Senegalese Migrants in Morocco: Rethinking the Temporalities and Spatiality of Borders at Europe’s Margins
Résumé
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Morocco in the early 2000s among Senegalese migrants attempting clandestine entry into Europe, the article seeks to sketch a portrait of the border's “inhabitants” and, in so doing, contribute to re-examining the way we think about migration. Taking as a starting point the description and Senegalese hostels in Rabat, it shows how ad hoc forms of social organisation implemented by the migrants reveal the contained and circular forms of mobility in place, at once indirectly produced by migration policies and marking attempts to resist them. While this work is in line with the research on waiting times and spaces within in a context of restrictive migration policies, the article extends the existing discussion by inviting a deconstruction of the dichotomy between mobility and immobility to conceive of “the inhabitants of border spaces-times” as defined by “mobility in immobility and immobility in mobility temporalities.