Unfulfilled expectations for making a better life: Young Malian men coping with their adventures post deportation

Abstract

This article gives insight to the unfulfilled expectations of young Malian men, who sought to make a better life through adventure on their way to Europe, but were forcefully returned home. By following their representations of life situations, their social and work environments, this text explores these realities as experienced in their daily lives and in actors' narrations. It further explores the trajectories of the young men in relation to work, mobility, and ideas of a better life, and analyzes to what extent their ideas and narrations contribute to the concepts of youth, migration, and work within the relevant literature. The key issue is that expectations for making a better life through migration remain unfulfilled as the actors - in most of the presented cases - never arrive to the originally desired places and cannot live out their aspirations. The following article shows how these young men cope with this situation and the subsequent consequences. For these men, the established idea of success through migration and thus also the hopes of contributing to family income does not become reality. On the contrary, these are thrown back into a potential "waithood" where they cannot gain the status and responsibilities of adulthood. The text highlights a case in the administrative circle Kita in the south of Mali, where emigration towards Europe has become increasingly aspired since the end of the 1990s. Data gathered in two villages show the spectrum of potential coping strategies for dealing with a forced return. I show that many aim to or talk about re-emigrating, but in the end stay, which may be a coping strategy itself. This finding is different from what post-deportation literature mentions as a common consequence of forced return re-emigration. While some may be held in a situation of "involuntary immobility", others positively cope with the presumed situation of failure and find ways to make a better life where they are.