‘An important book that highlights African migrants’ agency in the face of structures of inequality and violence. It offers invaluable insights into the processes of invisibility and visibility that mark the trajectories of African migrant encounters with the global migration industry. The accounts provided challenge the normalization of border enforcing mechanisms that work to exclude and distance Africans while living off the wealth extracted from the continent.’
Nina Glick Schiller, University of Manchester
'The book shows, in diverse African situations, migrants’ capacities of negotiation and their genuine agency, even in the most precarious and unfavourable contexts.
Through the use of case studies, the authors question the bureaucratic categories and oppose them with their meticulous understanding of social and political process of categorization. Thus, they implement the necessary
independence of research vis-a-vis the powers and the state-centered point of view.'
Michel Agier, École des Hautes études en Sciences sociales