Lost in Transition to Adulthood

The so-called 'refugee crisis' has been portrayed as an invasion that threatens
Europe and calls its sovereignty into question, prompting exceptional emergency
responses. These (re)bordering processes highlight Europe's uneven, discriminatory,
and racialized filtering system. European nation-states sort desired and undesired
migrants through sets of precarious administrative statuses that translate into
limited access to resources, most notably the formal labor market. European border
regimes impose specific spatialities and temporalities on migrants through long-term
physical and social deceleration: territorial assignation, enduring unemployment,
forced idleness, and protracted periods of waiting. These temporal ruptures interrupt
individual biographies and hinder the hopes of a young population seeking a better
future. However, some find ways to navigate the socio-spatial deceleration they face.
In this paper, I explore how European border regimes affect the trajectory of Sub-
Saharan male migrants and how they appropriate such temporal dispossession. I use
biographical analysis and participant observations of a squatting organization in a
Swiss city to scrutinize the everyday practices and aspirations of a population made
illegal and, as a result, denied access to social markers of maturity. I investigate
how time intersects with physical, social, and existential im/mobility. I argue that,
in navigating spaces of asymmetrical power relationships, impoverished migrants
find autonomy in illegality. Neither victimizing nor romanticizing illegalized migrants'
trajectories, this paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the capacities of an
impoverished population to challenge European border regimes.