If ‘hopeful dreams’ are the ‘stuff’ of which migration is made, as Samuli Schielke (2020: xiii) has recently remarked, then we need to ask what are the imaginary constructs that transpire in subjective aspirations towards the ‘good life’ and what is the price that one incurs for pursuing these through migration. As imaginaries, contrary to popular portrayals, can quickly turn from a vehicle of empowerment – prompting one to pursue possible alternatives to a dead-end present – to a vehicle of deception.  By mispresenting daytime reveries as realities within reach they contain the potentiality for colonising subjective aspirations and initiating social practices that sustain and reproduce relationships of domination. Their regressive force is concentrated in their paradoxical persistence – the fever and desire with which they are pursued does not diminish even when their unrealistic nature is revealed (Manolova, 2019). Today we are witnessing at one and the same time the global proliferation of promises for a good life and the rapid diminishing of pathways for their realisation, a situation which creates a ‘pressure to hope’¹ for a life that can fill the gap between the existent ‘is’ and the desired ‘ought’. For those ‘stuck’ in the spatio-temporal peripheries of both the Global South and North, where the double bind of the imaginary is most painfully experienced, migration is often the only available strategy for breaking away with symbolic and material marginality and approximating a certain ideal template of the ‘good life’.

In this piece, I show how looking at migration from the point of view of imaginaries transpires as a condition of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called ‘cruel optimism’, a relation of attachment between the desiring subject and the object of desire that continues to persist regardless of the realisation that the pursued dream works against one’s well-being. By tracing the ‘cruel optimism’ that marks east-to-west labour mobilities within the EU, I reveal how the desire for ‘normal lives’ in the postsocialist East, one that sustains a cyclical core-periphery labour supply, plays out on the plain of individual aspirations and experiences. I focus on the case of post-2014 Bulgarian ‘existential’ migrants to the UK, their encounters with the politics of ‘non-spectacular’ bordering that mark the intra-EU migration regime and their transformation from legal status holders to informalised and temporary migrant subjects. My ethnographic work shows how prospective, first time and ‘permanent’ migrants in different localities in the UK and Bulgaria conceived of their migration projects as individualised strategies for realising an imaginary ‘Western’ life and its associated forms of well-being. Yet, in the process, they were often caught in an irreversible condition of perpetual ill-being – unable to settle and achieve ‘normality’ in the UK and at the same time deprived from the possibility of permanent return.

Assen (41) and his wife Petya (43) had decided to start a ‘new life’ in the UK where as they claimed, people did not simply ‘vegetate’ like in Bulgaria but dreams could ‘really’ come true for those willing to put in the work. Both stated that this was their ‘last chance’ for bringing in much-needed change in their lives which continued to lack ‘normality’ and were marked by a constant ‘waiting for something to happen’. Intra-EU movements, readily called ‘mobilities’, have been treated as temporary moves driven by a narrow cost-benefit rationality (Favell, 2014). As a consequence, those who engage in them are rarely seen as affective beings with complexly evolving hopes and imaginations that can construct migration as a radical and lasting break away from an unbearable present. The majority of the people I met saw their physical mobility as an individualised strategy for achieving a sense of ‘existential advancement’, which was linked to a desire for overcoming a postsocialist collective entrapment outside of modernist templates and progression towards membership in a first-class world order. Ensuing Europeanisation campaigns and neoliberal reform policies since 1989 had not alleviated concerns with ‘lagging behind’ and developmental disadvantage but rendered even more acute experiences of ‘Third-Worldization’ (Vassilev, 2003). Thus, the need to re-assert a ‘connection, a relationship and aspirational equality’ (Ferguson, 2006: 22) with the West found its expression in Bulgarians’ growing desire for a permanent escape.

It is images of ‘normality’ and ‘normal lives’ (normalen zhivot) that fuelled and sustained such projects. Through them, my research participants depicted a highly idealised and deceitful image of the West as a place where dignified living, working class respectability, social justice and equality of opportunity were guaranteed benefits for those with a strong work ethic and ‘civilisational’ loyalty. Across the postsocialist space, imaginaries of normality, embedded in hegemonic narratives of Western supremacy and part of the (quasi-) colonial modus operandi that has long subordinated East European peripheries as incomplete and inferior ‘Other within’ (Todorova, 1997), continue to inform collective future vistas despite their inherent discrepancies (see Jansen, 2018). The widespread impulse to pursue the Western dream that I observed in late 2013 was a reaction to the drop of ‘transitional’ restrictions and the opening of the British labour market that for many signalled the long-awaited conferral of a full-fledged (as opposed to incomplete) Europeanness and the outset of opportunities for permanency, regularity and membership in a community of equals. At the same time, the political moment in which these Western fantasies resurfaced – the height of the fearmongering campaign against ‘free movement’ which demonised Bulgarians (and Romanians) as the ultimate ‘threat from within’ – is a testimony to the counterintuitive and denialist logics that propel the cycle of ‘cruel optimism’ underlying migration.

The hopeful dedication with which migrants embarked on their migratory projects often made them selectively oblivious to the pitfalls that awaited them and rendered pointless the attempts of their compatriots to warn them of the risks of exploitation and underground existence. Upon arrival, most faced the challenge of navigating the daily grind of the administrative ‘plug in’ – procedures for regularising their status and procuring documents to start legal employment – while under the added pressure of overdue migration debts and the punishing cost of living in London. Newcomers’ post-migration time was spent chasing after deadlines, delayed responses, cancelled appointments and multiple returns and rejections from bureaucratic mechanisms that seem arbitrary and inconsequential. The seemingly routine procedures of ‘settling in’, such as the opening of a bank account, the registration in national taxation systems, and the receipt of a proof of address turn into a spider web of dependencies that gradually but durably dismantle migrants’ formal legality as residents, workers, and claimants of public services (Manolova, 2021). Rada, a 38-year-old child sitter and cleaner who was assisting her recently arrived son with ‘sorting’ his residence status likened the post-2014 migration management regime to a ‘catch 22’ situation: ‘The Brits don’t want us here [. . .] this is why they don’t want to give the documents. It’s a nightmare, a closed circle, they throw you around like a rag [. . .] you go from one place to the next just to be directed back to the start [. . .]. People are told “come and work, you have all rights”, but in reality, they are just playing with people’s lives [. . .] we have no rights, we only have obligations’.

The ‘bureaucratic bordering’ that many EU labour migrants encounter is a manifestation of the downshifting of the European border regime that patterns and regulates movements through infiltrating processes of day-to-day administrative regularisation of migrant life (Manolova, 2020). Such forms of micro-scale bordering do not evolve à lade Genova’s ‘border spectacle’ (2013); instead they are enforced in much less visible ways and often operate outside frameworks of formal legality. Their consequences for migrants’ trajectories of incorporation and longings for ‘normal’ living are, however, not less violent and enduring. The ‘invisible’ bordering within the bureaucratic organisation of everyday living is a technology for intra-EU migration governance through which national authorities attempt to ‘migrantise’, both discursively and in terms of practical control, populations that are increasingly perceived as unwanted but continue to hold a legitimate right to movement (see Trevonen, Pellander and Yuval-Davis, 2018).

Two months after his arrival in London, Assen was fully immersed in an ‘underground’ existence – toiling on cash-in-hand jobs for half the minimum wage, living in an overcrowded ‘immigrant’ house with no rental contract and fully dependent on the informal migrant economy to sustain himself during his protracted arrival in the UK. Despite following all application procedures and meeting requirements for legal residence he was still unable to obtain the basic documentation that would put him on the path to regularity – a national insurance number and a bank account. With his time used up by unjustified delays, arbitrary rejections and painful re-applications, he found himself in a state of prolonged waiting and enforced temporariness (Anderson, 2010), which severely impeded his settlement trajectory. Like many others who came in search of permanency and security, Assen was pushed into a pattern of circular temporality as he started alternating spells of seasonal employment in the UK with piecemeal jobs and ‘waiting’ at home (Manolova, 2017).

Migration, initially imagined as a transition from a state of material and symbolic ill-being to an idealised well-being as existential advancement often embeds one into a permanent situation of ‘cyclical impermanence’ (Schielke, 2020). For many ‘second-class’ EU citizens, bureaucratic technologies of bordering manifest dynamics of extreme vulnerability and impermanence that speak directly to the economic instrumentalisation of free mobility as a supply source of temporary, irregular and flexibilised labour. This had led to a deepening transnationalisation of migrants’ trajectories, as their opportunities for socially reproducing their livelihoods depend more and more on their readiness to navigate access to differentially formalised cross-border sources of income and support.

The cruel optimism driving migration desires make migrants cling on to their dreams and aspirations, which they adjust and re-imagine to smoothen the discrepancy between what they long for and what seems available. The Bulgarian workers and their families that I spoke to, continued to hold on to the promise of the ‘impossible’ West because enduring the present, they said, was impossible without believing that something better lay ahead. In the words of Rada: ‘Insisting on a better future against all odds is what is left for us. Sometimes one needs to close their eyes and keep on dreaming. That is what keeps me going; otherwise I better put a loop around my neck’. Migration as a work of the imaginary sustains and reproduces relations of domination while enabling, or perhaps rather pressuring, migrant subjects to keep on dreaming about an individual progress from ill- to well-being. Looking at contemporary migration as a relation of cruel optimism, we see how the imaginary of the ‘good life’ can serve to further entrench existing global divisions and individual geographies of center – peripheral interdependence. Ultimately, however, the ability to sustain hope despite circumscribed horizons is also due to the paradoxical transformative potential of migration dreams – while they cannot alleviate perceptions of globally structured inferiority, they can create a subjective feeling of transition from a state of existential stuckedness to purposeful engagement.

Endnotes

1. Paraphrasing Schielke’s ‘pressure of hope’ (2020). [↩]

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