Making it' through migration: success, (im)mobility, and 'development' in The Gambia Martin Aucoin Contemporary scholarly and journalistic literature consistently represents migration from and through The Gambia using the lens of "crisis". While these representations normally focus on Gambian migration to European statesa movement that is highly politicizedthis thesis presents a case study of Gambian migration to a less-politicized destination, North America, in order to explore the relationship between lived experiences and representations of migration absent the discourse of crisis that pervades other scholarly and journalistic works. Drawing on the mobilities paradigm, feminist geographies of migration, critical race theory, transnationalism, and literatures on bordering, humanitarianism and development, I examine, through a multi-sited case study, the experiences of Gambians who migrated to the U.S. and Canada, then compare them to the ways their experiences are represented in The Gambia. I then, through a discourse analysis, compare the relationship between lived experience and representation in the North American case study to the ways that Gambian migrants are portrayed by European actors in attempts to stem or stop migration flows. This thesis reveals that legal status intersects with class and race to impact upon migrants' lived experiences in North America, the importance of geographic imaginaries as a form of representation in transnational communities, intimate impacts of North American bordering practices within transnational communities, and the use of discursive bordering practices to control and manage migrant flows in The Gambia. Chapter 1: Introduction, Background, Literature Review and Research Questions At the end of January 2019, a plane landed at Banjul International Airport carrying twelve Gambian nationals who had just been deported from Germany (Altrogge and Zanker 2019b). As the plane touched down, their journey of many months, and in some cases, years, came to an end. All of these individuals had taken an 'irregular' route leading from Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, overland to Agadez in Niger and then across the Sahara Desert to arrive in Tripoli, Libya. From there, Libyan smugglers loaded them onto old fishing boats that they used to cross the Mediterranean Sea. They were likely intercepted by the Italian coastguard, or a search-andrescue operation run by a non-governmental organization (NGO) and booked at a processing