Christine M. Jacobsen and Marry-Anne Karlsen
Introduction
While international migration involves human mobility across political borders, it also encompasses multiple, layered and complex temporalities. Recently, migration scholars have begun to unpack the temporalities at stake in modes of governing migration (McNevin & Missbach, 2018; Tazzioli, 2018), and how complex temporalities and discrepancies shape migration experiences and practices (Mavroudi et al., 2017; Barber & Lem, 2018). Scholars have also importantly drawn attention to how temporal frames inform different conceptualisation and understandings within migration scholarship (ĂaÄlar, 2016; Ramsay, 2019a). Foregrounding temporality as an analytical lens can provide critical new knowledge about the socio- cultural dynamics of contemporary migration. Considerable advances have been made, but there is, we argue in this volume, a need to develop more conceptually robust approaches to time and temporality. While the mutual imbrication of time and space is crucial to acknowledge, we insist on a thoroughgoing temporal gaze as necessary to destabilising the dominance of spatial understandings of migration in anthropology and beyond.
This edited volume focuses on the form of migration that tends to be labelled irregular, or sometimes undocumented or âillegal.â These terms refer to people who enter or dwell on state territory without formal authorisation, and comprise a wide range of situations, including those who remain on state territory after having overstayed their visa, having had their residency revoked or asylum application rejected or never having applied for residency or asylum. While some scholars have criticised the term âirregular migrantâ for becoming dangerously broad (Kubal, 2013), others have proposed what they see as more flexible and inclusive terms such as precarious migratory status (Goldring et al., 2009) and liminal legality (MenjĂvar, 2006). The boundary between âregularâ and âirregularâ in particular socio-historical contexts can often be overlapping, fluid and contextual. This is the case notably with the categories of asylum seekers and refugees and that of undocumented migrants. The widespread dichotomisation of these categories reďŹects regimes of power and interest as well as assumptions about individual agency or the lack thereof (Yarris & Castaneda, 2015), inscribed on bodies with long and complex migration histories, often involving both political and economic violence and hardship. Furthermore, the broad spectrum of irregularity is not confined only to the non-citizen, and citizens may also sometimes get caught up in the deportation apparatus and become deportable âirregular citizensâ (Nyers, 2018).
Notwithstanding the challenges of terminology and different uses in the chapters of this edited volume, they all speak about migrants whose presence on state territory is somehow contested and/or legally precarious. In approaching such contested and precarious legal statuses, we are informed by the anthropological literature on the socio-legal production of âmigrant illegality.â In a landmark article published in the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2002, De Genova argued that it is insufficient to examine the âillegalityâ of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to pay attention to the historically situated socio-legal production of migrant âillegality.â In this volume the temporal dimension is accordingly discussed not only in terms of its consequences, such as the prolonged periods of waiting that are produced by contemporary border regimes, but also in terms of the role of time in processes of illegalisation or irregularisation in particular socio-historical contexts. Rather than approaching âirregular migrantsâ as a generalised category, the volume aims to situate the analysis within distinct configurations of âillegalityâ that are constituted within particular regimes of migration control (De Genova, 2002), but also in everyday life beyond legal codes, government policies and bureaucratic apparatuses (Coutin, 2003).
Engaging with the literature on time and migration, this volume zooms in on the question of waiting. In both research and public debate, there has been a proliferation of representations of refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants waiting in refugee camps, asylum reception and detention centres and at border crossings. In their fieldwork, ethnographers have increasingly encountered temporal insecurity and conflicts in time, as a crucial element of migrantsâ experiences of (im)mobility and inequality. While some works have analysed waiting as a significant facet of (im)mobility (e.g. Vigh, 2009; Conlon, 2011; Anderson, 2014), waiting needs to be further explored as a particular engagement in, and with, time in migration. In combination with theories on time and temporality, we approach waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregular migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. According to Hage (2009a: p. 5), the analytical power of waiting derives precisely from its capacity to highlight previously overshadowed features of a social process or practice. Waiting as an analytical lens offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. Waiting is not only produced and experienced within such complex and shifting processes, it is in itself productive, and contributes to the production of migrant âillegalityâ or âirregularity.â
A challenge for research into temporalities in irregular migration is to make explicit and explain the temporal entanglements, shifts and relations between multiple forms of waiting (Hage, 2018). Waiting in migration can include both quotidian forms of waiting, including waiting for public services and bureaucratic decisions, and more prolonged and open-ended forms of waiting, for regularisation, justice and uncertain futures. Dwyer (2009) describes these two forms of waiting as âsituationalâ and âexistential,â with the former being a reaction to things or events, and the latter an embodied state of being. He cautions, though, of mistaking this analytical tool for the territory it tries to map. As he points out: âThere is no fixed line that separates situational and existential waiting. There is, instead, a personally experienced, and context-dependent, thresholdâ (Dwyer, 2009: p. 25). The entanglement between situational and existential forms of waiting is something that runs through the chapters in this volume. While some of the situational forms of waiting are specific to migration, existential waiting in the form that Vigh (2008) calls âchronic waitingâ is arguably a constitutive practice of globalisation and central to the post-colonial experience as such (Bayart, 2007). Increasing precarisation contributes to spreading âexistential stuckednessâ also to previously more privileged groups and regions (Hage, 2009b). Such conceptualisations of existential waiting destabilise neat partitions between citizens and migrants, and raise questions about historical, social and cultural specificities of waiting. What is the relation between subjective experiences and macro structures of waiting? And, particularly for the purpose of this edited volume, are there specific migratory forms of waiting?
A key concern in this volume is to contribute to the development of more theoretically robust approaches to waiting and migration, focusing on how temporal structures related to irregular migration are shaped by legal regimes, cultural norms and power relationships, as well as on how they are encountered, incorporated and resisted by migrants. As we will detail more later, we contribute to the existing literature by pushing further the understanding of the multiple temporalities of waiting, the relations between such temporalities and the normativities they involve. Chapters address questions of how waiting is worked on, and differentially experienced, at the intersection of multiple temporalities and social positions, tracing thus the social and relational contours of power in its temporal form. Paying attention to how migration regimes and geopolitical borders consign migrants to waiting, the chapters investigate the chronopolitics â or politics of time â involved in waiting and irregular migration.
Waiting as an analytical lens â whatâs at stake?
One of the analytical difficulties posed by the notion of waiting is its inclusiveness. âWaitingâ spans not only an array of experiential phenomena (Hook, 2015) but is also related to diverse affects ranging from anticipation, desire, hope, urgency, doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, boredom, dread, anger, to shame and apathy (Bandak & Janeja, 2018). Several important and insightful contributions have been published on waiting in recent years, including ethnographies of youth in India (Jeffrey, 2010), of welfare recipients in Argentina (Auyero, 2012), of hope and the future in urban Ethiopia (Mains, 2012) and of contemporary Iranian life (Khosravi, 2017). Edited collections by Hage (2009a), Dalsgaard et al. (2014), Vidal and Musset (2016), Pecheny and Palumbo (2017) and Bandak and Janeja (2018) have shed new light on how analysis of waiting can enhance the understanding of phenomena as diverse as capitalist modernity, neoliberal economic restructuring, love and gendered sexualities, white nationalism and ethnographic fieldwork. These volumes highlight waiting as a prominent feature of modern everyday life, to the extent that its familiarity and pervasiveness has meant that it is hard to pin down analytically and tends to be taken for granted in academic research. There is also, we argue, an acute need for greater awareness of how waiting, as a social and temporal practice, is represented and replicated in migration research. What does it mean to approach irregularised migration through the lens of waiting?
This book emerged from a 4-year interdisciplinary research project called Waiting for an uncertain future: The temporalities of irregular migration, or simply WAIT. One particular concern and recurrent discussion in the project, and with the larger group contributing to this book, was how to deal with the often tacit normativities implied in the concept of waiting. As Rozakou (2020: p. 25) poignantly asks in her chapter in this volume:
Is this scholarly emphasis on the migrant condition of waiting just the reflection of an empirical reality encountered in checkpoints, detention centres, asylum courts, and immigration bureaucracies? Or does it risk replicating a specific understanding of migrant temporalities that is produced by the migration regime?
Rozakouâs questions draw on insights from scholars who have increasingly begun to problematise the exceptionality often attached to migrants in migration studies and how this is entangled with discourses that normalise migration-related differences and certain, often exceptional, modes of governance (Anderson, 2013; Dahinden, 2016; Ramsay, 2019b). Migration researchers risk reinforcing a logic of otherness when characterising migrants as people who occupy a distinct temporality related to their migration status (ĂaÄlar, 2016). As Ramsay (2019a: p. 20) argues: âWe deny the coevalness of refugees by describing them as âstuckâ in the present and ignoring the ways in which they share particular temporal rhythms with other people.â Ramsay (2019b) criticises in particular the tendency to analyse ârefugeeâ and âmigrantâ as a distinct category of experience that is defined by lives lived in âcrisis,â which does not reflect the contemporary reality of how precarisation, stemming from the expansive effects of global capitalism, has made âcrisisâ the norm in many contexts. Ramsayâs critique thus draws attention to the difference between understanding irregularised migrantsâ waiting as exceptional, or as emblematic of a more pervasive experiences of precarity caused by contemporary configurations of neoliberal capitalism.
The tendency to portray irregularised migrantsâ waiting as exceptional relates to how their condition of politico-legal exclusion is often conceptualised as a form of protract...
