The triad of exploitation: Migration, remittance pressures and the politics of survival in transnational spaces

This article introduces the concept of the ‘triad of exploitation’ to theorize the layered pressures faced by Cameroonian male student migrants under constrictive migration regimes. In contrast to celebratory remittance narratives, this article foregrounds the emotional, educational and ethical tolls of kinship obligations. Empirical insights demonstrate how migrants, particularly students, are often compelled to abandon their studies due to unrelenting financial demands. In response, many migrants enter strategic intimate relationships with native women to secure legal status arrangements that often become sites of emotional and sexual subjugation. Some migrants later dissolve these unions to return to endogamous relationships that symbolically restore a semblance of autonomy. The article maps this trajectory, exploitation by kin, by intimate partners and ultimately by migrants themselves, into a conceptual model. It locates how the pressures of transnational survival corrode migrants’ aspirations and well-being while entangling them in morally ambivalent practices that reproduce the very exploitations they initially sought to evade. By synthesizing these stages, the article proposes a nuanced framework that complicates binary understandings of agency and victimhood while calling for renewed attention to the emotional, gendered and ethical dimensions of African migration.