Imagining Migration

Introduction: Imagination, Technology and the Colonial Imaginary

Imagination is the mental faculty through which people are able to project themselves beyond their immediate circumstances and orient themselves towards possible futures, thereby giving meaning to desires and aspirations that extend beyond what is materially available to them in the present. It is also, as I will argue in this essay, a faculty that is never simply free or autonomous but is always shaped by the symbolic environments and technological infrastructures in which it operates. Therefore, to understand how imagination is produced and structured is a necessary task for any serious anthropological inquiry of the social world, and nowhere is this more evident than in the study of migration. The latter has long been theorised through frameworks that prioritise economic calculation by reducing migrants' decisions to move to rational responses to material circumstances that can be mapped and predicted. By contrast, an anthropological approach focuses on the ways people imagine and interpret their circumstances and engage with the world around them. Indeed, in this way, migration becomes tied to moral expectations and symbolic horizons that extend beyond immediate material conditions. In order to explore this dimension, this essay will draw on Stefania Pandolfo’s (2007) essay "The Burning": Finitude and the Politico-theological imagination of illegal migration, where she suggests that the ethical and theological traditions of Islam can provide an important lens through which it is possible to understand the psychic world in which some young Muslim men decide to leave Morocco and place their lives at risk in the pursuit of a different future. The strength of Pandolfo’s contribution lies in its capacity to restore interiority and moral complexity to people who are routinely reduced to a political problem in public discourse. However, within this paper, I will question whether theological or psychological interpretations alone can adequately account for how migration is imagined in the contemporary world. The conditions which shape these imaginaries are deeply entangled with wider social and technological forces that have radically transformed the symbolic environment in which desire and aspirations are formed. Social life has entered into a symbiotic relationship with technological infrastructures, in which people’s desires and imaginaries are increasingly shaped by algorithmic engineering and the widespread use of social media. The ubiquitous presence and centrality of digital platforms in the current economy of attention raise important questions about how imagination itself is generated and whether the symbolic horizon through which migrants imagine departure has been fundamentally altered by these conditions.

As a consequence, it will be necessary to consider how algorithmic logic and social media platforms might influence the ways in which contemporary subjectivity imagines the phenomenon of migration. Amitav Ghosh’s (2021) essay “The Great Uprooting: Migration and Displacement in an Age of Planetary Crisis” provides a compelling empirical basis for this premise. Indeed, drawing on his own experience of interviewing Bengali migrants in Italy, he finds that the imaginaries driving their departure were shaped by a mimetic desire to emulate those who had already left, an aspiration produced and sustained through the digital exposure of life elsewhere that bore little resemblance to the reality they eventually encountered. This is further illustrated by the case of a young Pakistani professional with a stable life and income who, despite having no material reason to leave, considers abandoning everything to migrate to Italy. Moreover, I will expand on this by also focusing on the moral and social panic effect which the digital media environment has on the hosting population. I will employ theories concerning new nationalism to argue that online political propaganda disseminates narratives about migrants that don’t correspond to reality but that serve a specific political agenda (Venanzetti, 2024; Bandara, 2024). To conclude, I will argue that taken together, these dynamics constitute a new and more subtle form of colonial practice, which Mirca Madianou (2019) has named technocolonialism, through which colonial intimacies have mutated into technological intimacies that connect the world population and also open their imagination to algorithmic and political manipulation, by reducing the phenomenon of migration to a fantasy or political talking point.

The Burning: Islam and the Symbolic Horizon of the Crossing

Within the field of psychoanalysis, debates about the relationship between Islam and subjectivity have long been structured around a problematic dichotomy, in which Muslim religious experience has at times been interpreted as a form of delusion or a symptom of psychosis rather than as a complex and coherent ethical orientation towards the world, reflecting the Euro-American centric assumptions that continue to permeate the discipline and that position the Western rational subject as the normative horizon of psychological development. In fact, this tendency renders the Islamic tradition intelligible only as a deviation from that norm, and, in doing so, it obscures the rich ethical and theological universe through which Muslim subjects actually navigate their lives and make decisions. It is precisely against this reductive understanding that Pandolfo’s (2007) essay “The Burning” is aimed, as she argues that the inner lives of the Moroccan youth she encounters are organised by a complex theological and psychological imagination that psychoanalysis has failed to recognise (pp. 329-332). In order to demonstrate this, she draws on ethnographic research conducted with young men from poor urban neighbourhoods in Rabat, in particular Kamal, who is preparing for clandestine migration to Europe, and it is through their accounts that she traces the specific imaginative world in which the decision to leave is formed and given meaning. It is in these conversations that the concept of l-harg, the burning, emerges as the central vocabulary through which the imagination of illegal crossing is discussed, connoting departure as transgression and as the crossing of a threshold from which there may be no return. What is striking about this terminology is precisely its imaginative power, namely the way in which the decision to migrate opens onto an “eschatological elsewhere” that extends beyond the immediate material world in which the risk or the proximity of death is understood as the condition of a deeper form of freedom. This imaginative horizon is further shaped by the concept of al-rihla, the journey, which in the classic Arabic tradition carries connotations of morally significant movement into the unknown, and through which the imagination of crossing becomes part of a meaningful tradition, thus giving danger a deeper theological significance that goes beyond logical risk calculations (pp. 332-337). The depth of this worldview is most vividly evident in the exchanges between Kamal and Jawad, in which the two young men have arrived at opposing conclusions about the moral legitimacy of attempting to cross the Mediterranean. For Jawad, the imagination of departure is shaped by the conviction that risking one’s life in the Mediterranean constitutes a sin, that is to say, an act of defiance against divine authority, since it is God alone who determines the moment of death. Conversely, for Kamal, the imagination of crossing is oriented differently, through the concept of jihad an-nafs, understood as the effort of the self to resist immediate circumstances in which every other avenue has been closed and to move towards the possibility of a better and more dignified future. Moreover, he situates his reasoning within the Qur’anic tradition that holds migration to be an obligation for those who find themselves living under conditions of oppression, making, therefore, the risk of death in the crossing morally analogous to the sacrifice required in the path towards God (pp. 335-343). Accordingly, what emerges from this exchange is an imaginative elaboration of considerable complexity, through which the eschatological tradition of Islam furnishes the symbolic resources for understanding and directing desire, risk, and the aspiration to leave.

The analytical contribution of Pandolfo’s essay lies in its capacity to show that the imagination of migration is always situated within a symbolic world, and that for her interlocutors in Morocco, this symbolic world is structured by an ethical and eschatological tradition of genuine depth, which restores moral agency and interiority to people who are often reduced to a political issue in Western public discourse. However, in this paper, I will question whether theological and psychological frameworks are enough to fully comprehend how migration is imagined in the contemporary world. Pandolfo does note that youth access theological notions through “cassette tapes of sermons, and television and radio programs, which host lectures on Islam and question-answer sessions with muftis and scholars on a daily basis” (p.339), yet these technologies and media remain in the background and do not become objects of inquiry in their own right. Indeed, what happens to the imagination of departure when the symbolic horizon through which migrants imagine leaving is structured by the algorithmic logic of contemporary platform culture?

The Technological Unconscious: The Mimetic Logic of Migration

Amitav Ghosh’s (2021) essay “The Great Uprooting” offers a strong basis for addressing this question by investigating the forces that drive migration in the contemporary world. Indeed, while interviewing Bengali migrants in Italy, he finds himself confronted by the fact that, despite Bangladesh not being a war-torn country nor an economically disadvantaged one, it consistently ranks among the top countries of origin for migrants and refugees according to UN Statistics. He further notes that the media’s standard explanation that migrants leave solely for better opportunities or to escape war is an insufficient explanation, as it fails to consider what shapes the imagination of those opportunities in the first place, and through what images and promises the idea of elsewhere acquires power over those who contemplate leaving (pp. 712-713). What he discovers through his conversations with the Bengali migrants is that among the most influential and least visible forces driving departure is the desire to emulate those who have already left, a mimetic impulse which, as he argues, has always played a central role in migration, but that has been fundamentally transformed by the emergence of social media. In the nineteenth century, this impulse was transmitted through personal networks as well as by the accounts of returned travellers, but today it has become the structural logic of digital platforms, which are designed and engineered precisely to exploit and amplify this desire to emulate. In fact, social media works by drawing users into a continuous cycle of imitation, inducing them to signal their desires to others and, in turn, generating a feedback loop of new desires. Ghosh argues that the result of this type of mimetic desire is the homogenisation of aspirations on an unprecedented scale, since images of life elsewhere penetrate the deepest reaches of human imagination. Crucially, as smartphones have made these images accessible to those with the means to acquire an inexpensive device, and in many parts of the Global South, young people develop sophisticated digital skills disproportionate to their formal education, it would be incorrect to limit this mechanism to the rich and educated (pp.714-716). This leads Ghosh to a concept that is central to the argument of this paper. Indeed, he observes that the presence of digital technology is so pervasive in people’s lives and, at the same time, so rarely acknowledged that these devices have become part of what he calls the technological unconscious, which is embedded so deeply in everyday cognition that they are taken for granted in the same way as electricity. As a result, the information to which migrants are exposed through these technologies is shaped by their desires and social networks in ways that reinforce existing aspirations, by producing powerful imaginaries of the destination country that have little, if any, correspondence with the reality that awaits them (p. 718). In this way, the technological unconscious actively produces the images of departure itself, thus structuring desire before any conscious consideration can be made. This imaginative process is perfectly revealed by Ghosh through two different examples. The first one is a hypothetical scenario in which he asks the reader to imagine a Bengali village boy living and working in his father’s rice field amid harsh climatic and material hardships. His family owns a mobile phone where they are connected via WhatsApp to relatives who have emigrated to Europe, and on the screen, the boy sees their images in prosperous European cities, alongside advertisements for commodities entirely beyond his reach. This leads Ghosh to question whether his eventual decision to leave begins with the economic and environmental events that destabilise his life, or with the mimetic desire caused by the technology he’s interfacing with (p. 715). The second example, instead, is based on the real experience of a young Pakistani medical laboratory technician with a stable income who nonetheless becomes consumed by the desire to migrate to Italy. The attempts by those around him to reason with him proved futile, and two years after his arrival, he ended up working in the shadow economy and leading a quite precarious life, regretting that he had not listened (p.719). His imagination of Italy, formed through digital exposure, had no relation to the social reality he was expected to encounter.

Both of these cases illustrate how the imagination of migration has been restructured by the technological unconscious, and it is exactly here that the parallel with Pandolfo’s framework becomes analytically significant. In both essays, what drives the migrants' decision to leave exceeds rational calculation and is rooted in a symbolic world that shapes desire before it can be consciously reflected upon. For Pandolfo’s Moroccan youth, this symbolic world is constituted by a theological and eschatological tradition that provides departure with its imaginative charge. On the other hand, for Ghosh’s subjects, their symbolic world is constituted by the technological unconscious, in which the mimetic circulation of images produces a chimerical elsewhere that attracts people without considering the consequences. However, their difference is equally significant, as where Pandolfo’s theological horizon is based on a centuries-old tradition of ethical debate, the technological unconscious is produced by social platforms whose logic is that of engagement and the amplification of desire, indifferent to the well-being of those whose imagination it affects. Nevertheless, this does not mean that migrants are merely passive recipients of algorithmic desire. Indeed, Ghosh himself raises the question of whether the decision to migrate is wholly the migrant’s own, “or is it, to some degree, the product of his interaction with the 'cognitive assemblage' that manifests itself in his handheld device?” (p.716). By doing so, he opens a space for thinking about agency as operating within and against the structures that shape it, since migrants also use smartphones and digital platforms strategically to organise their journey, stay connected with people back home, and navigate the situations they encounter upon arrival. Hence, it is with these practices that the capacity to exceed the imaginaries that drive departure begins to take shape.

The Distorted Mirror: The Moral Panic of New Nationalism and Technocolonial Intimacy

As I showed in the previous section, the technological unconscious actively produces the imagination of departure by influencing and structuring the desire of the migrants who contemplate leaving. However, it will be important to highlight that the same logic also operates within the receiving countries' public sphere. In fact, the same digital infrastructure that generates aspirational imaginaries of the West for those who look towards it from the Global South simultaneously produces a distorted imaginary of the migrant. It is within this double dynamic that the full analytical force of this essay’s argument is revealed, since, in my view, the imagination of migration is not complete if it is not understood from both of these ends. As a consequence, understanding how the imagination of arrival is produced in the West is as necessary as comprehending how the imagination of departure is formed. As Bandara (2024) argues, nationalism, as a political imagination of collective identity and belonging, has been fundamentally reconfigured by the rise of social media. Digital platforms have transformed how national sentiments are constituted and circulated, contrary to how they had traditionally been reproduced, by employing algorithms that favour engagement and amplify content that provokes strong emotional reactions. This gave rise to a paradoxical environment in which nationalism became more widespread and, at the same time, more susceptible to manipulation (p. 20). Indeed, in this new context, digital technologies allow communities to bypass traditional gatekeepers and create bonds of ethnic solidarity in decentralised ways, with social media enabling the formation of an imagination in which symbolic markers of identity are constantly reiterated with the purpose of determining who belongs to the national community and who is excluded from it (p.22). Furthermore, this boundary-making imagination is intensified by the algorithmic logic of recommendation systems, which draws users into self-reinforcing cycles of extreme content, such that, by briefly engaging with national identity topics online, people can be pushed towards extreme views (p. 24). It is exactly within this algorithmically engineered public sphere that the migrant is imagined as a threat to social order and national purity. Venanzetti (2024) argues that political communication is designed to serve partisan interests by producing a sense of danger and generating social cohesion through the identification of an enemy against whom the community must defend itself (pp. 22-23). What social media has added to this mechanism is an infrastructure of unprecedented reach and intimacy where platforms have become so pervasive in everyday life that users encounter politically charged imagery as a necessary feature of their online experience. In fact, algorithmic logic ensures an almost constant exposure to content that frames migration as a crisis or invasion. Moreover, politicians, such as Matteo Salvini, who in turn become influencers, exploit this infrastructure to subject users to content which associates migration with a social disorder, thereby, through sheer repetition, accumulating a distorted picture of the migrant that bears no correspondence with the lived reality of those who arrived. The cumulative effect of this exposure is a collective imagination characterised by a moral panic that considers migrants' cultural and ethnic differences as the cause of national social problems, which, through continuous algorithmic affective reinforcement, produces a racialised vision of migration. As a result, the migrant is imaginatively reduced to a symbol of disorder and an economic burden, stripped of any complexity and individuality, which serves to legitimate violent political responses, such as mass deportation and anti-immigration policies (pp.25-26).

Now, drawing on and extending Madianou’s (2019) concept of technocolonialism, I will argue that the double dynamic described above, namely the aspirational imagination of the migrant and the threatening imagery of new nationalism, constitutes the contemporary mutation of colonial intimacies into technological intimacies. Madianou develops the concept of technocolonialism to capture how digital innovation converges with market forces to reconfigure colonial relationships of dependency. She argues that data practices reproduce power asymmetries by extracting value from the lives of the most vulnerable people and preserving the discriminatory hierarchies produced by colonial hegemony. At the heart of this argument is the observation that the traditional extractive logic has today found its expression in the commodification of attention and the mining of personal data, with social media platforms providing free services in exchange for data sold to advertisers, furthering the authority of cloud capital in producing knowledge and shaping behaviour (pp. 1-3). However, how can it be possible to extend these claims beyond the context of humanitarianism, in which Madianou develops them? During the colonial period, subjects who formally shared national identity with citizens of the mother country were nevertheless separated from them and categorised as inferior through the racist and exclusionary practices of colonial administration (Carby 2019, pp.36-42). Today, both migrants and citizens of receiving societies share a common dependence on the same technological infrastructure, yet they are separated by it, as it produces aspirational imaginaries for the former and xenophobic moral panics for the latter. It is precisely in this sense that I maintain that colonial intimacies have mutated into technological intimacies. Indeed, the intimate penetration of subjectivity that was once performed by the colonial bureaucracy is today enacted by the algorithm, invisibly and at scale, reducing the phenomena of migration to either a fantasy or a political subject which serves both the interests of populist politicians and, most importantly, the commercial interests of tech corporations who are the contemporary inheritors of the colonial extractivist tradition.

Conclusion

In this essay, I argued that the imagination of migration is always situated within symbolic worlds that shape desire before it can be consciously reflected upon. What the journey from Pandolfo’s (2007) theological horizon to Ghosh’s (2021) technological unconscious ultimately reveals is that the power to produce these imaginary worlds has been progressively transferred, from communities and traditions rooted in centuries of ethical deliberation, to corporations whose interest lies not in the well-being of those they reach but in the optimisation of engagement and the commodification of attention. This transfer of power is what the concept of technocolonialism helps illuminate, and it carries consequences that extend far beyond the phenomenon of migration itself. The most significant of these consequences, in my view, is the disappearance of imaginative sovereignty, that is to say, the capacity of individuals to imagine their circumstances and futures on their own terms, independently of the commercial logic of cloud capitalism. When the imagination of departure is produced by algorithms designed to amplify mimetic desire, and the imagination of arrival is produced by the same system optimised for violence and fear, the space for a genuinely human imagination of migration begins to shrink. This kind of imagination, which takes seriously the complexity and dignity of those who move, has gradually been pushed aside. This has profound implications for how Western societies understand and respond to migration, both culturally and politically. The moral panics produced by digital nationalism actively reproduce and intensify pre-existing xenophobic attitudes by creating a political climate in which punitive and exclusionary policies are normalised. In this way, attitudes that once might have seemed extreme come to be accepted and demanded by a public whose perceptions of migrants have been distorted by the platforms they engage with. Recognising this mechanism does not absolve politicians of any responsibility. However, it does suggest that the problem of anti-immigrant politics cannot be understood in isolation from the technological system that sustains and amplifies it. There is also a deeper irony at work, namely that the same technologies that are meant to connect humanity across borders end up reinforcing borders at the level of imagination, widening the distance between people. Therefore, the democratic governance of this technological apparatus and the push for regulation are central concerns for any serious politics of migration. To conclude, I tried to show the structures that produce the imagination through which migration is understood and lived, and to insist on how these infrastructures are the byproducts of specific historical and politico-economic forces that can be identified and comprehended. Imagination, as I argued from the beginning, is a mental faculty through which human beings can orient themselves, and it is in defence of this faculty, against the commercial interests that seek to engineer and exploit it, that both the political and anthropological stakes of my argument ultimately lie.

References

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2. Carby, H.V. (2019). Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. Verso Books.
3. Ghosh, A. (2021) “The Great Uprooting: Migration and Displacement in an age of planetary crisis” The Massachusetts Review, 62(4), pp. 712–733. https://doi.org/10.1353/mar.2021.0158.
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6. Venanzetti, C. (2024). “Anti-immigration panics: the role of online political propaganda in building the untrustworthy ‘other’” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Otago).