“It is kind of rough out here”: the hard work of mobility

In this story, I trace how the compulsion to work has shaped the lives of Elias and Biruk, two men who left their home country, Ethiopia, and now live in the US. Despite working hard at multiple jobs, work was not something they celebrated. Working hard was the embodiment of their precarity, simply the main currency in their lives of mobility. Were Biruk and Elias refugees? Undocumented migrants? Alien residents? What they told me about their lives over the phone did not help me understand their status in the US. Face to face, I had a chance to ask them a straightforward question, but Biruk and Elias did not reply by saying: “I am this, not that.” Their status would be stable and definable only when they got a paper recognizing they had a right to be in the US. Before that all-important scrap of paper, they were in a state of constant becoming. All they could do in the meantime was work and work. Because “if you do not work, what the hell are you in the USA for?” Elias said.