters. She told me of her brother, who also lived in perpetual fear of the militant group,  yet still found opportunities to help and provide for the children. She spoke of her sister, who, despite raising a family of her own, spent countless hours gathering and sending documents from Somalia to support Fatima’s application in Ireland. What appeared at my desk, I quickly realised, was not just Fatima’s story, it was the story of a wider infrastructure of care stretched across borders.

When we talk about migration, we tend to focus on the person who leaves. We follow their journey across borders, through asylum systems and immigration processes, and into a new country. Sitting across from Fatima, I was reminded that migration is rarely an individual experience. The responsibility of holding families together, both emotionally and practically, often falls on those left behind, shaping their daily lives in ways which remain largely unseen.

I met countless individuals in this role where a similar pattern became apparent. For families separated by asylum and immigration systems, every stage of the process becomes a shared burden.

A delayed decision is not simply an administrative inconvenience for the individual seeking protection; it is months, often years, added onto a period of separation. A refusal of permission to work not only impacts the individual living in the reception centre or asylum accommodation, it also impacts the relatives waiting for support, the children waiting for school fees, the parents hoping for medicine, and the family members who continue carrying financial and emotional responsibilities alone.

Families are drawn into the consequences of decisions made about one person, yet their role in sustaining, supporting, and absorbing those outcomes is not reflected anywhere in the process. They are present in what migration requires but absent in how it is recorded. These are the aspects of migration that the systems do not account for. Systems account for the experience of one legal subject. Everyone connected to that person exists in practice, shaping outcomes and consequences, but has no formal place within how migration is defined.

Migration is narrated as movement, rupture and individual agency. Our attention remains with the migrant in transit, navigating borders, papers and new languages. However, this leaves something crucial unexamined.

What about those who stay?

In Fatima’s case, her daughters remained in Somalia while she navigated a system over which she had little control. Their lives became entangled with timelines set by people they would never meet. Every decision made about Fatima’s future had impacts beyond the walls of the immigration office.  Fatima left Somalia in an attempt to find safety for her family. Rather than the typical picture of one person leaving and starting again elsewhere, her and her family’s lives became split across two continents at once, held together through distance, responsibility and ongoing administrative labour.

Migration is never carried by one person alone. It is carried across families, distances, and relationships that remain largely invisible to the systems that govern it.