Migration Across Intersecting Temporalities: Venezuelan Migrants and ‘Readiness’ in Montreal

Abstract

The chapter explores various temporalities in relation to the Canadian skilled migration stream and the implications of these temporalities for the experience and unfolding of individual migration journeys. Drawing on narratives of Venezuelan migrants in Montreal, Canada, the chapter discusses how migration trajectories are imagined and configured at the intersections of political-historical moments in source and destination countries. The chapter focuses on the period between having submitted the application to migrate and actually relocating; a period during which the prospective migrants were subjected to temporal forces of both Canada and Venezuela. It particularly considers the lived consequences of the Canadian authorities’ attempts at producing ‘faster results’ of immigration and ‘winning time’ by urging immigrants to arrive ‘already ready’ to become productive workers, and it argues that this political strategy aims to dislocate in time and in space certain processes usually associated with resettlement, making them part of pre-migration planning and preparation. This shift has important temporal consequences for migrants, both by imposing time-consuming obligations, creating temporal dilemmas and slowing down individual migration processes. The chapter engages with these issues by examining migrants’ personal experiences of temporal discrepancies in this period, as presented in their narratives. The narratives show how they negotiated various temporal forces in real life and created strategies to cope with the ambivalence and dilemmas that these forces represented with regard to their personal life projects.