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The elevator doors opened to the smell of coffee, olive oil, and cumin. “Salam!” Ayoub called out. “Salam,” I answered, barely awake. I had brought bread and oranges. Ayoub was busy frying eggs. Dawn, as I was to find out, was his favorite time of day: awake while everybody else was asleep, it was as if the shelter’s kitchen was his own.
Ayoub and I had first met months earlier, in the same kitchen, in the basement of an emergency shelter for migrants, on the outskirts of a small town in the French Alps. At the shelter, Ayoub was both a guest and a worker of sorts, cooking meals every day with volunteers who called him chef. He had proved so helpful that he’d convinced employees at the shelter to let him stay for a few months, in exchange for his help in the kitchen. In the weeks after I arrived, Ayoub and I met almost every afternoon. We got to know each other over pots of soup and trays of apple pie. He’d mentioned in passing the difficulties he’d faced on his way to France, but until that morning in the basement kitchen, he had never shared any detail.
“In Hungary, I hid in the back of a truck for the first time,” Ayoub said in between two bites of scrambled eggs.
“It was a truck carrying wood, and the door wasn’t closed properly. Soon after we left, the driver stopped at a gas station and went to close the back door. That’s when he found us. He told us to leave and called the police. The police caught us and brought us back to Serbia. After this, we tried to hide under trucks: we held onto them from beneath, we couldn’t move, couldn’t pee, or couldn’t do anything until the truck stopped. The next truck we took went to Romania, which was the wrong direction for us. We didn’t know it was going there until it stopped at customs and we saw the sign that said Romania. We stepped out. All the truck drivers could see us and we thought at least one of them would call the police. We ran until we found an abandoned factory away from the border, and we hid there for a day. At night we met two Syrians who’d walked across the border from Romania. We walked for three days across Hungary and then we found another truck. We wanted to go to Austria. In the morning, the truck left. When it stopped, we were at the border with Slovakia, not too far from Austria, but not too close either. At this moment I thought I was going to give up. I started walking. At the customs, there were Hungarian police, but I just walked as if I was a driver. I told myself, what must happen will happen. They didn’t arrest me. We walked to an abandoned train station, and we hid there for the day. We were so exhausted we had stopped talking to each other. At dusk we left the station and walked across the border to Austria. We walked all night across wheat fields. At the first train station in Austria, I bought the cheapest ticket for Vienna. We arrived there in the evening. With the money we had left, we bought sandwiches and cigarettes.”
Ayoub’s way across Europe was far from straightforward. His was the kind of mobility shaped by criminalization and the need to hide—in the night, at abandoned train stations or beneath freight trucks—to escape arrest and maintain relative control over where he was going, and how. Far from the official maps which sometimes figured migrant mobilities as following linear routes with defined departure and arrival points, Ayoub had zigzagged across Europe in a sequence of crossing attempts, arrests, re-attempts, leaps forward and unexpected setbacks.
Routes refer less to migrant trajectories across Europe than to a modality of control and regulation. As anthropologists have noted, techniques of migration control in Europe today mobilize routes thinking as a way to make migrant trajectories legible and targetable, from beginning to end. It was not just the act of border-crossing which European authorities criminalized, then, but migrants’ entire trajectory, both to and within Europe.
Being targeted as an unauthorized migrant in Europe meant Ayoub could never stay anywhere for very long. He couldn’t ride passenger trains or buses—or any transportation that required a ticket. He couldn’t walk in broad daylight across national borders either, without risking arrest, imprisonment and deportation. To avoid arrests, Ayoub had had to keep moving. He was always on the move. As his story illustrates, unauthorized migrants in Europe were pushed towards useless mobilities: border enforcement meant they had to find ways around control, and frequent pushbacks forced them to walk along the same paths several times before making their way across. All this movement was exhausting, Ayoub said, and there was no guarantee that it would stop anytime soon.
Even at the shelter in the French Alps, Ayoub had been denied the possibility to settle down and become a resident. Volunteers said it was too isolated and too crowded with police for any unauthorized migrant to ever really live there. This was yet another stopover in the list of places which Ayoub had had to leave after a few weeks or a few months during his journey across Europe, then. He’d had lots of places to go, but nowhere to stay.
Riding a freight train from Bulgaria all the way to Austria over the course of several days, Samir had been luckier than Ayoub. He’d avoided difficult border crossings, and the kind of useless detours which many unauthorized migrants faced, who travelled by foot and truck. Samir was a guest at the shelter when I volunteered there. Like Ayoub, he’d managed to extend his stay because he’d broken his foot. His injury had granted him a few months of respite. There was one moment, Samir recalled over a cup of sugary black tea one afternoon, where he thought he and his friends were going to get caught and sent back to Bulgaria. “Before we entered Hungary,” he recalled, “the train stopped in a freight yard for several hours. It was night. Guards walked along the train with flashlights and searched every wagon for people hiding in containers. When they walked past our wagon, we froze. We held our breath until they moved away. We were lucky. They didn’t find us. After a while the train started moving again and the next day we jumped off in a freight yard near Vienna.”
On his uncertain way forward, Samir had relied on illicit forms of transportation. Not that they were illicit in and of themselves, but the way he had used them was. They were not meant for him to travel on. These were the freight trains and trucks which, from one corner of Europe to another, along railroads or highways, carried resources, uninterrupted. Hiding on freight trains, Samir attempted to take advantage of Europe’s liberalized system of free trade, just like Ayoub had done in the back of long distance trucks. Although their mobility as people was regulated by repressive regimes of immigration control, Ayoub and Samir still hoped to cross borders undetected as illicit travelers among cargo, lost among the transnational flow of goods.
Porosities between cargo and migrant mobilities led to risky encounters, between migrants and truckers, railway workers, and customs officers. Ayoub, Samir and the people they had travelled with were always afraid that truckers, customs officers or freight yard patrols would call the police if they ever found them walking around or hiding among their stuff. Transport infrastructures and the people who composed them often proved hostile to migrants who tried to repurpose trade routes for their own mobility.
Being excluded from legal means of transportation also had symbolic effects. Forced into cramped spaces, ignorant of where they were going and fearful of getting arrested, Ayoub and his friends had little choice but to travel as undesirables. In attempting to avoid police encounters, or to conceal themselves from the gaze of security, they came to embody the image of unauthorized migrants. Who else, authorities would argue, would go so far as to hide beneath a truck?
There’s always a slippage, Julie Chu noted, between modes of transport and the people in them, between comfort and a sense of belonging, or discomfort and abjection. In the eyes of border enforcers, crowding inside shipping containers or hiding beneath freight trucks was not simply a consequence of migrants’ exclusion from legality, or their pragmatic response to immigration control, but a sign, or evidence even, of migrants’ immorality. Travelling uncomfortably along trade routes marked migrants as guilty. Freight trains and trucks were more than a means of transport, then. They were places of enclosure and movement with moral undertones, casting their captive travellers into unequal roles depending on how and where they travelled to.
Discomfort and the necessity to take risks on the road cast unauthorized migrants as undesirable subjects. It didn’t matter that they were taking such risks in the first place because border enforcement across Europe had excluded them from safe and legal means of transportation. In hiding among freight, unauthorized migrants like Ayoub and Samir pointed to the cruel irony of European regimes of mobility. They could only move westward as undesirable subjects, for whom no routes existed but those built for trade.