When arriving by boat in Malta from Libya, migrants encounter a strong state and legal framework that shapes their mobilities and journeys. This chapter brings forward migrants’ lives in Malta’s reception structures. It reveals how people experience mobility as a form of stuckness, influenced by bureaucratic techniques of governance.

This chapter opens up space for rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life. It sheds light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework, enabled through the book’s unique analytic of the journey. Journeys foster novel understandings of the intersections between economy and unauthorized migration, encapsulated by the concept of mobility economies. The ethnographic and analytical insights of the book furnish a new anthropology of mobility and economic life.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.

Migrants’ journeys are often characterized by immobility and waiting. This chapter describes the experiences of migrants at a house in Libya as they prepare to take a boat to Europe. Furthering analyses of mobility economies, it brings economy into conversation with questions of time and immobility. The chapter reveals how a clandestine economy surrounding mobility intersects with intimate economies that reproduce the mobile body.

Confinement is a prominent feature of migrants’ journeys through Libya and onwards to Europe. Turning to migrants’ experiences in informal sites of confinement and in government-run detention centres in Libya, this chapter foregrounds how forced immobility is a crucial part of processes extracting value from migrants’ lives. Through a dynamic I call ‘accumulation by immobilization,’ the chapter reveals how peoples’ mobilities become a locus for generating value.

This chapter highlights that not all journeys are linear. It turns to the lives of migrants who decide to stay in Libya rather than move onwards to Europe. The chapter foregrounds how migrants navigate informal bordering practices enacted by a range of different actors. It offers a novel analysis of affective labour, as a labour of endurance and coping, and reveals how it plays a pivotal role in the making of peoples’ mobilities.

How might we characterize the unauthorized journeys of migrants from countries in Eastern and Western Africa as they make their way to or through Libya to Europe? This chapter front stages the journey as an analytic for understanding contemporary migration. It outlines what is at stake when the lived experiences of migration and migrants’ lives are brought into conversation with biopolitics and political economy. It highlights the concept of ‘mobility economies’ as a means for recasting analyses of migration and economic arrangements under contemporary capitalism.

The Mediterranean boat crossing highlights vulnerability and risk along migrants’ unauthorized journeys. This chapter attends to migrants’ experiences of taking a boat from Libya to Europe. The chapter enlivens affective and meteorological dimensions of the crossing to show how they configure mobilities and peoples’ futures. It provides a unique insight into unauthorized migration and its intersections with affect and atmospheres.