Street dealers in Geneva

In Geneva, several streets in the city center are characterized by the daily presence of drug dealers. Waiting on the sidewalks, they approach passers-by, in search of potential customers, sometimes for several hours at a time. Their visibility and regular presence have made them familiar figures in the neighborhoods in which these points of sale are located (Felder and Pignolo 2018; Felder et al. 2015). However, these dealers did not grow up in Geneva and have not generally been involved in dmg dealing for several years. These are West African migrants who have migrated illegally to Europe and tried to apply for asylum there, in the hope of acquiring better living conditions. Rejected or discouraged by the asylum process, these migrants finally found themselves in Geneva, where they saw the dealing of drugs (mainly cannabis, cocaine or ecstasy) as an alternative means of survival, providing them with an income in a context where, for lack of valid documents, the formal labor market is restricted to them.
The scenes where deals take place discussed here probably do not represent, by far, the entire illegal drug market in Geneva. In the same urban space, several markets generally coexist (Coomber and Tumbull 2007). Yet, West African street dealers have attracted particular media attention. Moreover, probably because of their dual status of illegality, both in terms of their activity and their status as undocumented migrants, their presence has not failed to generate political controversy in recent years. The problem of street dealing is thus intertwined in Geneva (as in other cities in Switzerland) with the thorny issue of illegal migration, to such an extent that in Switzerland, according to Veuthey (2014, p. 63); "Nowadays, the political-media figure of the dealer is almost systematically identified with a young black man, seeking asylum, practicing street dealing (usually marijuana and cocaine)" (author's translation).
This chapter proposes to report the results of sociological research conducted in 2015 to understand what drug dealing meant to these people on a daily basis and what issues were related to it. The chapter is structured as follows: after a brief literature review on drug dealers, the research question and survey methodology will be presented. Then, the results will be presented in three stages, before proposing, on the basis of them, a conclusion on West African street dealers in Geneva. [Extract]