I first met Mahmoud seated on a chair propped up against the wall of his house in Shatila, camp in Beirut. He was watching three men mend a broken sewer. Mahmoud was in his early twenties. He told me he liked to watch people working because it relieved the intolerable pressure of forced idleness. The image of Mahmoud silently watching laborers at work stuck in my mind as a troubling inversion of the classic Marxist definition of labor in which you work to rest, an almost literal equivalent of watching paint dry, where the mind settles on something constructive in order to generate a sense of momentum where there is none. Unemployed and deprived of the opportunities that would give meaning to daily life, Mahmoud’s experience was like that of many of Shatila’s disenfranchised young men, for whom a history of dispossession and displacement has evolved into one of immobility and exclusion. Unemployment is particularly debilitating for men because it prevents them from fulfilling cultural expectations of marrying and establishing households of their own. In a context where the future appears foreclosed the act of moving elsewhere opens up spaces of possibility. Increasingly, young men like Mahmoud are turning to emigration as a means of resisting the humiliation they experience and regaining agency and control. Both in its planning and execution, emigration has created space for speculation and hope because it introduces the possibility of discontinuity—both spatial and temporal—between who (and where) one is and what one might become. My paper explores the social, political and existential significance of migration among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. My analysis brings together the political economy of migration––both in its local and transnational dimensions––with a detailed ethnography of the culture and politics that surrounds it. Following histories of individual men as the move from one world to another, I consider the place of gender in the migratory project and the complex interplay of subjective and structural forces. The lure of futures elsewhere reveals aspirations that cut against the grain of Palestinian nationalism: seeking asylum in a third country complicates the relationship between home and homeland in subtle but significant ways. Examining the place migration now occupies within the Palestinian political imaginary involves rethinking the relationship between nation, people and place, and therefore contributes––albeit indirectly––to the reimagining of political alternatives.