For some years now, young Senegalese have been attempting to emigrate irregularly by sea aboard cayucos, or by land aboard trucks and pick-ups. While the causes, consequences, methods of financing and policies to prevent travel has been widely studied, the profiles of candidates for irregular migration have received little attention from researchers and political decision makers. It is with this in mind that this contribution aims to examine in depth the profiles of these candidates for irregular migration, little explored in the analysis of irregular migration in the Senegalese context. Using the Casamance region, where we have been conducting research on irregular migration for over ten years, as our point of observation, and drawing on a rich corpus of 70 life histories of would-be migrants, this contribution sets out to highlight the different profiles of would-be migrants and shows how, over the years, these profiles have undergone profound change because of the diversification of migration routes to both Europe and the USA.