Ethnographic Experiences Around Imagined Emigration
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article develops a theoretical and ethnographic analysis of the concept of imagined emigration, understood as the set of representations, narratives, aspirations, and symbolic projections that precede the migratory experience and provide it with social, moral, and biographical meaning. Far from conceiving migration solely as a physical displacement or an instrumental strategy, the text is grounded in the premise that every migratory experience is preceded by an intense imaginative process through which individuals shape expectations, construct horizons of possibility, and confer coherence upon their life trajectories.
Drawing on a reflection based on an ethnographic study conducted with young people in situations of vulnerability in northern Morocco, the article examines how the social imaginaries of emigration become an organizing principle of life projects, future expectations, and identity processes. These imaginaries not only guide the decision to migrate, but also shape specific ways of interpreting the present, resignifying precariousness, and projecting an alternative future marked by promises of social mobility, recognition, and dignity.
From a constructivist and interpretive perspective, grounded in the theory of social imaginaries, it is argued that migration cannot be understood exclusively as an automatic response to structural factors such as poverty, unemployment, or global inequality. Rather, the migratory decision emerges as the result of a complex ecology of meanings in which material conditions of precariousness, the circulation of narratives of migratory success, aspirations for social recognition, cultural models of success, and dynamics of youth socialization converge. Within this framework, the accounts of those who have migrated, media images, and indirect experiences of contact with Europe play a central role in the production and reproduction of migratory desire.
Imagined emigration thus operates as a symbolic device of orientation, compensation, and legitimation of action. It makes it possible to give meaning to waiting, justify risk, and resignify sacrifice, especially in contexts marked by the absence of immediate horizons, institutional fragility, and a lack of stable adult role models. In such scenarios, imagining migration becomes a way of inhabiting the present and sustaining hope, even when the actual possibility of migrating is uncertain or limited.