People Seeking Asylum Research Articles

Are asylum seekers and refugees provided with appropriate mental health support in the United Kingdom?

ABSTRACT Over 220,000 asylum seekers and refugees (ASR) lived in the United Kingdom in 2021. Traumatic experiences lived during the different phases of the migration process make people seeking asylum vulnerable to mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress and depression. Assessments conducted by various local authorities since 2016 stress the need to improve ASR’s access to appropriate mental health support, but lack clarity on how to achieve this. This article explores perceptions of mental health support needs for ASR, and contrasts them to service provision. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with nine ASR and six individuals who provide wellbeing support to ASR living in Brighton and Hove, and were analysed via thematic analysis using NVivo. Three main themes emerged, relating to the need for holistic mental health support for ASR, the disjunctive between perceived needs and the available support, and the barriers to accessing existing services. Findings highlight the need for holistic, specialised, culturally sensitive and sustainable mental health support for ASR, and illustrate how training healthcare receptionists on the rights and entitlements of ASR and greater support services coordination can help strengthen ASR’s access to the available support services and their mental wellbeing.

Sites of intensity: leisure and emotions amid the necropolitics of asylum

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to highlight new insights on the social and political dimensions of emotions experienced within leisure through a specific focus on the everyday lives of people seeking asylum in the UK. In doing so, we draw on and expand inter-disciplinary perspectives that have underlined how the affective intensities and (in)capacities of bodies, and the conditions through which these emerge in everyday lives, are central in the workings of power. Leisure scholars have advanced important analyses on the politics of affects and emotions at the intersection of gendered, sexual and racialised axis of difference. Yet, the relevance of these perspectives has yet to be fully explored in articulating leisure, forced migration and the (necro)politics of asylum. Drawing on two ethnographic studies with people seeking asylum and their allies in Bristol and Leeds, UK, this paper contributes to address this gap by looking at two different leisure domains, music-making and football, as sites of intensity: not just discursive or symbolic, but lived, embodied and felt domains where the gradual wounding produced by the asylum regime is both made manifest and negotiated.

Categorising anti-asylum Seeker Sentiment through a Regime of Securitisation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we reveal three classes of asylum seeker sentiment in the Australian population. The first group are pro-asylum seekers who think Australians should help refugees, that government agencies should not be turning back boats carrying people seeking asylum, that immigration levels are low, and that current government policy is too tough. The second group are anti-asylum seekers who strongly disagree with helping refugees and people seeking asylum, and support a tough border policy. A third group are pro-government policy but largely sympathetic to refugees and people seeking asylum. We explain the demography and attitudes of these three groups using the theory on border securitisation. The securitisation actions and discourse position people seeking asylum as a threat. This has received widespread public endorsement. This is an empirical reflection of over two decades of influential Australian government discourse of antipathy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Successive Australian governments have tied those seeking asylum who arrive by boat with strict border enforcement policies that target people seeking asylum as a security threat to be repelled from the Australian mainland. This largely negative discourse has supported the merits of tough border controls. However, this discursive campaign has not entirely eradicated sympathy towards refugees and asylum seekers.

A feminist geopolitics of living: Syrians’ struggles to maintain and reunite intimate ties across borders

In this article, I examine the protracted separation of Syrian families. As the number of people seeking asylum in Europe spiked during the summer of 2014, Denmark introduced a new refugee protection status to the Danish Aliens Act, known as §7.3: A General Temporary Protection Status (GTPS). This status enables recipients to legally reside in Denmark. Yet, it crucially permits the Danish state to suspend recipients’ right to family reunification for a three-year period, creating a condition of protracted separation. While feminist scholars have called attention to how intimate ties are being deliberately targeted by western states, I argue that there remains much to be said about how people actively negotiate these forms of bordering, sustain kinship, and build futures. To this end, I examine Syrians’ lived experiences of forced separation and their efforts to maintain intimate ties across time and space. Building on feminist and postcolonial scholars’ attention to life-making practices, I develop the analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living. This article offers two crucial insights. First, it makes visible the intimate and often hidden ways that the violence of protracted separation is materialized through kinship ties. Second, it illuminates the central roles of kinship ties within the struggles against violent bordering regimes. I argue that this analytic helps to understand how people make lives, assert rights, and build alternative futures collectively. In doing so, I grapple with the uncomfortable tensions, possibilities, and constraints at work within intimate ties.

Exploring the place of adult learning for refugees and asylum seekers in migration policy for integration in England and Scotland

Learning, particularly learning English is presented as a key part of integration for adult migrants in the UK. England and Scotland differ in how their policy approaches to integration include adult learning. This article aims to explore and uncover the ways in which adult education, particularly for refugees and asylum seekers is embedded and included in policy for integration of new migrants in England and Scotland. This is based on a discourse analysis of policy documents, through which themes were developed and explored. In these documents, adult education can be included in explicit ways, particularly when it comes to language learning, while informal learning is not always explicitly considered. In England, British values are highlighted as an important area for learning, while Scottish policy uses a different tone, referring to newcomers as ‘New Scots’. The ways in which certain groups, particularly people seeking asylum are politically constructed, appear to impact greatly on how they are included in policy. This paper argues for the need for an explicit policy for adult learning for refugees and asylum seekers, the need to consider informal learning in policy, and identifies areas for future research in the field of adult learning relating to migration.

Offshore detention: cross-sectional analysis of the health of children and young people seeking asylum in Australia

ObjectiveTo describe the health and well-being of children and young people (CYP) seeking asylum subjected to Australia’s immigration policy of indefinite mandatory detention on Nauru.DesignCross-sectional analysis of a cohort of...

“How about Asylum Seekers who are Homeless?” The Racialised Logics Behind State Designed Strategies of Containment and Control During Covid-19 and Anti-Racist Alternatives: A Glasgow Case Study

This paper asks two questions: How has the Covid-19 pandemic been experienced by people seeking asylum who are subjected to United Kingdom (UK) State designed-in destitution? And what might be the alternatives to State produced destitution? To answer these questions, we draw on two case studies from Glasgow, a city unique in the UK for its long history of asylum dispersal and its deeply embedded ecology of third-sector support and asylum advocacy work. We argue that to understand the segregatory power of dispersal and tiered welfare provision as forms of violent migration governance, centring the racialised logics at play is imperative. This provides the framework for developing anti-racist approaches to supporting people made homeless through destitution by design. Using case studies, we explore how the UK Government’s use of ‘emergency hotel accommodation’ for people seeking asylum who are already homeless or are at risk of homelessness, are becoming normalised strategies of containment for racialised others and an extension of the distributed violence of dispersal accommodation that long pre-dates the pandemic. We offer an alternative advocacy-led and rights-based approach to secure refuge for people made homeless by the State.

Waiting for what? Hope and endurance in situations of uncertainty for asylum-seekers in Greece

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss how transformations in the asylum management in Greece in 2019 led to the increased uncertainty about the future among asylum-seekers and refugees, altering their experience and interpretation of waiting amidst the bureaucratic procedures. Those in process of asylum application questioned their commitment to waiting, which culminated in the mobilisation of some groups of refugees and asylum-seekers in an attempted collective walkout. Critiquing the Greek state for its restrictive welfare policies and exclusionary practices of asylum, the participants of mobilisation acted on their own vision and ideas of future – elsewhere. Drawing on a year of ethnographic work in Greek borderlands, I reflect on the state’s capacity to generate social hope versus how hope acts as a resource deployed in the future-making by people seeking asylum. Examining the emergence of the Glitter of Hope, a collective march of asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece in spring 2019, and the following response to it by the Greek state, I contrast hope as a medium for political projects, as opposed to it being a technique instrumentalised and manipulated by the state to create disciplined and inactive subjects, suspended in a state of hopeful waiting.

A grounded theory of information exclusion and information inclusion: framing the information experience of people seeking asylum

PurposeThis paper discusses an original theory of information exclusion and information inclusion, which explains how information interactions can be structured in ways that either exclude or include people seeking asylum.Design/methodology/approachThis theory was developed through an ethnographic study of the information experience of people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. Fieldwork involved participant observations, participatory research workshops and semi-structured interviews, analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach.FindingsPeople seeking asylum are confronted with two main information environments: the asylum system and the local third sector. Each environment frames contrasting information access, sharing and literacy practice modalities: the former produces information deprivation, information sharing agency denial and a fracturing information literacy practice; the latter facilitates multiple information affordances, information sharing agency promotion, and both local and heritage information literacy practice promotion. Our theory of information exclusion and information inclusion describes how through these modalities, an information environment can either promote or preclude inclusion.Originality/valuePrevious information studies of migration tend to conceptualise social ex/inclusion as a linear journey. Our theory originally frames this as a non-straightforward and conflicting process, allowing to better understand the experience of people who are not simply either socially excluded or included, but may experience both states depending on context. It also shows that exclusion is not a matter of fact and is not fundamental to asylum systems: it is produced by specific policies and procedures and can therefore be changed. Thus, this theory provides conceptual tools for researchers to investigate the information experience of individuals moving between conflicting information practices, and for civil society actors and policymakers to document exclusionary information practices and design inclusive ones.

The Right(s) to Remain: Art, Asylum and Political Representation in Australia

Abstract Thinking about artistic representation as a form of political representation enables a better understanding of what can be seen and said, who has the ability to see it and say it, and how it is possible to know and do politics in different ways. In the case of Australia’s immigration system, this understanding is critical. Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees is widely criticised by the international community as violating international human rights and humanitarian laws and norms. The legal and bureaucratic frameworks surrounding refugees in Australia not only render their stories largely invisible but continue to perpetrate harm and suffering which goes unaddressed. In the absence of state protection, artistic representation becomes an important intervention into the practices and narratives surrounding Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees. In this article, I explore Hoda Afshar’s video and photographic artwork Remain (2018) which documents the experiences and struggles of a group of stateless men who were left to languish on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in the aftermath of the Australian government closing its Manus Regional Processing Centre. Remain is one of the only available avenues open to the men to share their stories and to communicate the harm caused by national policy and practices. I argue that the artistic representation of Remain becomes a crucial form of political representation in this aftermath; political representation which would not otherwise be possible.

What has Dheisheh to do with Doncaster?

My visit to the Stateless Heritage exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms, London, led me to reexamine how the concept of “heritage” is used to create and preserve particular narratives of the state, in this case by proposing Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Palestine as a World Heritage Site. Central to the exhibition was the madafeh, seen as a space of openness and hospitality. I am not a refugee and do not speak for refugees. I interpret the Decolonizing Art and Architecture Research (DAAR) collective’s decolonizing project in the context of attempts to make room for people seeking asylum within “asylum dispersal areas” such as Doncaster, where I live—attempts in which the madafeh could play an important role.

Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: on waiting within the asylum process in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article examines experiences of temporal dispossession within migration bureaucracy in the case of asylum. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data with officers at the Swedish Migration Agency and people seeking asylum under the ‘new’ asylum law in Sweden, this article makes visible the politics of time inherent in the distribution of life chances in state practices. Examining the temporal governance of asylum, I interrogate how waiting, time, and timing are enacted as means of dispossession in the asylum process, with a particular focus on the effects of neoliberal time structurings. The analysis argues that migration bureaucracy in Sweden invokes temporal dispossession through the use of temporal governance that withholds frames of intelligibility from asylum applicants. Examining how waiting is enacted as a means of dispossession both through slowing and accelerating timeframes, the analysis reveals the negotiations, strategies, and struggles that take place within the realm of migration bureaucracy, and in doing so, stresses the relational character of time as a mechanism of control. Central to my argument is that migration bureaucracy dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum, yet with very different effects on the distribution of life chances for each.

Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 in the Wastewater and Rivers of Tapachula, a Migratory Hub in Southern Mexico.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been monitored by applying different strategies, including SARS-CoV-2 detection with clinical testing or through wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). We used the latter approach to follow SARS-CoV-2 dispersion in Tapachula city, located in Mexico’s tropical southern border region. Tapachula is a dynamic entry point for people seeking asylum in Mexico or traveling to the USA. Clinical testing facilities for SARS-CoV-2 monitoring are limited in the city. A total of eighty water samples were collected from urban and suburban rivers and sewage and a wastewater treatment plant over 4 months in Tapachula. We concentrated viral particles with a PEG-8000-based method, performed RNA extraction, and detected SARS-CoV-2 particles through RT-PCR. We considered the pepper mild mottle virus as a fecal water pollution biomarker and analytical control. SARS-CoV-2 viral loads (N1 and N2 markers) were quantified and correlated with official regional statistics of COVID-19 bed occupancy and confirmed cases (r > 91%). Our results concluded that WBE proved a valuable tool for tracing and tracking the COVID-19 pandemic in tropical countries with similar water temperatures (21–29 °C). Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 through urban and suburban river water sampling would be helpful in places lacking a wastewater treatment plant or water bodies with sewage discharges.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12560-022-09523-2.

Current guidance for communicating with refugee and asylum seeker patients: An environmental scan of online resources.

Primary healthcare practitioners (PHPs) are often the firstpoint of care for people seeking refuge or asylum inAustralia. Communication plays a vital part in their care. The aim of this study was to identify, appraise andsynthesise online resources that aim to support communication during consultations with these patients. A systematic environmental scan of online Australian resources, using the Google search engine, was conducted. The resources were appraised and rated using a validated purpose taxonomy as well as the PatientEducation Materials Assessment Tool for Printed Materials to determine understandability and actionability. A total of 32 unique resources were identified. On average, the resources scored better on understandability (mean 64%) than actionability (mean 49%). The resources each had between two and five purpose taxonomy types, and the proportion of the content relevant to communication ranged from 5% to 100%. There are multiple resources available to PHPs to improve their communication with refugee and asylum seeker patients. Those that were rated better overall identified the population group and had practical suggestions to help operationalise their content. This article synthesises the online resources with practical suggestions regarding continuity of care, language barriers and PHPs' responsiveness to individual and cultural considerations.

THE KINGDOM OF GHOSTS

Bearing witness is complex, and haunted by the past and the present. It takes place through and within a web of power relations attested by truth telling. This essay suggests that ghosts have the capacity to bear witness beyond the human in the disoriented world of the ganzfeld, presented here in the imbricated histories of Christmas Island. Ghosts offer non-human agency to the living. Their testimonies are reclamations of the world. We argue that spectral witnessing involves notions of calling to account, unblinking attention to what is, becoming aware of other realities that are present and the echoes of others (human and non-human) absent through their disappearance and excision from history or exclusion to the margins of society. These others include people seeking asylum, indentured labourers and their descendants, artists, and the living world.

Covid-19 Vaccine in Pregnancy: Don’t Forget Pregnant Women and People Seeking Asylum

Pregnant women and people are at an increased risk of severe disease and pregnancy complications if they contract severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2). In April 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised this group to take the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines; however, recent data from Public Health England (PHE) indicate that this population are vaccine-hesitant. As midwives urge this cohort to get vaccinated, consideration should be given to pregnant women and people seeking asylum so that they are not left out. This population experience significant health and social inequities, which place them at a higher risk of developing serious illness from COVID-19. This article considers the risk factors for infection, and the barriers and facilitators for COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy. This article uses the term ‘pregnant women and people seeking asylum’ as it focuses on the people seeking asylum and not their status.

Photovoice as an unfamiliar act of citizenship: everyday belonging, place-making and political subjectivity

ABSTRACT This article draws upon a photovoice project with people seeking asylum and with refugee status in Manchester, UK. It considers the ways in which resistance and political subjectivity can be mobilised by photovoice. The article documents where participants were resisting abjection. Firstly, through their engagement in everyday place-making and practices of belonging that were further made by partaking in the photovoice project; and secondly, through gaining political subjectivity and creating a new political community, one where no sovereign power was present. The work posits that engagement in photovoice is an unfamiliar act of citizenship because it is not normative in its form nor is it necessarily intended towards resistance. Moreover, the context in which the claims are being made is unfamiliar: through photography, creativity and a research process. This article reflects on what this means for our understanding of acts, citizenship and resistance.

Generalised push-back practices in Europe

In recent years, more and more asylum seekers trying to reach the European Union (EU) have found themselves subjected to practices that contradict the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the democratic principles within the Dublin III Regulation. The inalienable right of those individuals to seek asylum is violated every time that the Member States’ national authorities subject them to irregular procedures and deny them their right to international protection without an individual assessment of their asylum claims. These practices are defined as push-backs. This brief outlines the ways in which asylum seekers are exposed to both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ push-backs by and between the Member States, while also underscoring the importance of safeguarding the physical safety and integrity of people seeking asylum. It offers case studies of EU countries where push-backs have become the new normal, and highlights the role of courts in remedying the wide-spreading push-backs practices. Within this context of generalized push-backs and executive backlash against European and domestic judgments finding violations of human rights, the withdrawal of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency from Hungary is an alarming signal for human rights protection. In the face of the rule of law and human rights challenges, was the Agency's withdrawal the most appropriate measure?. Finally, it asks whether the recent EU border procedure proposed in 2020 will have a positive or a negative impact on the right to seek asylum on the ground.

Trauma Exposures, Resilience Factors, and Mental Health Outcomes in Persons Granted Asylum in the U.S. for Claims Related to Domestic Violence and Persecution by Organized Gangs

Survivors of domestic violence (DV) and of violence perpetrated by organized gangs (GV) face barriers to legal protection under U.S. asylum law. We abstracted data from 132 affidavits based on forensic medical evaluations of asylum seekers granted legal protection in the U.S. on the basis of DV and/or GV. We described claimants’ trauma exposures and resilience factors and used multiple logistic regression to quantify associations with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5 (DSM-5) diagnoses and improvement in mental health. People seeking asylum based on DV and/or GV have endured multiple types of trauma with significant impacts on their mental health. New experiences of trauma following migration to the U.S. were common and associated with DSM-5 diagnoses. Conversely, resilience factors were associated with improved mental health. Policies that aim to reduce ongoing trauma in the U.S. and to bolster resilience factors may promote asylee mental health and well-being.

The ‘integrative potential’ and socio-political constraints of football in Southeast Europe: a critical exploration of lived experiences of people seeking asylum

This paper critically interrogates the ‘integrative potential’ of football by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that includes 84 semi-structured interviews with refugees, asylum seekers and local community organizations, and five interviews with representatives of national football associations across Southeast Europe, a region that has hitherto been under-examined in this field of research. The results show the uneasy and strained relationship between football and integration, characterized by incongruity between micro-level practices and experiences of solidarity and inclusion, and State-sponsored marginality and deterrence taking place in Southeast Europe. We provide empirical evidence for social connections, facilitators (i.e. language and communication, safety and stability), and rights as relevant, meaningful and challenging domains of integration in the context of football. We conclude that foundational rights, and hence dehumanizing policies and discourses, need to be addressed if the proclaimed ‘integrative potential’ of football is to be realized beyond social connections and sporadic examples of access to decent work through football.