The space-times of migration and debt: Re-positioning migrants' debt and credit practices and institutions in, and through, London

This paper interrogates the space-times of migration and debt in, and through, the global city of London. It advances three key arguments. First, we argue that migration must be understood as a financial practice situated within specific space-times thus highlighting the destructive debt implications of current migration policies. Second, exploring debt through a migration lens problematizes its spatial and temporal boundaries. In both its guise as a debt advice industry and resistance, the focus is largely on formal debts situated within territorially bounded nation-states. Yet, migrants' debt ecologies traverse myriad boundaries such that formal/informal, economic/social and market/nonmarket debts are folded into, and sit alongside, each other. Third we argue that spatial and temporal explorations of the migration-debt nexus potentially affords new insight into the politics of migration and debt. Drawing upon research with migrants from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Brazil, we explore how debt shapes migration; the creation, management and resolution of 'new' formal debts in London and migrants' participation in and creation of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in the city. The paper concludes by identifying broader lessons which can be drawn from migrants debt relations in configuring spatial and temporal politics of debt and credit.