Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of the internal bordering processes of European mobility regimes on illegalized migrants and their daily forms of resistance. It discusses how precarious legal status impact the strategies and the imaginaries of an illegalized population from sub-Saharan Africa

Paper long abstract:

European Union proceeds to a selection of nationals from only certain countries or benefiting of some specific skills by facilitating their access to the mobility across Europe. This bordering processes represent a hierarchical sorting creating an uneven access to mobility rather than actual hermetic borders. Therefore, the existence of an illegalized population, able to live and work for a more or less long duration, is a stable and structural pattern of contemporary Nation-States and not, as some argue, an anomaly or the proof of the inefficiencies of the migratory policies. Nation-states try to regulate such "irregular mobility" by denying accesses to public services, labor and housing market. I focus on how impoverished and racialized migrants from sub-Saharan Africa bypass those internal apparatuses. Drawing from the trajectories of illegalized migrants, I use biographical analysis and participant observations of a squatting mobilization to explore the evolution of their projects and their (trans)local anchors despite the spatial and social exclusion they face. In this paper, I examine the local layer of a Swiss city in order to grasp the strategies of illegalized migrants to negotiate police controls, move in public spaces and find alternative dwelling places. Thus, it offers an analysis of how precarious migrants achieve or not to navigate and appropriate European mobility regimes' constraints which try to narrow their movements.