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Paper short abstract:

Young migrants from urban Eritrea and Ethiopia soon realise that the outside world does not keep what it seemed to promise. Lacking economic capital and valid documents they can rarely rely on formal bureaucratic processes when encountering embassies, borders, immigration departments or refugee agencies. Cheating may help, however.

Paper long abstract:

Young migrants from urban Eritrea and Ethiopia soon realise that the outside world does not keep what it seemed to promise. Lacking economic capital and valid documents they can rarely rely on formal bureaucratic processes when encountering embassies, borders, immigration departments or refugee agencies.

So honesty is a 'psychological privilege' they cannot afford, as Michael Jackson puts it (2006). Cheating in one's refugee biography, bribing a policeman or establishing and exploiting personal ties to official staff in embassies and NGOs may help, however. In order to advance this cultural competence and praxis can and has to be learned in the migrants' dispersed, but well-interconnected milieu. Here perceptions, trajectories and evaluations are broadly shared and debated, while most recent tricks and ways out are carefully protected and imparted only after one's own next steps seem secure. Informal and fraudulent approaches are pursued even if formal processes (visa, asylum etc.) seem more promising and permanent from the ethnographer's point of view. Informality has become a dominant mode of action. Migration's need to advance as well as the experience of social exclusion, exploitation and human rights' hubris are seen as a valid legitimation.

This paper wants to contribute to the theoretical discussion on informality as a habitualised mode of action, a specific culture and a constitution of self and the world. Its empirical examples have been collected in the ongoing research project "Dynamic worlds of imagination - learning processes, knowledge and communication among young urban migrants from Eritrea and Ethiopia" within the Bavarian research network "migration and knowledge" (ForMig).