Rethinking commonality in refugee status determination in Europe: Legal geographies of asylum appeals

The Common European Asylum System aims to establish common standards for refugee status determination among EU Member States. Combining insights from legal and political geography we bring the depth and scale of this challenge into sharp relief. Drawing on interviews and a detailed ethnography of asylum adjudication involving over 850 in-person asylum appeal observations, we point towards practical differences in the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics of asylum appeal processes as they are operationalised in seven European countries. Our analysis achieves three things. Firstly, we identify a key zone of differences at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped academic attention, which allows us to critically assess the notion of harmonisation of asylum policies in new ways. Secondly, drawing on legal- and political-geographical concepts, we offer a way to conceptualise this zone by paying attention to the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics it involves. Thirdly, we offer critical legal logistics as a new direction for scholarship in legal geography and beyond that promises to prise open the previously obscured mechanics of contemporary legal systems.     

Family,community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics

Abstract

This article explores how the medicalization of poverty in 19th-century aetiologies of insanity provided the basis for which the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum became an option for the relief and treatment of the poor. It is argued that the poor, their communities and poor law officials, by being key to the process of committal, were partially responsible for the asylum population and the role that the asylum played in the local community. The article explores how important poverty was in asylum admissions and, from an analysis of the length of stay of those entering the asylum, the number of patients for whom the asylum provided short-term respite. Using case histories of patients, the article argues for the asylum to be seen as part of the poor law process that discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor.     

Presentational state power: temporal and spatial influences over asylum sector decisionmakers

Previous analyses of forced migration have drawn attention to the increasing discretion held by asylum sector decisionmakers. According to these accounts, as the state reacts to the political risks associated with asylum migration control, responsibility for forced migration management is increasingly transferred onto a range of intermediate actors, between state and society, including local government employees, asylum interviewers, immigration judges and security staff. Yet little research has directly addressed these intermediaries' collective experiences and the influences to which they are subject. The article therefore focuses attention explicitly upon the nominal conduct of this increasingly authorised, discretionary and highly heterogeneous population. Drawing upon 37 interviews across four sites at which asylum sector intermediaries have significant and increasing discretion over asylum seekers' experiences, the findings demonstrate the importance of institutionalised timing and spacing for the determination of their volitional conduct. The timing and spacing of government institutions are important, not only through their influence over asylum seekers directly, but also because they present asylum seekers to those with discretionary authority in ways that are conducive to exclusionary uses of this authority.     

‘Staying active’ in confined living conditions: participation assessments of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) in the Netherlands†

This article contributes to the critical literature on child participation discussing the positionings of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) residing in a Dutch asylum centre. It queries participation as an institutional measure, outlining the informants’ perspectives on the creation of a youth council within the confines of an asylum centre. Contradictions and tensions in the wider societal context, in the asylum centre, and in the functioning of the youth council are identified. They demonstrate the gulf between theory and practice in the fulfilment of children's participation rights. The authors scrutinize concepts such as ‘methodological immaturity’, ‘voice’, and ‘recognition’ and argue for the integration of the perceptions and practices of young asylum seekers through dialogue. This can assist in creating an atmosphere conducive to an ethically responsible and meaningful collaboration with young asylum seekers and adapted policy interventions to enhance participation against an on-going backdrop of insecurity, exclusion, and forced inactivity.     

Constructions of Australia in pro‐ and anti‐asylum seeker political discourse

ABSTRACT. Whilst there has been a proliferation of research on the role of nationalism in the exclusion of asylum seekers, less attention has been paid to how nationalism can be mobilised in accounts opposing, rather than supporting, harsh anti‐asylum seeker regimes. This paper compares the ways in which ‘Australia’ is constructed and used in parliamentary speeches on asylum seekers by both refugee advocates and those seeking harsher asylum seeker laws in Australia. This dual focus is particularly important as it highlights the flexibility of nationalist discourse, in that the same constructions of the nation may be used for both exclusive and inclusive purposes. Whilst typologies of inclusive and exclusive nationalisms, such as Smith's (1991) ethnic/civic typology, focus on the content of nationalist ideologies, we argue that the inclusivity or exclusivity of nationalism can best be determined by examining the subject positions, political solutions and social realities they make possible, and who these discourses benefit and oppress.     

Local press,dispersal and community in the construction of asylum debates

How has the prominent and contentious international issue of asylum been debated at a local level; what local variations are there and why? This paper presents analysis of local newspapers and interviews with press workers for Cardiff and Leeds, two UK case study locations that have received asylum seekers through the dispersal policy. The case studies show that asylum is framed and constructed differently by the local press in different places with implications for reactions to asylum seekers and community cohesion. The relations between local press and community are explored as explanations for varying discourses. It is found that the way the local press represents and constructs local identity sets the framework for reactions to dispersal; and that the operation of the local press within local networks of power and information shapes the extent to which established discourses can be challenged. For Cardiff, the localising of asylum through the dispersal policy created an opportunity for local negotiation of difference in the context of the national moral panic on asylum.     

Living in a ‘free jail’: Asylum seekers' and local residents' experiences of discomfort with asylum seeker accommodation

This paper shows how asylum seeker accommodation produces a politics of discomfort among both asylum seekers as well as local residents. The paper compares two collective asylum centres located in the city of Augsburg, Germany, one of which is a nationally renowned refugee integration project, the ‘Grandhotel Cosmopolis’, the other, a state-run asylum centre. Data was obtained through participant observation and semi-structured interviews between September 2016 and November 2017. Drawing on carceral geographies, the paper identifies three mechanisms through which the material and institutional standards of asylum accommodation generate discomfort among and between asylum seekers and local residents, which are self-mortification, depersonalization and role-breakdown. Through the sharing of rooms and facilities, asylum accommodation contributes to asylum seekers' self-mortification, referring to changes in the conceptions and beliefs of oneself. The comparison of the two cases highlights how large asylum centres depersonalize asylum seekers by creating images of a homogenized ‘mass’ and contribute to role-breakdown, meaning a reduction of individuals' identities performed with regard to work, home or family life. National discourses of asylum seekers as dangerous merged with the space of asylum accommodation, thereby preventing social interaction ‘as neighbours’ between asylum seekers and local residents. Overall, the paper exposes how a politics of discomfort utilizes affect as a governmental device, thereby turning asylum accommodation into a carceral space by creating social distance and ‘moral closure’.     

Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation

Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.     

Deliberation and Resecuritization: Australia,Asylum-Seekers and the Normative Limits of the Copenhagen School

In the lead-up to the Australian federal election in 2010, both major political parties represented the ‘unauthorised’ arrival of asylum-seekers as a security issue. This article explores the dynamics of this resecuritization of asylum in Australia, suggesting the case has important implications for both the securitization framework and Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers. The relationship between securitization and calls for an open debate about asylum-seekers challenges the securitization framework's normative claims about political debate and deliberation as a progressive development illustrative of desecuritization (the removal of issues from the security agenda). This case also illustrates that without political leadership to engage with the social and cultural context that allows the securitization of asylum to resonate with large segments of the Australian population, the exploitation of this issue for short-term political gain will continue.     

Governmental mobility: The power effects of the movement of detained asylum seekers around Britain's detention estate

This paper explores the ways in which mobility can have governmental effects in the context of the management of asylum seekers awaiting deportation from the UK. Drawing upon the case of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, a facility for the incarceration of immigration deportees near Oxford, the paper makes the case that the way asylum seekers are moved between detention centres within the UK has implications for the way they are represented to both asylum activists and asylum sector employees, causing them to choose to use their influence differently by with-holding the support that they might otherwise provide. The constant moving and repositioning of asylum seekers means that they are depicted as transitory, fleeting and depersonalised to those actors with the greatest degree of influence over them. The subjection not only of asylum seekers through forceful, blunt forms of power, but also of more powerful asylum sector actors through subtler, governmental techniques, has significant material implications for the incarcerated asylum seeking community that populates Britain's detention estate.     

Enter the myopticon: Uncertain surveillance in the Danish asylum system (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Foucault's panopticon, I want to suggest a counterpoint to the panopticon, which I call the ‘myopticon’ to indicate the near‐sightedness of the central surveying eye. The myopticon is a near‐sighted system of surveillance practices, knowledges and sanctions, deployed as though it were panoptic. I want to suggest that the uncertainty that has soaked through the Danish asylum system and profoundly affected the asylum seekers in it is not a byproduct of bureaucratic processing, but intrinsic to the operation of the myopticon. By drawing out points of distinction with Foucault's panopticon, I sketch the outlines of a new technology of power that has powerful consequences for the daily lives of asylum seekers in Denmark.     

On the Temptations of Sovereignty: The Task of Catholic Social Teaching and the Challenge of UK Asylum Seeking

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the main tenets of Catholic social teaching as they relate to the politics of asylum in a UK context. Addressing the multilayered and complex crisis of confidence and asylum seekers with regard the moral performance of the UK system, this article proposes that the significance of CST's contribution to public discourse has been heightened by three key shifts in state practice. While the constructive contours of this teaching are explored, to be of service to forced migrants CST itself requires a deeper understanding of and engagement with the political cultures that shape practices of democratic exclusion. To this end the conclusion proposes two areas for further dialogue between CST and asylum experience.     

Asylum and the Post‐Political: Domopolitics,Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship

This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post‐political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper questions the tendency within “post‐political” thought to strip the potential of modes of informal citizenship through arguing that minor acts of resistance are ineffectual and illusory. In response, the paper explores irregular migrant's “acts of citizenship”, and suggests that such prosaic acts can be powerful forms of political interruption through which new ways of seeing asylum are constructed. The paper concludes by suggesting that an incremental politics orientated around such acts of interruption is essential to challenge the material, affective and discursive closures of asylum domopolitics.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

‘You said “home” but we don’t have a house’ – children’s lived rights and politics in an asylum centre in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This study explores children’s lived rights and articulated politics in the context of housing underpinned by their lived experiences in an asylum centre in Sweden. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the children’s articulated standpoints, where well-being is connected to having a home, and their lived experiences of lacking conditions for both house and home at the asylum centre. This discrepancy enables demonstration of the children’s articulated politics, as they criticize conditions, practices and relational aspects they experience as constraining their well-being at the asylum centre. Thereby, the children themselves identify the structural denial of their right to conditions for well-being and adequate housing. They also express what conditions for well-being should be accessible to them, which is interpreted here as their making rights claims when their formal rights are not fulfilled.     

‘Vile liars and truth distorters’; Truth,trust and the asylum system (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Immigration detainees and failed asylum seekers constitute some of the most mistrusted persons in British society. There is some basis to this stereotype – many people do provide information they know to be untrue or request asylum when they have no valid claim under the Refugee Convention. One could of course challenge this picture by critiquing the definition of ‘lies’, identifying flawed bureaucratic assumptions about what information people can be expected to know, and highlighting the reductive narrowness of immigration categorisation. However, rather than examine the association of asylum seekers with lying, this paper draws on ethnographic research to explore how those within the asylum system experience, understand and explain the bureaucracy they are embedded in. It suggests that deception, uncertainty and mistrust are as much characteristics of asylum seekers' perspective of the immigration system as of the reverse. In so doing, the paper contributes to a wider discussion about the fairness and consistency of immigration systems, as recently addressed in this journal by Caroline White and Zachary Whyte (White, 2012; Whyte, 2011).”     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin

Asylum policies in Britain and in the countries of its EU partners are failing to cope with the demands made upon them. With migration pressures mounting and opportunities for legal immigration to many EU states restricted, larger numbers of potential migrants are turning to alternative means of entry and access, namely irregular migration and asylum channels. The responses of states to these challenges have been to adopt more restrictive policies and practices that have considerably changed the balance between immigration control and refugee protection. While states have the right to control entry and enforce their borders, the restrictive measures that have come to dominate policy-making and recent immigration enforcement initiatives in Britain and its European partners do not sufficiently discriminate between asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants, thereby failing to safeguard the right of refugees to seek protection. Current British proposals to move asylum seekers to 'safe areas' in regions of origin fail to understand the burdens, pressures and priorities of countries in the regions, fail to ensure effective protection for those in need, and are unlikely to deliver the UK policy objective of substantially reducing the numbers of illegal entries to Britain. What is needed is an approach that reduces the number of individuals seeking protection in Europe while maintaining the European tradition of providing asylum to those in genuine need. The 'missing link' in asylum policy that would respond both to the concerns of states and to the protection needs of refugees is more comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin. It is in this way that western asylum countries, including the UK, may best address the challenge of providing international protection to victims of persecution and respond to their own concerns about asylum.     

Memorialisation and remembrance: on strategic forgetting and the metamorphosis of psychiatric asylums into sites for tertiary educational provision

This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum.     

Getting the best of both worlds? Britain,the EU and migration policy

In perhaps unexpected ways Britain has become quite closely linked to key aspects of EU migration and asylum policy. This could be a rather surprising outcome given that the UK is outside Schengen, opted out of the free movement, asylum and migration provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty and remains fixed on the maintenance of border controls at ports of entry to the UK. However, the differential and conditional engagement that has developed with EU migration and asylum policy has been described by Tony Blair as ‘getting the best of both worlds’. What could it mean to get the best of both worlds? Can the ‘two worlds’ of Britain and Europe be so neatly distinguished? To answer these questions the article surveys the extent of British engagement with EU migration and asylum policy and explains when, how and why the UK has opted into key aspects of it, particularly the more coercive components concerned with asylum and border controls.