Abstract
The past decades of inquiry into the “what, where, and who” of borders have more recently been followed by an interest in borders’ temporal dimensions. In this article, I contribute to this research by analyzing how border temporalities operate on the scale of the lived experiences of rejected asylum seekers in Germany. My point of departure is the so-called Ausbildungsduldung, which since 2016 has permitted the suspension of deportation for rejected asylum seekers who start vocational training. After three years of training glimmers a promised residency permit. I approach the Ausbildungsduldung as a biopolitical technique of bordering and focus on its temporal aspects. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how young Afghan asylum seekers negotiate the Ausbildungsduldung and how they can make its promised future their own. I show how the state deploys techniques of “future giving,” suspension, and deportability to produce skilled workers, and argue that the Ausbildungsduldung works as a bordering technique by producing affective attachments to a particular future trajectory, and by elevating certain ways of dealing with suspension and deportability in support of this trajectory. Showing how migrants are compelled to “wait well” while confined to a condition of deportability, the paper highlights how migrants’ experiences and practices of time become central to processes of bordering.
Highlights
I am sitting next to Alan in his lawyer’s office in central Hamburg on an August afternoon in 2017
I am thinking about his words in the waiting room: “I cannot stay like this . . . I think about my future, you know.”
This work highlights the centrality of pace, deadlines, and deferral in the control and governing of migrants and illuminates how prolonged waiting saturates migrants’ everyday lives
Summary
I am sitting next to Alan in his lawyer’s office in central Hamburg on an August afternoon in 2017. In the context of the Ausbildungsduldung, the analytical lens of recalibration highlights how the regulation’s promise of a (German) future comes with the expectation that migrants synchronize their temporal practices and experiences to its particular spatiotemporal order, or what I call border timespace. From a perspective underlining the entanglements between capital and biopower, Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) for example analyze how border regimes manipulate and stretch migrants’ time to produce governable and useful subjects from “ungovernable flows” (149) As such, they form part of a broader literature focusing on how techniques such as programmed delays, suspension, and deportability function to synchronize migrant mobility with the needs of national and global labor markets (Barber and Lem, 2018; De Genova, 2013; Tsianos et al, 2009). By paying ethnographic attention to material and discursive practices of synchronization, the analysis allows visibility to how these are resisted and negotiated
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
