Suspended Lives: Undocumented Migrants’ Everyday Worlds and the Making of ‘Illegality’ Between Morocco and Italy

Menin, Laura

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-94972-4_12

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The image of one's own country as a prison evoked by Tawfiq in the 2007 interview is a common figure of frustrated hopes of migration in the face of restrictive border regimes across the Global South (see, e.g. Capello 2008;Menin 2017). It also expresses a sceptical political vision of Egypt as a state that provides imprisonment rather than rights and services to its citizens.…”

Section: Prison Escape Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different visa and labour regimes also make a difference. The Gulf states offer work visas on all income levels and do not systematically criminalise low-income workers as illegal residents the way European and north American states often do (see Menin 2017), but legal residence is governed by highly exploitative laws, most importantly the labour sponsorship (kafala) 4 system (Mednicof 2013). Importantly, Gulf states usually do not allow migrant workers to stay after retirement.…”

Section: Migration Travel Strangerhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Bigger Prison

Schielke

2020

Suomen Antropologi

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How does existential mobility-the sense of being able to move forward in one's life-relate to the experience of borders and limitations? Tawfiq is an Egyptian man who once longed to migrate to Europe or the United States, but has since then worked on and off as migrant worker in the Arab Gulf states. He has reflected on this question by using the metaphor of walls:prison walls over which one wants to jump, new walls which one faces next, walls that gently guide you to a certain direction, and the idea that facing and overcoming obstacles is what human life is about. Based on a longitudinal fieldwork with Egyptian labour migrants to the Gulf, this article takes up migrant labourers' reflections about different senses of migration and travel, dreams, money, walls, limits, escape, steps, stability, return, postponement, forward movement and loops. Such ideas are helpful for thinking about the existential pursuits of moving forward in life, the moral shape of social becoming, and the political economy of migrant labour. Taken together, they also contribute to a non-binary understanding of movement and stasis, limits and openings, and the direction and magnitude of steps on the path of social becoming.

show abstract

Section: Prison Escape Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Migration Travel Strangerhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bigger Prison

Schielke

2020

Suomen Antropologi

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Never having expected the possibility to one day being illegalized, and disliking the idea, it took my interlocutors time to emotionally deal with such uncertainty and vulnerability, otherwise common in international migration (Andersson, 2014;Goldring et al, 2009;Menin, 2017). Beyond their decision to remain in Brazil, my interlocutors regularly felt stripped of their autonomy and ability to choose.…”

Section: Becoming Illegal or Obtaining A Possible Status Onlymentioning

confidence: 99%

Post/Colonial Reconfigurations. The Disregarded, Renewed Arrival of Spaniards in Rio De Janeiro

Heil

2020

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Given the renewed arrival of Spanish migrants in Brazil since 2008, I analyze how post/colonial power relations are re/configured and contradictions produced when legal and economic precarity question status hierarchies based on origin, race, and class. Brazil currently hosts the largest number of illegalized Spaniards worldwide. Illegality and precarity contest the favorable effects of nearly unconditional whiteness in Brazil and globally racialized, colonial power hierarchies. Derived from 2.5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, my interlocutors' trajectories show how they struggle with and embrace the urban fabric and its structural post/colonial configuration.

show abstract

“…At present, much migration scholarship sustains the implicit assumption that both before spatial movement begins and after movement ends, migration is experienced as a state of fixity. The concept of existential mobility, which is increasingly being applied to migration research, can help complicate this assertion (Jackson 2013;Lucht 2015;Menin 2017). However, understandings of the existential experience of migrantsand conceptualisations of waiting as a condition of modern capitalism more generally -remain trapped by the dualisms of immobility and mobility.…”

Section: Existential Immobility Migration and Oscillationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration as hope and depression: existential im/mobilities in and beyond Egypt

Pettit

Ruijtenberg

2019

Mobilities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent scholarship has asserted that prolonged periods of 'waiting' or 'stuckedness' are becoming the condition of modern capitalism for many people. This article complicates this assertion by interrogating the affective life of migration, an act which offers the possibility of overcoming, but also reinforces, existential stuckedness. Using two ethnographies with young aspiring male migrants in Egypt, and older migrant men in the Netherlands, we reveal how migration, both before and after physical movement, is experienced through constant existential oscillation: between ''amal' (hope) that the good life is arriving, and 'ikti'āb' (an Egyptian understanding of depression) when a new blockage is met. Developing existing understandings of migratory experience and governance, the article argues that oscillation emerges out of 'cruel' migratory regimes which perpetually offer up the promise of the good life to aspiring migrants, while inhibiting the means of achieving it for the majority. ARTICLE HISTORY

show abstract

Suspended Lives: Undocumented Migrants’ Everyday Worlds and the Making of ‘Illegality’ Between Morocco and Italy

Cited by 7 publications

References 25 publications

A Bigger Prison

A Bigger Prison

Post/Colonial Reconfigurations. The Disregarded, Renewed Arrival of Spaniards in Rio De Janeiro

Migration as hope and depression: existential im/mobilities in and beyond Egypt

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About