The Road, the Cost and the Wait: A Multidimensional Analysis of Irregular Migration From Afghanistan to Türkiye

ABSTRACT Irregular migration from Afghanistan to Türkiye has undergone a structural transformation following the Taliban's return to power in 2021—a shift in both scale and character, marked by institutional collapse and the flight of professionals alongside the poor. Drawing on van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenology together with the aspirations‐capabilities, migration infrastructure, transit migration and existential immobility literatures, this study examines the lived experiences of 17 migrants and 10 expert informants, supplemented by one focus group, across several cities in Türkiye. Four themes emerge: the layered architecture of migration motivations, within which a structural hopelessness, the participants name ‘seeing no future’, extends beyond economic and security concerns; the route and its instalment‐based economy with smugglers; Türkiye's hybrid role between transit hub and destination; and the search condition produced by plural belonging and suspended time. The study contributes empirically to the institutionalised, post‐arrival debt relations of brokerage infrastructures and to Türkiye's position beyond the transit‐destination dichotomy.