Introduction

Chapter 5 of this book has shown how migrants become slowly disembedded from dominant time perspectives while living in Morocco, and Chapter 6 showed how forced immobility influences their relationships with each other. Both chapters describe how migrants’ ideas about their own self-worth and their ability to shift their social location in relation to others is conditioned by the peculiar times and tempos they are living and the spaces and places they are occupying in forced immobility. This chapter will build on these previous insights by looking at people's strategies to leave the country. By describing the process followed by migrants who are waiting to depart, I will examine the connection between time and social agency.

The data presented in this chapter shows that migrants’ opportunities for leaving or staying are shaped by their capabilities to influence the forces of mobility on the one hand and luck on the other. Capabilities and luck, however, are both difficult to control in situations of extreme marginality. Rather than planning for departure, migrants have to wait for unpredictable opportunities to arise. Waiting like this can be seen as an act of choice to create a new future within very limiting constraints for action in the present. In the conclusion of this chapter, I contrast this perspective on unpredictable futures with contemporary ideas about time and modernity in order to show why migrants waiting for departure create such an uncomfortable situation for migration policy makers.

What migrants are waiting for and how waiting feels

Hage (2009b) has argued that waiting emphasizes a dimension of life where the problem of our agency comes to the forefront. While waiting can be analysed as a lack of agency, it is also possible to look at it as an exercise of agency, because it emphasizes the choice not to act in a predetermined way. In this case, it is akin to resistance (Lakha 2009). In this respect, why people wait and for whom is a political question. Referring to the work of Bourdieu, Hage (2009b: 2) adds: