Border Crises and Migrant Deservingness: How the Refugee/Economic Migrant Binary Racializes Asylum and Affects Migrants’ Navigation of Reception

Abstract

Focusing on Europe’s 2015 crisis in Italy and drawing on Balibar’s notion of “crisis racism,” this article discusses how the amplification of the refugee/economic migrant binary in “crisis” contexts carries asylum adjudication beyond courts, into the public sphere. Analyzing policy-related discourse and interviews with asylum seekers, I discuss how crisis racism feeds a culture of suspicion toward Black subjects, and how migrants understand their deservingness of protection in relation to social belonging. In crisis contexts, notions of deservingness have heightened significance for authorities, publics, and migrants, bolstering anti-Black racism, threatening asylum regimes, and putting migrants’ lives at risk.