Ten years after the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ a growing corpus of studies have developed sophisticated analysis of the multifaceted practices of border-making (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002) enacted upon thousands of autonomous migrants who have crossed the Western Balkans and challenged the EU thresholds seeking for asylum security and reception through its eastern passages. However, a tendency to focus on the spatiality of the ways of thinking, acting, and inhabiting borders has limited the development of a more comprehensive approach of the temporal components that inform both the experiences of migrants’ (im)mobilities (e.g. stasis, waithood) and the reception policies and practices, hrough a historical, local lens. In times of globalized migration governance how to make sense of the different and ambivalent treatments assigned to asylum seekers, which vary from pushbacks and institutional abandonment to semi-carceral regimes or widespread reception? 

This lecture aims to explore the relationship between borders, temporalities and (im)mobility to capture the complexity of the current migration borderscape (Brambilla et al., 2015), discussing the relational dimension of persons and localities. 

Drawing on fieldwork in Northern-Eastern border zones of Italy, the presentation addresses the nexus of migration and mobility through the lens of ethnography (Heil et al. 2017) to show the intersecting forms of (im)mobility that involve migrants and the interactions with other social actors (e.g. members of state or humanitarian apparatus, public services, and local population).

The lecture argues for a more holistic understanding which discloses the local, historical implications of the reception policy process, and invites to unpack the temporal experience of migrants' (im)immobility to recognize its liminal and creative dimension beyond victimised and passivist analysis. This approach may prove useful in accounting for the migrants' point of view and overlapping forms of temporalities upon their attempt to entry into the EU.