Suspended Lives: Undocumented Migrants’ Everyday Worlds and the Making of ‘Illegality’ Between Morocco and Italy

Abstract

This chapter explores the existential and embodied experience of border(ing) by focusing on the trials and tribulations of Abdelkrim, a young Moroccan man in his late 20s. Abdelkrim’s biography offers insights into the structural constraints, which produce lives suspended in the borderland. His slippage into ‘illegality’ testifies to the extent to which becoming an ‘illegal alien’ in Italy can be the result both of the migration policies rhetorically legitimized in the name of legality and, equally, of the system of exploitation that marks Italy’s underground economy. In a period of financial crisis and neoliberal economic policies, these dynamics push migrants to the margins of citizenship, while their legal limbo becomes increasingly permanent and uncertain. At the same time, within the ‘grey areas’ of exclusion, new modes of political subjectivity and collective agency emerge. By joining the protests on Imbonati Street, Abdelkrim and the activists reverse the securitarian argument about the need for security and legality, and invite us to rethink the EurAfrican border regimes in the light of the illegalization of migration. In doing so, they make visible the institutional processes of inclusion and exclusion through which certain types of human beings and power relations are brought into being.