When Europe closes - on emerging Transatlantic migration

In recent years, it has become exceedingly difficult for African migrants to enter the European Union. The EU and its member-states have imposed further restrictions on national asylum and migration policies and have de facto outsourced its border control by establishing agreements with transit migration countries in Africa. This development and the economic recession put together have limited the possibilities for successful migration to Europe. Concurrently, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Argentina has emerged as a destination for West African migrants, especially since the mid 2000s. When the opportunities to enter Europe are reduced, it seems that hope for a better future is redirected towards new destinations and emerging economies in the Global South.

In a new book chapter Ida Marie Vammen, PhD candidate at DIIS, sheds new light on this recent flow. The chapter is based on eight months’ of ethnographic fieldwork and explores how hope is shaped and reworked among Senegalese migrants in Argentina. It highlight how Senegalese migrants perceived the opportunity to transcend their irregular status in Argentina by entering a recent regularization program for undocumented migrants. The case illuminates how the migrants navigate in a fairly new destination and how they try to gain momentum by relying on their known path of spirituality, but seem less interested in becoming new citizens within a state-governed framework of rights and obligations.

The chapter is part of the newly published anthology ‘Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration’ edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen.