Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa

Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa PDF Author: Maybritt Jill Alpes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317186044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Do young West Africans want to go abroad at any cost because they receive too little or erroneous information? Why do they and their families risk large sums of money with migration brokers? How do the risks of illegality and deportation change migration aspirations in West Africa? This book places trafficking and smuggling within a wider framework of high-risk migration and proposes a novel interpretation of how people manage unwanted and uncertain migration outcomes. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with aspiring and failed migrants, their families, migration brokers and consulate offices in anglophone Cameroon, the author analyses high-risk migration from the vantage point of people in a place of departure. Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa: Abroad at Any Cost develops a critical socio-legal approach to the governance of migration that sees the state without ‘seeing like the state’. The state’s monopoly over legitimate means of mobility is continuously in the making – frequently through accusations of fraud and criminality. By revealing how authority, legality and legitimacy operate in a country of origin, the analysis contributes original insights into processes that create the conditions for illegality and migrant exploitation. The book will appeal to those in the fields of migration and development, African studies, gender, anthropology, sociology, criminology and law.

Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa

Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa PDF Author: Maybritt Jill Alpes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317186044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Do young West Africans want to go abroad at any cost because they receive too little or erroneous information? Why do they and their families risk large sums of money with migration brokers? How do the risks of illegality and deportation change migration aspirations in West Africa? This book places trafficking and smuggling within a wider framework of high-risk migration and proposes a novel interpretation of how people manage unwanted and uncertain migration outcomes. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with aspiring and failed migrants, their families, migration brokers and consulate offices in anglophone Cameroon, the author analyses high-risk migration from the vantage point of people in a place of departure. Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa: Abroad at Any Cost develops a critical socio-legal approach to the governance of migration that sees the state without ‘seeing like the state’. The state’s monopoly over legitimate means of mobility is continuously in the making – frequently through accusations of fraud and criminality. By revealing how authority, legality and legitimacy operate in a country of origin, the analysis contributes original insights into processes that create the conditions for illegality and migrant exploitation. The book will appeal to those in the fields of migration and development, African studies, gender, anthropology, sociology, criminology and law.

Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa

Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa PDF Author: Maybritt Jill Alpes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317186036
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Do young West Africans want to go abroad at any cost because they receive too little or erroneous information? Why do they and their families risk large sums of money with migration brokers? How do the risks of illegality and deportation change migration aspirations in West Africa? This book places trafficking and smuggling within a wider framework of high-risk migration and proposes a novel interpretation of how people manage unwanted and uncertain migration outcomes. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with aspiring and failed migrants, their families, migration brokers and consulate offices in anglophone Cameroon, the author analyses high-risk migration from the vantage point of people in a place of departure. Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa: Abroad at Any Cost develops a critical socio-legal approach to the governance of migration that sees the state without ‘seeing like the state’. The state’s monopoly over legitimate means of mobility is continuously in the making – frequently through accusations of fraud and criminality. By revealing how authority, legality and legitimacy operate in a country of origin, the analysis contributes original insights into processes that create the conditions for illegality and migrant exploitation. The book will appeal to those in the fields of migration and development, African studies, gender, anthropology, sociology, criminology and law.

Argonauts of West Africa

Argonauts of West Africa PDF Author: Apostolos Andrikopoulos
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822613
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Examines the paradoxes of kinship in the lives of unauthorized African migrants as they struggle for mobility, employment, and citizenship in Europe. In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa, Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes.

The Fixer

The Fixer PDF Author: Charles Piot
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478003421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker—known as a “fixer”—as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life.

Unmaking Migrants

Unmaking Migrants PDF Author: Stacey Vanderhurst
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Unmaking Migrants engages critical questions about preventing trafficking by preventing migration through a study of a shelter for trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria. Over the past fifteen years, antitrafficking personnel have stopped thousands of women from traveling out of Nigeria and instead sent them to the federal counter-trafficking agency for investigation, protection, and rehabilitation. Government officials defend this form of intervention as preemptive, having intercepted the women before any abuses take place. Yet many of the women protest their detention, insist they were not being trafficked, and demand to be released. As Stacey Vanderhurst argues, migration can be a freely made choice. Unmaking Migrants shows the moments leading up to the migration choice, and it shows how well-intentioned efforts to help women considering these paths often don't address their real needs at all.

The Migration Industry in Asia

The Migration Industry in Asia PDF Author: Michiel Baas
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811396949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
This pivot considers the emergence and functioning of the migration industry and commercialization of migration pathways in Asia. Grounded in extensive fieldwork and building on empirical data gathered through interactions and interviews with brokers, agents and other facilitators of migration, it examines the increasing co-dependence on, entanglement of and overlap between migrants, industry and state. It considers how for low-skilled migrants, migration is often not even possible without the involvement of the industry. As the opportunity to migrate has opened up to an ever-widening group of potential migrants, receiving nations have fine-tuned their migration infrastructure and programs to facilitate the inflow (and timely outflow) of the migrants it deems desirable. The migration industry plays an active role as mediator between migrants’ desires and states' requirements. This pivot focuses on what unites sending and receiving sides of migration, going beyond presupposed established networks, and offering a clear conceptualization of the contemporary migration industry in Asia.

Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration

Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration PDF Author: Giuseppe Sciortino
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839105461
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Adeptly navigating one of the most pressing issues on the current global agenda, this topical Research Handbook provides a comprehensive and research-based exploration of the sociology of migration. As well as highlighting the field’s achievements and current challenges, it explores key concepts used in current research, methods employed, and the spheres and contexts in which migrants participate.

Trajectories and Imaginaries in Migration

Trajectories and Imaginaries in Migration PDF Author: Felicitas Hillmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351119648
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This book draws attention to the various factors that characterize migrant flows and mobilities, calling into question familiar concepts such as push and pull, migration as a life project and sociocultural integration. It highlights processes such as fl exible migrant routes, temporary and return migration, mental aspects of migration processes and transnationalism, which are organised around the themes of shaping trajectories, frictions in space, and the migrant mental framework. It brings together work from scholars from Europe and beyond, with the contributions collected emphasizing the social and mental processes that underpin the migratory process, which can be seen as the ‘soft side’ of migration. Too often, this side is neglected when the governance of migration is discussed. The novel ideas expressed here also help to overcome the mechanistic view of migration as a push-pull event. Thus, the book suggests a different understanding of migration and mobility as relational, non-linear and fluid social processes, characterized by instability in migrant life trajectories. Emphasizing the fl exibility of migrants and migration and advocating the importance of emotionally charged, individual perceptions as central to migrant decision-making, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, politics and geography with interests in migration and diaspora studies.

Research Handbook on Irregular Migration

Research Handbook on Irregular Migration PDF Author: Ilse van Liempt
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800377509
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Moving away from state categorizations on irregular migration, this Research Handbook critically examines processes and dynamics that generate and reproduce irregularity, and discusses who may count as an irregular migrant.

Touts

Touts PDF Author: Enrique Martino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110755920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.