Migrants categorized as irregular, illegal, clandestine, or undocumented are constantly being intimidated and criminalized by racial profiling in Europe's Schengen Area, threatened by the deportation apparatus, exploited as informal labor, and frightened by racist and xenophobic practices and discourses. In most cases, these categorizations are based on their lack of the rights of full citizenship or documents allowing them to cross borders or stay, and they also face daily exclusionary practices of securitization and anti-immigration discourses (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002) related to their gender, social class, origin, religion, and/or racial identification (Bhui 2016; Rytter and Pedersen 2014). Considering the risks of simply being present as outsiders in normative European political spaces (Balibar 2009), the public presence of these migrants and their geographical mobilities might in itself be considered a political act of resistance.
This article explores precarious migrants’ everyday practices insofar as they contest European mobility regimes. We draw attention to minor acts that attempt to resist and/or navigate the constraints of specific regimes of (im)mobility and their diverse consequences (Loftsdóttir 2019). Using the concept of infrapolitics, or minor acts of resistance to institutional pressures (Scott 1990), we focus on (im)mobility practices that, intentionally or not, challenge the policies, discourses, and implementation of mobility rules (see Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue). Our discussion contributes to understanding how precarious migrants’ practices can have the unintended political effects of co-producing mobility rules through their apparently minor acts, exposing not only how mobility rules often “work in practice,” but also how they are resisted, negotiated, and reshaped from above, from below, and in between (Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue).
Here we use the term “precarious migrants” to capture particular kinds of mobility (Loftsdóttir 2022). While the term “precarity” is often theorized in relation to the labor market (see the discussion in Paret and Gleeson 2016; Lewis et al. 2015), here we see it as drawing attention to “multiple forms of vulnerability” (Paret and Gleeson 2016: 280) that are produced through social and institutional processes. We recognize precariousness as a condition of all human life (Deshingkar 2019) in which some legal frameworks and structural rules make some groups of people more precarious than others. As Marcel Paret and Shannon Gleeson (2016) emphasize, due to the various insecurities that arise from their legal status and institutional barriers, migrants can be particularly vulnerable, though like other human beings they actively engage with, resist, and manipulate their conditions and situations. These precarious migrants that we focus on here are notably not the only ones who face various discriminatory practices and racism in Europe, as other racialized and migrant populations with EU or European citizenship are targeted as well, often with a similar rhetoric of their being a threat to Europe or somehow contradicting European values (Bangstad 2011; Loftsdóttir 2019).
This article is grounded in our recent research1 on the migration route through the Canary Islands to the EU from West Africa, while also benefiting from insights from our past research projects. Our aim is to understand how migrants both resist mobility rules through infrapolitical mobilities and use them to their advantage, sometimes with the support of local populations, activists, lawyers, and other allies. To tease out some of the overlapping issues involved, we orient our ethnographic materials toward three interrelated challenges that characterize the lives of many precarious migrants in the EU: expulsability, transient (im)mobilities, and insecure livelihoods. These three challenges intersect with and reinforce each other while constituting a crucial preoccupation for people on the move in a precarious position. This applies especially to those depicted and categorized as irregular or whose condition as non-nationals entails some lack of rights and less access to resources. We start by introducing our theoretical frame, where we stress the importance of looking not only at migrant resistance but also at different forms of agency, where we emphasize the challenges relating to expulsability, transient (im)mobilities, and insecure livelihoods. We then demonstrate what we see as infrapolitical mobilities through brief ethnographic examples from the reawakening of the Canaries Islands migration route to the EU.
Theoretical frame: Rethinking resistance and mobilities
Since the boom in the literature on anthropological resistance in the 1970s–1980s and the later decade of critiques in the 1990s (Abu-Lughod 1990; Brown 1996; Moore 1998; Ortner 1995), resistance studies have entered a rethinking mode (Gledhill 2012). This re-evaluation of resistance studies has benefited from local anthropological experiences and from decades of fine-tuning our concepts beyond the binaries of dominator/dominated or offstage/onstage (Theodossopoulos 2014). This has left room for acts and relationships of ambiguous resistance and subjective ambivalence (Ortner 1995). Relying mostly on militant ethnographic methods and Foucauldian conceptualizations of power, scholarship on the so-called Autonomy of Migration (AoM) has become crucial in analyzing migrant resistances at European borders (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; De Genova 2017; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Stierl 2018; Tazzioli 2018). The AoM perspective allows us to go beyond classical migration studies because of its basic premise that migration occurs regardless of any intention to control it, coupled with a critical perspective on how previous theories underestimate both the power of migration flows and mobility as a phenomenon (Hess 2017). Furthermore, instead of emphasizing individual migrant actors, the perspective also highlights migration as a “collective force” rather than one revolving around the agency of individuals (Cobarrubias 2020). The main criticisms point to the romanticization of the migration experience—curiously the same criticism often leveled against resistance studies—as well as the homogenization of the migrant subject and over-abstract understandings of migrant agency (Nyers 2015). More recent criticisms have also stressed that AoM perspectives tend to obscure and trivialize individual agency at the expense of highlighting migrants as agents of political struggle (Otto and Hoffmann 2022).
While recognizing the value of the AoM perspective and seeking to benefit from it, in this article, we argue that research on resistance in relation to mobility might benefit from adapting some of the concepts developed through decades of anthropological debates on resistance and empirical research into peoples’ everyday lives. Thus, our theoretical departure is informed by two classical sources: James Scott's (1990, 2012) writings on infrapolitics, and Sherry Ortner's (1995) work on resistance and agency.
The term “infrapolitics” generally refers to the aggregate of minor acts of resistance by individuals who find themselves under institutional pressures but unable to respond with open political opposition (Scott 1990, 2012). Scott's use of the term “infrapolitics” derives from his interest in understanding various everyday forms of resistance and draws attention to forms of politics that are not always visible or that are generally not seen as political actions. He calls for close attention to be paid to “political acts that are disguised” or that take place “offstage” and are thus concealed from those in power (1990: 20). Scott's term “hidden transcript” similarly directs attention to what takes place offstage, referring to “discourse—gesture speech, practices—that is ordinary excluded from the public transcript of subordinates by the exercise of power” (1990: 27). Scott's stress on the analysis of hidden transcripts as a counterpoint to public transcripts also seeks to tease out how particular forms of resistance are appropriated by those in power and are classified as theft, ignorance, or sabotage (1990: 20). Scott's critics highlight that the emphasis on onstage/offstage binary and static understandings of hegemony ignore the relational and processual characteristics of Gramscian subaltern politics and oppositional practices (Ciavolella 2018; Gledhill 2012; Moore 1998; Theodossopoulos 2014). While this criticism is valuable, it does not alter the importance of how Scott's analysis critically dissolved the distinctions that are usually drawn between action as either “pre-political” or as effective political action (Gledhill 2012; Theodossopoulos 2014). As Dimitrios Theodossopoulos argues (2014), Scott's work has contributed to a deeper understanding of indirect resistance by bringing “to light the non-dramatic dimensions of resistance, [and] the tactics of subversion in day-to-day life” (2014: 423).
Thus, small acts, while appearing insignificant, can together shape the political, or as Scott phrased it in his afterword of 2012, “such politics was, though made up of thousands of small acts, potentially of enormous aggregate consequence in the world” (2012: 113). Thus, while everyday forms of resistance might not be political in their forms or contents (Marche 2012), consisting of punctual invisible actions or coping strategies utilized by different individuals, the cumulative actions of many individuals carried out in an unorganized way have the potential to produce political change (Murru and Polese 2020).
This property of non-coordinated acts that, in the aggregate, have a direct political impact in altering official mobility rules is rarely highlighted but is of vital importance in understanding migrant mobilities. For example, during 2015 the growing number of Syrians trying to reach the EU through the Balkans route not only triggered the so-called European (hosting) refugee crisis, they could also be seen as infrapolitical mobilities that changed how the rules of the EU's border apparatus were implemented.
Guillaume Marche's (2012) overview of Scott's ideas points out that there are in fact two dimensions to Scott's use of the term “infrapolitics”: a reference to what goes “unnoticed” and a reference to aspects that are generally not seen as “qualifying as political” (2012: 3). These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but there is still a subtle distinction: whereas some acts can be political in nature, others are more liminal and do not necessarily seek to change the power dynamics at hand. Marche explains that, as subaltern populations do not have access to conventional political expressions, their dissatisfaction will take place in a more discrete way, one where the goal is not necessarily to “gain official legitimacy” (2012: 4). Thus, infrapolitics as theorized by Scott strongly resonates with the novel conceptualizations of imperceptible politics (Papadopoulos et al. 2008). As the word “imperceptible” indicates here, although political action is often not easily grasped due to its low intensity, it can still be significant (Merriman 2019).
What, then, are the limits of infrapolitics, and how is it linked to intentionality and agency? In 1995, Ortner took up the discussion of resistance studies more broadly and the tendency of scholars to romanticize subalterns’ agency to confront power inequalities. For our purposes here, we see her discussion as valuable in two senses: as clarifying issues of agency in relation to the term “infrapolitics,” as well as other terms such as “imperceptible politics,” and in her emphasis on thick ethnography. Ortner points out that Scott's notion of “everyday forms of resistance” raises the question of “what is resistance?” When is it useful to categorize something as resistance instead of—to use Ortner's example—a survival strategy? As she pointed out, while some scholars have stressed intentionality here, she feels it necessary to recognize, following Marx, that “intentionalities of actors evolve through praxis” where the meanings of particular acts can change both for those analyzing them and for the actors themselves (1995: 175). Ortner's emphasis on the usefulness of the ambiguity inherent in certain terms is in our view important in putting the concept of infrapolitics to work by drawing attention to the fact that the intention of the actors—whether they see themselves as performing political acts or as changing an unjust system—is not always the most relevant question to ask.
Ortner (1995) also proposed to study resistance through a thick ethnography that includes the internal politics of the subaltern, its cultural richness, and the difficulties of representation, focusing on the multiplicity of projects, ambivalences, and creative transformations that permit the subaltern to cope with power and structural imbalances. For her: “Agency is not an entity that exists apart from cultural construction . . . Every culture, every subculture, every historical moment, constructs its own forms of agency, its own modes of enacting the process of reflecting on the self and the world and of acting simultaneously within and upon what one finds there” (1995: 186). Ortner's insights provide a point of departure for studying agency and the complexity of resistance practices in multiscalar mobility regimes (Salazar and Glick Schiller 2014). Moreover, the analysis of migrants, borders, and regimes of mobility is usually restricted to those on the move. Much less is known about the acts of resistance undertaken by other individuals and groups that are not on the move or are not labeled migrants. Our analysis thus positions diverse precarious migrants as inhabiting the same social and historical space as non-migrants, such as the police officer who turns a blind eye, the lawyer who voluntarily supports an illiterate migrant, or a regular passenger who prevents a migrant from being deported on a commercial flight.
Challenges of mobility rules
In the foregoing, we have identified three interlinked challenges that precarious migrants must cope with and that are directly related to mobility rules: (1) expulsability, (2) transient (im)mobilities, and (3) insecure livelihood strategies. We will deal with the first at some length, as it is a baseline for the precarity of many migrants, shaping the second two—transient (im)mobilities and everyday livelihoods—directly and indirectly.
Expulsability is the potential and feeling of being constantly exposed to expulsion at any moment in an arbitrary way. It includes deportability as the ever-present menace of forced return (i.e., pushback, deportation, ban entry, etc.), but also expulsion from migrant camps, asylum systems, or informal jobs. Saskia Sassen (2014) uses expulsions from jobs, the biosphere, or the land to capture the major dynamics of contemporary neoliberalism. For precarious migrants, expulsion is even more of a problem, as their legal status and racialization make them removable in multiple senses. Even migrants who have stable legal positions without being citizens are more likely to be deported (Paret and Gleeson 2016), expelled from their workplaces, or evicted from their homes. As Nicholas de Genova notes, “whereas deportation must be situated alongside a variety of other practices of expulsion and in this way represents a kind of coercive mobility, . . . detention instead signals a practice of confinement, and therefore coercive immobilization” (2016: 5, italics added). In dealing with being arrested as a prelude to possible expulsion, a warning is a common infrapolitical act of resistance. One example is Nigerian migrants in irregular situations selling artisanal items in a public park in Holland. The authorities arrested two of the second author's interlocutors who were selling on the other side of the park. Although they had permission to sell in the park, they did not have authorization to stay in the Schengen Area, which illustrates how contradictory rules of (im)mobility operate within the EU. When they were arrested, they quickly texted those with whom the second author was staying with a warning to get out of the area. This scenario revolves around their avoiding being trapped by the police—reflecting their detainability—and consequently the possibility of their entering the process of deportation.
In other cases, migrants use official mobility rules that work to their benefit to avoid deportation. For example, in 2020 and early 2021, deportation became more difficult due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve young Palestinian men seeking international protection in Iceland were due for deportation to Greece, where the authorities said that their asylum applications were being processed, completely ignoring the increased difficulties of assisting refugees in Greece in the aftermath of COVID. These young men refused to undergo a COVID test, which was necessary for the Icelandic government to take them out of the country, thus in fact refusing to facilitate their own deportation. None of them were sick, so the case was not that there was a risk of infection to others but rather that a COVID test was necessary so that the state could deport them from Iceland.2 This case shows how migrants in the process of deportation can use their agency to exploit the pandemic mobility rules to resist different rulings and enforcement posed by the mobility regimes. Thus, resisting, avoiding, and exploiting rules allowing expulsion are common infrapolitical mobilities of resistance.
Nonetheless, resistance is also performed during the process of deportation. Deportation flights from the EU to other countries, made on both charter and commercial flights, are part of a black box of deportation politics and machinery (Walters 2016). On one occasion in 2009, the first author was traveling from Spain to The Gambia. The plane was late in taking off. The last rows at the back of the plane were empty, and two Spanish police officers, both white and young, entered with a young Black man, who was forced into a seat in the last row of the plane and tied to it. The man resisted, spitting, shouting, trying to untie himself and fighting by using his body. The passengers became worried while watching the scene. The struggle with police officers lasted for a while after take off and then stopped, the restrained man being tired after his long resistance. Upon arrival in Banjul, the man was quickly removed from the plane, and he and the police officers disappeared from public view.
Migrants and activists have organized themselves to prevent these deportations and to inform others about strategies of resistance, such as sending public alerts. In some cases, activists have tried to empower ordinary passengers or at least provide these tools to those who want to show their lack of agreement with deportation practices. When passengers become aware of the deportation practices and the violence being directed at the deportee, they can stand up and ask the plane crew to talk to the pilot, who has the final say in stopping the flight taking off until the person being deported is taken off the plane. Such acts of humanitarianism can be situated along a broad spectrum of organized activists’ operations, which can range from cost-intensive NGOs to small groups of activists or just the incidental acts of individuals who are simply seeking to show kindness by offering people water to drink or a tired person a lift (Fekete et al. 2017). However, such practices of resistance to stop deportation flights have been criminalized and those assisting them prosecuted, not only campaigning organizations that actively contest and resist deportation regimes, but also “protesters [who] have no links to NGOs but are just ordinary citizens sickened when they are forced to witness acts of extreme brutality” (Fekete 2009: 92). As Scott has recognized, these recall how the boundaries between infrapolitics and politics can be fuzzy in respect to how openly power is confronted, particularly, when does something stop being infrapolitics and is more usefully identified as political activism or movement? (2012: 116). Such fuzzy boundaries involve small political movements with only low levels of organization and based on the minor actions of individuals (2012: 116). Thus, infrapolitics might take different forms and be performed not only by those directly involved in contesting deportation, but also by other individuals, parties, activists, and groups in an amalgam of knowledge and praxis that evolves through action and informal personal networks.
The second challenge, transience, implies attempting to enter liminal phases of mobility and immobility without clear start or end points (i.e., stopped in the center, bureaucratic waiting, etc.). What is transient is not only a matter of the intimate relationship between mobility and immobility (Salazar 2022), it is composed of various departures and arrivals, that is, the various activities linked to the processes of leaving one place and arriving at a new one (e.g., travel preparations, making one's farewell, smuggling deals, journeys). The third challenge, the insecure livelihood, has two aspects. Formal and informal strategies of subsistence and support (i.e., informal work and accommodation, remittances, support networks, etc.) are shared by most other precarious people in society by blurring the boundaries between coping and resisting strategies. Second, the migrants’ everyday struggles within what are often hostile racialized systems makes them more visible, rendering them invisible as individuals but revisable as criminalized subjects. These also have an impact on non-migrant racialized populations, and precarious migrants in general share some of these challenges with those who do not have migrant backgrounds. Also, in combination with the other two challenges—expulsability and the transient—insecure livelihoods make everyday mobilities especially difficult for precarious migrants.
These three challenges in relation to precarious migrant's preoccupations overlap in migrant journeys, trajectories, and circular territories of mobility (Tarrius 2000), as well as in migrants’ experiences of immobility (Salazar 2022). Irregular migrants become subjects who can be expelled, placed in detention, or deported, including with the use of violence where these actions are actively resisted through various means in order to avoid the process of deportation and its execution, which then shapes people's everyday preoccupations and strategies. In the next section focusing on migration routes to Europe through the Canary Islands, we use ethnographic research to show how various forms of infrapolitical resistance to the challenge of migrant precarity in the EU overlap.
Infrapolitical mobilities: (Circum)navigating mobility rules in the Canarian route to Europe
The labels Canarian route, Western route, and African Atlantic route refer to an irregular maritime migration route from mainland West Africa to the Canary Islands to enter Spain and thus the territory of the European Union (EU) and Schengen Area. This migration route was considered the initial ground where the EU's anti-immigration measures were tested during the so-called Cayuco crisis of 2006 (Godenau and López-Sala 2016; Vives 2017). After years of extraterritorial control and deterrence strategies by the EU, only a few migrants embarked on this dangerous route, preferring the Mediterranean alternative. However, this trend changed in 2018–2021 with arrivals increasing significantly via the Atlantic route due to intersecting political, economic, and social events triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic (Zapata 2021).
The arrival of a few thousand people from West Africa in small boats and the deaths of others attempting to do the same were clearly visible in Europe's mediascape in late 2020, calling for compassion while also feeding hostile anti-migration discourses. The Spanish government, with the agreement of the EU, neither welcomed nor hosted those who arrived in accordance with human rights or with national or European regulations. Instead, legal support was delayed, and accommodation kept scarce, with migrants being confined to ports and given inadequate resources. Simultaneously their movement to mainland Spain was limited, thus restricting their onward passage to the mainland Schengen Area. During 2020 and 2021, the Spanish government prevented their transit to continental Europe, in contravention of Spanish law and the mobility rules of the Schengen Area, through various sub-regimes of immobilization—exceptional, humanitarian, racist, bureaucratic, and carceral—which are part of a European mobility regime that increases the precariousness of unauthorized migrants in connection with their origin, race, gender, age, religion, and social class (Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir 2023). These regimes immobilized these migrants for months on islands that are just one more stage in their mobility trajectories, having first been settled temporarily in hotels and then in hosting camps funded by the EU and the Spanish government, though managed by NGOs. Spain's ombudsman, who visited the Canaries in 2020 and 2021, clearly criticized this in stating that “certain coastal areas of southern Europe cannot be converted into places of deprivation of rights such as free movement, on the grounds of migration control and avoiding the calling effect” (Defensor del Pueblo 2021: 65, own translation).
These practices of institutionalized racism (Buraschi et al. 2022) and politics of containment and confinement in the Canaries, like those that have been applied in other European hotspots for identifying and selecting migrants (Tazzioli 2018), such as Lesbos or Lampedusa and other archipelagos of incarceration around the globe (Mountz 2011), are based on rules of exception and facilitated by geographical constraints. The European mobility regime in the Canaries attempts to put pressure on third countries to avoid departures or accelerate deportations while simultaneously generating tensions on a local scale, producing images and imaginaries of waves of migrants and malfunctioning humanitarian action, all of which dehumanize migrants and smooth the path to xenophobic discourses, as some xenophobic demonstrations in the Canaries has shown (Buraschi and Aguilar-Idáñez 2023). Immobility here also produces a stuckness effect (Ghassan 2009), which creates incertitude and suffering in migrants who are not just accepting their fate but contesting the vagueness surrounding immobility rules. As we show through this case study, precarious migrants resist and overcome rules of mobility through different infrapolitical mobilities, which provide insights into how mobility rules are met with creative resistance by migrants and other actors who engage with these rules.
Infrapolitical (im)mobilities: (Circum)navigating the fuzzy borders of containment politics
“Control, bip bip bip, no problem (hand gesture of what is to come), backpack (hand gestures of opening luggage), no problem, (hand gestures of continuing and to the left) stairs.” One activist was explaining these basic rules of orientation to migrants in an irregular situation, showing them how to move within the airport without raising suspicion. At the time, in late 2020 and early 2021, the police were stopping Black passengers arbitrarily in the Canaries airports. Migrants in irregular situations but with valid passports and/or asylum applications had bought two, three, or four flights, repeatedly being refused travel to mainland Spain without any legal reason.3 Informal mobility rules were used at Canarian airports and ports to hold African migrants in the islands, with the police involved in racial profiling and rejecting their documents, despite the validity of the latter for travel within Spanish territory. Likewise, the air companies were also checking documents in controversial ways. While Vueling were permitting migrants to travel with an asylum document, Ryanair were only permitting embarkation to those with a passport. These arbitrary rules to control mobility extended to other agents without direct instructions from the police. For example, one tourist agency started asking for both passports and asylum applications as a requirement to sell tickets.
Having the right papers for travel, some migrants began to prepare for their trip by dressing for the airport in particular ways. As they would generally be classified socially as Black, their performance as cosmopolitans was necessary to avoid being racially profiled, involving “contestatory acts of cosmopolitan citizenship” (Caraus 2018: 803). For example, Ali, a Senegalese migrant in his early twenties who had arrived irregularly by boat in 2020, had spent seven months in Tenerife. Ali was asking for asylum and finally took a flight from the Canaries to Barcelona, thus reaching the European continent. Ali's Spanish friends on the islands gave him an elegant suit, leather shoes, a chic white shirt, and a classic watch. This tactic might be combined with traveling on early morning flights, when there are generally fewer police. In our view, infrapolitical mobilities are the formal and informal practices of migrants who circumnavigate—without direct political confrontation—the rules that are designed to immobilize or expel them. These practices are compatible with other open tactics of navigation (Vigh 2009; see also Haile and Schapendonk, this issue), along with other (circum)navigational strategies in cooperation with more powerful agents, such as activists or lawyers, as the next example shows.
In April 2021, a magistrate ordered the police in the Canary Islands to allow a migrant who had arrived irregularly to travel to peninsular Spain (Gazzotti 2023). This migrant was prevented by the police from leaving the Canaries on two occasions despite having a valid passport. In his judgment, the magistrate stated that “[t]hese are arrests that are intended to frustrate the mobility of people . . . who, de facto, are confined in Gran Canaria without there being legal protection for it.”4 This judgment apparently changed the mobility rules of traveling from the Canaries to the European continent, showing that it is difficult but not impossible to change or challenge the rules through litigation in migration courts and other politicized systems of constraint (Abel 1998). However, even after the judgment, many migrants still found themselves unable to travel for some time. In the airports, the rules of mobility of the state of emergency, active in Spain at the time due to COVID, did not permit travel for leisure but only for work or relocation. This returned the power to the police to decide whether someone could travel or not. As a result, it often became necessary to convince police officers of the necessity of one's trip, and many migrants in irregular situations were rejected for travel at the airport. Thus, some states and actors may find ways to change, co-opt, or create new mobility rules to put hurdles in the paths of precarious migrants, as Antje Missbach shows in this theme section in an article about the Indonesian state imprisoning fishermen it has charged with smuggling or trafficking migrants.
These two examples show that between infrapolitical mobilities and open political confrontation to mobility rules of constraint there is a continuum of practices—both strategies from above and tactics from below in Michel de Certeau's sense (1984)—in which different actors might use or combine both diluting horizontal divisions. When police officers follow informal rules and conduct racial profiling illegally, migrants avoid confrontation and try to stay under the radar of such profiling. In the same situation, others—even the same people—have an opportunity to make open political interventions when, for example, lawyers or accompanying activists travel with the migrants or just by buying flight tickets giving one access to the airport terminal, where one can openly discuss the right to travel with the police. Speaking “law to power,” in Abel's terms (1998), is one strategy of mobility among others.
Moreover, being illegally or informally rejected for travel due to the lack of certain necessary documents can be puzzling for migrants in transit. They often have preconceived notions of Europe as a space of justice, which the racialized practices and their hostile treatment contradict (Loftsdóttir 2022). “This is a country of law,” Mohammed, a migrant from Mali in an irregular situation, repeatedly stated to us. We were chatting in a restaurant outside of one of the big “migrant hosting centers” that had recently opened in Tenerife, and he stressed that the police here in Spain “do not beat you” as in other countries. After years escaping war and traveling across North Africa, he held Europe in very high regard. His perception of the law was a sort of notion that “it might be fair or unfair, but that regardless, everyone follows the rules, even those with power.” Similarly, Ousman, who arrived irregularly in the Canaries from Mauritania fifteen years ago and was now working as a translator in one of the migrant camps, said that, although he did not agree with all the rules of the camp, these are nonetheless the rules, and people in the camp would know that from the beginning. Although the rules of the mobility game are apparently transparent and must be followed, they are sometimes incomprehensible and born of racist apparatuses or regimes of immobilization, which produces uncertainty and incomprehension. In some cases, as Viola Castellano in this theme section indicates, although migrants might not be formally in detention, the conditions in the migrant camps (basic needs or legal support) informally “force” migrants to stay there.
In the Canaries, migrants did not know why they were being immobilized and tightly controlled in the camps. Why was the Spanish government, a “country of law” in Mohammed's terms, spending money and energy keeping them in the Canaries when they already had the right to continue their travel? In this context, the way to overcome contradictory and ambivalent rules of mobility becomes not a matter of official or legal information but of trust and action. Migrants’ friends and families in both Europe and Africa have experience and knowledge of the difficulties of (circum)navigating European mobility regimes. These transnational personal networks have their own norms and social rules in which trust, knowledge, and advice are sometimes decisive in establishing infrapolitical mobilities. This was well summarized by a lawyer working in the camps by giving legal advice: “Many times they do not believe me, that is, they do not believe that the information I am giving them is totally true. And then there are other times that, although I tell them this is . . . they, from another source, have information in which they trusted more” (Interview with Lara, May 2021).
Similarly, activists are sometimes just spectators of attempts at infrapolitical mobility. This was the case for María and her friend Suhail, a Moroccan with a passport who, for reasons described above, could not travel to continental Spain by plane. One day he asked María to drive him from the migrant camp to the port. She recalls their conversation:
I need to be taken to the Santa Cruz pier tomorrow. But what for? I'm going under a truck. How do you go under a truck? Yes, a ship is going to leave, and a few [friends] already left, as they do in the Strait [of Gibraltar], they grab under the truck [that crosses by ferry to mainland Spain]. When he told me, I cried, “Under a truck!” He laughed and said, “I just got off a patera! The worst thing that can happen to me now is that they take me out of the truck covered in oil.”
Of course, it's true, at that time they were not being deported because the borders were closed [due to COVID measures], so I helped him get to the pier. And he tried it, and the police caught him, and he called me and told me, “María, I'm full of oil!” (Interview with María, November 2022)
Migrants in irregular situations are forced by mobility regimes to get dirty in a symbolic sense. The aim of the EU's mobility policies and forms of governance is to discourage people from crossing the border, but deterrence measures do not really stop migration: instead, they introduce the risks and effects of different forms of dissuasion into the equation regarding border control (López-Sala 2015). Migrants will face any risk to cross a border and, even after being sent back, some will try to cross it again. In the process, they will find new paths, no matter what the risks, which will also produce a counterreaction from the EU's anti-immigration measures (Vives 2017). Thus, we cannot underestimate the potential of infrapolitical mobility actions, even the riskiest, because for many they also represent an advance in terms of spatial mobility that may translate in many cases into existential mobility (Ghassan 2009). This happens because they cannot answer immobility from a position that organizes or rules politically. Infrapolitical mobilities do not nullify the possibility of coordinated actions that constitute direct or covert political opposition. On the contrary, in some cases this may allow these people to overcome immobility and encourage combinations and hybrid forms of infrapolitics, alterpolitics, and activism, leading to true emancipatory politics. Moreover, such bottom-up practices might produce policy change from below just by resisting policies, though without necessarily creating new ones. They might also mitigate exclusionary policies, or request the application of “existing ‘favorable’ policies and legislation when these are not implemented” (Però 2011: 245).
Summing up, what we have seen in practice is a need to expand the notion of infrapolitics to those subterfuge actions and advice, their aim being to overcome illegal, unfair, or informal mobility rules without there necessarily being a political aim. Even if there is a political objective behind it—as happens with many activists’ individuals or groups—it is not revealed during the action but operates as a framework with which to overcome the mobility rules at that moment. These connections between migrants’ tactics and other powerful actors’ strategies can work together to overcome mobility hurdles. Strategies and tactics can be differentiated, but, as our ethnographic example shows, they can also work in conjunction when challenging specific or exceptional rules of mobility.
Conclusions
The concept of infrapolitical mobilities captures how precarious migrants perform minor, uncoordinated acts of resistance to European mobility regimes. Some of these acts of resistance are reactions to specific political actions and policies, while other practices challenge the discourses and images of migration, religion, and race. We have identified three challenges of mobility rules—expulsability, transient (im)mobilities, and insecure livelihoods—which precarious migrants must cope with due to the restrictions imposed by the racialization and criminalization of EU mobility regimes. Second, we have shown how various practices of warning, refusal, active invisibility–visibility, and daily “regular” living are contesting regimes of mobility that are imposed from both above and below by the media, governments, and citizens. Third, our discussion draws attention to how the infrapolitics of mobility are not only performed by migrants but also by others who encounter inequalities while on the move. Regular citizens stopping a deportation flight, a volunteer lawyer winning a case to permit migrants to move, or supporters giving a suit as a present or her/his time to accompany someone the airport to avoid the person undergoing racial profiling are also doing infrapolitics, indicating the need to see different actors in conjunction with or relation to each other. These challenges that precarious migrants face are, furthermore, coherent with criticism against framing migrants’ mobilities simply as a sequence of departure-movement-arrival-integration (Schapendonk et al. 2020), which have emphasized how aspirations and relations change during movement (Ibid 2020: 2). Here agency and creativity are a part of mobilities just as they are with regard to other aspects of human existence. In line with Laura Otto and Felix Hoffman's (2022) constructive appraisal of the AoM approach, we want to emphasize the diversity of methods precarious migrants use to improve their lives.
This article contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the rarity of precarious migrants entering into direct political confrontation over mobility rules does not mean an absence of agency or of resistance to these rules. The case study shows that the encounter of precarious migrants with constrained mobility rules is confronted not only through political, organized, and direct actions but with more subterfuge and with shadowy, minor, and non-coordinated actions that have political effects in overcoming, producing, and changing mobility rules. The lack of coordination is key to calling this infrapolitics, although it somehow limits the concept to individual agency, when in fact a sort of coordinated but shadow politics might occur. Indeed, as our ethnographic study shows, the boundaries between infrapolitics and politics can be fuzzy in terms of how openly power is confronted, complicating the process of how agency is given or taken in practice. Future research on migrant's agency to confront mobility constraints might focus on these fuzzy borders between direct political action and the infrapolitics of mobility, their shifting meanings for different actors, and how they combine to give rise to hybrid forms of infrapolitics, alterpolitics, and activism, including the long-term political and social effects of mobility regimes and their rules.
Our analysis also emphasizes the necessity of identifying and making visible multiple forms of agency and resistance where, in line with Ortner (1995), “resistance” is not conceptualized as a fixed box but is rather interwoven with ambiguity. It highlights the intentionality of resistance as evolving and changing through performative acts, indicating as well how the meanings of different acts can be transformed. For example, many of those who have assisted precarious migrants through small acts of kindness, such as by giving them water or a ride over a short distance, probably did not see their acts as resistance or as political acts at the time. Nonetheless these acts were recontextualized as political when people were persecuted for them, or when they were performed by many in a non-coordinated way and thereby had an impact on both the public and political spheres.
Notes
We carried out observant participation and formal (17, recorded) and informal (29, non-recorded) interviews with migrants, activists, and workers of the hosting system in the Canary Islands in 2021–2022. Some migrants are also being followed in their migrant trajectories in Spain. All migrants interviewed were men and this represents a limitation of the research, as we could not interview women and children. This research is a part of the project CERM (Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities), funded by the Icelandic Center for Research (no. 207062-051).
See Ministry of Justice (Dómsmálaráðuneytið). 2021. “No. 282/2021 Ruling.” 15 June. https://www.stjornarradid.is/efst-a-baugi/frettir/stok-frett/?NewsId=a7e43a3a-ce92-11eb-813d-005056bc8c60.
According to Spanish law any foreigner who has arrived irregularly is under a return process and must be entered in a detention center (CIE) or be released after 72 hours and left free to move.
Saúl García. 2021. “A Court Orders the Police Not to Prevent Migrants from Flying to the Peninsula from the Islands If They Have a Passport.” El diario de Canarias, 14 April. https://eldiariodecanarias.com/noticia/un-juzgado-ordena-la-polic%C3%ADa-que-no-impida-los-migrantes-volar-la-pen%C3%ADnsula-desde-las-islas.
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