Precarious Mobility: Infrastructures of Eritrean migration through the Sudan and the Sahara Desert

Abstract

This paper explores migrants’ experiences and their specific practices geared
towards negotiating migration barriers and the effects of externalization.
Contemporary migration from Eritrea is shaped by changing migrant
aspirations, expanding networks of intermediaries and socioeconomic
challenges. This is compounded by the European Union’s (EU) externalization of
border controls and limited opportunities for legal migration paths. In this
context, a vast majority of Eritrean young men and women opt for overland exits
through dangerous and long trails across the Sahara Desert and the
Mediterranean Sea until they arrive in Europe. The irregular transitions and
stepwise mobility are facilitated by the interactions of actors, mainly smugglers,
family members in one’s homeland, former migrants en route and in the diaspora
as well as the local people along the trails, which I call infrastructures of
migratory mobility. The paper argues that migrants and their communities
develop and use alternative mobility infrastructures by establishing a
transnational knowledge community to navigate increasing migration controls
in origin and transit countries, as well as the externalization of European
borders and migratory controls.