Tracing Asylum Journeys

Transnational Mobility of Non-European Refugees to Canada via Turkey

Ugur Yildiz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138364554
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429775574
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the asylum journey of non-European asylum applicants who seek asylum in Turkey before resettling in Canada with the aid of the Canadian government's assisted resettlement programme. Based on ethnographic research among Syrian, Afghan, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Iranian, Somali, Sudanese and Congolese nationals it considers the interactions of asylum seekers with both UNHCR's refugee status determination and Canada's refugee resettlement programme. With attention to the practices of migrants, the author shows how the asylum journey contains both mobility and stasis and constitutes a micro-political image of the fluidity and relativity of attributed identities and labels on the part of state migration systems. A multi-sited ethnography that shows how the migration journey is linked to the production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the diffusion of produced knowledge among past, present, and future asylum seekers who form trans-local social networks in the course of their route, in Turkey, and in Canada. Tracing Asylum Journeys will appeal to sociologists and political scientists with interests in migration and transnational studies, and refugee and asylum settlement.

1 The asylum journey and the governance of transnational refugee mobility

Refugee movements have been examined in various ways (the legal asylum regulations of states and the experiences of refugees in the country of asylum and/or resettlement) in a number of different disciplines (political science, sociology, international relations, legal studies, and anthropology). However, the ‘journey as method’ approach has remained limited in the literature. Considering the diversified practices employed by asylum travellers and the changing regulations imposed by states—not to mention the different perspectives offered by each of the abovementioned disciplines—I approach the asylum odyssey as an inter- and multi-disciplinary phenomenon.

In general, the global refugee system—i.e., the 1951 Geneva Convention and related protocols, primarily based on humanitarian needs—provides one of the most highly regulated schemas of mobility. In fact, the system seems to operate in a multi-layered environment where nation-states, refugees, and local and international NGOs encounter—and negotiate with—each other. Refugee movements are not limited to the border crossing practices of travellers. They are also shaped in any number of ways by the policymakers and asylum bureaucracies that regulate, adjust, and map the journey and impose various bureaucratic statuses and fluid interpellations on travellers along the way. Therefore, research on refugee movement is not only multi-disciplinary, but also multi-dimensional in the empirical sense, embodying a variety of agents and structures.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the various ways the image of the contemporary refugee has been approached by three research fields: transnationalism, autonomy of migration, and critical migration studies. Different as they are, all of these fields of study invariably advise scholars to exercise caution in the application of certain concepts in the study of transnational migration, including the descriptors ‘transit’, ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’. After framing the debate in the literature on refugee journeys, the chapter turns to detail the conceptualizations and theoretical frames that will be utilized throughout the book.

The general image of the refugee in migration studies

‘It is the refugee’, according to Melaku Kifle, the Refugee Secretary of the All-Africa Council of Churches, ‘who reveals to us the defective society in which we live. He [sic] is a kind of mirror through whose suffering we can see the injustice, the oppression and the maltreatment of the powerless by the powerful’ (cited in Malkki, 1995a, p. 12). The statement underlines the multi-dimensional—and inter- and multi-disciplinary—nature of studies on refugees. Kifle also raises broader themes here: defective society, injustice versus justice, oppression and maltreatment, and the powerless versus the powerful. This implies that the migration literature should consider conceptualizations of nationalism, the nation-state, citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, mobility and stasis, the legality versus illegality binary, and human rights law seriously. However, the vast majority of refugee studies treats the figure of the refugee as nothing more than an exposed, helpless wanderer. Kifle’s statement is emblematic here, essentializing as it does the refugee experience through the figure of the refugee as a vulnerable being. In other words, especially with the adaptation of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) notion of homo sacer to that of the refugee, the field of refugee studies has all too often foregrounded the apparent ‘vulnerability’ of the refugee and the notion of mobility as ‘forced’ (Diken, 2004; Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2004). It has also idealized and romanticized the experience of ‘exile and diaspora’ (Malkki, 1995b, p. 515).

The contemporary image of the refugee has thus become an object of knowledge-making within various discursive domains—political, social, bureaucratic, and legal—in the decades since the UNHCR was founded in 1950 (Malkki, 1995a). The question of ‘who a refugee is’ begins ‘from the first procedure of status determination to the structural determinants of life chances’ through the 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 Additional Protocol (Zetter, 1991, pp. 39–40). The contemporary refugee represents in-between-ness as both ‘an insider and an outsider, existing at the borders and between sovereigns’ (Haddad, 2008, p. 8). This in-between-ness results from ‘the politico-ethical collision between the raison d’état of the nation-state, the raison de système of the international system, the raison d’humanité of the humanitarian discourse and the raison de justice of the global justice system’ (Haddad, 2008, p. 12, italics in the original). Becoming a refugee or holding the identity/status of refugee is not the consequence of ‘a breakdown in the system of separate states’; rather, it is an ‘inevitable if unanticipated part of international society’ (Haddad, 2008, p. 8). In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt connects the condition of homelessness, statelessness—and, eventually, the condition of rightlessness—to the rise of totalitarian tendencies among nation-states, and the totalitarian state’s denationalization weapon (Arendt, 1973, p. 269).

From this perspective, the ‘holy trinity’ of nation-state, territory, and citizen–subject in the contemporary world system makes refugees and the condition of statelessness inevitable (Arendt, 1973, p. 282; Malkki, 1992). Indeed, this trinity produces the conditions for unwanted individuals to be readily deported/removed—leading not only to the loss of the original home, but more importantly the impossibility of finding a new one (Arendt, 1973, p. 293). As Malkki (1992, p. 24) observes, the refugee identity compels us ‘to rethink the question of roots in relation—if not the soul—to identity, and the forms of its territorialisation’ within the tripartite regime of nation-state–territory–citizenship. However, it should be noted that refugees are not the product of the contemporary socio-politico-economic world system, nor are they simply a result of the politics of citizenship. Therefore, it is important to approach all essentialist notions in refugee studies critically and to move beyond politically loaded binaries/labels as well as ‘categorical fetishism’ in the domain of asylum (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018).

Transnationalism and refugee mobility

In the context of refugee movements, the mobility of individuals is highly politicized. It has become an issue of inclusion and exclusion, of being admitted or rejected, and of status—namely, of legality and illegality. Scholars examining the phenomenon through a critical lens have generally adopted two different perspectives. The first approach examines the immigration and asylum policies of states¹ and the role of the UNHCR in providing protection.² This perspective explores the escape of refugees within the frame of a ‘technical and operational “solution”’ (Nyers, 2006, p. xiv).

The second approach focuses on the precarious experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in the country of asylum, drawing on Agamben’s notion of homo sacer (Fitzpatrick, 2001; Edkins & Pin-Fat, 2005; Hanafi & Long, 2010). There is no doubt that exclusionary governmental strategies and the securitization of borders have imposed limitations on asylum seekers and refugees. However, this representation of refugees—and, moreover, the term ‘refugee crisis’—serve to reduce individuals taking asylum journeys to vulnerable drifters. Both tendencies reflect a state-centric view, whereby the state is a machine that has power to include and exclude individuals by throwing some of them into bare life living conditions. Especially with the emergence of forced migration studies, the figure of the refugee has been placed ‘within the larger context of forced migration’ (Adelman, 2001, p. 7). Both approaches—along with the shift to the forced migration conceptualization—largely ignore the agency of migrants. After all, migrants are constantly making choices, negotiating certain encounters and interactions, and selecting autonomously from among various potential paths, routes and border crossings (Nyers, 2006, 2008; Walters, 2008; Owens, 2009).

The transnationalism literature offers a distinct perspective in exploring the economic, political, and cultural cross-border activities of migrants.³ Transnationalism is a broader notion that refers to the ‘everyday practices of migrants engaged in various activities’—cultural and social engagement, involvement in political activities, and financial activities in both the home and host country (Vertovec, 2001; Faist, 2010, p. 11). The transnationalism notion in migration studies is a crucial tool to organize and contemplate the perceptions on migration and cross-border related activities involving (in)direct relationships (Faist, 2010; Pitkanen, Icduygu & Sert, 2012; Quayson & Daswani, 2013).

In the present research, the lens of transnationalism is significant at least for two reasons. First, transnationalism poses a conceptual challenge to methodological nationalism. That is, it stands opposed to the conventional perspective on the nation-state as the ‘natural’ container of human populations, and the current international system as ‘the [natural] order of things’ (Malkki, 1992, p. 25) and the only way to make sense of ‘the social and political form of the modern world’ (Quayson & Daswani, 2013, p. 17). Thus, transnationalism suggests a ‘dialectical relation between integrity and discontinuity, spatialized as a form of deteriorialization’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, p. 302; see also Faist, 2010). Second, transnationalism attempts to explore the ‘permeability, transcendence, or irrelevance’ (Quayson & Daswani, 2013, p. 5) of borders. It thus stands opposed to the heavy stress on borders in migration studies. In line with the transnationalism lens, the present study examines not only the crossing of national borders, but also the simultaneity and discontinuity in relationships, knowledge and tactics in space and time in the context of asylum journeys towards Canada via Turkey.

The autonomy of migration in refugee journeys

Another viewpoint that has emerged in debates in the migration literature that I find insightful for exploring migrant journeys is the autonomy of migration perspective. The term was first used in relation to US–Mexico border crossings to describe ‘the movements of peoples into the U.S. independent of state authorization and regulation’ (Rodriguez, 1996, p. 23). It emphasizes ‘the relations, encounters, and negotiations’ among migrants, with institutions and between states that structure the actual process of human mobility (Ashutosh & Mountz, 2012, p. 340).

The concept of autonomy of migration poses a challenge to the conventional thinking on borders, which sees them through ‘the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers’ (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias & Pickles, 2015, p. 894). The autonomy of migration perspective instead ‘offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility’ (ibid., p. 894). In so doing, it offers a more ‘autonomous gaze’ for migration studies that allows for critical interrogation of how ‘border architectures, institutions and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities’ (ibid., p. 894). The autonomous gaze in migration studies is a critical intervention that moves the field beyond the binary conceptualizations of forced versus voluntary migrant/migration. While the latter has generally cast unforced/voluntary migrants as economically motivated in choosing to move, refugees—through their very vulnerability, passivity, and lack of agency and autonomy in their home country—are ‘forcibly’ political in nature (Hein, 1993). Critical migration scholars have questioned the shift from refugee studies to forced migration studies on account of the latter’s potential ‘failure to take account of the specificity of the refugee’s circumstances’ (Hathaway, 2007, p. 349). Chimni (2009, p. 11) argues that this shift in perspective from refugee to forced migration ‘must be viewed against the backdrop of the history and relationship of colonialism and humanitarianism’.

It is crucial to note that the notion of compulsion that is embedded in the way forced migration studies conceives of the figure of the refugee has normative implications as well. Namely, in the way the field configures and shapes modes of political imagination in approaching human mobility and migration. Political imagination as a meta-narrative ‘refers to a set of assumptions or rules that are more often than not unspoken and tacit’ (Walters, 2002, p. 381). The political imagination conditioned by the emphasis on compulsion (embedded, as mentioned, in the very categories ‘migrant’ and ‘migration’) simultaneously produces a set of binaries—forced/involuntary and unforced/voluntary—in imagining the migration phenomenon itself. In forced migration studies, the effect of this political imagination serves ‘governmental and agency agendas’ that increasingly reduce all ‘irregular’ human mobility to the idea of being driven to move compulsorily (Hathaway, 2007, p. 350, italics added). The political imagination here assumes that mobility exists on a spectrum: at one pole, sits voluntary or unforced migration and migrants; at the other, the involuntary or forced migrant. This distinction shaping our political imagination assumes that asylum seekers and refugees are ‘involuntary’ in their act of mobility since they are ‘forced’ to flee due to the fear of persecution and external forces in the home country settings. It further essentializes and naturalizes a strict and clear distinction between unforced/voluntary and forced/involuntary.

What is significant here is that by reducing the journey in this way, mobility can be governed, controlled, bureaucratized, and il/legalized along with domestic asylum and migration policies. Thus, the migratory system has been able to differentiate the movement of refugees from that of other mobile bodies—tourists, economic migrants, expatriates, and so on—who are deemed fully agential beings in command of their choices. In so doing, individuals are readily placed into a hierarchy based on the genuineness of their pain and vulnerability. More importantly, the construction of a binary—‘forced’ versus ‘voluntary’ migrants, with ‘refugee claimants’ automatically categorized as the former—is significant in concealing the rationale for the regulation of migration and justifying the voluntary repatriation projects of states and NGOs.

In this political imaginary, the general assumption for determining the admission and/or rejection of an asylum applicant is also binary. Any person that seeks asylum ‘must’ have been ‘forced’ to leave and should be able to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution—or worse—if the person stays. Otherwise, he/she is nothing but a voluntary migrant (most likely seeking work) and has thus arrived to further her economic interests. Turton’s critical point on these categories of ‘economic’ versus ‘political’ migrants or ‘free’ versus ‘forced’ migration bears repeating. He notes that famine is a political as well as an economic phenomenon, since there is no longer any clear boundary between economy and politics (Turton, 2003). Whether forced or voluntary, any transnational journey of individuals requires that those on the move consider a range of detailed calculations, (counter-)strategies, and tactics before, during, and after the journey.

In other words, the adjective forced in the notion of forced migration ignores the agency of individuals, who invariably have access to human, social and physical capital of one kind or another, not to mention the possibility of using human smugglers to navigate ‘illegal’ routes, albeit it at staggering cost. Koser’s findings underline the extraordinary profitability of the human smuggling business since today the cost of such a ‘ticket’ to Canada will set the asylum seeker back approximately US$20,000—including flights, passport, and visa (Koser, 2008; Papadopoulou, 2008). Even though the financial exploitation of asylum travellers attracts serious attention from the media, NGO reports, and policymakers, the political imagination leads us to consider asylum travellers as victims of human smugglers instead of questioning border regimes themselves as the root cause of the human smuggling business.⁴

My point is not to disregard the social, political, and other contingent factors leading individuals to seek asylum abroad. However, as illustrated by the fieldwork conducted for this book—and the narratives provided by the respondents interviewed for it—the essentialization and naturalization of the categories of ‘forced’ and ‘involuntary’ in the current political imagination undermines the agency of asylum travellers and the autonomy of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table of abbreviations
• Introduction: The asylum journey en route to Canada via Turkey
• 1. The asylum journey and the governance of transnational refugee mobility
• 2. Asylum and resettlement policies as an ‘abstract model’ for the asylum journey
• 3. The separation phase of the asylum journey
• 4. Practicing liminal space in the ‘journey of hope’
• 5. The journey of hope and the incorporation phase of the asylum journey
• Conclusion: The asylum journey as the ‘journey of hope’
• Appendix: Interview list
• References
• Index