How is undocumented migration across international borders facilitated, enacted, and impeded? This research project is based on the findings of a multi-sited ethnography from Iran to Germany, which examines how social relations and economic transactions mutually enable, shape, and reinforce each other in undocumented migration.

Tracing migrants’ trajectories in Iran, Turkey, Greece, the so-called Balkan route, and Germany, the study develops a dynamic and emic explanation of how migrants’ relationships facilitate economic interactions necessary for exerting mobility. It draws on the concept of moral economy and introduces the concept of a moral economy of coming to Europe. It analyzes how mobility emerged and was maintained through informal loans from families, smuggling services, and financial exchanges with fellow migrants, and explains periods of externally imposed immobility.

This project focuses on different forms of experienced immobility during the closure of the EU Schengen borders due to COVID-19 amongst three highly mobile groups. Since the pandemic has meant a sudden halt to certain groups of migrants, it raises questions on how border perceptions have altered and how solidarity with and between migration movements is redefined during and after periods of (partial) immobility.

The study consists of three highly mobile groups representing different migratory movements within the EU for the purpose of work, education, and protection: Seasonal workers, Erasmus exchange students, and asylum seekers. These three groups embody movement within the EU, but experience different forms of privileges, protection, dependencies, and solidarity.

Article: Pool, H. (2023). Immobility beyond borders: Differential inclusion and the impact of the COVID-19 border closures.

‘Walled Economies’ explores how actors imagine, construct, and materialize borders that “the state” envisions to fortify its territory through walls. The research project’s proposition is that the modern nation-state defines itself by a precise territory that is increasingly marked not only by lines on the map, but by concrete walls, barriers, and digital technologies to shield itself in a globalized world.

It investigates how walled territories are constructed by and through the interplay of actors ranging from investment firms, border guards, programmers, to construction workers, who invest in, build, and securitize these physical barriers, while at the same time the wealth that enables richer countries to construct these walls is based on a capitalism built on the very idea of a rapid and borderless circulation of global goods and services.