Beyond the Border: Clandestine Migration Journeys

New directions in exploring the migration industries: introduction to special issue

“…In relation to this, there exists an increasing number of studies that empirically focus on the migrant journey, most notably on the perilous journeys of irregular migrants and asylum seekers (e.g. Belloni 2016;Khosravi 2011;Mainwaring and Brigden 2016;Schapendonk and Steel 2014). These studies underline that mobility processes may include multiple thresholds (Van der Velde and Van Naerssen 2015) as well as multiple forms of facilitation and control.…”

“…The third development is that which draws upon the mobilities turn (Cresswell 2006(Cresswell , 2010Ernste, Martens, and Schapendonk 2012;Sheller and Urry 2006), which challenges sedentarist understandings of the social and sees migration as being a journey that is produced on the move, but not necessarily bound up by discrete beginnings and ends (Mainwaring and Brigden 2016;Schrooten, Salazar, and Dias 2016). This literature is in part directed by research that explores what happens on the move as a way by which we can understand how the meaning of mobility is produced (Cresswell 2006), but also controlled (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013).…”

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Irregular Transmigrants’ Journeys and Mental Mapping Methodology

“…Indeed, “repressive state tactics generate new and creative social strategies to survive and resist aggressive border policing” (Wheatley and Gomberg‐Muñoz, , 5). Nevertheless, in the migrant trail not all is about “collective agency”; the physical and psychological scars of the challenges they have to overcome and the concessions they have to make in order to survive follows “them in countries of destination, and on their communities back ‘home’” (Mainwaring and Brigden, , 247). It is important to understand how transmigrants embody these challenges, dangers, and concessions, how they represent them and, eventually, how they deal with the daunting experiences that they have to bear in order to achieve their journey's goal.…”

Governing Migration from the Margins

“…Hanafi and Long, 2010;Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004), other scholars have revealed how migrants are not reduced to bare life in these states of exception. Rather, they negotiate, resist and demonstrate agency despite the formidable barriers and marginalization they face (Mainwaring, 2016;Squire, 2016). Many of these interventions draw from analyses that focus on the everyday experiences of migrants and the implementation of policy.…”

“…Western states have increasingly externalized asylum processes, exhorting sending and transit states to fortify their borders and to sign readmission agreements: offshore interception and processing means that migrants travelling by boat run the risk of being returned to countries of departure or to other states, where they are detained. This spatial architecture that traps or deflects mobile subjects shrinks spaces of asylum, denying access to refugee protection in the First World, and makes migrant journeys longer and more dangerous (Collyer, 2007;Hyndman and Mountz, 2008;Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016;Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014). …”