In a 2021 interview, Nigel Rapport cautioned against the risk of treating all migrants as the same, and called for a stronger awareness among social scientists of “the enormous individual differences there will be beneath these labels and beyond these classes and categories” (Rapport 2021). This caution is fundamental in respecting the diversity of migrants’ experiences and the inequalities marking their trajectories. My intent in this article, however, goes in the opposite direction. I explore seemingly different experiences of migration as part of the same thing: the sociocultural normative imaginaries and predicaments of mobility.1 I portray the lived experiences of two migrant women (with pseudonyms Wafa and Hela), their feelings around the condition of existential immobility, and how they try to respond to it, including imaginatively. Wafa migrated to Switzerland to seek asylum. Hela temporarily relocated to Switzerland to follow her partner on an overseas assignment. Wafa and Hela are both mothers, at different ages and stages of their lives and careers. A common aspect, however, as with other migrants who look for employment, is the fact that both women have qualifications and had worked at a professional level or planned a career before the displacement. Wafa had run her own healthcare business. Hela was studying and planning a career in research. I visited Wafa and Hela in their houses in 2015 and 2019 respectively. I shared with them my personal experience as a migrant and mother in Switzerland, working in a professional environment (academia) where mobility matters (Jöns 2011) and precariousness is common (Lempiäinen 2015). On the one hand, I was struck by the tangible fragility of Hela despite her moving in what could be viewed as a “comfortable” environment. I was taken by surprise when she cried while talking about the difficulties of moving. On the other hand, I was moved by Wafa's story about her family disruption and impressed by how she seemed to handle the forced distance from her children. At the time, I was already a mother of two, so I could not help but imagine the enormous suffering in that separation.
I choose to share the experiences of Wafa and Hela, since these initial reactions I had to their stories led to further reflections on dominant images of “vulnerability” and “privilege.” I draw upon a large body of literature that has challenged the fixity of mobility categories, critically reconsidered the dichotomy between movement and stasis, migrancy and citizenship, and focused on the meanings, lived experiences, and temporalities of (im)mobility as structurally constructed (e.g., Anderson 2013; Andrijasevic and Anderson 2009; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Jacobsen, Karlsen, and Khosravi 2020; Lelièvre and Marshall 2015; Schapendonk et al. 2018).
The experiences of migrants belonging to different categories, however, except for a few exceptions (Andrijasevic and Anderson 2009; Hercog and Cangià 2021; Neilson 2009), have rarely been explored in tandem from an empirical point of view. This article contributes by unpacking the commonalities of different migration experiences through the prism of existential immobility, defined as a condition where people feel that life does not move on (Hage 2005). I focus on the uncertainty of professional life in migration as a specific context where existential immobility arises and when a person can feel “vulnerable.” Professional aspirations may be in tension with the circumstances of migration, which may immobilize and put people in a situation where planning the future, let alone a career, becomes difficult. Reflecting on my ethnographic encounter with Wafa and Hela, and on the stories of others like them, I started catching sight of a common condition and a common trait that go beyond migration categories. The condition relates to the ambivalent feelings, awareness, and reflectiveness that different migrants face when migrating to (an)other place(s). The trajectories of migrants who are confronted with disruption in their careers after their displacement converge in the lived experience of existential immobility, the feeling of not moving on in their working life or not being in control of life anymore. These experiences converge in the effort of navigating the codes of mobility2 and personal career aspirations. The common trait relates to the human capacity to navigate these codes, to continue to aspire and engage with possibility (Jenkins and Csordas 2020). The ambivalence characterizing this condition can be conceptually illustrated by what I call immobile subjectivities.
In what follows, I introduce the concept of existential immobility and frame the study of migrants’ career trajectories within the (im)mobility approach and a damage-versus-desire perspective. Then, I present my studies and the sociopolitical climate within which refugees and professionals migrate in Switzerland. I continue by defining existential immobility through sharing the stories of Hela and Wafa. I then describe the concept of immobile subjectivity as a vantage point for understanding the interplay between mobility and immobility. I conclude with some reflections on further research on immobility.
Existential Immobility in Migrants’ Journeys: Between “Damage” and “Desire”
The transnationalization of work in various professional sectors, the massification of tourism, and the global response to the “migration crisis” and more recently to the pandemic are parallel examples of how mobility enters into our imaginary. Transnational mobility has become an imperative for many professional sectors (Bilecen and Van Mol 2017), and is often viewed as a desirable path for success or personal development, freedom, and progress (Salazar and Jayaram 2016). It defines other forms of movement, at the social, economic, and existential levels. Migration, as one form of mobility, may be associated with a person's life project and with the search for a space for progressing in life (Hage 2009).
These are instances of how mobility now comes to define people like never before. And yet, never before have so many people faced so profoundly the effects of mobility as a correlate of freedom and progress (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012). In a world where different and uneven mobility regimes operate, “mobile” individuals have become subjects either of “praise or condemnation, desire, suppression or fear” (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013: 196). Some may be encouraged to challenge work and life possibilities through movement. Others are rather criminalized for and refrained from their attempt to move. On the one hand, political discourses on migration tend to depict the refugee as “vulnerable” and “passive” (Mozetič 2018), lacking any aspirational capacity and political subjectivity (De Genova 2017). On the other hand, the mobility of professionals like diplomats, academics, corporate employees, and business specialists has long been associated with a voluntary and aspirational form of migration. These dominant representations tend to hide the social construction of such categories, and the social, emotional, and gendered cost of a life on the move (Cangià 2018; Smith and Favell 2006). The mobilities of different travelers, including “elite” globetrotters and refugees, stand in some relation to each other (Amit 2011; Sheller 2018), particularly in times when the meaning of “privilege” and “vulnerability” can be contested (Easton-Calabria et al. 2017; Gutekunst et al. 2016).
I focus on migrants’ existential immobility3 to shed light on some of those elements that debates on migrants’ “empowerment” in the “Global South” have only occasionally addressed, such as noneconomic aspects or the multiple definitions of self-reliance (Easton-Calabria et al. 2017). Previous literature discussed how labor market integration measures do not properly address the structural conditions producing migrants’ vulnerability and the noneconomic aspects that are important for migrants’ self-reliance (Easton-Calabria et al. 2017; Fiddian- Qasmiyeh 2020). This article contributes to this sense with a special focus on migrants’ journeys to the so-called “Global North.” By sharing the stories of Hela and Wafa as migrants in Switzerland, I will illustrate how categories of vulnerability are not in neat opposition, and that, as Easton-Calabria et al. put it, “a person can be vulnerable to issues but at the same time be self- reliant in other ways” (Easton-Calabria et al. 2017: 2). Vulnerability is a latent feature of contemporary life that may concern a variety of people at different stages of their life course. It arises from events that are experienced as critical (Le Feuvre, Davoine, and Cangià, 2022). It relates to the lack or loss of resources that makes the occurrence of these events more likely and the ability to recover more difficult. Individuals, however, can mobilize a range of alternative resources to meet the immediate and future implications of critical events (Spini, Bernardi, and Oris 2017).
Existential immobility represents a condition where “vulnerability” can come to the fore in multiple ways. As an experience of disruption from previous values, resources, and worldviews, migration can imply an existential crisis (Schutz 1976). A sense of disorientation and strangeness can also arise at home in a world of familiarity where life seems to stand still. Ghassan Hage (2005) argues that it is precisely when a person does not have the sense that life moves on that they start contemplating the idea of moving physically. Some may be “displaced in place” before departure, not because of actual migration but because of the immobilizing effects of the circumstances they wish to escape (e.g., war) (Lubkemann 2008). Others can face a “mobility dissonance” (Bygnes 2021), a disjunction between the initial (cap)ability of moving geographically and the existential immobility experienced after the displacement (Lems and Moderbacher 2016).
Existential immobility, here, relates to the impossibility of continuing one's career and the status loss after displacement; the feeling that time does not pass or passes too quickly while life is on hold; the inability to recognize oneself in the present or to picture oneself in the future; and the feeling of losing control over life. This condition can present an embodied connotation of the feeling of being physically stuck between real or metaphorical borders (Cangià 2020). Existential immobility is marked by an ambivalent mix of feelings, an “intense sense of being thrown back upon oneself” (Lems and Moderbacher 2016: 114) on the one hand, and the aspirations and desire “that outstrip and in some sense transform these prior conditions” (Jackson and Piette 2015: 3) on the other. Desire4 is key here. In an open letter to communities, researchers, and educators, Tuck invites them to rethink the impact of common “damage-centered” research on marginalized communities, which tends to pathologize people's “brokenness” and reinforce an image of vulnerability. Capturing desire instead of damage helps to document not only the painful elements of lived experiences but also people's hope, capabilities, and visions of the future (Tuck 2009). The lived experience of displacement can strongly differ from the imaginaries and expectations associated with the move for various migrants. A focus on the ambivalences of existential immobility can also support the understanding of how migrants can continue to aspire and engage with the future in the face of uncertainty. We need first to consider the structural inequalities and exclusion processes of local systems of reception for migrants (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Surveying the sociopolitical climate in Switzerland, where Hela and Wafa migrated, will help.
“Highly Skilled Migrants” in Switzerland
Between 2015 and 2021, I conducted research on the career trajectories of various “highly skilled migrants”5 in Switzerland. For the first study, interviews were conducted with 30 “expat” families of various nationalities, including the working person, the children, and the accompanying partners (Cangià 2018; Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019; Levitan 2019). For the second study, interviews were conducted with 27 highly skilled refugees from Syria (Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021). In both studies, the interviews followed a semi-structured grid (Roulston and Choi 2018) and enabled respondents to take the time to narrate their experiences and propose other topics. Of particular importance for both studies were questions about professional and life aspirations before and after the displacement, as well as the imagination of future alternatives. Asking questions about aspirations and imagination highlights the lived experience of inequality not as a mere reproduction of or resistance to these, but as an ambivalent desire of what is not yet relative to what is not anymore: desire, in this regard, matches the experiences of people who, at different moments in the same day or in a lifetime, “reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures” (Tuck 2009: 420).
Migrants may have different capacities and options for projecting themselves in the future. Hela and Wafa face very different material and institutional constraints when picturing their future, one as a “refugee,” the other as “the partner of a mobile professional.” They can face very different structural barriers and can rely on very different external resources to achieve their goals. The legal status of migrants is at the core of the success of their “integration” (Bolzman 2001).
Rights and restrictions linked to the legal status of people seeking asylum in Switzerland may strongly influence their trajectories (Bolzman 2001). Both the length of stay in asylum reception and the type of permit they have may have a negative impact on refugees’ socioeconomic insertion (Bakker, Dagevos, and Engbersen 2014). For one thing, the asylum channel of migration in Switzerland has long been considered as humanitarian and not skills-based: migrants in search of protection do not see their skills and education easily validated (Sandoz 2018). They are prohibited from working for at least three months following the submission of the asylum application, whereafter they may be granted provisional authorization to work. Refugees cannot move across or leave the country with a permit N (application still being processed) or F (provisionally admitted). Refugees do not get easy access to the employment market with these permits, which are perceived as uncertain by most employers. The wait for a B permit (recognized refugees) can last from three months to more than three years. Local employers, moreover, tend to favor people with more stable permits and associate the refugee legal status with temporariness (Spadarotto, Bieberschulte, and Walker 2014). The multiplicity of authorities that can recognize migrants’ qualifications and the lack of flexibility in the rules make the process of recognizing a foreign diploma particularly complex. This, at times, might give rise to a certain subjectivity in officials’ prejudices regarding the quality of education acquired in other countries. Different types of integration measures can be offered to refugees arriving in Switzerland, including language courses, financial aid to subsidize training, professional orientation, or orientation through a placement agency. For one thing, these measures vary between regions. Refugees often report cases of discrimination from social workers who, during the job search, associate certain occupations with gender (i.e., seasonal agricultural jobs or storekeeping for men and caregiving or cooking for women). Refugees may have high levels of education and may not wish to merely overcome their financial dependence by working in low-skilled jobs (Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021). The temporariness associated with the volatility of an asylum seeker's status is paradoxical in a way, for this category of migrants can wish and tend to stay: refugees are therefore often distinguished from “expatriates” and “highly killed migrants” (Hercog and Sandoz 2018) who are expected to return to their home country (Cranston 2017).
For this second category of migrants, work-related mobility represents a signifier of competence and an imperative for career progress in many professional sectors (Cangià 2019; Kesselring 2015). In the case of certain jobs such as in the diplomatic and humanitarian sector, it becomes the only possible option. Switzerland applies a dual admission system: it grants free movement to the citizens of EU/EFTA member states and yet limits the entrance of “qualified workers from third countries” to those who are “absolutely needed” (Sandoz 2018). A majority of these “needed” migrants have an employment contract or job offer on their arrival, and receive support from the employer during the move (Sandoz 2018). However, (repeated) mobility can have an impact on the lives and careers of accompanying partners (Cangià 2018; Walsh 2007). Partners are often initially assisted via family reunification and through company-funded networks (e.g., spousal associations, university welcome centers, career networks), which provide initial support in a job search. Imaginaries concerning the mobility of “dual career couples,” where both partners negotiate their career while moving together, are common in the corporate environment and other international work sectors. However, respondents reported a situation where jobs are scarce and employers tend to favor “locals” rather than “temporary” migrants with short-term visas (e.g., Ci permit).6
Despite these two different mobility regimes, respondents in both studies talked about the rupture experienced in their professional lives and the various obstacles encountered. They all talked about the nonrecognition of their foreign qualifications, language barriers, and the perceived discrimination toward certain nationalities and legal status, both associated with menial jobs and with low-skilled migrants. All respondents reported a sense of uncertainty and “stuckness”: they described passing from a previous professional life or clear plan to a work situation that was not yet in place and was difficult to foresee given the scarcity of employment opportunities. Some did not manage to work or ended up in jobs that did not match their skills. A sense of immobility also emerged from a physical sensation, or imagination thereof: the bodily feeling of confinement in the house or in the refugee reception center, the imagination of being stuck between the metaphorical walls of the origin and destination countries, the sense of disorientation when in a public place, as illustrated by Hela, or the boredom of waiting at home, as with Wafa. I now explore these subjects’ trajectories respectively.
Hela
Hela (in her early thirties) followed her husband on overseas assignments across various countries before arriving in Switzerland. At the beginning of their mobile trajectory, Hela was studying in another European country. She wanted to embark on a research career, but following her partner she changed this project. The birth of children can alter the migration experience (Ryan and Mulholland 2014). Before having children, Hela explains, she could manage to live between two countries and continue studying. Hela decided to quit her studies. People from an “expat” community, where “dual career couples” and paid labor for women are the norm, can feel ambivalent about the horizon of a mobile life: the frustration of not contributing financially to the household alongside the expectations of having a free and “exciting” time traveling around the world (Cangià 2017; Suter 2019); the initial excitement about the ability to move, then the actual experience of repeated mobility, finding oneself immobile professionally. Hela mentioned all the different countries they had lived in, with a certain fatigue. She did not feel “excited” to visit new places anymore. A strategy to survive this constant change, she said with a wavering voice, would be “reducing the number of countries where we have to live.” “And go to places you have already been?” I ask. “Exactly!” she answers. Creating a sense of continuity beyond the disruption of mobility represented an important strategy for Hela, and for many people facing the accelerated rhythms, uncertainty, and volatility of a life on the move (Bygnes 2021; Levitan 2019).
As more than physical movement, migration encompasses a set of multidimensional and multidirectional (im)mobilities in a person's trajectory (Schapendonk et al. 2018). It is often the feeling that life is going nowhere that creates in many the desire to move physically to a place “where the quality of their ‘going-ness’ is better than what it is in the space they are leaving behind” (Hage 2009: 98). If this “going-ness” does not look any better, the whole point of relocating is missing. Mobility then starts generating a sense of uncertainty about possible future moves, a sense of “stuckness” in the present, and existential immobility (Cangià 2020; Lems and Moderbacher 2016). Hela is split between her “skills” and the frustration of not having much to do at home: “I am highly educated, I have skills, and I feel they are seriously underused. Like today, you came, and I forgot that you were coming, but I am not doing anything.”
Her corporeal sensations and the interaction with me that day was where existential immobility became tangible. My physical presence in her house reminded Hela that she does not have much to do and should have remembered our meeting instead. The problem is the existential invisibility of a life constantly on the move. It is that every time you move to another country, she said, “no one knows you, no one cares about you . . . no one gives a damn if you exist or not.” Then, whenever she goes to a supermarket, she feels lost, entrapped in certain routines, like grocery shopping, while the others are at work, moving on with their lives: “when I was in a supermarket during the day last time, I thought I was like worthless, I didn't exist. I thought about all the people who are at work, my husband has an important job, and I was shopping for potatoes in the middle of the day.” By moving into space (crossing a border or simply going to the supermarket), Hela becomes aware of her sense of stuckness. Initially, Hela felt mostly disoriented. Later, however, she started “feeling up” (Maehara 2010) by focusing on positive feelings that were initially absent and wondering what she could do to enjoy this time. Hela started counseling, met new people and made new friends, and spent time doing what she loves: “for the first time I wasn't homesick and I decided this is a new chapter, now we are gonna enjoy it, gonna do something proactive, and we made some new friends.” She had always had the dream of writing, she said. She also explored the surroundings and engaged in photography: “that's one thing [photography] I would like to learn to do properly later after the writing. Maybe in the long term it can help me.” The capacity of reconverting the resources available to cope with the situation is what helps Hela continue to aspire for and imagine alternatives for herself, which ideally can transform into a new professional life. I will now share the story of Wafa and discuss a similar capacity under very different material and social circumstances.
Wafa
Wafa arrived in Switzerland after moving to another country, where she lived for almost four years. At the time of her departure, she was forcibly separated from her children. Wafa was in her late forties and lived on her own. She was in a very different stage of her professional life compared to Hela. She had run a healthcare business, had a family and a house: “I had a good life, I had it all.” Migration does not take place once, as a single event. Migration is rather a dynamic process, characterized not only by the initial cross-border movement, but also by multiple short-term, forced, or tactical movements (across countries, but also towns) (Schapendonk et al. 2018), and by the decision about staying immobile or about potential future movements (Moret 2017). Asylum seekers are trapped in the paradoxes of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013).
Upon arrival in Switzerland, Wafa was sent to one of the Swiss Reception and Procedure Centers, where her asylum application was considered. She didn't know whether she would be granted refugee status, which town she would be sent to, and for how long. While she was at first “forced” to leave her country, once in the new destination Wafa could not move from the center for months, and then, once she was granted legal status, she faced possible restrictions of movement across cities or countries. Wafa was trapped in what Shahram Khosravi called a “regime of circulating people,” which keeps people “in circulation so that their experience is usually one of ‘not arriving’, an experience of temporariness, being constantly on the move” (Khosravi 2018). And yet mobility (past and current traveling or migration, or short-term internal movements) represents an important resource for refugees to act upon work and life conditions before arriving at their destination. Wafa relied on her previous experience of mobility (migration or travel) to adapt to the difficulties faced in Switzerland or to compare her current situation with the past: refugees often imagine or even plan internal or international migration or travel to find a job or a training program, when permissible. Differently from Hela, who wanted to stay or to go to previous destinations, Wafa stressed her desire to migrate to another country if she could not find a job where she was based on her qualifications. Her initial aspiration was to continue her life as it used to be. A first barrier, however, was the nonrecognition of her qualifications. Another barrier was her legal status. She struggled to create a space for imagining and planning an alternative life.
Migration institutions and policies, in particular, can put people like Wafa in a situation of waiting that delays access to labor and increases their sense of precariousness (Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021). Wafa, like other refugees, reported a feeling of losing control over her life and complained about having to “start from zero” after years of professional life. Some refugees would like to change their profession or engage in further education or training. They are often required by social workers to stay at home in a “waiting zone” (Axelsson, Malmberg, and Zhang 2017). Respondents talk about the difficulty of attending alternative training, constructing a new profile and learning a new job, especially when older, or the recommendation common among social workers to “forget about previous life and former qualification” and opt for something else (Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021). Imagining alternatives becomes difficult in such conditions. Wafa wanted to move on and progress; she had plenty of ideas about how to do it, but her assigned social worker asked her to wait or to find any available employment instead: “I can't wait. To stay here [in her house], only to sleep and eat, eat and sleep,” Wafa said. She insisted on asking about possible training, and by persevering managed to engage in whatever was available at the time, including hairdressing, a media course, language classes, and cookery. She also kept looking for a job to gain financial independence.
When I met her, Wafa worked in the care sector. She did not like it, but it was better than other jobs and helped pass time instead of staying passive at home: “You need patience and finding something that occupies you, that's why I work. Although I hate this job, it fills up my time. Time passes like that . . . If I can't change it, I have to adapt to it! [laugh].” Her desire was still to have her diploma recognized. Otherwise, she said, she would leave the country: “I don't have a choice. I'm not saying it's not a good job, but I prefer my old profession. I've worked a lot for that, and I have experience!”
I suggest that the lived experience of immobility for Hela and Wafa, similar and so different at the same time, gives us a hint of the ambivalence of mobility. This can be better elucidated by the concept of immobile subjectivities.
Immobile Subjectivities
Hela and Wafa are unable to conform to the demands, velocities, and imperatives of mobility (to escape a conflict, to follow the family). They come to feel excluded, slowed down and stuck in the present: immobile. Hela reported being stuck in the image of “housewife type,” in which she did not recognize herself. She is talented, she says. Being at home is wasted time: “I cannot live just as his spouse and just in the house, I am not at all, you know, housewife type.” Wafa, in turn, felt trapped in the category of “refugee”: the problem, Wafa explained, is those who manage refugees’ migration administratively and view refugees as all the same, as “vulnerable,” “passive,” and “low-skilled” migrants, who come to Switzerland only to benefit from social support.
Responding to the predicaments of mobility is not free of ambivalence and contradictions for these women. Conflicting meanings, values, and feelings regarding mobility meet in these migrants’ subjectivities: the imperatives of mobility on the one hand, and the willingness to stay (for Hela) or to move again (for Wafa) on the other; the inconsistency between the ability to move geographically and the existential immobility experienced after arrival (Bygnes 2021: 37). These codes, values, and feelings meet in “the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects” (Ortner 2005), which live through and bear upon the conditions unfolding from the experience of mobility. This ensemble of codes, values, and feelings, and its ambivalent affective and reflective nature, is at the core of the complex interplay between mobility and immobility (Tošić and Lems 2019). One can become aware of oneself as being immobile, and yet orient toward the world in alternative ways and imagine an alternative future. The experience of existential immobility can “provide the ground for subjects to think through their circumstances and to feel through their contradictions” (Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007: 14). Hela and Wafa, like many other migrants, are confronted with the new circumstances of migration, as well as the disjuncture between the need and ability to move to another country and the feeling that their life remains stuck.
Hela and Wafa's reflections about their condition of immobilization resemble the ambivalent nature of subjectivity, the negotiation between contradictory emotional codes around the experience of mobility and the feeling of existential immobility; between the codes of mobility (dictating who can move, and how, why, and when) and more personal codes (contemplating how, why, and when one should move or stay put, or what to do to escape the situation). A paradox arises “not only out of there being two codes—different appraisals, different appropriate displays, different representations—but a recognition that in being responsive to each, one fails both” (Luhrmann 2006: 356).
Hela and Wafa are caught in this paradox. On the one hand, an immediate solution to the damaging effects of mobility might be staying patient, accepting the damage, suppressing or silencing certain feelings in the hope that they will disappear (Cangià 2017). Hela initially “suppressed” her feelings to follow her partner: “I just decided it must work out, one way or another.” She had to find a solution to handle the volatility of her life on the move. Wafa, in turn, admitted that she might need to adapt to a life where change did not seem possible. Better not to have too many plans, she said; better to slow down and stay still in the present, patiently: “I learned a lesson here. You don't have to plan far ahead.”
On the other hand, a way to respond to the damage of mobility is, paradoxically, to appropriate the codes and rules of mobility: to desire to be proactive, to change and move on when things seem not to do so (Montulet and Mincke 2019). Alternative resources play a special role here, besides the economic or class-based resources that are normally viewed as increasing the resilience of migrants after the displacement (Bakker, Dagevos, and Engbersen 2014; Greco Morasso and Zittoun 2014). Imagination, hope, and motivation to aspire to a better life are some personal resources that are mobilized (Cangià 2020; Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021). People can also activate interpersonal relationships (friends, neighbors, counselor), which might play a key role of support, or use semiotic or symbolic resources (knowledge, information, or cultural elements, such as sport, religion, the Internet, hobbies) (Zittoun 2012). Hela manages to motivate herself to get out of her house, look back at the world around, meet with a counselor and new friends, and do what she loves (e.g., writing, photography). Wafa proposes ideas regarding other possible training to better match her skills or learn something new to stay active. When asked what her aspirations were, Wafa stressed her desire to work in her professional field, to further study, or to move somewhere else. “I'm the one who can change [my life]. I don't accept to stay like that.” Other refugees rely on neighbors to learn the local language or for practical assistance. Others, both refugees and accompanying partners, engage in volunteering jobs.
It is here, in this “capacity to do things” inherent in a condition of immobility (Bissell and Fuller 2010) and continued desire, that I see the common human trait of very different people like Hela and Wafa, of those who have contrasting motivations to move under very different conditions, or simply present different dispositions, personalities, and ways of acting toward “being immobile.” This capacity resembles Tuck's desire (Tuck 2009: 417), the capacity to aspire no matter what, and engage creatively with the world around to endure the state of things. It is the navigational effort of going through the difficulties of mobility while projecting one's life into the future (Vigh 2009: 430), of moving between the damages and desires of mobility, that makes the immobile subjectivities of very different migrants comparable.
Conclusion
There are many routes into immobility when it comes to migration. There is no single legal, socioeconomic, and political condition that produces a single immobile subjectivity. The production of immobilities (spatial, professional, social, existential) is a process that takes different forms, depending on the regime and channel of migration. I consider the experience of immobility as an existential zone where both commonalities and differences between mobile trajectories emerge: the multiple and sometimes contradictory circumstances, feelings, awareness, and reflectiveness on a condition of be(com)ing immobile in a world that has long made some of us mobile in many ways. It is not merely the immobilizing and damaging effects unfolding through distinct mobility regimes that make different individual stories converge beyond migrant categorizations. What converges and what is worth further exploration is the human responsiveness and existential struggles of those who feel or choose to be “immobile” (Salazar 2021) to counteract the damages of different yet at times intersecting regimes.
With the increasing imperative of mobility (e.g., to escape a conflict, to progress in a career, or to escape from a virus), we all become more mobile and immobile simultaneously, in relation to someone or something else (Cangià 2021). And yet there are different ways of being immobile and living through immobility. I do not aim here to discredit the importance of such differences. Migrants can imagine reestablishing a previous professional life, maybe in another country in an imagined future, like Wafa. Others like Hela can concretely put into practice a new plan in the present, using available resources (i.e., financial, symbolic, social). Some refugees manage to find a job matching their skills, while some accompanying partners remain unemployed.
Immobile subjectivities live through the ambivalent condition of being immobilized and feeling trapped in the present, and the “braving” of these conditions (Hage 2009: 102), along with having the capacity to imagine alternative futures (Brun 2015). The ways (or whether) individuals will eventually endure this condition are multiple, depending on the circumstances of mobility, and the different resources at hand.
By shedding light on the career trajectories of different migrants and their negotiations, aspirations, and expectations of mobility, this article aimed to challenge conventional binaries of “privileged” and “vulnerable” migrants. Because of its focus on existential immobility, it also contributed to reframing the meanings of “self-reliance” (Easton-Calabria 2022), in the light of the structural conditions and regimes that shape the (im)mobility experiences of different migrants in Switzerland. The concept of immobile subjectivity can help illustrate both the damaging implications of mobility and the hopes, desires, and capabilities in existential immobility. Lived experiences, after all, are also political insofar as they represent a sphere where daily struggles for change and the desire for a “better” life can emerge (Andrijasevic and Anderson 2009; Tošić and Lems 2019). “Integration” measures designed for migrant workers should incorporate these experiences, with an eye to those noneconomic, social, and individual aspects that make a career meaningful for migrants (Easton-Calabria 2022), and that they can value for imagining alternative professional trajectories after their displacement. Moreover, better access to information concerning possible opportunities would be a good way to support migrants who want to continue their career, study, or change profession in Switzerland (Cangià, Davoine, and Tashtish 2021; Sontag 2018). Social scientists and workers should also start reflecting on how existential immobility and “vulnerability” linked to increasing job uncertainty and precariousness becomes a feature of the lives of many variously mobile individuals and their families (Le Feuvre, Davoine, and Cangià,2022), as well as those who are not mobile (Tsing 2015). Further research on how immobile subjectivities are produced and lived among various categories of “migrants” and “citizens” is needed: to grant distinct experiences of mobility the dignity of their uniqueness while keeping in mind the inequalities that are the fabric of our contemporary world and that make people's career and life journeys both different from and similar to each other.
Acknowledgments
This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centres of Competence in Research LIVES (Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives) and the NCCR – On the Move, which are financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant numbers: 51NF40-185901 and 51NF40-182897). The author is grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial assistance.
Notes
A previous version of this article was presented at the Society for Psychological Anthropology SPA Biennial Conference in 2021.
By “codes” I mean the imperatives, imaginaries, assumed qualities, and rules associated with mobility, for example mobility as a prerequisite of career progress, as an “exciting” experience, or as a forced choice to escape a conflict or follow the family, and the rules on how to “ideally” move (Cangià 2020).
Immobility usually refers to structural constraints that hinder the capacity to move, like those points through which movement stops or slows down, for example borders, or the realization of a desire not to move (Cangià et al. 2022; Khan 2016; Salazar 2021; Schewel 2019).
I refer to the conscious desire, a motivational force that drives the volitional action to feel a need or a wish, or to express or avoid the arousal of a sentiment (Spiro 1997). In this article, the “need” is to reconstitute a professional career or develop it according to plans and aspirations.
These studies were conducted at the University of Neuchâtel and at the University of Fribourg, supported by the NCCR On the Move “The Migration-Mobility Nexus” and the NCCR LIVES “Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives,” and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
This permit gives access to the labor market, regardless of nationality or qualification (https://www.eda.admin.ch/missions/mission-onu-geneve/en/home/manual-regime-privileges-and-immunities/introduction/manual-family/access-labour-market-family-staff.html). However, it may be associated with temporariness and preclude access to long-term employment (Permits Foundation 2009).
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