Introduction to the Special Issue on Transit Migration: Renewing the Focus on a Global Phenomenon

This special issue is the collective effort of a group of scholars working in the area of transit migration and was informed by a workshop conducted with some of the authors.1 It draws renewed attention to transit and demonstrates that, despite some ambivalence in existing literature, there is a salience to transit as a space, a period of time, and an identity that speaks to the lived realities of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. We take ‘transit’ as a starting point for a multi-faceted and multi-sited exploration of irregular migration, which has been the focus of much attention in recent years. Across Europe, parts of Asia, Turkey and the Middle East high numbers of refugees and migrants continue to arrive by land and sea. For example, over a million people reached Greece and Italy in 2015 and, subsequently, made their way to other parts of Europe (UNHCR, 2016). This had led to expressions of concern by politicians about the security of borders and the enactment of restrictive immigration measures in many countries which are popular among domestic voters and carry strong messages about sovereignty and border protection. Policy-makers and governments, amongst others, are asking questions about the global phenomenon of irregular migration as they seek to determine the origins of new arrivals, how they are able to travel irregularly and the factors influencing their decisions to move. There are also silences in their debate about immobility, especially of those who do not or cannot move, a disproportionate interest in so-called ‘destination countries’ to the detriment of the sites people move through and get stuck in, and the obscuring of the social reality of migrants and refugees. In our introduction, we first explore the ways in which transit migration has been theorised, which we take both as the critical foundation and also as the point of departure for this special issue (Düvell, 2006, 2012; Collyer et al., 2012; Papadopoulou-Kourkoula, 2008). Earlier scholarship on transit acknowledged it to be a contested concept, but largely treated it as a distinct category and assumed that drivers and motivations for movement were largely individual (Collyer et al., 2012). Those who would seek to render transit linear and manageable will find little comfort in this special issue in which transit is unpacked and contextualised, but left as a contradictory space that has been created by externalisation policies and highly selective immigration regimes. Another limitation of much of the transit literature is that it draws on the situation in Europe and portrays those outside the European Union as having one fixed goal of reaching what is often described as ‘destination Europe’. Drawing on the work of Papadopoulou-Kourkoula (2008), articles in this special issue show transit as a condition – a contradictory space that has been created through externally imposed mobility restrictions regimes funded by the Global North – and extend the application of transit to multiple geographic regions, including Mexico and Indonesia, to widen the analytical lens and show commonalities in the ways border regimes are enacted. The outcomes of border regimes are shown here as a consequence of the explicit expectation of externally funded mobility restriction regimes, that recipient governments in transit countries are responsible for containing and controlling irregular migration. Throughout this special issue, transit is understood as a space that is both constructed and contested, and being in transit is shown to be the daily lived reality of many people on the move. Transit is constructed in public policy dialogues as a site of engagement, enforcement and a ‘space apart’ (see Oelgemöller in this issue). As a result of securitised and bureaucratic language, one of the modes of migration management favoured by the Global North, transit migrants have emerged as a category that is also interrogated here. Thus, being in transit is both a condition and a point in time; the temporal nature of transit is the central theme in Schapendonk’s article, which considers a ‘multiplicity of transit’ as people who reach Greece and Italy continue on to other locations in Europe where they may face transit situations similar to those in the countries they have just passed through (Griffiths et al., 2013; Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012).