This book explores the issue of border crossing in the current era of globalization and transnationalism, analysing how the nation State system regulates movements of people. The author examines how migrant “illegality” is configured in the contemporary world and explores what it means to be an irregular migrant.
This book is written in an auto-ethnographical style, with personal experiences interjected into ethnographic writing. Based on the author’s own migration journey and the informants’ border experiences, the book explores the nature of borders, border politics and the rituals and performances of border crossing. The author explains that auto-ethnography was adopted as the methodology for the book because it lets migrants contextualize their accounts of the experience of migrant ‘illegality’. Fieldwork for the book was conducted by the author between 2004 and 2008.
The book is divided into nine sections, encompassing an introduction, seven chapters and a Coda. It includes an appendix detailing the destinations of the migrants discussed in the book and a preface that discusses the issues to be dealt with in the book through the description of two separate events: the author’s own descent into “illegality” at the Iran–Afghanistan border and the suicide of an Iranian asylum seeker in a Swedish detention centre. The first chapter examines the author’s own migration experience and journey into “illegality”, as he defines it. The author is an Iranian young man driven into a clandestine existence before he decides to flee the country. He highlights elements of choice in contexts of ‘forced’ migration. The next two chapters discuss issues of migrant illegality in which the author explores his own attempts to exit Iran and his life as an “illegal” migrant (as he describes it) in Pakistan, in transit to the West. In the final sections the author explores the perils and dangers associated with fleeing to the West, his shift from asylum seeker to refugee and the issue of refugees’ rights.
Although the book does not set out to highlight any findings or conclusions, the author explores the experience of asylum seekers, the reasons that asylum seekers are forced into clandestine existences and underlines how the experience of border crossing does not end when the final destination is reached. The book provides information on the fees and payments for migrant smuggling services and the modus operandi and routes of smuggling, particularly from Iran to the West. It also discusses the various factors that fuel irregular migration, such as war and political strife.
The strength of the book is the way in which the author presents ethnographic data, which provides rich empirical insights and raises important points in relation to irregular migration and migrant smuggling. The book makes a contribution to the body of knowledge on migrant smuggling with its insights into smuggling networks, the modus operandi of migrant smuggling and the human rights abuses of irregular migrants.
