Speculating about the migration crisis: acting from above and below on the Canary Islands route

In Europe, increased precarity characterises the lives of many people, making crisis-talk especially appealing as a framing mechanism to naturalise anti-migration policies within the EU. In 2020–2021, the EU and the Spanish government proclaimed a migration crisis and immobilised in dehumanising conditions a few thousand African migrants who had just arrived in the Canary Islands. This action was facilitated by narratives of migrant invasion and the view of Europe as a space of formality. This article asks what kinds of speculation the proclamation of a migration crises creates and who is doing the speculating. We stress that the term ‘speculation’ is based strongly on temporalities involving the creation of value by future predictions in uncertain circumstances. Using the Canary Islands as an example, we use this future-oriented understanding of speculation to emphasise that different actors, and not only financial ones, also imagine and act on the future as a sort of infraspeculation. While not losing sight of how the latter differs from financial speculation, it is important to highlight the diverse forms of agency in relation to migration within a quite complex changing policy and ­crisis-management environment.