Follow the People! Examining Migration Regimes through the Trajectories of Unauthorized Migrants

This article combines the perspective of the migration regime with a mobile research perspective focused on migratory trajectories to make visible the experience of unauthorized migrants navigating through a series of migration and border regimes between their original starting point and their eventual point of arrival. It draws on two case studies from our own research: Anna Lipphardt’s study on the transnational trajectories of Holocaust survivors from Vilna/Vilnius in the aftermath of the Second World War and Inga Schwarz’s on-going postdoctoral project on current movements of unauthorized migrants to, through and beyond Europe, by taking the Tri-State Area between Switzerland, Germany and France as a node and transit point. The concluding section addresses key conceptual and ethical challenges for trajectory analysis and discusses the insights to be gained from the conceptual integration of trajectory analysis into migration regime analysis.