Alternating temporalities experienced by North African unaccompanied minors in The Netherlands: a story of waiting and hypermobility

Migration regimes in the Global North use endless waiting to discourage and govern migration. This leads to what has been described in the literature as a state of 'waithood'. In this paper, we analyse how North African unaccompanied minors navigate the waithood they are subjected to in the asylum system in the Netherlands. We challenge the idea that waithood slows down mobility or limits it to a geographical location, and we explore mobilities that have remained unaccounted for. Based on 16 months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among 22 North African unaccompanied minors, we find that these young people experience alternating temporalities. While living in housing and care facilities for asylum seekers, they first experience an enforced endless present. But, dissatisfied with the endless waiting, they often leave their care facilities and engage in a period of hypermobility where they move frequently and experience time as accelerated. Through hypermobility, young people reclaim agency over time but often accumulate physical and psychological trauma in the process. The paper deepens our understanding of how the temporalities of the asylum system shape the experiences of unaccompanied minors and how youth navigate and contest such temporalities.