Current Project

For more and more migrants, it is nowadays impossible to find legal ways to reach Europe as well as legal permits to stay there. Nevertheless, there are thousands who manage to resist contemporary migration control that seeks to exclude them from European territory. Many of them are on the move for years, cover long distances and cross several borders. The hope of meeting with one’s aspirations and fulfilling the dreams of making it in Europe often endures and makes migrants continue their journeys despite all the obstacles and hardships. Their hopes to regularise their legal status are held up particularly because of hearing of success stories from other migrants who got permanent residence papers due to a positive asylum decision, marriage with a European citizen or who were economically successful in the black labour market.

This project is about migrants with precarious legal status in the Schengen Area. Observations suggest that many migrants, whose country of origin leaves them with low chances of receiving any type of residence permit, exhibit a highly complex migration pattern that is characterised by the following aspects. Firstly, these migrants are frequently in durable ‘transit’ across Europe (and beyond), which is a multi-linear movement according to opportunities that open up along the journey. Secondly, they must exhibit a high degree of flexibility, as they have to respond to suddenly changing conditions, such as work opportunities, rejection of asylum claims, detention or deportation. Thirdly, they often switch between different legal statuses, such as asylum seeker, rejected asylum seeker or holder of a temporary residence permit. This leads to a general state of uncertainty and psychological distress. The experience of these mostly young and male adults show a deep ambivalence between a sense of autonomy, on the one hand, and of profound hope- and powerlessness, on the other.

Anna Wyss explores the ‘fragmented journeys’ (Collyer 2007) of these migrants by way of an ethnographic approach. What are their strategies to circumvent the restrictive Dublin III regulation and other national as well as international control policies? How do migration law and its implementation influence their life prospects, their integration in however flimsy and unstable social networks? On the one hand, she is interested in the consequences of politics of exclusion and illegalisation regarding irregular migrants, and on the other hand in practices of subversion and everyday resistance of migrants.

The dissertation project is funded by the Doc.CH scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Joppke (Institute of Sociology, University of Bern) and Prof. Dr. Janine Dahinden (MAPS, University of Neuchâtel).