Identity, emotion, memory in the structuring the moralities of migration

This paper discusses the emotional sphere that both motivates and mediates mobility and the everyday lives of migrants. The paper is particularly interested in the survival circuits of irregular migrants, such as temporary migrant workers, asylum seekers and trafficked persons and the moralities that guide migrants’ transactions and knowledge systems alongside those of the native born. Are the moralities that guide migrants as newcomers and noncitizens distinct from those that guide citizens or the native born? In turn, what is similar and what is distinct in how the emotional spheres of attachment and devotion, or of shame and humiliation are experienced by newcomers. Migrant workers, asylum seekers and other temporary or illegalized migrants may borrow or rent documents that allow them to have a presence in the official economy, to open bank accounts, to send remittances home, or to access medical care. Many of these activities are survival strategies of vulnerable individuals where migrants engage in subaltern channels as ‘survival circuits’ that may well by-pass official regulatory systems. The paper draws on the theorization of human vulnerability as well as transnational understandings of citizenship to argue that new knowledge of the migrant experience ought not to be considered relevant only to newcomers, but rather offers more generalizable guides for all persons as sharing in vulnerability.