“Klokka tikker,tiden går”: Time and irregular migration

The border

Borders, displacement, and migration are commonly understood as spatial phenomena, but it has been posited that there exists a “strong relationship between power, the state and the management of time” (Griffiths et al., 2013: 30), and that time is both an aspect and a tool of migration management and border control (Cwerner, 2001). Despite scholarly efforts to destabilize the natural reality of borders and ample attention to what has been described as a “borderless world” (Appadurai, 1990; Bauman, 2000; Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991), borders figure prominently in the ordering of the contemporary world. This is especially the case when the demands generated by political upheaval, violence, inequity, poverty, and mass displacement are increasingly at odds with sovereign interests in controlling territorial boundaries and restricting migrant movement (Van Houtum et al., 2005). Serving as recent testament is that which has been described and contested as the “refugee crisis” of 2015, at which time disputes erupted as European nations struggled to cope with rapidly rising numbers of asylum seekers and reconcile opposing stances on border openings, closings, and controls. Norway responded by, among other things, erecting a fence along its arctic border with Russia, where some 5500 refugees, many from Syria, had crossed in 2015. Among the Norwegian public were both advocates and opponents of stricter border control, but, at only 200 meters long and easily circumvented by walking or swimming around it, this fence soon became the subject of ridicule among both camps (Johnson, 2016). The mockery escalated, both nationally and internationally, thanks to widely circulated press images of hundreds of amassed bicycles at the border checkpoint, legally ridden across and abandoned given a governance loophole that restricted crossings by foot and motor vehicle only (Holland, 2015).

Nicholas De Genova (2002) suggests that such border endeavors accomplish a productive “spectacle of enforcement,” rather than an effective realization of their alleged purpose. This “spectacle” can be understood as a kind of border control theatrics that simultaneously constructs migrant illegality as a natural fact and sustains the vulnerability of the persons upon whom it is imposed. We suggest that this Norwegian “border spectacle” be examined in its capacity, together with a host of interacting policies and processes, to not merely govern the territorial border but, moreover, to ideologically order the Norwegian welfare state, the persons who enter and inhabit it, and their access to its goods and possibilities. Our interest is in the temporal dimensions of these “b/ordering” phenomena (Karlsen, 2015; Van Houtum et al., 2005; Van Houtum and Van Naerssen, 2002), which are confronted already at the territorial border and with respect to this fence.

For example, we can consider the timing of the fence’s construction in the midst of the 2015 “refugee crisis.” In other words, this fence was erected in a sensational historical moment of transnational moral panic and anxiety about migrant “exoduses,” “flows,” and “waves” (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016), in which rifts emerged between nations previously invested in the “harmonization” of asylum policy and a common European asylum system. This fence thus served as a timely assertion of closed borders and strict migration control, particularly for the Norwegian nation that has traditionally had little need to patrol its borders or monitor its seas in the interest of migration governance (Wevling, 2011). The fence was paired with an array of supplementary deterrence tactics, such as printed warnings in local newspapers of nations where asylum seekers originate and social media campaigns about increasingly strict migration regulations in Norway and Norwegian policies of forced return (Deacon, 2015; Jacobsen, 2015b). Such measures not only disperse and displace the territorial border, as is characteristic of modern-day migration governance (Parker et al., 2009), but also enact a temporal colonization of sorts. In other words, as a governance tactic intended to defend the nation against and deter crossings yet to take place, this fence exemplifies the ways in which borders and seas are not only physically patrolled, but also temporally infiltrated by preemptive, risk-based migration control strategies that anticipate the future as a “‘territory' to be ‘occupied'” (Giddens, 1995: 5 in Andersson (2014: 800)). In practice, border barriers of course also delay those determined to cross. They execute, particularly when paired with detainment and lengthy periods of waiting and uncertainty, what Ruben Andersson (2014) describes as an “usurpation” of time through which irregular migrants are punished, policed, and governed.

The asylum assessment

Once the border is crossed and the asylum claim is filed, a temporality characterized by a particular form of uncertainty ensues. The asylum seeker, whose future hangs in the balance, enters into an ambivalent relationship with the state, for which the asylum seeker represents both a potential citizen and possible deportee (Brekke, 2004; Haas, 2017). Both have high stakes in the asylum assessment that takes place, and an interrogation of supposedly significant and knowable dates and time periods assumes a central role. Many project participants recalled struggling to provide this kind of temporal information, and some understood their asylum claims as having been rejected as a result. An Ethiopian woman who had resided in Norway without legal residency for eight years recounted her difficulty translating between the Ethiopian Ge’ez and Gregorian calendars. To this she attributed an inconsistency in the accounts she had provided during the asylum seeking process, which had in turn undermined her application. An Afghan man who had been detained and tortured in Iran failed to consistently recall sentencing and release dates. He perceived this as compromising his credibility, despite having described to the migration authorities the deliberately disorienting conditions of his captivity. He had been detained in a dark and windowless cell, in which food was provided sporadically, interrogations were conducted at random and, ultimately, his capacity to relate to time as once known and track its passing were eroded. Another, a rejected Nigerian asylum seeker who later, during the data collection period for this project, sought a residency permit on the basis of reunification with his Norwegian wife and child, explained,

When did you meet? How long were you together? How long did you live together? When did you get married? How much time passed between when you met and got married? How long did you live apart? For how long have you been married? We’re married. We have a child. We’re a family. But all of that is somehow less important, all of that can actually be torn apart, if we, you know, mess up some of this time and date stuff.

The examples we have provided point to what might be understood as another, closely related cultural norm, namely the decisive weight lent to a particular way of knowing and narrating time, which is not merely granted a certain hierarchical status over other ways, but which operates implicitly as though it is the only way. This entails a collection of allegedly self-evident, significant things to know—dates of birth and bombs, for example, and durations of torture, flight, and detainment—chronologically ordered to compose a coherent historiography. As if that was not enough, among those for whom the Gregorian calendar is foreign, this potentially demands not merely a translation between two formal systems of time measurement, but, moreover, that internalized ways of ordering time be overwritten in the midst of an especially pressing situation. The significance attributed to this particular way of knowing and telling of time persists in spite of ample evidence of its flaws, such as sociocultural contexts in which birthdates are unknown and happenings are ordered in relation to the harvest, the weather or religion rather than calendars. Additionally, as the psychotherapists who participated in this project explained, trauma and torture are understood to produce fragmented, ruptured, and inconsistent memory patterns. This is indeed the established psychological understanding of trauma and memory, and the implications for the asylum narrative are that it renders unlikely the orderly, linear, and consistent retellings demanded by the law (Herlihy and Turner, 2007; Herlihy et al., 2002; Paskey, 2016; Shumam and Bohmer, 2004). The participants’ experiences suggest that the consequences of not knowing time in this way, or of being unable to consistently recount and place things in history accordingly, can be devastating.

As is the case around the world, asylum applicants in Norway often face long periods of waiting and uncertainty while their claims are processed. How long they should wait and whether this waiting should be limited has been an ongoing political debate. At stake has been humanitarian unease about extended periods of rights limitations and uncertainty, as well as sociopolitical concern about the economic resources of the state. This has not, however, resulted in a standard restriction on processing time. The prolonged, indeterminate periods of waiting that many asylum seekers endure in Norway and elsewhere have received distinct attention in the media and among scholars (e.g. Andersson, 2014; Brekke, 2004; Haas, 2017; Khosravi, 2014; Kobelinsky, 2010; Mountz et al., 2002; Odland, 2017; Richards and Rotter, 2013; Rotter, 2010, 2016; Turnbull, 2016). At the same time, the asylum determination process involves a diversity of tempos and what Saulo Cwerner (2004) calls “time politics.” For example, in Norway, asylum applications are sorted into various queues of dramatically different duration based on country of origin. Some of those who participated in this project recalled having calculated their odds in relation to the outcomes of other applicants, and they retrospectively described having felt demoralized when those who arrived after them received decisions before them or were granted asylum when they were not. Their accounts suggested a limited understanding of the bureaucratic system and rationale, and they described having experienced this process as unpredictable and arbitrary, as has also been noted by others (Brekke, 2004; Richards and Rotter, 2013). When coupled with the denial of their claims, this solidified their experience and understanding of the asylum system as unjust. This resonates with Ann-Mari Sellerberg’s (2008) suggestion that whether one waits alone or together with others, as well as the amount of insight that one has into the determination process that takes place behind the scenes, has implications for how the wait is interpreted.

The politicization of time within these diverse tempos becomes even clearer with respect to what is known in Norway as the “48-hour procedure,” through which some applications are understood as unfounded and rapidly processed and rejected, the stated intentions being to maintain strict control over asylum seekers from lands understood as safe and to deter others from following their lead. It has been proposed that applicants assessed under this procedure should be detained (Kjernli and Sandvik, 2016), which exemplifies the interplay of the spatial and temporal aspects of migration governance. This interplay also manifests at the asylum reception centers, where those seeking asylum reside while waiting for decisions alongside those who continue to reside there after having been denied, and where a disciplinary orchestration of minutely structured and surveyed time—meal times, activity times, curfews, and the requirement that residents file applications for time spent away—facilitates governance within the overarching temporality of uncertainty that otherwise characterizes both the asylum seeking process and the future trajectory for those who have been denied. Finally, migrant illegality, as a judicial fact, typically results from a violation of temporal regulations, such as the obligation to depart Norway within a certain amount of time following a rejected asylum claim—the crossing of a timeline, in other words, that renders one’s presence illegal.

Internal migration control

Once this timeline is crossed, the political strategy of the state becomes one of apprehension and deportation, as well as internal migration control and exclusion (Broeders and Engbersen, 2007). With respect to the latter, the Norwegian welfare state has experimented with various strategies for delineating and enforcing its limits and compelling rejected asylum seekers to leave. For example, Jan-Paul Brekke (2008) has described that which transpired when a policy introduced in 2004 forced rejected asylum seekers out of the asylum reception centers and onto the streets, without rights to economic assistance or health and social services. The policy demanded a temporality of “absolute temporariness” in all interactions between the rejected asylum seeker and the state. As Brekke (2008: 14) explains, “all signals should indicate that their time in Norway had come to an end, that their presence was temporary and that they were on their way out,” the intention being to “induce the rejected applicants to leave the country by making their life here as difficult as possible.” This agenda was pitted against social policy aimed at alleviating suffering, meaning that health and social service agents otherwise committed to relieving distress and empowering were redirected to “weaken,” “break-down,” and “disempower” rejected asylum seekers (Brekke, 2008: 20).

With one notable exception—rejected asylum seekers are currently entitled to accommodation at the asylum reception centers and, if they exercise this right, to the modest subsistence stipend that accompanies it—the Norwegian policy today remains essentially the same. It manifests via what Marry-Anne Karlsen (2015: 242) has called a “dispersed border,” characterized by a “temporality that accentuates temporariness and unpredictability.” This border surfaces in the encounter between irregular migrants and the civil servants or “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980) of the Norwegian welfare state, creating what some research participants described as a precarious situation of “living on the verge of” or “near” death. This also bears semblance to what Cindy Horst presents as “‘don’t die’ survival” (Horst, 2008: 10 in Hyndman and Giles (2011: 362)). We might recognize this as a deliberate withholding, by the state, of the formal and legal preconditions for being reckoned as a viable object of social inclusion, or even of societal existence—as the instrument of misrecognition fundamental for not only prohibiting services, but for producing and governing irregularity. Health care rights provide an example of the politicization of time therein.

With few exceptions, the health care entitlements of persons without legal residency in Norway are limited to “emergency care” (“øyeblikkelig hjelp”) and “health care that is absolutely necessary and cannot wait” (“helsehjelp som er helt nødvendig og som ikke kan vente”) (Ministry of Health and Care Services, 2010). In extending rights to both “emergency care” and “health care that is absolutely necessary and cannot wait,” the Ministry alleges that these are distinct, distinguishing the latter as care that must be provided within two to three weeks to prevent escalation to an emergency state. Two to three weeks is the time period deemed adequate for an irregular migrant to travel “home.” This presupposes that the migrant in question can and will do so, despite overwhelming evidence suggesting otherwise. Moreover, as argued by the Norwegian Medical Association (2011) and the health personnel who contributed to this study, and as is also consistent with Karlsen’s (2015) findings, this legally inscribes a medically artificial distinction as well. In other words, “health care that is absolutely necessary and cannot wait” is, at best, clinically understood as encompassed by “emergency care” and, at worst, medically ambiguous.

Our material suggests that what this policy does accomplish, when effectuated in practice, is the temporality of temporariness described by Brekke (2008) and Karlsen (2015). When enacted, it imposes yet another form of waiting on the irregular migrant, who endures the escalation of a health problem to a critical state before becoming eligible for care and, after receiving acute care, a potential health decline back to an urgent state. This is not only a resource-demanding cycle for the state, but also a demoralizing and punishing one for the migrant. Moreover, the health personnel who contributed to this study were of the opinion that extending rights to but denying rights beyond acute care legally demands an ethically and practically impossible division of temporally and medically interdependent health states and care systems. They also, like the Norwegian Medical Association (2011), voiced concern that this could be perceived as an expectation that they potentially compromise their medical code of ethics while negotiating and prioritizing judicial matters of migration status and, as Karlsen (2015: 10) has conceived of it, clinically enacting “the border” instead. This demonstrates the role of time and its politicization as an instrument of exclusion in what she describes as the “complex and contradictory interplay” between a politics of border enforcement and exclusion on the one hand and humanitarian concern and limited access to care on the other hand. It illustrates, in other words, the temporal dimensions of a condition in which irregular migrants are “neither fully excluded nor fully recognized, but nevertheless governed.” Importantly, this may be insidiously achieved, particularly when providers who are unaware of a patient’s residency status unwittingly contribute merely by providing care. For example, an emergency physician might discharge an urgent care patient with a referral for follow-up that the patient lacks rights to and a prescription that the patient will not be able to fill.

The temporal dimensions of migrating

We begin with a consideration of the migratory journeys undertaken by the research participants, as they not only traversed vast spaces, but also unfolded in and over time. We consider, as well, their diverse tempos and timings, as they intersected with varied configurations of that conventionally and problematically conceived of as “push” and “pull.” We aim to not merely illustrate the temporal dimensions of that which is routinely understood as a predominantly spatial migratory process, but, moreover, to unpack the narratives that the research participants retrospectively describe having crafted at various points in their lives, examining, in particular, their ongoing struggles to create sense out of loss and suffering.

Some research participants had fled their homes and homelands abruptly following confrontations with danger and death that they understood as necessitating urgent flight. Others spent a longer period of time anticipating their migrations, assessing and negotiating threatening circumstances, abandoning their studies or work, preparing to leave their homes and families, arranging their journeys, and living clandestinely. Illegality, in other words, had begun materializing already prior to migrating and marking their time long before setting in judicially (Coutin, 2003). Most of the research participants described having depleted their economic resources and having indebted themselves to family members, friends, neighbors, smugglers, and traffickers. They described having left behind family, homes, and careers. They told about abandoned offices, shops, livestock, and plots. They lamented responsibilities unfulfilled and dreams unachieved. Their stories were ones of abrupt and irreconcilable interruption and loss. They risked their lives as they embarked upon and followed through with dangerous journeys that spanned not only countries, continents, and vast geographic spaces, but also months and even years. They trekked across nations and deserts by foot, and they were smuggled in boats, buses, trains, and cars. They were arrested, detained, and deported. They took up camp in refugee settlements, and they resided and worked “illegally” in transit countries. These journeys were characterized by, rather than mobility and linear movement through time and space, lengthy periods of immobility, detours, and delays.

One participant, an Eritrean young man, abandoned what he described as a life of certain poverty after droughts had depleted his father’s crops and his family was forced to sell their livestock. He journeyed to Yemen, with the intention of reaching Saudi Arabia, where he hoped to find work and send remittances to his family. After being arrested and detained in Yemen, he went to Ethiopia. From there, he crossed the Sahara and, nearly four years after having initially embarked, he smuggled his way across the Mediterranean and into Europe. Another participant, an Ethiopian mother of two girls, lived and worked without legal permission in Saudi Arabia for several years. There, she endured beatings, rape, and meager wages. She sent remittances to her sister, who was caring for her children. She also saved little by little in preparation for the next leg of her journey, which was intended to bring them all to Europe. She sacrificed several years away from her children in what she perceived as their only chance for a secure future. She described her suffering as bearable only by looking forward to the day that they would be reunited, their struggles to survive and escape dictatorship and poverty behind them, and an emancipated future a reality. Another participant, a former merchant and shopkeeper from Afghanistan, fled following threats that likened his fate to that of his father and uncles. They had disappeared, presumably assassinated for alleged political activity in opposition to the Mujahedeen forces during the Soviet War. He travelled to Turkey, where he was arrested and sent to Iran, where he was detained and tortured. From there, he made his way back to Afghanistan, and from there he started all over again. This accounted for nearly two years. That which gave him strength, he explained, was his mother. She was ill and in need of medical care. He perceived her as all he had left and himself as her only reason and means to continue living. They were dependent upon one another; their temporalities and fates were intertwined.

Described here are realities shared by many of the research participants who, when confronted with circumstances perceived as threatening, were compelled to assume dangerous and trying migratory journeys. They subsequently render these undertakings valuable with respect to a desired end. Paul Ricoeur (1984) suggests that time is experienced in two distinct but interconnected ways, cosmologically and phenomenologically. He describes cosmological time as a linear chronology of passing time and the life course that resembles the chronos of the ancient Greeks. Phenomenological time refers to the nexus of past, present, and future that reminds us of kairos. “Human time,” Ricoeur argues, is the inscription of phenomenological time onto chronological time. It is the rendering meaningful or kairotic, we might say, of the chronological succession of events that chronos comprises. This takes place, he maintains, via a process of narrative emplotment, which involves what James Champion (1989: 343) has described as “the creative shaping of that prefigured order of action in imaginative composition.” In other words, the happenings of life are ordered and their significance configured with respect to a whole, as the elements of a story are woven together into a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. We suggest that the research participants created sense out of, we might say “kairofied,” their migratory undertakings, risks, and hardships by emplotting them within a comprehensible narrative of time invested and suffering endured in the quest for freedom, safety, and security. Crossing the border into Norway thus constituted a temporal shift in which they had finally arrived at a viable destination for such and, at the same time, only begun the process of establishing a claim to it. It also marked their transition into the particular form of uncertainty and indeterminate waiting that characterizes asylum seeking. They entered, in other words, into a situation of immense stakes and insecurity (Bourdieu, 2000; Haas, 2017).

Waiting

Many research participants recalled the period following arrival in Norway, during which they awaited asylum decisions, as difficult. They described mourning their losses and struggling to reconcile the pain of their prior experiences. They remembered worrying about their families and anxiously awaiting asylum decisions. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months and, for some, months to years. In the retrospective words of some, they experienced their lives during this time as “paused,” “interrupted,” and “on hold.” Some remembered visualizing a positive decision as the “key” to resuming their lives and “unlocking” their futures. Some also recalled hoping that violence might cease, that dictators would be overthrown, and that the socioeconomic conditions in their home countries would improve, thus enabling them to return to their homes and families. Their descriptions suggest an experience of what we might understand as temporal and, following Ghassan Hage (2009b), existential, immobility—an experience of being unable to move either forward or backward in time and their lives. They recalled sleeping excessively and endless hours of watching TV, walking aimlessly, playing cards and billiards, and exercising. Some called these activities “distractions,” which they explained they had sought out to “pass” and “kill” time.

This suggests that enforced waiting, which we have examined already as an instrument of migration governance and which others have theorized as a powerful form of social and state control (Auyero, 2011; Biehl, 2015; Haas, 2017), is potentially experienced as limiting the conditions of possibility for rendering meaningful, or “kairofying,” the time spent and life lived while waiting for an uncertain outcome, perhaps particularly when the investment is so great and the stakes are so high. A number of researchers have described the asylum seeking period in similar ways—as, for example, one of “existential limbo” (Haas, 2017) and “existential crisis” (Rainbird, 2014)—and the suffering and feelings of powerlessness, paralysis, and despair that it can entail (Biehl, 2015; Haas, 2017; Rainbird, 2014). To control and manipulate time, and to make others wait, has indeed been theorized as “the constant prerogative of all power” (Barthes, 1978: 40) and as absolute power itself (Bourdieu, 2000). “The all-powerful is he who does not wait but who makes others wait,” writes Pierre Bourdieu (2000: 288), for whom absolute power is “the power to make oneself unpredictable and deny other people any reasonable anticipation.” Among the powerful, Bourdieu argues, time is “well filled” and passes without notice. Among those who wait, “empty” time that is too slow in passing is “killed” (Bourdieu, 2000: 224) and an experience that “life is elsewhere” is endured while waiting for one’s “actual” life to start (Bourdieu, 2000: 237).

At the same time, waiting has been described as an essential, unifying condition of social being (Hage, 2009a; Rundell, 2009), and a growing body of research explores the ways in which asylum seekers engage in agentive forms of hope and action (Bendixsen, 2015; Brun, 2015; Rainbird, 2014; Richards and Rotter, 2013). Many of the research participants did indeed recall, in addition to or rather than the passing and killing of time just described, looking forward to the day when the risk they had assumed, the journeys they had survived, and the time they had spent would be validated with a residency permit. In anticipation, they had learned Norwegian, enrolled their children in school, kept up with the asylum procedure, followed the rules and laws, and participated in the routines of the reception centers. Together, these activities constituted a chronological sequence of everyday life and activity that they, in retrospect, described having rendered meaningful and valuable—emplotted and “kairofied,” we might say—as time “served,” “filled,” and “invested.” This raises what Hage (2009a) has described as an ambivalent question of agency in waiting, and many participants did recall moments in which agency clearly emerges.

Illustrating this is, for example, the memory shared by one participant, a father from Iran, who recalled joyfully celebrating the National Day of Norway with his son and proudly waving the Norwegian flag. He remembered watching his son enjoy ice cream and excitedly await the appearance of the royal family, explaining that he looked “just like every other kid in Norway, so carefree and happy.” It was as though “the past was forgotten,” he explained. Seeing his son so fully absorbed in the excitement of the day, he felt genuinely happy himself for the first time in years. “Watching my son enjoy himself, I just decided to hold the flag up high and, for that day, just enjoy myself too. I felt proud to have brought my family here. I felt free. I was hopeful for the future.” Described here is indeed a negotiation of time and, moreover, a deliberate suspension of oppressive time and decision to craft and inhabit an extraordinary and existentially grounding time space of happiness, pride, freedom, and hope. To wait, in this sense, suggests an extreme capacity to effectively put something that continuously threatens to colonize the foreground in the background, and to not only navigate, but also act within and upon, different times. This suggests, and particularly if we understand waiting as a shared, existential human condition, that migrant irregularity is not only produced, governed, embodied, and negotiated, but also renegotiated, resisted, and even transformed.

The asylum rejection

Just a few days after celebrating the Norwegian National Day, the participant just described was notified that his family’s asylum case was rejected and that they were obliged to return to Iran. He had anticipated asylum as the “kairotic,” fate-altering event that would have confirmed the significance of the risks he had undertaken and the hardships he had endured, and that would have relieved the burden of uncertainty in the present and unlocked the future. He recalled having experienced this rejection as a tragic disruption. “Our lives and future, my son’s future that had started to look so bright, just completely fell apart,” he explained. Contrary to the prevalent belief that rejected asylum seekers choose to come and can choose to leave, he and the vast majority of the research participants conceived of themselves as without viable options for safe return. They thus, upon being denied asylum, transgressed the temporal threshold for departure stipulated in their rejection letters and remained, without legal grounds for doing so, in Norway. Narratives that they recalled having previously been about “time invested,” thereby enabling a kind of sense-making through which they had, at that time, reckoned their undertakings and experiences as valuable, became instead about unrecoverable time wasted and the futile undertaking of risks and enduring of hardship in pursuit of a future that would not transpire. Seemingly bereft of not only the future but also the happenings prior, the comprehensible relations that had been established via chronological narratives were negated. As one young, Eritrean woman explained,

I had finally put together the puzzle pieces. For the first time, I started having less nightmares. Started remembering the good moments instead of the bad. Started to feel happy sometimes, excited even. I was just waiting for the confirmation from UDI [the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration], just waiting to glue the pieces in place. Instead, they destroyed the puzzle and have denied me the one thing that I need to put it back together. Without that, I have nothing. No past worth remembering, no future to look toward, nothing but suffering and a life that’s not worth living.

The temporal (re)ordering of irregularity

As explained, the vast majority of the research participants continued to conceive of themselves as without viable options for safe return. Whether or not one is legally administered this status, however, has implications for the temporal ordering of lived irregularity. “Deportability,” referring not to deportation itself, but to the threat of it and anxiety that it is impending, has been theorized as a disciplinary mechanism through which migrant illegality is produced and lived (De Genova, 2002). For those who are legally deportable, the experience of time is infused with the always present, imminent threat of forced return, which has been aggressively enforced in recent years in Norway (National Police Immigration Service, 2016; Skjeggestad, 2017). Profiling and arrests in public spaces of everyday activity and apprehensions at home have increased and been increasingly sensationalized, both in the media and among irregular migrants themselves. Many of the research participants shared stories and their anxieties about police forcefully entering homes in the middle of the night, frightened children, belongings left behind, and flights that depart prior to when legal offices open for the day. All this has produced a tangible atmosphere of “deportability,” which is lived and embodied as public spaces are avoided, residencies are relocated, jobs are changed, exploitation is endured, and nights are spent sleepless.

A threat is an intensely temporal phenomenon, through which the future perverts the present; this is indeed the profundity of the subtle but significant distinction between deportation and deportability, as described by De Genova (2002) and for those who participated in this project. Deportability constitutes a particular kind of horizon, simultaneously subliminal and always in focus. It produces a nightmarish indwelling in which the future colonizes the present and infuses it with anxiety. Many research participants feared that deportation would result in imprisonment, torture, and/or murder. Many also foresaw deportation as a return to political tyranny, poverty, lacking medical care, poor education, and dire prospects for their children. They regularly insisted that “there is no future in _____.” They completed this sentence with both the names of nation-states and the states of those nations, such as war, dictatorship, and destitution. Implicit was both a pessimistic prophesy of the national future, as well as a tacitly comprehended and spatially delimited temporality—or, rather, the temporal “dead end” located “there.” It is the latter that is apparently also at stake in “deportability,” which threatens a peril for which one can never be truly prepared, but that, paradoxically, invites constant preparedness. “And so what to do,” wondered the mother presented in the introduction—anticipate her daughter’s first day of school while living every night as the night when her daughters might awake to police and packed bags instead? And how to prepare for that? Among other things, such as organizing a phone chain through which supports in her network and church would be alerted and compiling a file of important papers, she wrote a packing checklist. Her little girls’ stuffed animals were listed first. These were the things that she would have to remember, she explained, despite the futility of it all.

Not all irregular migrants in Norway are deportable. Many of the project participants were “unreturnable.” This is a status accorded to persons who, despite having been denied residency in Norway, cannot be deported. This recognizes, in other words, a temporal impasse without legally factual possibilities for either establishing lives in Norway or leaving and doing so elsewhere. It can be the case that deportation cannot be enforced due to what the migration authorities understand as temporarily unstable conditions in the origin country. This was the case for Palestinian research participants from Gaza and the West Bank. It might also be that the migrant lacks acceptable identification and/or that the return country, with which Norway may lack a return agreement, refuses to receive them. This was the case for many participants from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Iran. This predicament can be illustrated by the struggles of an Eritrean participant who had initially sought refuge in Ethiopia, and who then fled to Saudi Arabia during the Eritrean and Ethiopian war. She resided there, without legal permission, for nearly a decade before making her way to Norway, where she sought and was denied asylum. She then registered for voluntary return and received assistance from the International Organization for Migration, and she appealed to both the Ethiopian and Eritrean states for travel documents and residency recognition. She was repeatedly denied. Her appeals to the migration board of Norway were also rejected. Without travel documents or any country willing to receive her, she continued to live in Norway without permission. Another participant, an Iranian Kurd who had lived as a refugee in Iraq, spent six years aggressively pursuing voluntarily return. He registered for voluntary return with the International Organization for Migration and engaged the assistance of the migration police, but neither Iran nor Iraq recognized his identification papers as valid or his right to return. When he appealed to the Norwegian migration board for a reconsideration of his case, he was once again dismissed for failing to fulfill the requirement of legitimate identity documentation.

Deportability and unreturnability are judicial appointments that are mutable given constantly changing conditions and legal interpretations. They also entail several temporal similarities of considerable significance for illegality as lived and embodied. To take one example, we might consider the impact on family relations. Though the spatial dimensions of intimate relationships and the value of physical proximity are rather well established, intimate relationships have significant temporal dimensions as well, with respect to not only the sharing of time, but also the importance of a shared temporal framework (Tang, 2012). Likewise, though the consequences of irregularity for familial relations are readily apparent in a spatial sense—family members and relatives left behind and scattered across different countries and continents—perhaps less obvious are the ways in which, as Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2017: 122) suggests, “polity borders are not only spatial demarcations that delimit sovereignty and create divisions between citizens and non-citizens but function also as temporal boundaries linked to different social orders and their varying modes of imagining time and space.” In other words, the temporal boundaries erected along border lines potentially challenge the synchronization of the perspectives and experiences of those who migrated with those who remained. They thus alter and/or limit possibilities for establishing shared perspectives and perceptions of pasts and futures, and they enforce spatiotemporal distance with real consequences for relationships. For those who participated in this project, this seemed to be the case, in particular, when experiences of irregularity in Norway, such as a parent’s absence from a child’s upbringing or a biological aging that was out of sync with the anticipated social markers of time, like marriage or childbearing, could not be sufficiently communicated across this divide. We let the experiences described by one young adult, male research participant from Kurdistan exemplify this, beginning with what he described as his first and only effort to share his asylum rejection with his mother:

At first, I decided to share the bad news. I called home to my mother and explained that my asylum application had been rejected, but she began clapping and singing, praising Allah and celebrating. And so I realized that she had no idea what I was talking about. All she knew was that I had made it safely to Norway. It never occurred to her that I would not be accepted or that I would not be okay once I made it. The asylum system and its possibility for denying me, those weren’t things that my mother knew about, weren’t things that I knew how to explain. So, I just let her celebrate. It’s better that way anyhow.