Introduction

Deportation, death, starvation, overexploitation, poverty, unemployment—just to name a few— are the images most used to redefine labor migration in order to discourage young West African migrants from undertaking dangerous trips towards Europe or large African cities. Recently, in the Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Libya), several thousands of sub-Saharan migrants, including women and children, have been rounded up and deported to Niger and Mali. Most of them had been living and working in these countries for several years. Maghreb security forces treat them as source of criminality and a threat to national values and identity. What, however, is the real impact of this communication strategy and ill-treatment, even coupled with setting up legal and physical barriers? Why does migration intensify despite such deportation policy? To answer these questions, we need to consider the cultural, social, and economic factors that enable migrants to formulate their own definitions of work in the migratory context. In the last four decades West African youth mobility within Africa has substantially increased. In both sides of the migration nexus, migrant workers are permanently re-evaluated according to their social, economic, and political role. While host countries degrade their jobs, migrants dignify them based on their own definition of labor migration in their countries of origin.

In the mid-1970s, in order to better analyze the strategies of immigrant communities in protecting their work sectors, the social sciences abandoned the push and pull factors approach to use concepts such as “networks” or “chains” to describe the biographies, experiences, and trials of migrants who organize themselves into communities to help each other in the search for work and the development of careers. In what follows, I attempt to do just that while focusing on the local concepts by which the migrants establish social, material, and cultural relations with work in destination countries.

The Three Dimensions of Migrant’s Work

Immigration policies and labor markets in capitalist societies continue to create new, and often shifting, categories of migrant workers: temporary, permanent, precarious, legal, illegal, etc. This categorization is conceived to facilitate their exploitation, turning them into human machines for capitalist profit. To understand migration surge despite such discriminatory categorizations, I consider the cultural, social, and economic factors that enable migrants to formulate their own definitions of work in the migratory context. My research in West Africa shows how labor migrants are defined along three dimensions of work: material, social, and symbolic. (1) The material dimension is determined by financial impacts of migrants’ work on their society or family. (2) The social dimension is related to social expectations which migrants encounter during visits to their village or city of origin. (3) The symbolic dimension refers to the perception of migrants as “heroes” who have overcome various risks. The issue of self-realization through labor migration has always been prominent among West African youth, who often accept to work under any forms and statuses while attempting to succeed according to the material, social, and symbolic dimensions of labor migration.

In my recent publications on migrants identifying as Dogon, Songhay, and Bambara, I have shown that in migrants’ own narratives, being able to migrate for work is in itself a heroic act. They define themselves as “dignified travelers.” Their dignity lies in their courage to undertake a perilous voyage and that requires great strength and stamina. They understand that migration is never without risks. The question is rather: How can one confront the dangers? What assets and support can be mobilized? They portray themselves as strong, powerful, resistant, valuable, and mobile men and women, capable to carry out any kind of work. The most important aspect of this conception is that the returning migrant is celebrated as the hero. A return to the home village/community means that s/he has coped with the wilderness and been victorious. The newly acquired qualities of this person, based on what s/he has learned or obtained outside, may form a cluster of values that contribute to the migrant’s overall identity.

To examine work from the perspective of migrants shows that, the latter enter into it with their own social, cultural, and economic experiences and that these, in turn, influence their perception of work. The idea that migrants can realize themselves through their work is formed in their communities of origin. They are culturally, socially, and economically influenced by the ideas, identities and social capital that their immigrant elders have transferred and continue to transfer to their communities. The possibility to work and to import the labor benefits from the host country to their community of origin is their primary motivation. Prospective migrants enquire about the chance to be employed in the same jobs as their predecessors, the income they can save per year, and how much they can send back to their country to be redistributed in their community, where it can serve to establish symbols of success, such as building a house or opening a family business.

However, this “country of origin representation” of work does not exclude the “destination country representation” of work as I have shown in my not yet published paper where I analyze migration and the construction of deuxième chez soi (second homes) among Malian migrants in Ivory Coast. The notion of deuxième chez soi refers to the Malian migrants’ perception of Ivory Coast as a hospitable country where they have been able to find well paid jobs, vast arable lands, and where they find good environment for their religion practices (Islam) and economic and cultural activities.

In the spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to discuss with male and female immigrants from Francophone Africa (Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast) in New York City. Their testimonies evolve around their work and its three dimensions. They came to New York with the expectation to get well paid and dignifying jobs, and subsequently to be seen as successful migrants back in their communities. But the realities turned out to be different. Many got jobs that in their country of origin they would have never done: car and dish washing, cab driving for men; hair braiding and babysitting for women immigrants. But as they acknowledged, these forms of labor are thought of as low class works, but once they are paid and they translate their money into realities (building houses, helping family members solving social need, building small business in agriculture or services) in their African cities or villages, they became proud of themselves. In the eyes of their community of origin they became somebody, that means successful migrants, valuable to their close relatives. A migrant's work is meant to bring back happiness in the migrant’s country of origin. That can take decades or more, but the myth of coming back home as a “hero” strengthens migrants’ will to work against all kind of odds. While degrading perception of migrants’ work is significant, looking at a migrant's self-definition from the viewpoint of their native community of belonging introduces a shift in focus towards narratives of material opulence, social prestige, and heroism. Their willingness to work under any conditions makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation.