Navigating the European Migration Regime

Abstract

This inaugural dissertation was submitted by Anna Wyss in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor rerum socialium at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Bern. The faculty accepted this work as dissertation on 23 May 2019 at the request of the two advisors Prof. Dr Christian Joppke and Prof. Dr Janine Dahinden, without wishing to take a position on the view. The dissertation has been re-written and developed for the purpose of this monograph.The open access version of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.vii Contents Series Preface viii viii Series Preface: The Unwanted of the European Migration RegimeAnna Wyss' Navigating the European Migration Regime offers a compelling account of the hopes, aspirations and daily challenges that young, single, male migrants, perhaps the most ostracised cohort among the immigrant population in Europe, face in Europe. Through a fine-textured ethnography that follows the journeys of migrants across various European countries in their interaction with the law, bureaucratic and police apparatuses, and rampant anti-immigration rhetoric, the book constructs a complex portrait of multi-sited and asymmetrical border struggles, in which young migrants are confronted with a system designed to exclude them and grind down their resistance. While central, migrant agency in Wyss' book is not romanticised. Instead, Wyss captures the encounter between migrants' agency and the working of migration regimes and how, faced with migrants' attempts to legalise their position, create better opportunities for themselves, and simply avoid immigration control and detection, states react by installing new measures attempting to turn migrants' endurance into exhaustion. These measures, Wyss argues, may not succeed in their goal of controlling human movement and combatting irregular migration, but they certainly contribute to reproducing and reinforcing racialised and classed structures of oppression, exploitation and inequality.We are delighted to add Navigating the European Migration Regime to our series. Drawing on an in-depth examination of migrant journeys across Europe, the book returns from a novel perspective to core concerns in the Global Migration and Social Change series: the encounter between states and their migration regimes, in their multiple permutations, and migrants; the racialised, gendered and classed impact of borders and bordering; and the spaces for a politics of hope centred on migrant agency and solidarity across communities.