Abstract
This article analyses practices of transnational care and the lives of male asylum seekers and refugee families in the context of increasingly restrictive border and migration regimes. Research on transnationalism, transnational families, and care among forced migrants has emphasised the importance of the institutional context in transnational care and family relations across borders. This article contributes to the extant literature by examining how bureaucratic bordering – within nation states and beyond – restricts the possibilities of refugees in providing care to their family members and reuniting. The article also examines the struggles experienced by male refugees at bureaucratic borders. These struggles reveal a central dimension to transnational care that relates to the bureaucracy of visas and residence permits. The article highlights the importance of temporality and examines how the lives of refugee families are affected by extended and bureaucratically induced waiting. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted on Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers in Finland in 2017–2019 and focuses on three asylum seekers in particular – namely, Amal, Sajed, and Yasin.
Highlights
In the autumn of 2015, during the ‘long summer of migration’ (Kasparek & Speer 2015), thirty-two-year-old Amal fled Kirkuk, Iraq, for Finland
I argue that considering how nation-state borders are implemented in practices of bureaucratic bordering is a useful analytical addition that helps us to understand the ways in which transnational care can be practiced
As the cases of Amal, Yasin, and Sajed demonstrate, men have an important role to play as providers of transnational care in refugee families
Summary
He received the news that his youngest daughter has been in a car accident in Iraq His wife is no longer speaking to Amal, because he has been in Finland for the past two-and-a-half years. Amal’s wife feels that he has abandoned his family and has threatened to divorce Amal if he does not return to Iraq. She refuses to speak to him on the phone and instead, only communicates by sending pictures of his daughter in the hospital. Transnational families, and care among forced migrants has emphasised the importance of the institutional context, state policies, and migration and asylum regimes I present the context for my research, the theoretical concepts that have guided my analysis, the analytical and methodological strategy, and a discussion of the three cases
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