Paper short abstract:

Refugees resettled in the US are recruited to truck training schools by the imaginary of the "American dream." Documentary work in truck training and testing yards reveals these as sites of international friction that challenge ethnographic assumptions about the sedentarism of migrant destinations.

Paper long abstract:

The ubiquity of e-commerce in the United States has led to a labor shortage of an estimated 30,000 truck drivers. What used to be regarded as a respectable working class job and a pathway to the “American dream” has since degraded into poor working conditions. To address this disjuncture, newly arrived immigrants are being recruited for truck driving jobs, driven by the promise of financial freedom and the chance to work for themselves as owner-operators. The “American dream” persists, but is it achievable? This paper describes the theoretical implications, ethical struggles, and methodological challenges that emerged from an ethnographic film project following the experiences of Afghan refugees resettled in the United States in their attempts to train and test for a Commercial Drivers License. We rethink mobile subjects, considering how the eponymous figure of the “migrant” is moved and changed through economic conditions that demand new forms of imagined and empirical mobility, and which produce new forms of mobility injustice (Sheller 2018). Simultaneously, we rethink the sedentarism of traditional ethnography, showing how the empirical and practical demands of documenting trucking parallel the lived realities of migrants as mobile subjects whose dreams of place-stability are never guaranteed within the conditional and precarious conditions of international refugee resettlement. We present the truck training yard and its ethnographic contours on and off the road as a space of friction where international mobilities and localized constraints intersect.