Asylum System Research Articles

Caring and building friendships in the UK’s asylum system

To care and feel cared for are considered fundamental to what makes us human, and what enables us to live and thrive in this world. Yet for the UK’s asylum-seeking population who is living with uncertainties for the future, care appears absent. In such contexts, it is imperative to understand how care is enacted, experienced, and valued amongst spaces and people often considered to be care-less. Drawing on data collected in four collaborative photographic workshops and photo elicitation interviews with asylum seekers and refugees (ASRs) (N: 7), this study aims to gain insight into how ASRs in the UK care and feel cared for and their relative ability to forge friendships during their migration journey. We show how their relationship to caregiving and care-receiving changes over time and is deeply influenced by asylum policies and the refugee experience more generally. Responding to feminist scholars’ calls to disrupt the normative assumptions about how and between whom care is exchanged, this article highlights the diversity of friendships forged while on the move and seeking asylum as well as the caring practices emerging in situations of precarity, the pervasive impacts of the hostile environment on disrupting and distorting such caring relationships, and cautious but agentic and caring ways that ASRs seek to navigate the ambiguities of friendships in hostility. In doing so, the article provides an important counter-narrative to the dominant portrayal of ASRs as passive recipients of care, by highlighting how their way to approach care and friendship varies across time and circumstances.

Gender in European Union Asylum Law: The Istanbul Convention as a Game Changer?

Abstract The European Union (EU) has historically been a proactive player in advancing equality between women and men, and fighting gender-based discrimination. The past two decades have also seen the EU becoming a major actor in asylum law, with several EU secondary law instruments and a large amount of case law in EU Member States relating to the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Yet, these two areas of EU legislation – gender equality and asylum – have yet to become consistently connected. Similarly, judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union addressing gender-related elements of asylum cases are scarce. Could the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) help bridge the gap? The Istanbul Convention identifies gender-based violence as an extreme form of discrimination and contains a whole chapter dedicated to women in the context of migration. This article sheds light on the yet-to-be-realized potential of the Istanbul Convention to amplify the protective power of the Refugee Convention in the EU. While at present neither the Common European Asylum System, nor its new iteration in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, fully meets the standards of the Istanbul Convention, it may be expected that the EU’s accession to the treaty will further encourage a gender-sensitive approach in EU asylum law. The Istanbul Convention may well be a game changer for the protection of female asylum seekers, and possibly also for asylum seekers with other gender identities.

Injustice by design

ABSTRACT Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems.

Why failed asylum seekers should have a conditional right to stay: an ethical guideline for policy debates

This article aims to reconcile the moral rights of failed asylum seekers with the integrity of the asylum system. Can the state grant failed asylum seekers a right to stay without undermining the core purpose of the refugee system? Can the state sometimes return those whose asylum claim has failed without violating their moral rights? The article argues that restricting the rights of asylum seekers and reducing the length of the asylum process raise ethical concerns and practical problems. It emphasizes that liberal states should charitably interpret the norms of international protection. It proposes to extend the right to stay on social membership grounds qualified by a good faith condition, and limit returns to those that have lodged their claim in bad faith. Engaging with the good/bad faith distinction the article aims to counteract a culture of suspicion towards asylum seekers by clarifying what it really means to launch a claim in bad faith and to realign its scope in a morally appropriate way.

Enhancing the Rights of Protection-Seeking Migrants through the Global Compact for Migration: The Case of EU Asylum Policy

Abstract This article argues that the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) is not only a breakthrough for a rights-based approach in international migration governance but also an asset to the international protection system. By way of example, three key issues of the European Union’s (EU) Common European Asylum System are discussed: access to protection, reception conditions, and detention. These examples illustrate that faithfully implementing the Migration Compact would require the EU and its Member States to make significant changes in their asylum policy. The parallel emergence of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) may suggest otherwise – namely, that the GCM is not relevant for refugees and other protection-seeking migrants. However, the legal construction that best serves the object and purpose of both documents is the assumption that the two Compacts have an overlapping scope of application. The GCM addresses specific protection needs of protection-seeking migrants who are not covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention, and it serves as an umbrella, strengthening the core human rights of migrants regardless of their status, including protection-seeking migrants. Hence, the GCM improves the international protection system as a whole and should be acknowledged as such.

PRODUCING “ILLEGALITY”: THE RACIALIZATION OF MEXICAN AND CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM SEEKERS IN THE UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT As record numbers of Mexican and Central Americans arrive at the US-Mexico border, they encounter an asylum system that has evolved to exclude them. After detailing the specific legal changes that racialize these nationalities through criminalization, this study uses asylum data to illustrate how the current structure of the asylum process produces illegality for Mexican and Central Americans seeking protection in the US. We draw on asylum data outcomes for the largest groups filing defensive asylum claims to halt their deportation over the past decade to emphasize the impact of changing laws and the divergent impact of the implementation of those laws on Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran, Chinese, and Indian asylum seekers. While Chinese and Indian nationals have relatively high rates of success obtaining asylum, their Mexican and Central American counterparts are consistently denied asylum, partially as a result of their criminalization in the US asylum system.

From negative to positive internationalised protection: Attenuated solidarity and the practice of refugee protection

Abstract This article explores the growth of international civilian-protection concepts since the 1990s and the question of what protection means in a qualitative sense. It makes a significant intervention in advancing a typology of positive and negative protection, allowing more systematic analysis of whether protective practices fulfil the normative goals of internationalised protection and creating openings for expanded imagination of possible protective practices. It is argued that practices of refugee protection during this period have been shaped by logics of externalisation that seek to maintain distance between protector and protected and attenuate cosmopolitan solidarity with vulnerable non-citizens, both of which have detrimental impacts on the depth of protective practices and the experience of protection. These practices occur at the intersection of conflicting interpretative backdrops – between the cosmopolitan-minded commitments to the protection of vulnerable non-citizens and backdrops that frame migration as a problem. Using the case of the United Kingdom (UK) asylum system, the article argues that this is generative of negative protection – practices providing immediate physical protection, but simultaneously constructing conditions of acute vulnerability. Conversely, positive protection might be found in practices that embody fuller solidarity with protected people and enable them to flourish as a socially embedded individuals.

Everyday digital dis/connection: Locating slow violence in (non)encounters with the UK asylum state

AbstractEncounters with, within and between digital technologies have become characteristic of life in the contemporary moment. This is, often, no different for displaced individuals seeking asylum across European states. Smartphones have become part of the everyday ‘doing’ of life for individuals governed through asylum systems which now includes routinely encountering the state. Whilst smartphones are commonly said to offer the promised affordances of increased connection or communication, this paper aims to explore how everyday encounters with the UK asylum state fall short of these imagined expectations. In its place, the paper identifies how a series of ongoing (non)encounters—encounters that fail to manifest in expected ways; characterised by pauses, delays or voids—become characteristic of the everyday experience of being a digitally connected asylum seeker in the UK. Drawing upon a year‐long ethnographic research project with people actively seeking asylum in the UK between 2022 and 2023, this paper thus explores how the increased uptake of smartphone affordances within the UK asylum system contributes to the ongoing administration of state slow violence: experienced as exhaustion through everyday digital (non)encounters. Developing the concept of the (non)encounter for geographic research, this paper outlines how forms of dis/connection become characteristic of the state encounter for asylum‐seeking individuals. These modes of dis/connection are traced as slow violence along the contours of neoliberalisation and hostile assemblages of asylum governance within the UK context.

Where Asylum and Austerity Meet: Deservingness and In/Exclusion in Rochdale

AbstractThe UK's asylum and social welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations through a decade of austerity. With this, asylum‐seeker accommodation and the impacts of welfare reform have become increasingly concentrated in already‐impoverished, peripheral urban areas such as Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Despite these parallels, scholarship and commentary in the UK has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in relative isolation. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two charity drop‐centres in the town, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the UK's converging politics and geographies of asylum and welfare governance shape everyday negotiations of deservingness and social in/exclusion.

Sexual/Orientation: Navigating the Asylum System as a Queer Black Man in Edafe Okporo’s Asylum (2022)

Unable to live in his homeland of Nigeria because of his sexuality, Edafe Okporo fled to America. Seeking asylum in the so-called Land of the Free, however, proved harder than he expected. In his memoir and manifesto Asylum, Okporo traces his search for refuge from Nigeria to New York City.The result is a harrowing tale of loss, detailing Okporo’s tiresome fight to find refuge from persecution. Recent ethnographic studies have explored the experiences of queer refugees, specifically how queer community groups have supported and excluded queer refugees in asylum, but also how the safety of queer refugees within the asylum system is extremely precarious. Asylum, however, provides a rare insight into an asylum system from a queer refugee’s perspective. The narrative also offers an in-depth exploration into the often- hidden parts of the asylum process, such as his initial moments of exile and life in detention in the United States.

‘When they’re lying, and they say you’re lying, then there’s no hope’: Asylum-seeking, trauma, and the abusive state

This article explores the story of Sanwar, who fled Bangladesh following persecution for his sexuality, and spent five years struggling for asylum in the UK. Analysing our conversations together with his asylum paperwork, I show how trauma was apprehended in the asylum process, and how the process itself produced more trauma. Taking this trauma as diagnostic of state violence, I advance the notion of ‘the abusive state’: the disbelief Sanwar faced constituted gaslighting, echoing childhood abuse from his father, while the pressure to ‘change his story’, to perform as someone he was not, further figured as the impossible demand of a capricious, false authority. In the final section, I reflect on the moments when things fell apart and Sanwar attempted suicide, pointing to the ways in which suicidal subjectivities emerge in the asylum system. What might it mean to put suicide at the heart of our thinking, and feeling, about asylum? Keywords: asylum seeking; trauma; abuse; the state; suicide; immigration law

Defining “Crisis” in Migration Governance: a Critical Legal Mapping of EU Crisis Response Mechanisms

Abstract Over the past ten years, the language of crisis has become increasingly common in discourse about migration governance at the European Union (EU) level, and policy responses have been oriented by an emergency rationale that prioritizes short-term solutions over long-term planning. EU migration and asylum law incorporates several crisis response mechanisms, and the addition of a new set of instruments has recently been proposed. This paper offers a critical legal mapping of what counts as a “crisis” in EU migration and asylum law, and the mechanisms for responding to such crises. It exemplifies a complex system in which the tension between the imperative to address threats purportedly arising from unwanted migration is intricately intertwined with the necessity of granting Member States flexibility to respond to contingencies without compromising the integrity of the common EU asylum and migration system.

The reform of the Common European Asylum System in the context of the implementation the EU principle of solidarity

The polycrisis in the European Union has a great influence on the issue of solidarity. The events of recent years demonstrate a significant lack of solidarity within the EU. At the same time, solidarity is one of the principles of the Union’s immigration and asylum policy, as well as one of its key value. For a long time, it was assumed that all member states act in the spirit of mutual solidarity, which should flow from the very fact of a country’s membership in the EU. In other words, international solidarity within the Union is based on voluntariness, which does not require any special mechanism for its implementation. However, in recent years, this presumption has shown its inconsistency, and as a result, the idea has arisen to create a special solidarity mechanism. The migration crisis of 2015 forced the institutions of the Union to start reforming the Common European Asylum System, a key element of which is the creation of an effective solidarity mechanism within the Union. This article is devoted to the study of the transformation of the solidarity principle in the framework of the reform of the Common European Asylum System. The article highlights the main stages of the protracted reform of asylum legislation, reveals the key features of each stage from a solidarity perspective. The author comes to the conclusion that the proposed asylum system in the EU will not become fairer and will not ensure the implementation of the principle of solidarity. At the same time, the reform of the asylum policy could lead to an increase in the centralization of this policy and the expansion of the powers of the Union bodies, which will not make it possible to resolve the current problems and provide solidarity. Thus, solidarity will turn out to be only a tool in the hands of the institutions of the Union for carrying out planned reforms. According to the author, at the moment one can observe the transformation of solidarity within the EU into collectivism, when the interests of the Union are put above the interests of the member states, and the latter are forced to follow a common policy against their will.

‘Living, that’s what we do’: an ethnographic account of time and leisure in the British asylum system

ABSTRACT For many, wage labour dictates the rhythm of everyday life, delineating hours of rest, recreation, and labour. For people seeking asylum – most of whom have no right to work and subsist on support payments below the level of destitution – such divisions are less clear. This makes grappling with the concepts of time and leisure in the asylum system important. People seeking asylum often wait years for a decision on their claim and, in the UK, the application process often involves multiple rounds of application and re-application over several years. This has profound implications for leisure. In this article, I explore the leisure practices of people seeking asylum in the city of Sheffield in the north of England. By looking at the temporal power exercised by the state over people seeking asylum, I consider access to parks and greenspaces; parties, drinking and smoking. I find that greater attention needs to be paid to informal use of greenspaces; leisure practices beyond targeted interventions to promote integration or cohesion; and discourses around legitimate leisure in the asylum system. I conclude by calling for more sustained engagement with what the temporal demands of the asylum system mean for how we understand leisure.

Contested Appropriations: Informal Migrant Settlements as Ambiguous Spaces Beyond Temporal Borders

Temporalities of control are a key element of the migration reception regime: deadlines, waiting times, and limited durations of stay link safe housing to temporal and normative prerequisites. As a result, those who are unable to cross these temporal borders are stuck outside of reception and beyond the temporal nomos of the asylum system, in heightened im-mobility, cut off from protection mechanisms, and in a vicious circle of illegalisation. Based on a literature review and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Italy between 2018 and 2023, and from the analytical vantage point on migrant practices of appropriation, this article aims to explore informal camps as ambiguous spaces between coercion and subversion. While informality is used by state authorities to disrupt migrant multiplicities, mobilities, and temporalities, it can at the same time become a loophole for migrants to evade control, deportation, and detention and to pursue their migration projects. Through practices of appropriation, migrants regain not only time and space but also rights that have been denied to them. In doing so, they contest the temporalities of control, demonstrating that time can be “taken” through endured limbo, but that it is still relative and can thus be recoded. Despite presenting informality as an arena of collective renegotiation, the article concludes arguing against a romanticisation of informal encampments, showing that they are subject to politics of violence and abandonment.

(Non-)Institutional Manifestations of Migrant Infrastructures for Refugees in Rural Greece

The year 2015 was a turning point for the migration and asylum system in the EU and Greece.Almost 900,000 migrants and refugees crossed Turkey’s land and sea borders on their way to Europe. Theso-called ‘migration and refugee crisis’ dominated the academic and political discourse and provokeddifferent reactions from local communities, civil society and long-time resident migrants. Especially in ruralareas, the newly arriving refugees triggered different reactions from the local population. At the sametime, accommodating the refugees and facilitating their integration into rural localities created additionalinfrastructure needs. Drawing on the theoretical discussion on migrant infrastructures’ and ‘arrivalinfrastructures’, the main objective of this paper is to discuss the different manifestations of migrantinfrastructures in rural communities, in Western Greece in particular. The paper draws on a recentempirical study conducted in the framework of a project that explored territorial inequalities and the linkswith different forms of mobility in both urban (Attiki Region) and rural areas of Greece (Western GreeceRegion). While the discussion on arrival infrastructures mainly relates to urban settings, in this paperwe argue that the rural context informs and enriches the debate, allowing to be considered in termsof non-fixed assemblages of institutional (formal) and non-institutional (informal) arrangements that fulfilboth tangible and less tangible needs and requirements. Forging better links between the migrationinfrastructures approach and the formulation of imaginaries and characteristics of wellbeing will enablea better understanding of refugee agency, and one more informed by social theory.

Governancestrukturen in der Grenz- und Asylpolitik: starke europäische Agenturen, schwache mitgliedstaatliche Souveränität

This article analyses the impact of recent reforms in the Common European Asylum System on the governance structure of asylum and border policies of the European Union (EU). Drawing on the Core State Power framework and New Intergovernmentalism, we argue that recent regulations have significantly strengthened Frontex and the European Union Agency for Asylum (previously known as European Asylum Support Office) and therefore contribute to independent capacity building at the EU level. Interestingly, much of this capacity existed before it was codified by EU law, showing a remarkable trend of ex post judicialization. The Migration Forum suggested in the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation, however, is largely intergovernmental and thus rather confirms expectations of New Intergovernmentalist theories. Moreover, the proposals to enhance solidarity remain cautious and suggest no significant sovereignty transfers.

Shifting equality from the margins: the Common European Asylum System and the making of trans rights in the European Union

This article investigates the role played by the main European cooperation mechanism on asylum, the Common European Asylum System, in the making of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex rights in the European Union. Based on a one-year qualitative inquiry in Brussels and online, it shows that European Union asylum policies were a key arena for the consolidation, invention and renegotiation of European Union lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex rights, especially concerning trans recognition. This pioneering role, far from being fortuitous, was part of the conscious strategy of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex movement to use asylum as a ‘side door’ to the creation of a de facto recognition of ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic. Characterising this phenomenon as a ‘politics of interstices’ and analysing the importance of ignorance (and not just knowledge) as a tool for policy change, this article makes the case for an analysis of policymaking that acknowledges the importance of non-equality-specific arenas in the making of equality norms.

Bordering subjectivities: the psychic holds of Britain’s asylum system

ABSTRACT Questions of subjectivity are increasingly key to critical studies of migration, which highlight the production of subjectivities as one of the central functions of borders. Yet the question of how borders operate at a psychic level is rarely considered. Drawing inspiration from Gail Lewis’s psychosocial approach to the racial formation of subjects and focusing on the UK asylum system, this article examines how borders shape and are navigated within psychic reality over time. Through close analysis of ethnographic material, I propose the concept of “psychic holds” to understand some of the ways in which borders impinge upon the psychic mobility of those they target over time. This term captures a dual process, invoking both the subjective chokeholds and deep attachments that may be involved in the bordering of subjectivities. These psychic holds, I argue, operate in the long durée, often far outlasting the temporary legal categories created by migration regimes.

Providing permanent protection to refugees in Australia: Real change or window dressing?

This article argues that the recent changes to Australia’s rolling temporary protection regime do not mark a shift away from Australia’s flawed and unjust asylum system for two key reasons. First, the government did not repeal the temporary protection regime nor the fast track process. Secondly, the changes mobilise and perpetuate the inherent hostility of Australia’s asylum seeker policies targeting ‘irregular arrivals’. This article offers a critical analysis of the design and operation of Australia’s asylum system, as well as an examination of the 2023 changes and the political and journalistic discourse surrounding their announcement.