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’.     

The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.     

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.     

‘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.     

Community Antagonism Towards Asylum Seekers in Port Augusta,South Australia

An overtly hostile response to asylum seekers was observed in questionnaire responses provided by residents of Port Augusta, South Australia in April 2002. A social construction approach to identity and representation was used to interrogate this antagonism within its social, cultural, political and geographical contexts. Asylum seekers were constructed as ‘burdensome’, ‘threatening’ and ‘illegal’, and opposition to them was set within the discursive framework of a ‘Self/Other’ binary. Enmity towards asylum seekers was articulated concurrently with overwhelming support for the Federal Government's exclusive and deterrence‐oriented asylum policies. However, vehement opposition was expressed regarding the government's decision to construct Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in close proximity to Port Augusta. Factors contributing to the respondents’ negative perceptions of asylum seekers include xenophobia (specifically Islamophobia), events of geopolitical significance, and problematic government and media representations of asylum seekers. An awareness of these factors is necessary to unpack and, potentially, to destabilise the negative constructions of asylum seekers circulating in contemporary Australian discourses. Their entrenchment in the national consciousness may lead to tangible social implications including fear, friction and ultimately violence between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and this should therefore be countered. Community antagonism also contradicts notions of a culturally tolerant Australia and fosters electoral support for the policies of exclusion and deterrence that undermine Australia's commitment to international human rights frameworks.

相似文献   

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.     

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.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

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.     

Spaces of nostalgia: the hollowing out of a London market

In this paper we look at the place of memory and nostalgia in peoples' narratives of an old, traditionally white, working-class market in London, which over the last decade has experienced social and economic decline. We argue that in this hollowed out space, abandoned by many of those who can move, has emerged a nostalgia for the halcyon days of the market when people came from far and wide to shop, and when there was a strong sense of community. What these nostalgic discourses mask are the social divisions (particularly racialized divisions) of the time, while in this romanticized vision of the past, the new population of asylum seekers have become an easy trope for the dissatisfactions of the present. Regeneration strategies in an area such as this need to confront the force of these nostalgic discourses in order to tackle the deep social and racial divisions and reverse the socio-economic decline.     

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.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

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.     

Accommodating Otherness: anti-asylum centre protest and the maintenance of white privilege

Geographers have recently progressed the debate on NIMBYism by demonstrating that opposition to new development is frequently motivated by white residents' desire to exclude non-white groups. In this paper, I extend this argument by exploring community opposition to a proposed accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Nottinghamshire (UK). Herein, I detail a rhetoric of opposition that ignored the multiple origins and ethnicities of asylum seekers to depict them as an undifferentiated Other group. Though local campaigners rarely referred directly to their own 'whiteness', I argue their campaign can only be understood within a racialized problematic, constituting an attempt to defend the privileges of an 'unmarked' whiteness against the imagined threat of a racialized Other. In conclusion, I argue that studies of NIMBYism must take careful account of the contingency of racial identities if they are to effectively contribute to the geographic literature that seeks to de-centre white privilege.     

Assessing community participation in local economic development — lessons for the new urban policy

Urban policy in Britain has long been characterised by circumscribed and fluctuating institutional structures of community involvement. From the Community Development Programmes of the early 1970s to the assertive neo-liberalism of the 1980s and back to the partnership based politics of the 1990s, community involvement in the construction and delivery of urban policy has been a critical theme. The new administration, with its emphasis on the ‘stakeholder’ society seems set to continue the trends of the 1990s by promoting the concept of partnership as something of a panacea for the difficulties and exclusionary politics that have dogged urban policy programmes. Consequently, a vital area of study into the next century concerns the form that local democratic structures will take and the relative levels and distribution of risk and reward that regeneration schemes create for different sections of local communities.Drawing on material from Cardiff, this paper examines the construction of local political relations in the new urban governance and addresses the issue of community involvement in the politics of local economic regeneration. In particular, it focuses on a small business association which emerged in the wake of the major regeneration programmes being undertaken by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), a powerful quango established by central government in the late 1980s. The study demonstrates how the association, which consisted of local businesses, tried to influence the local regeneration programmes and how its ‘pro-growth’ stance was actively used by the CBDC to legitimate its own policies in the face of wider criticisms from local residential groups. The paper looks at the difficulties of constructing local community participation and concludes that voluntarist, top-down partnership structures in existing policy may only serve to legitimate and implement policy decisions taken by powerful non locally-accountable regeneration agencies.     

Light and Darkness in an Edwardian Institution for the Insane Poor—Illuminating the Material Practices of the Asylum age

Natural light and its provision within asylum and other buildings is a neglected aspect of the historical archaeology of institutions. An Edwardian asylum in the north of Ireland is analysed for the management of natural light through the siting of buildings, window design and placement of interior glazing. A close reading of selected contemporary literature relating to natural light is employed to assess the significance of light provision within institutions of this period and contemporary discourses are in turn illuminated by the material practices recorded in the case study.     

The Liberal Paradox and the Politics of Asylum in Australia

This article interprets the politics of asylum in Australia in light of what James Hollifield calls ‘the liberal paradox’; that is, the trend amongst contemporary states towards greater transnational open-ness in the economic arena alongside growing pressure for domestic political closure. It begins with an outline of Australia's recent history of economic reform and of the discourse of globalisation that has been employed to legitimise the changes wrought by this transition. Focusing on the period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the article provides an account of anxieties associated with these changes and an analysis of government strategies to secure the support of disaffected sections of the electorate. Asylum policy is analysed in this context. The article shows how the policing of asylum seekers constitutes performances of political closure designed to assuage those made vulnerable by Australia's neoliberal economic trajectory. It argues that these politics of asylum are indicative of the tensions between transnational engagement and territorial closure faced by neoliberal states more generally.     

Control and Abandonment: The Power of Surveillance on Refugees in Italy,During and After the Mare Nostrum Operation

Migrants' daily arrivals to Italy's southern coasts and continuous shipwrecks in the Mediterranean have captured international media attention, producing a fixation on the scene of landing and a deliberate marginalization of what happens to migrants and refugees after the moment of landing. This paper aims to refocus analytical attention on the lives of asylum seekers after landing in Europe, breaking through the institutional silence that is cast upon the infrastructure of the camp, the logic of assistance and the bureaucratic waiting zone asylum seekers are stuck in. By documenting political changes in European and national policies, the paper reflects on the forms of institutional control and abandonment refugees are subjected to once they land in Italy, and are housed in the governmental camps and extraordinary structures which arose at the time of the Mare Nostrum Operation where strict discipline, carelessness, uncertainty and confusion intertwine.