“I Risk My Life in Search of a Better Life”

This chapter examines the experiences of African migrants whose attempts to reach Europe from Türkiye are shaped by prolonged waiting, restricted rights, and racialised exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in İstanbul and İzmir, it traces migrants’ trajectories before, during, and after attempts to cross the Türkiye–Greece maritime border. The chapter highlights the criminalisation and racialised controls that govern these journeys, including unlawful detention, deportation, and interception by Greek authorities, which reinforce structural inequalities and limit access to protection and safe passage. By focusing on the temporal dimensions of migration, the chapter demonstrates how waiting is enforced unevenly along racial and national lines, producing chronic precarity, marginalisation, and constrained mobility. It explores how these border regimes not only regulate movement but also shape everyday experiences of vulnerability and exclusion, extending the effects of systemic racism beyond the border itself. I argue that waiting is a long-term, socially imposed condition that structures African migrants’ access to geographic and social mobility.