Temps migratoires en tension

The kafala is a system of guarantee for immigrants in the Arab world. In Lebanon, it produces a highly restrictive regulatory environment for non-Arab migrants; this institution organizes the import of a vast majority of women from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to become domestic employees. It imposes its - as defined - global institution's temporality to migration. It conflicts with the other temporalities that shape the migratory space : temporalities of individuals on the move, whose careers fit into the hierarchy of socio-economic baseline and into the hierarchy between host countries; temporalities of migration industry, that develop a cleaved rationality of their own. In this paper, we want to present the contradiction of migration time and temporalities, in order to understand the resulting negative social relationships. We also study the normative workarounds that migrants and other actors operate in the pursuit of their goals on this globalized scene