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Time, Migration and Forced Immobility

This book is concerned with the effects of European migration policy on migrants in the Global South. In particular, it uncovers how border enforcement policies and the crackdown on irregular migration affect the life of migrants in so called ‘transit’ countries outside the European Union. The material for this study is based on ethnographic research in Morocco with migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. The book is mainly concerned with the human and social effects of immobility during the migratory journey. It describes how migration policies in and outside Morocco contribute to a situation where migrants get stuck in Morocco for years, and in the process become increasingly marginalized from participation in society. These prolonged periods of forced immobility negatively affect migrants’ life course, as well as their relation to the present, past and future. This alters their feelings of identity, their social relations to friends and relatives, and their aspirations for the future. The immense human suffering this situation implies has a tendency to further reinforce their wish to leave the country, rather than encouraging them to abandon their migratory projects. The book links these empirical insights on immobility to social theories of time. It argues that the fragmentation of migration processes and immobilization of migrants has an impact on migrants’ view of their own lives as ‘out of sync’ with modernity. Thinking about migration and immobility in relation to time offers a different perspective on migration processes which have until now mostly been theorized through reference to concepts of space.