The “system” as another sea: Contrasting mobility rules and migrant navigations

This article analyzes how African migrants are confronted in Europe with contrasting mobility rules. We argue that mobility rules not only come from formalized immigration bureaucracies but also emerge from people's transnational social spaces. From there, we first seek to capture the particular mobility regimes and the social imaginaries that produce desirable and undesirable mobility. Subsequently, we ethnographically engage with people's actual responses to particular formal and informal mobility rules. These insights construct a highly dynamic and translocal topology whereby bureaucracies and social lifeworlds intersect, which makes questions of success/failure, good migranthood as well as mobility/immobility highly diffuse. We use these insights to reflect on uncertainty in the light of shifting im/mobility itineraries and consider migrant navigations as political acts.