Time and the Migrant Other: European Border Controls and the Temporal Economics of Illegality

The Western world's borders increasingly seem like a battleground where a new kind of “threat” is repelled—the so‐called “illegal migrant.” At Europe's southern frontiers, sea patrols, advanced surveillance machinery, and fencing keep migrants out, much like at the U.S., Israeli, and Australian borders. Such investments have created a dense web of controls that displaces the border both inward and outward into the borderlands beyond it. Building upon recent border studies and ethnographies of illegality, I explore in this article Europe's migration controls by focusing on their temporal rather than their spatial aspects. I show that, in the borderlands, irregular migrants are not only subjected to extended periods of waiting, as migrants often are, but they also face an active usurpation of time by state authorities through serial expulsions and retentions. The ways in which migrants’ time is appropriated reveal a complex economics of illegality, complementing existing “biopolitical” perspectives on Europe's borders. [ migration, illegality, time, borders, temporality ]