Bilal's Journey

In early 2017, a Senegalese youth arrived on the Italian shores undocumented. During the registration at the police office he was asked about his age. The boy took some time to reply: ‘I told them that I did not know. I was feeling confused because of the journey.’ In order to assess his actual age, the cultural mediator asked the youth whether he remembered his date of birth. He replied that he was born in 1999, then, after a few seconds, he said he had miscalculated and declared more firmly that he was born in 1998:

I didn't know the actual date of birth. I was feeling confused, and I was unsure about the day and month to declare. Then I remembered that a guy who was travelling with me had told me that, if asked, he would have said that he was born in 1998 so that he could surely pass as an adult. ‘Otherwise, they won't let me work’, he said.

The boy then declared that he intended to present an asylum claim, and was later relocated to northern Italy with other migrants in the same condition. After a couple of days spent in a big regional hub on the outskirts of Bologna, the young Senegalese was taken for a medical examination. A doctor measured the circumferences of his limbs and chest, and took an X-ray of his wrist. ‘They wanted to know if I was lying about my age. That's why they took me to the doctor with some other boys who also looked younger.’ An X-ray of the wrist and hand bones can be ordered by the Italian judicial authority in cases of well-founded doubts about the age declared by a suspected unaccompanied minor – though the procedure is known for having a wide margin of error. ‘There were many migrants coming in those days. They didn't take too long, and they just let us go.’

He was then taken to a semi-autonomous apartment project for adult asylum seekers in Ferrara, a small town in north-east Italy. I met him upon his arrival, as I was working as an educator for the social cooperative that was managing the apartment project. The young boy could not speak any other language than Wolof and some other West African dialects. His flatmates, also young boys from Senegal and Guinea, would facilitate communication, translating his words into French. As a joke, they would call him Bambino, ‘kid’ in Italian.

Bambino disappeared from the reception project in the late summer of the same year. His flatmates told me that he was probably headed towards France – a general tendency among asylum seekers coming from French-speaking countries – but the young Senegalese did not speak French. Five years later, while pursuing my PhD in Lisbon, his former flatmates, who were now all living independently in rented apartments, told me he was in Portugal: ‘Do you remember Bambino? The small guy from Senegal? He is now in Lisbon!’ They gave me his Portuguese telephone number, and, as I spoke to him, I noticed he had forgotten Italian, a language that he was never really eager to learn. Eventually he was able to speak some Portuguese. We met again in Lisbon in summer 2021.

In this article I recount his story and call him Bilal, a fictional name that I have chosen carefully after consulting several people with a similar migratory experience. Bilal – an important character in Islam – was an ‘African slave and early convert to Islam who was freed and chosen to be the first person to call people to prayer’ (Campo 2009: 101). My research interlocutors and I have chosen this name to recount a story representative of young men who abandon institutional centres for the sake of autonomous mobility. Even if the Bilal of this story was never enslaved, in his own view he was nonetheless able to emancipate himself from the restrictions and limitations imposed on him by European asylum regulations, in a pursuit of freedom through spatial disruption and racialised insubordination (Roberts 2015). Bilal's emancipation came through exploitative forms of labour that he underwent willingly: he worked under extremely precarious conditions in Libya to pay for his ‘trip to Italy’. In Italy, as well as in other European countries, he engaged in short-term informal work to make quick money for his journey.

While moving irregularly through Europe's inner frontiers, he combined formal means with informal strategies, such as, for example, using his personal Italian document, even if it had no validity abroad, or assuming other migrants’ identities to buy train and bus tickets at shelters around Europe. After visiting Switzerland, France and Spain, Bilal chose to settle in Portugal, where he got a regular work contract and then, through legal claims presented at the Immigration and Borders Service,² a valid residence permit. He is currently waiting for the European passport that he will receive for residing and working in Portugal for five years: ‘I am paying for my own room now. I pay taxes. I have my work and my documents. In a few years I will be able to register for a passport.’ Portuguese citizenship represents for Bilal the token of his emancipation. It will allow him to travel to his family in Senegal and come back to Portugal regularly and without restrictions, defeating the regime of containment and immobility. ‘Finally’, he said, ‘my family will see the return of a real man!’

Bilal's story is representative of those of many migrant youths whom I have encountered during my fieldwork carried out on NGO boats at the European Mediterranean border during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their age set spans from 15 to 25 years, and their migration stories differ slightly according to the country of origin and the expectations they had of Europe. In some cases, young migrants may falsify their age, passing as ‘minors’ in order to resist deportation, mostly if coming from a ‘safe country of origin’³ like Tunisia, Algeria or Morocco and, therefore, unlikely to have their asylum claim recognised or have access to welfare guaranteed. Yet others, like Bilal, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, have chosen to fabricate their own identity and present themselves as ‘adults’ in order to gain more freedom of movement and to augment the chance of finding a job in both formal and informal economies. These young men, whose age was uncertain, would modify their year of birth while staying on board the boats during their quarantine, switching between ‘minor’ and ‘adult’ ages continually during private meetings with psychologists and legal experts. For many migrants, their age became fixed in chronological terms and in the day-month-year-of-birth format only upon their registration with the police once disembarked in Europe. Most likely, in many of these cases, their ‘true age’ was created at this point. While some modified their birth date intentionally, many did not know when exactly they were born, and others simply did not concern themselves with the accuracy of this detail.

The day Bilal left the apartment project, he was holding an Italian residence permit for asylum seekers. In those years, due to a large number of arrivals, the final decision for asylum cases would come only after five to six years or even more. At present (spring 2023), a small group of migrants who arrived in 2017 are still holding the same residence permits and their asylum cases are still pending. The Italian residence permit for asylum seekers has a validity of six months, at the end of which it must be consigned at the police office for renewal, a procedure that can last one or two months, during which asylum seekers are almost invisible to public offices, work agencies and possible employers. As a matter of fact, while the residence permit is held for renewal, asylum seekers can access healthcare only in emergencies and cannot sign a working contract. Scholars have demonstrated how these forms of bureaucratic and temporal control jeopardise the autonomy and restrict the mobility of asylum seekers across the European territory (Cabot 2012; Khosravi 2018; Bhatia and Canning 2021). Yet, for some youths in this project, this precarity has also served as a driving force to leave, as Bilal did, remaining undocumented in search of an income.

As we were sitting in my apartment in Lisbon, Bilal told me that life in Italy made no sense to him: ‘I couldn't stay there any more, just sleeping and eating and having no chance at finding a job. And the school was also too hard for me. Why should I start learning Italian if Italy does not give me a job?!’ Abandoning the housing project and remaining undocumented was described by Bilal simply as an alternative form of precarity to the one offered by the bureaucracy of the Italian asylum system. ‘Dormire, mangiare’, Italian for ‘sleeping, eating’, are the two words that many asylum seekers still use to describe their life in the reception and integration projects. More importantly, for many youths such as Bilal, the precarity of this condition is a challenge to their identity as young men and adults. In migrant parlance, ‘dormire, mangiare’ is also the formula that describes the fate of minors who are ‘detected’ and hosted in protected reception centres. According to Italian law⁴ unaccompanied or separated migrant minors are entitled to a residence permit for minor age, which lasts until their eighteenth birthday. For those whose asylum claim has not been assessed before that date, the maze of the asylum system starts with the reaching of majority, with fear of deportation and expulsion orders overshadowing the future for nationals of safe countries of origin. It is in these circumstances that for many young migrants, running away before their eighteenth birthday is seen as the best option.

During another meeting with Bilal, he told me again about the distress he suffered while being hosted in the apartment project: ‘I was tired of waiting. The time that I had to wait was too much, and my head started giving me problems.’ Bilal then threw an accusation towards the Italian reception system: ‘I know what authorities do in Italy. They keep migrants in th e projects and make it impossible for them to work so that they will stay there like children. And the organisations hosting them earn the money that Europe is giving for the migrants!’ Bilal was surely upset at that moment. Yet he did not intend to insult me or my colleagues: ‘I know that you were all doing a great job, working a lot, even at night for us. But you were paid for that job, and you could quit any moment you liked. But we … We could not decide. We could only sleep and eat, “dormire, mangiare”, so that the money that Europe is paying for migrants will be given to the associations hosting us!’

If analysed critically, Bilal's argument was much more subtle than a conspiracy theory that the Italian asylum system and its institutions exploit migrants for monetary gain. What Bilal was describing instead was his vision of alienation and unequal redistribution of resources between institutions and their beneficiaries. He was also not arguing that European money should be given directly to migrants. Yet, while Bilal acknowledged the work carried out by social workers and institutions, he clearly described his feelings of alienation and how the reception project in Italy was affecting him. He saw his identity being impacted by the precarity of short-term residence permits, the constant and intricate renewal of which was an obstacle that kept migrants from working, and the infantilisation that made them dependent on state bureaucrats and social workers (‘so that they will stay there like children’).

Against the precarity and bureaucratised (in)activity that Bilal was facing in Italy as an asylum seeker, he found redemption in Portugal: the fact that he managed to stabilise his situation with a residence permit for work is, for Bilal, a clear sign of emancipation. This also explains why, for him, it is worth working in a country where wages are among the lowest in Europe: ‘I know that some of my former flatmates in Italy are doing the same job that I do. And I know that in Portugal the money is less. But look at them. They are still holding the six-month permit!’ We then started a video call with his former flatmates. As they saw him, they called him ‘Bambino’ again. He then replied, ‘No. I am not a “bambino” any more. I am now un uomo grande! [a big man!].’

Bilal's Emancipation

Bilal's journey is the story of a successful emancipation. Nevertheless, in my analysis, I reject the dichotomous approach that overemphasises and essentialises the ‘agency’ of migrant subjects (minors and adults alike), as opposed to the ‘structural oppression’ enacted by such things as ‘society’ or ‘institutions’. From the phenomenological angle that I adopt, agency does not exist as a quality of the subject, it must rather be conceived of as something that is lived, experienced and embodied by migrants through actions, practices and choices in an intersubjective dimension (Vigh 2006; Zigon 2009; Jackson 2012; Fabian 2014; Pina-Cabral 2016). Against the excessive stress put on the agency of migrants, often depicted in literature as resisting state power by moving through ‘underground routes’ and residing in autonomous informal settlements (Gambino 2017; Palmas and Rahola 2020), my fieldwork interlocutors and I generally agreed on the fact that informality frequently hides labour exploitation and physical abuse, a risk that is much higher for children and women in migration.

In their autonomous routes throughout Europe, minor and adult migrants alike combine formal and institutional ways of moving and working with informal ones. On the one hand, they assume fabricated identities by declaring falsified ages or buying other migrants’ documents in order to work in less exploitable forms and to access, if needed, public health and social services. On the other hand, they might prefer to remain undocumented, becoming more mobile and more exploitable as an informal labour force, finding a way to traverse frontiers and make money for limited segments of their journey. These two dimensions of migration should not be seen in conflict, since their dynamic interplay composes the lifeworlds of many whom I have met during my fieldwork.

Bilal refers to his journey as an ‘adventure’, which is a highly recurrent narrative topos in West African cultural production, found in many folk tales, literature and film (Bredeloup 2008; Sarró 2009). Besides its narrative and aesthetic value, it also conveys meanings for interpreting the migratory experience, whereby migrant youths are bestowed with a ‘positive social value’ (Koenig 2005: 78) by way of a ‘magical efficacy’ that transforms their personhood in terms of symbolic capital (Newell 2005: 170). The point that I want to highlight is that, in Bilal's words, their ‘adventure’ is considered a coming-of-age story, marking his passage into ‘adulthood’. This is expressed vividly in the reply that Bilal gave when called ‘Bambino’ again: ‘I am not a “bambino” any more. I am now un uomo grande!’

Another important element in Bilal's emancipation is the autonomy and the economic independence that he gained through legal work: ‘I am paying for my own room now. I pay taxes. I have my work and my documents’, these all being elements that make him appear in the eyes of his friends and relatives to be ‘a real man!’ This echoes what has been largely documented in non-European contexts, that adulthood is more likely to be understood in matters of mobility and socio-economic independence (Englund 2002; Thorsen 2006; Vigh 2006; Punch 2007; Farrugia 2016) rather than chronological or demographic objective data. Furthermore, scholars have pointed out that the impossibility of producing wealth undermines the social acknowledgement of ‘adulthood’ (Kleinman 2016) and of ‘manhood’ (Vigh 2016) among West African migrants in Europe.

On the contrary, according to humanitarian European institutions, age is understood as a chronological and demographic variable that is automatically linked to vulnerabilities and legal frameworks that categorise and differentiate migrant subjects. The category of age is the separator between ‘unaccompanied migrant children’ and adult ‘asylum seekers’, ‘economic’ or ‘irregular migrants’. Yet what is legally enforced as a matter of protection, like not allowing minor migrants to work, can be experienced by migrants themselves as the denial of a fundamental part of their identity, like, paradoxically, ‘adulthood’ intended in a performative praxis. Similarly, the bureaucratic maze of the Italian asylum procedures jeopardises the possibility for migrants to work regularly and keeps them in a childish (‘like children’) ‘dormire, mangiare’ (in)activity.

The bureaucracies and the temporal control exerted by the asylum regime impact deeply the way that migrants experience temporality (Khosravi 2018; Bhatia and Canning 2021). From a phenomenological perspective, relying on Heideggerian (2006) insight on ecstatic temporality, the way in which the human subject normally experiences past, present and future is disrupted by the asylum system, which constrains enormously the experience of freedom as a projection of the subject into future possibilities, resulting for example in the inhibition of attaining adulthood. Time is suspended as restrictions placed on the body and its mobility are experienced. Against this backdrop the urge for self-management calls for a break of temporal control, in order to reinstate life in its desired temporality. This has happened, in the case of Bilal, with the relinquishment of the nickname ‘Bambino’ as the turning point of his ‘adventure’.

Finally, it is the limitations and constraints imposed by the asylum reception system, as a mechanism of the European border regime, that many young migrants try to avoid by engaging in illegal working activities or embarking on life-threatening journeys such as ‘adventures’, ‘burnings’ (Pandolfo 2007; Vacchiano 2021) or other ‘agonistic performances’ (Andersson 2014) against European borders and their containment measures.

The need that many migrant youths have for economic resources is additionally intensified by the need to pay for their ‘trip to Europe’. In many cases, it is the family that contracted this debt as a form of investment, bestowing on young migrants who ‘made it to Europe’ the responsibility of paying it back.

While this need is surely of prime importance, the (in)activity and the precarity induced by the asylum system as part of the border regime must not be understood as a secondary factor. I argue that the Marxian notion of ‘labour’ as an activity in which value is produced and whereby the human subject is defined, projecting otherness onto both objects and social relations (Marx 1910, 1973, 2017), can help elucidate the impact of (in)activity and precarity on the life of migrants. This interpretation of labour has been further elaborated by Hannah Arendt (1958), who made a distinction between what she called ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘action’.

According to Arendt, labour is carried out for the subject's subsistence, while work is a process of production in which value is then reified in an object. Through work, value is alienated from woking subjects and is reified into something that is not always usable by them. Arendt's conceptualisation of work is similar to the Marxian understanding of the alienation that workers undergo while producing objects that they cannot use. Paradoxically, the ‘dormire, mangiare’ (in)activity that Bilal described also resonates with Marxian alienation and with Arendt's definition of work: in the case of migrants’ (in)activity, the value generated by their presence in these facilities is transformed into capital accumulated for the benefit of state institutions and social workers, but that reaches migrants only by objectifying them as recipients of the provided services.

Moreover, migrants suffer the alienation of not being able to interact with these services themselves due to the continuous mediation of social workers and intricate bureaucracies. In Arendt's model, both labour and work are opposed to ‘action’ – a process implying that the value produced through labour is embodied in the labourer's body, becoming fundamental to the subject's identity and social relations: ‘In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world’ (Arendt 1958: 179). From this insight we can see how the quality of ‘adulthood’ and ‘manhood’ is produced through legal or illegal work, or through life-threatening journeys and confrontations with the European border regime. These are ‘actions’ carried out in order to re-establish a connection with the world, a connection that is denied by the border regime and the (in)activity induced by the asylum system. It is striking that in Arendt's (1951) interpretation of totalitarianism, the public space where people could perform their action in terms of self-defining activities was denied by totalitarian power. In this sense, the system of global apartheid (Tchermalykh and Floristán-Millán, introduction) that young migrants face can be perceived as an emanation of totalitarian power, carried out by liberal states through seemingly democratic procedures, endorsed by the system of human rights.

Conclusions

Bilal's journey exemplified how the phenomenon of ‘unaccompanied minor migrants’ who abandon hosting facilities while remaining undocumented must not be understood as a separate issue from that of adult asylum seekers escaping from reception and integration projects in order to pursue their migration journeys. Observed in a wider framework, adult and underaged refugees alike make an agentive and rational choice in view of their emancipation through labour (understood not as Marxian ‘alienation’, but as a form Arendtian ‘action’), while acting within the structural constraints of the highly bureaucratised and segregated migration system of European states.

While facing the challenge of containment and infantilisation in the hosting facilities designed for asylum seekers, these young people choose to fabricate an adult identity in order to find economic resources to pursue their migratory journeys. Here, age is not merely chronological or demographic information that automatically determines the vulnerability and legal status of migrant individuals, but rather a complex factor shaped by various social and institutional dynamics that migrant subjects choose to act upon according to their conditions. The coming of age of these individuals is not associated with a temporal threshold; as Bilal's case demonstrates, his new masculine identity – that of an adult able to support himself and his family in a legal way – is a result of an interplay between his adventurous journey from Senegal through several European countries and his choice to combine formal and informal means to navigate the European labour market in view of the acquisition of citizenship within the European polity, which Bilal perceives as an ultimate form of emancipation, associated with free North–South circulation and equal and durable work opportunities. Bilal's choice of labour over protection and education, however, should not be perceived as a uniquely positive experience or a call for action. Moreover, his extra-institutional path can be perceived as a form of institutional critique of the reception facilities, formulated in praxis.

Against this backdrop, the need to restructure European reception and integration mechanisms is urgent. Projects should be designed and built around migrant subjectivities, understanding their needs and aspirations: while being hosted, migrants should be given the responsibility and ability to build their own horizon of meaning as active protagonists of their lives. To reach this aim, the issuing and renewal processes for documents should be made easier and should not expose migrants to vulnerability and precarity. Migrants should be given the possibility to easily manage these procedures themselves, avoiding the continuous mediation of state bureaucrats and social workers. The same can be said about any service provided for them that sees them as passive beneficiaries and not proactive protagonists of their migration journeys.

Moreover, instead of enforcing spatial containment and temporal control, reception projects should be mindful of the Heideggerian (2006) insight on ecstatic temporalities, according to which human existence is defined by our ability to transcend the present and project ourselves into the future while being influenced by our past. Excessive temporal control can lock the future out of migrants’ possibilities, augmenting alienation and frustration together with the dependence on the reception project. An excessive bureaucratisation of the asylum procedure jeopardises the correct development of social projects, turning beneficiaries into passive and addicted recipients of services.

Another step should be the reformation of public education that would see programmes designed to educate and accompany youths in European schools, both locals and foreigners, in the labour market, acknowledging their dignity as labourers by giving them a form of wage – short-term internships and protected positions for minors have failed in this sense. In 1975, in an article for the Corriere della Sera, Pier Paolo Pasolini called for the abolition of television and mandatory education after the fifth grade. In his view, mandatory education would reiterate class subordination, creating a frustrated proletariat able only to learn about social limitations while being taken away from labour and from life. If, in 1975, Pasolini was concerned about the creation of a ‘frustrated proletariat’, almost half a century later, I share with him the same concern. Furthermore, due to new circumstances dictated by globalisation and neoliberalism, I also feel concern about a progressively racialised working class, fostering social inequality and injustice. Against this grim prophecy, education devoted to labour as a positive modality of willingly being-in-the-world is possibly the only solution left. I conclude, therefore, my contribution to this issue by quoting Pasolini's words: ‘Work, then, in these circumstances, would take on another meaning, aiming at unifying once and for all, by self-determination, standards of living and life itself.’