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Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on ethnographic research among undocumented migrants in Norway and France, and argues that conceptualizing temporality as multiple, uneven and relational contributes to strengthening analytical understandings of migration, while simultaneously avoiding chronopolitical othering.

Paper long abstract:

Recent work in the anthropology of migration has criticised a tendency to place migrants in a different temporality from non-migrants, arguing that such analysis is a denial of coevalness in Fabian’s sense. The critique of how the chronotopes of migration research function as ‘othering’ devices, echoes calls to ‘de-migranticise’ migration studies that has gained traction within the field. We sympathise with these calls to complicate the migrant/non-migrant binary and to problematise how the temporalizing frames of research may contribute to a chronopolitical othering, and thereby to reproduce racialised and (post)colonial structures of power. Utilising a shared temporal framework, for instance, ‘neo-liberal capitalism’ and its embodied effects as an analytical frame, can destabilise neat partitions between migrants and citizens. However, such an approach also risks obscuring important temporal differences. We therefore argue for an approach that does not assume, a priori, a temporal difference between ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’, but still allows us to recognise and investigate how chronopolitics and temporal multiplicities are implicated in constructing and reinforcing difference, in governance, and in the lived experiences of differently situated people. In making this argument, we draw on anthropological and feminist perspectives that conceptualise time as multiple, uneven and relational, as well as our own ethnographic research with undocumented migrants in Norway and France within the project “Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration”.

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Paper long abstract:

How can ethnographic research escape the pitfalls of exceptionalising migration without, at the same time, euphemising the power of state orders that discriminate between legal and illegal mobilities, citizens and non-citizens? Reflecting on this dilemma, this paper proposes an ethnography of the everyday as a conceptual footprint to address both the need to consider migrant experiences beyond essentialised categories and the imperative of doing justice to the inequalities imposed on people deprived of legal and political rights. Far from being simply synonym of mundane, the everyday opens an analytical framework that reconnect people’s experiences and subjectivities with the analysis of the power dynamics that informs the socio-economic and political contexts in which they unfold. It does so by performing a double analytical operation outlined by Guillaume and Huysmans (2018): reintroducing the emplaced, dense entanglements of lives while also fostering a fleeting and multiple understanding of temporality. Attentive to the dynamics shaping structural inequalities, this double analytical movement exposes the spatio-temporal and relational operations of power that shape people’s lives differently depending on their situation. In doing so, the everyday carves a horizontal understanding of power that exposes how socio-economic and political domination un/do people’s rights to exist. Such manifestations of power are made particularly manifest in the interrelated diptych of people’s uneven rights to public presence (Lefebvre 1968) and to a future (Rapport 2017). An ethnography of the everyday hence offers an analytical detour to address the double-edged sword of de-migranticising migration studies, revealing existential differences without essentializing them.

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Paper long abstract:

In the last decades, an increasing number of migrants heading from the Global South has been crossing European borders irregularly, originating what has been commonly called the “European migration crisis”. Notwithstanding, the term “crisis” evokes an exceptionality that poorly describes what appears to be the direct consequence of growing global inequalities. In response to exceptionality, European nation states deploy humanitarian and security policies of mobility containment. Border control and reception projects restrict migrants' mobility forcing them into a subaltern, precarious and often irregular integration in the labour market, mostly in the southern fringes of Europe. Neologisms such as “dublinanti” and “retomados” have been coined to portray migrants caught in other EU countries holding Italian or Portuguese residence permits and who were sent back to the “country of first arrival” in the enforcement of the Dublin Regulation. Inquiring into the autonomous migration experiences of asylum seekers and refugees on the move across Europe, I analyse how the struggle for mobility is enacted by migrants, and how they seek to prosecute autonomous journeys relying on both formal and informal ways of circulating, becoming visible or invisible to EU States. Within regimes of exceptionality, border regulations are embodied and inscribed onto migrant bodies and persons, doing and undoing new subjects of state power. From a phenomenological angle, I seek to demonstrate how formal and informal dimensions of migration are merged in the lived experience of migrants as a continuum and not as a juxtaposition.

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Paper long abstract:

Deciding who can regularly enter, work and reside in a country, States distinguish between citizens, migrants and strangers in irregular situation. Though, the difference between the categories of migrants and citizens may be blurred as it not only depends on juridical labels but also on social experiences. This paper examines the case of Italian emigrants’ descendants born in Argentina who move to Italy thanks to the Italian citizenship they inherit from their ancestors through the right of blood. It argues that they should be considered as both migrants and citizens. Indeed, while their social experience is similar to that of migrants (they are considered as strangers and face social exclusion in the localities they settle in), their juridical experience is that of being Italian citizens and is thus different from that of fellow Argentinians who do not have an Italian passport. This paper also critically engages with the concept of de-migranticisation. On one hand, it shows the importance of de-migranticising the experience of Argentinians of Italian descent in Italy, first because they are juridically Italian citizens and second because the category of mobility is more accurate to make sense of their experience than that of migration. On the other hand, it argues that this doesn’t imply to dismiss the central role of the State. On the contrary, this case study shows that State power has a fundamental role in shaping privileged mobility, as it shapes and orient all kinds of mobilities.

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Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on fieldwork with Ukrainian migrants (including war migrants), conducted since 2021 in three Polish cities. The title refers to the legislation created in Poland ad hoc after February 24, 2022, treating people who arrived from Ukraine after that date as exceptional and care-worthy. They faced a simplified residence procedure, an employment path, easier access to medical care, language learning, and free transport. They were recognized as refugees. This is a term with which many of them do not identify due to the sense of threat to their agency and being labeled as deprived of capitals. In turn, those who have lived in Poland for many years, or even arrived there a few months before the war escalated, remain invisible. Meanwhile, contrary to popular beliefs, the latter were also affected by the war - by loss of property, the impossibility of returning, anxiety about the fate of relatives, and uncertainty. However, they do not have the privileges and “discursive vulnerability” provided to "later" movers. Different institutional perspectives on assessing who deserves and who does not deserve special treatment due to the full-scale war in Ukraine causing increasing inequalities in access to social benefits, which in turn cause internal Ukrainian-Ukrainian tensions in Poland, incomprehensible for the rest of society. Ukrainian diasporans use and reproduce the Polish law (blurred) categories and the social constructions of “a (war) migrant from Ukraine”. Tracing social constructs of “these other Ukrainians” reveals intra-diasporic tactics of inclusion/exclusion and potential conflicts.

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Paper long abstract:

Recent attempts to normalise or, rather, de-exceptionalise cross-border human mobility has been an attempt to shift focus from nation-state-centred viewpoints to the agency of refugees and migrants themselves. While this shift has understandable and recommendable analytical and moral grounds, the problem often persists that there is also something exceptional about the many migratory trajectories which take place in the context of enforced clandestinity and illegalisation, on dangerous routes, and under the threat of violence. There is, thus, a tension between two analytical points of departure: on the one hand, refugee and migrant agency and action and, on the other hand, state and intra-state action.

This paper is based on research into refugee and migrant disappearances at Greek-Turkish borderlands. I analyse refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths as a phenomenon distinct from other kinds of disappearances from the ‘ordinary missing’ to organised crime and warfare to enforced disappearances of political dissidents under authoritarian regimes. I argue that refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths are set apart by the very conditions in which they happen: anti-migration policies, life-threatening crossings, border violence, lack of access to medical care or recourse to law, and undocumentedness. By insisting on their exceptionality, we can address such disappearances and border deaths with the seriousness they deserve and bring questions of accountability to the fore, give name to what is taking away thousands and thousands of lives every year. This does not mean abandoning refugees and migrants’ agency but, instead, ‘seeing the state’ with them.