The ‘European border regime’ is a concept used to describe the complex governmental assemblage of different actors, norms, and border practices, involved in the management of migrant mobilities. It points to governmental mechanisms inscribed in a set of power relations that produce the European space as a zone of fragmented and multi-level sovereignty (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). The ethnographic research I conducted in Italy and Germany between 2011 and 2020 (Fontanari, 2018) has enabled me to highlight how migrant individuals negotiate the legal, bureaucratic, and social structures of domination embedded in Europe during their everyday lives. I suggest that the production of ‘ill-being’ can be considered as an embodied experience through which migrants pass while coping with the bordering practices implemented by the regime of migration control in their daily lives. The experience of Ben, a refugee who has crossed several borders towards and within Europe for almost ten years, sheds light on the power dynamics within the European border regime  with which migrants must grapple. The ways human movements are governed along differential and racialised lines strongly affect the migrants’ subjectivity, as the following words of Ben illustrate:   

‘The main problem is the wasting of time, my life is already gone. How many years am I in Europe just turning around without managing to settle? This is not life, how can I have trust in a good future for me?’ Ben’s words convey a condition of ‘existential ill-being’ related to the feelings of having wasted too much time in Europe without having the possibility to settle down. ‘I desire a normal life’, continues Ben, ‘with a job I like, a girlfriend and maybe also a family, the possibility to travel. I don’t want extraordinary things, I just would like to have the time to live my life and not to be stress about my document’. Like many of my research protagonists, Ben sought to regain control over his own life by aspiring to be an active subject able to autonomously decide upon his own biography. Thus, a claim for a temporal justice strongly emerges from Ben’s and the other refugees’ narrations, expressed as feelings and actions in opposition of the power relations that hinder them from building their life projects in the near future (Fontanari, 2017). The European border regime, hence, significantly hinders the capacity of individuals to construct their own future (Kabachnik et al., 2010) through systems of control and containment of their mobility deployed within Europe. Indeed, since 2011, an increasing number of migrants – like Ben – have been kept under a protracted legal and existential precarity by being enmeshed in a governmental mechanism of ‘containment through mobility’ (Tazzioli, 2017). Instead of blocking their mobility, the bordering practices during the last decades aim at obstructing, decelerating, and dispersing the intra-EU mobilities of unlawful migrants – as conflicts at internal border places like Calais (Agier, 2018), Ventimiglia (Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018), Val Roja (Giliberti and Palmas, 2020), and Brenner highlight (Benedikt, 2019). This onward mobility across national territories and legal statuses frequently collides with a progression into a condition of ‘integration’ within European societies. Ben has lived in Europe for nine years in two different member states – Italy and Germany – going through multi-directional mobility paths, crossing several legal statuses, and shifting from experiences of confinement to experiments of ‘forced integration’. However, he still feels that he has to break free from a metaphorical prison that hinders his ability to fulfil his life aspirations.   

Ben’s experience gives us insights into how the European border regime produces zones of ill-being, which do not only have a spatial dimension, but also a temporal one. Indeed, this essay addresses the centrality of the time dimension in the analysis of migration and borders, in line with the literature working on the intrinsic relation between the structures of power and the management of time embedded in governmental mechanisms for regulating migrant mobility (Coutin, 2005;  Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Nyers, 2013; Griffiths, 2014; Khosravi, 2021). Accordingly, keeping people waiting in uncertainty about their chances of legally residing on a territory functions as a strong instrument of deterrence. Several techniques of control impose a temporal precariousness, such as the combination of an extended waiting time with the glimmer of hope related to the future resolution of migrants’ juridical conditions, as was the case with Ben’s ‘forced path’ of vocational training. What emerges from Ben’s accounts is that when this condition of ‘non-settlement’ or ‘permanent transit’ is protracted over a long period of time, it strongly affects the process of the construction of the self: migrants feel dispossessed of their own biography.      

The feeling of having their own life dispossessed is the main source of the ‘ill-being condition’ experienced by migrants and refugees trapped in these mechanisms of the European borders. The European border regime directly produces substantial ‘zones of ill-being’ through such forms of power over migrants’ temporalities. The production of ‘temporal zones of ill-being’ is here analyzed as a subjective experience where people are subjugated to insecure juridical conditions and are at risk of mental and physical distress due to the intense uncertainty about their future. These are violent effects of the unequal redistribution of the opportunity to act on aspirations for a good life, with people like Ben denied the choice of where and how to live.

Endnotes