Brokering hope for Senegalese migrants in Argentina

In recent years it has become exceedingly difficult for African migrants to enter the European Union. The EU and its member states have made further restrictions on national asylum and migration policies and have de facto outsourced its border control by establishing agreements with transit migration countries in Africa. This development together with the economic recession seems to have limited the possibilities for successful migration to Europe. Concurrently, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Argentina has especially since the middle of the 2000s emerged as a destination for West African migrants. Argentina is a country with no former colonial ties, direct diplomatic or socio-economic links to West Africa but when the opportunities to enter Europe are reduced, it seems that hope for better futures is redirected towards new destinations and emerging economies in the Global South (see i.e. Haugen 2012, Pelican and Peter 2009, Bertoncello and Bredeloup, 2009).

This paper concentrates on how hope is shaped, brokered and reworked among this new group of migrants in Argentina. By focusing on a resent regularization program that gave the migrants the opportunity to transcend their irregular status I explore how they view “the distribution of hope” (Hage 2003) in the political system and thus show who is seen as the “real” puppeteer behind the scene of events.