Welcome aboard KLM Air Land! Hope and uncertainty in precarious migration projects

How do you feel when a border guard asks to see your passport? Is it a trivial experience that requires just a few moments before you are waived through immigration, or could this mean detention and deportation? And is it possible – or even imaginable – for you to migrate in safe and legal ways?

In today’s world, access to safe and legal migration is highly stratified and selective. It depends on where you come from and your economic situation, meaning that for many people around the globe, legal migration paths do not exist. In the new Research Handbook on Irregular Migration we get a comprehensive picture of cutting-edge research in 30 chapters written by leading scholars. Focusing on the movement of people that takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements, the handbook critically examines processes and dynamics that generate and reproduce migrant irregularity and discusses who may count as an irregular migrant.

In ‘Welcome aboard KLM Air Land! Hope and uncertainty in precarious migration projects’, Nauja Kleist takes departure in research on overland migration from West to North Africa to discuss the social hopes that underpin such high-risk and precarious mobilities. She explores the spaces, repositories and temporalities of hope in irregular migration while emphasizing the potential disruptions of migration – such as exploitation, detention, deportation – that may turn hope into hopelessness. Kleist thereby calls for reflections on the governance of hope and its absence through analyzing how migration is embedded in political economies and regimes of mobility that shape different kinds of mobility and immobility.