‘When Migrants become Messengers’: Affective Migrant Metamorphosis and Aspirational Management in Senegal

Along with more concrete efforts at managing West African migration to Europe through enhanced border control and return and readmission agreements – European funded and driven information campaigns aimed at discouraging African youth from migrating has become an increasingly important aspect of ‘border work’. Following one of these recent campaigns in Senegal that aims at internalizing a sense in the would-be migrants that their hopes of going to Europe are dangerous and futile, this paper ethnographically explores this particular form of European driven ‘aspiration management’ (Carling and Collins in press). It highlights how failed migrants become valuable actors in these campaigns and how humanitarian principles of care and border control intersect. By invoking the volunteer’s own migration and return stories and how they actively use them, I argue that contemporary European border governance carve out distinct subjectivities and roles for migrants, both when attempting to come to Europe and upon return.