By Dorte Thorsen
Contemporary policy regimes in Britain,
and in Europe in general, aim to manage migration through the separation of
what are perceived as productive and desirable forms of migration and what are seen
as threatening or undesirable forms. Such perceptions are not objective. As
migration scholars Nina Glick-Schiller and Noel Salazar[i]
point out, they normalize the movements of some people, while criminalizing and
entrapping the ventures of others.
So much attention goes into this
separation currently and produces a deeply problematic conflation of refugees
and migrants that not only runs the risk of violating the rights of refugees but
also of forgetting to assess whether the criteria for separating one category
from the other are apposite. If you read Dew’s story, you get an idea of
the level of ambition, the large sums of money spent to pursue that ambition
and the ingenuity demonstrated by many migrants to find solutions. Their
perseverance begs the question why people with so much ambition and capacity to
cope with difficult situations belong to the category of undesired migrants.
With the exception of a narrow
range of professions, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly
excluded from established and legal transnational mobility flows, not just to
the global North but also to the stronger economies in Asia and the Middle
East, and to African states that have aligned their mobility regimes with those
of the European Union.
Restrictions on foreign
nationals’ mobility and settlement are not a new phenomenon in Africa. For
decades migrants have been labelled as irregular migrants, their local mobility
has been curbed and expulsions of migrants have been articulated as part of
national security concerns during conflict or crisis or as part of broader
efforts to curb migration. Migrants across the continent have experienced
having their identity papers and residence cards inspected at random by state
authorities and others, who regularly demand levies whether the papers are
incomplete or not.
‘Irregularity’ and ‘illegality’
then is more than a question of preventing undocumented migration; it is a
political construction used to criminalize and exclude certain groups of
migrants, and to fuel a growing industry in itself of equipment and personnel
to separate the desired migrants from the undesired ones.
European funding and technical
support for border control and for pre-departure prevention of irregular
migration now extends beyond North Africa to African states known as sending
countries. As a result mobility patterns have changed in three important ways.
First, previously established migration routes towards North Africa have become
more difficult and dangerous to traverse for migrants who are seen as potential
irregular immigrants to Europe. Second, migration has been rerouted from both long-established
and more recent places of destination to a much broader range of locations.
Third, journeys require increasingly ingenious ways of circumventing border control, and they entail considerable danger of
being delayed or blocked at all stages of the journey. Contingencies shape
migrants’ trajectories as they navigate the closure of imagined possibilities,
insecurities where they are stuck, and the opening of never-thought-of
opportunities.
When potential and actual
migrants seek to overcome these politically erected barriers to realize their
aspirations for the future, breaking the law is not at the heart of their
strategies, even if they do clash with international legal systems. Rather, the
use of forged papers, carefully
constructed applications for visas or asylum, and the clandestine crossing of
borders, contest
the power of documents.
They challenge what Yael Navaro-Yashin[ii]
has termed the material culture and ideological artefacts of modern states by
ignoring the veracity and indispensability of such documents. In the regimes of mobility
advocated and practiced in the global North, such disregard is perceived as the
crux of illegality and not only individuals are criminalized: where corruption
allows for the purchase of false papers, sometimes directly from the issuing
state institutions, states too are criminalized
and branded as conservatories of kleptocracy and bad governance.
The politics at play here entail
the juxtaposition of a singular understanding of documents associated with the
modern state with an imaginative understanding of how converging regimes of
mobility open new spaces, in which enterprising individuals can make an
acceptable living as migrants or non-migrants, inside or outside the continent.
Dorte Thorsen is the Theme Leader for Gender and Qualitative Research at the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme
Consortium. Her research interests include child and youth migration and, since
2012, the lives of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa living in Morocco.
#IAmAMigrant
[i] Glick Schiller, N. and N. B. Salazar (2013) 'Regimes of
mobility across the globe', Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(2): 183-200.
[ii] Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2007) 'Make-believe papers, legal forms
and the counterfeit. Affective interactions between documents and people in
Britain and Cyprus', Anthropological
Theory 7(1): 79-98.
