“Pour Moi c’Est La Patience”. Migrants’ Experience of Time and Space in the Immobility Enforced By European Border Regimes

“Patience” is the term that many West African migrants use to describe the capacity to attune and comply with the immobility enforced by the border regime in Europe. Particularly, it refers to the will of those who, after a period of irregularity – this enclosing irregular border crossing, precarious livelihood, and informal labour activities – seek to become regular again, applying for asylum, or enduring other sorts of exhausting administrative procedures. Against this backdrop, irregularity is experienced by my interlocutors as a way to fasten the pace of the migratory endeavour, enabling irregular migrants to become more mobile and more exploitable in informal economies. “Patience” appears as the act of compromising with the suspended temporality and the constrained mobility dictated by the border regime and its declination in institutional reception and integration projects. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, I seek to demonstrate how varying perceptions of time delineate the sphere of contention between migrant subjectivities and the border mechanisms, and how “patience” describes the fashioning of a new migrant subjectivity that is forced to attune with the suspended temporality of the border regime and its liberal conceptions of self-determination against attempts of temporal acceleration and spatial disruption enacted through irregular mobility. Thereby, a process of racialisation is at work, creating subaltern categories of workers that align with colonial and racist imaginaries.This paper is based on over ten years of fieldwork, particularly accompanying former beneficiaries of migrant reception projects in Italy on their irregular journey across European internal borders.