among themselves about immigration fraud attempts that happen in their consular offices in Dakar. Though they believe—and express repeatedly in information sessions to aspirant Senegalese emigrants—that the path to a visa is very straightforward, they see countless examples of would-be migrants trying to game the system. Exaggerations, overstatements, and outright lies are remembered vividly, particularly when they border on the fantastic. Consular officers in the U.S. Embassy in Dakar are trained to ask pointed and unexpected questions to catch these tall tales. One consular officer told me about the man who claimed to be a medical student in his last year of school. The officer asked him to tell her how many bones were in the human body. After a long, nervous pause, the man replied, “Three.”
The same consular officer recounted the episode of another group who claimed to be a dance troupe, applying for a visa with a famous Senegalese musician to accompany him on his U.S. tour. This type of fraud is common, she said, and often half of the “band” or “backup dancers” are merely friends or paying clients of the headliner and his staff who will disappear in the United States immediately upon arrival and remain in country after their artistic visa expires. The officer asked this alleged dance troupe to perform something for her right there in the consular section of the Embassy. The group looked stunned and, as the officer recounts, they gave a half-hearted attempt at uncoordinated dance movements, bumping into one another and generally looking like a sloppy mess. Needless to say, their visas were denied.25
Another form of fraud that embassy officials are trained to spot is marriage fraud. As most destination countries of Senegalese migration have some type of spousal reunification program, and because marrying a national of a given country is a simpler path to access to that country than most, marriage seems like an effective means to migration. While in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, I once overheard a particularly uncomfortable visa interview for a young American woman and her Senegalese fiancé. The consular officer asked the Senegalese half of the couple questions including, “What do you like about each other? What is her mother’s name? Are you marrying her just to migrate?” while the American woman sat and fumed.
A U.S. embassy employee told me that the most common kind of marriage fraud that she sees is cases between Senegalese men and women. Someone wishing to migrate pays an agent to find a visa applicant who has a good chance of getting a visa. The agent will create false marriage documents, even staging wedding photos, and pay a fee to the viable visa candidate to go along with the ruse and include the customer in his or her visa application as a spouse. This consular officer said that sometimes she sees a stack of different applications in which the wedding date is the same and the wedding guests in the pictures are the same people in the same clothes for a series of supposedly unrelated marriages. Because marriage fraud is so common, the United States has a policy of crosschecking information about marriage dates with previous records. If an applicant has previously applied for a visa and included different information—for example applying in 2007 and saying he or she was unmarried, then applying again in 2011 and including a marriage license that states that he or she has been married since 2004—then the application immediately is rejected as fraudulent.
In 2010, a friend brought me a letter and a query from her neighbor. Hearing that she knew an American, the neighbor asked my friend to show me a letter from the U.S. embassy sent in 2001 informing the neighbor that he had won the “lottery,” the U.S. Diversity Visa program which distributes diversity visas to would-be migrants of select countries. At the time, the neighbor could not afford the other elements that would make migration possible—such as an international plane ticket—but he held onto this now irrelevant paper for nine years, hoping that it would one day be his ticket out. I marveled at the pristine letter and the crisp white paper—clearly the neighbor had been guarding this letter delicately, and pointlessly, for nearly a decade. In Senegal’s culture of migration, he had won the lottery but couldn’t cash in.
Conclusion
In Senegal, men are migrating to fulfill gendered ideals of masculinity including becoming husbands and household heads. For non-migrant Senegalese men, finding a foothold in the Senegalese marriage market is not easy despite the continued compulsory nature of marriage for social adulthood. Non-migrant men from middle-class families, like Momar, find it difficult to compete with those living overseas who seem to be a safer bet for a stable financial future for women also navigating economic hardship and social pressure to marry.
While Momar dreams of taking his soccer skills abroad, his younger siblings are trying other tactics to achieve full social adulthood. One of his brothers married a woman from a lower-class neighborhood, where his residence of origin—the middle-class Sicaps (an administrative district of Dakar)—still carries some prestige. The couple has moved into the crowded household with Momar’s family, and they have no clear plans to establish a household of their own. Another brother has been accumulating degrees in business administration. He wears a tie daily and carries a briefcase with him on most occasions—an ostentatious display of his own middle-class station—though he has no job at present and has few prospects for employment.26
The eldest of Momar’s two sisters is the one sibling who no longer lives under her mother’s roof and who is financially independent from her family. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a model and an actress and regularly contributes financially to her mother’s household and her siblings’ activities. How did she achieve this? She married an elderly French man and moved with him to Europe.
In Chapter 2, the focus turns from non-migrant Senegalese to migrants themselves. Just as it is argued here that neoliberal reforms in Senegal have driven many men into international migration and changed non-migrant perceptions of status and success, the next chapter shows that neoliberal restructuring abroad has also profoundly shaped migrant trajectories and orientations, making transnationality an imperative of contemporary Senegalese migration. Chapter 2 also examines the consequences of the myth of migration-as-wealth for the overseas-earners who struggle to remit adequately to their loved ones at home. Gendered ideals are not only a stimulus for men to migrate, but a source of motivation for most of their transnational activities in which they attempt to gain status and provide care from abroad through remittances, marriage, and other highly gendered activities in an unstable economic and legal climate.
CHAPTER 2
Precarity, Care Work, and Lives Suspended
In a focus group I held with a group of factory workers in the industrial town of Lecco, Italy, several of the men began mocking the only unmarried man in the group who was complaining about pressures from home. “You don’t have any problems,” they teased. “You don’t have a wife; you have no problems at all.”
When the laughter died down, one of the married men, Moussa, continued seriously. He said that not only does your financial burden increase when you marry, but the psychological pressure intensifies as well. Migrants struggle to save enough money to return to Senegal to visit, when “enough” entails not only transportation and living expenses for the trip, but also the funds for an impossible number of gifts and cash handouts expected from a migrant on his return. For migrants who struggle to live and remit on meager earnings, saving for a month-long trip can take several years. “But if you’ve left a wife behind, for one, two, three years, because you can’t go home,” Moussa explained, “your family starts to say, ‘hey, you have to come visit this doomu jambor [daughter of another/a stranger] who’s in our house.’ ”
In all Senegalese marriages, husbands seek to prove to their wives’ families that they are pious, hardworking men and good providers—that they are, in essence, goor jaarin, or men of value. In transnational marriage, migrant
