Impoverishment and Asylum

Social Policy as Slow Violence

Lucy Mayblin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367423100
• eBook ISBN: 9781000767346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Impoverishment and Asylum argues that a shift has taken place in recent decades towards construing asylum as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, to construing it as primarily an economic phenomenon, and that this shift has had led to the purposeful impoverishment, by the state, of people seeking asylum in the UK.

This shift has far-reaching consequences for people seeking asylum, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic pull factor leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups who seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes.

This book argues that within this context asylum support policies in the UK which are meant to help and protect, in fact do serious harm to their recipients. It argues that the shift from construing asylum seekers as economically, rather than politically, motivated migrants across the West, is part of a much broader set of historical and philosophical worldviews than has previously been articulated. The book offers a rigorously researched and richly theorised analysis drawing on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in making sense of the purposeful impoverishment by the state of a particular group of people, and why this continues to be tolerated in the fourth richest country in the world.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Imagining asylum seeking as economic migration

Over the past 20 years a shift has taken place in the way politicians and policy-makers within Europe (but also beyond) talk about asylum seeking. They have stopped narrating asylum seeking as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, and have shifted to narrating it as primarily an economic phenomenon. Once you notice this shift, you see it everywhere but it is most clearly articulated through a near obsessive focus on economic ‘pull factors’. That is, financially rewarding enticements which pull ‘bogus asylum seekers’ to Western countries. That such pull factors significantly affect asylum flows is ‘common sense’, rarely is evidence produced to substantiate the claim. Logically, these pull factors must then be removed, and their removal is best achieved through a raft of punitive measures to prevent economic migrants from abusing Western asylum systems. This shift has far-reaching consequences. For people seeking asylum, of course, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic pull factor leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups that seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes.

This book charts this shift in a single sovereign territory, the UK, but the shift from being understood as primarily a political and/or humanitarian problem, to being understood as an economic phenomenon, is widespread. In Europe, the broader shift to an exclusionary and hostile environment for people seeking asylum emerged at a moment in history when refugees ceased to hold geopolitical appeal within the context of the Cold War (Chimni, 1998). Now that people seeking asylum were no longer understood to be primarily white and Soviet, and were instead understood as black and brown and harking from formerly colonised countries in the ‘Third World’, the UK government, like other European powers, folded refugees into the broader category of undesirable immigrant and shifted back to being hostile to all such incomers (Mayblin, 2017b). It was at this moment, when people seeking asylum became racialised as black and brown, that they came to be construed not as politically persecuted refugees but as economic migrants in disguise.

This book is concerned with welfare and work as two key aspects of the control and exclusion of these ‘economic migrants in disguise’; but, of course, the policy responses to this shift go beyond removing the economic pull factors of labour market access and ‘generous’ welfare support. Over the past two decades, people seeking asylum in the UK, but also in other ‘Western’ countries, have become the subjects of a broad array of disciplinary measures as a consequence of being construed as, primarily, economic migrants. They have felt the full force of their rejection from places of potential sanctuary (Fitzgerald, 2019; Bohmer and Shuman, 2008; Gibney, 2006). In the UK, laws have been passed making it ever more difficult to reach the country, to apply for asylum, to gain legal support, and to be successful in one’s claim. Detention centres have proliferated, deportations have become routinized, biometric ID cards mandatory, ‘dispersal’ away from London standard, weekly ‘reporting’ in the image of criminals on remand, normal (Squire, 2009; Allsopp, Sigona and Phillimore, 2014; Glorius and Darling, 2016; Mayblin, 2017a; Canning, 2017). It is against this criminalising and dehumanising backdrop that those going through the asylum system have lost the right to work legally in all but exceptional cases, and have concurrently also lost access to the mainstream social benefits system.

Some deterrent measures are violent and result in direct or indirect bodily harms, even death. Some work against international human rights law, such as banning people from crossing an international border without appropriate travel documents. Others operate with the law, under the discursive guise of helping and protecting. It is these measures that this book is concerned with. It takes a deep dive in to the limiting of welfare and restrictions on working for people seeking asylum in the UK. Since people who have made an application for asylum have very limited economic rights under international refugee law, states can (and the UK does) systematically impoverish them; exposing them to all of the harms that poverty inflicts, while housing and paying welfare benefits to them. In this way, the UK government is fulfilling two contradictory imperatives: their reception conditions obligations in relation to human rights law and European reception standards on the one hand, and the politically popular demand to use their sovereign prerogative to exclude outsiders on the other. In doing so the UK state is purposefully inflicting a form of slow violence (Nixon, 2011) upon those going through the asylum system.

It is not a stretch, then, to say that life for people seeking asylum in the UK today difficult. Those going through the asylum system receive weekly support payments of £37.75 at the time of writing. This figure is determined on the basis of what the poorest ten per cent of British citizens spend on essential living items only (Regina (Refugee Action) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, 2014: see also discussion of this judicial review in Mayblin, 2017a). It is, then, around a third of the weekly income of the poorest citizens, themselves having undergone a decade of austerity policies which have left one third of British children living in poverty (Department for Work and Pensions, 2018). People who are receiving asylum support are rarely able to take busses to travel around the cities in which they live, to buy clothes, or even to eat sufficient food in many cases. As a group they experience higher than average rates of infant and maternal mortality, domestic violence, mental and physical health problems, social isolation, and struggle to access basic services to which they are entitled (Allsopp, Sigona and Phillimore, 2014).

Despite only existing as a collective category of people because of their legal status, as people making an application for sanctuary on the grounds of political persecution, I argue in this book that people seeking asylum are part of a shifting category of economically conceived people: the undeserving poor (Shilliam, 2018). As the undeserving poor, they are neither entitled to asylum nor to the ‘better life’ that they are purported to be in search of. There is very little evidence to suggest that people seeking asylum today are particularly different to those in the past in terms of the reasons for their flight from their country of origin, or the likelihood that they will want to work in a destination country (see Chapter 4). The lack of evidence, however, does not mean that the misconstrual has any less power in asylum policymaking. But we cannot understand this shift only by looking at recent factors and trends. The conditions of possibility for a hegemonic (mis)construal of asylum seeking as economic, are laid down in pre-existing worldviews; in this case, the line dividing the modern world from the non-modern world and its entanglement with hierarchical conceptions of human worth (Mignolo, 2000, 2009). In other words, this shift can only be fully understood, I argue, within the context of colonial histories, which gave rise to the spatial organisation of modernity, and the embodiment of unmodernity and incivility (see Mayblin, 2017a). Theoretically, then, my analysis is inspired by postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. I elaborate on this perspective in the next section.

Empirically, I explore the impoverishment of people seeking asylum from three different vantage points: from the perspective of policymakers, from the perspective of those in civil society who contest the policies through ameliorating their worst effects, and from the perspective of people who are seeking asylum themselves. But together, from detailed empirical data, we can also think about the actions and activities of different actors in relation to broader theoretical concerns. On the one hand, then, the book deals with detailed areas of public and social policy which may seem obscure and context specific. On the other hand, these detailed public and social policies are tied to much broader socio-historical processes and philosophical debates. Colonially informed ideas about differential human worth play biopolitical sorting functions which organise humanity into the deserving and the undeserving, the mobile and the immobilised. They are linked in a chain of connections that this book draws explicit attention to.

In looking at the economic rights of people who have made an application for asylum in the UK from the three vantage points mentioned above (from the perspective of politicians and policymakers, from the perspective of civil society, and from the perspective of people seeking asylum), the book therefore draws on a range of research methods and types of data including textual data, qualitative research interviews (both elite interviews, and those with people who are receiving asylum support payments conducted by refugee community researchers), and analysis of secondary quantitative administrative data sets. This data was gathered as part of a programme of research on asylum, welfare, and work in the UK (funded under the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Future Research Leaders Scheme) between 2015 and 2018. Because asylum is not a devolved power, the policies in this area are the same across the four nations that make up the UK, and are overseen by the Home Office whose central office is located in London. However, not all of the data that I draw upon covers all of these nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), and I have tried to be careful and accurate in reflecting where I am writing about at any given moment. Nevertheless, I should warn in this context that Scottish and Northern Irish readers especially may find my analysis somewhat Anglo-centric; but at the same time, I would argue that the regime under which asylum seekers live is itself oriented to broader Anglo-centric anti-immigration agendas which affect the whole Kingdom.

I have published a range of journal articles on various aspects of this project (Mayblin, 2014a, 2016a, 2016b, 2019; Bales and Mayblin, 2018; Mayblin, Kazemi and Wake, 2019; Mayblin and James, 2019) but it is in this book that I bring these aspects together to develop a broader argument. In overview I find that people who are seeking asylum are purposefully impoverished – subjected by the UK state, I argue, to slow violence – because they are viewed as a particular constituency of the undeserving poor, economic migrants from the Third World. The impoverishment of people who are seeking asylum in the UK is purposeful in that it is explicitly intended to remove economic pull factors as people seeking asylum have come to be viewed as economically motivated migrants. In making sense of the purposeful impoverishment of people seeking asylum in the UK, I piece together in this book an analytical framework drawing on a range of theoretical resources. This is elaborated in Chapter 3 but I provide a brief introductory overview in the next section.

Slow, structural violence as a form of colonial/modern necropolitics

The underlying context to the analysis in this book is the colonial present. I understand the colonial present as an analytical device for understanding how colonial histories can ‘yield new damages and renewed disparities’ in spite of their implications for the present being continually effaced (Stoler, 2013:5). Central to the colonial present is the historical phenomenon, and contemporary influence of coloniality/modernity. Coloniality/modernity is the proposition that the process whereby some countries became modern, or rather came to understand themselves to be modern in contrast to ‘undeveloped’ others, cannot be disentangled from colonialism (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2000; see also Bhambra, 2007). This self-understanding as modern, and superior, gave (and gives) Western European societies a framework through which to understand all the world and the various people in it in relation to one another – spatially and temporally. Coloniality/modernity thus provides the underlying framework for our understanding of the world in the contemporary period. The dichotomies developed/developing, First World/Third World, Global North/Global South are indicative of the ongoing resonance of colonially informed ideas of human difference, temporality, and hierarchy.

The colonial present is therefore my starting point for thinking through how the victim category of humanitarian refuge has been transformed into a suspect category of the undeserving poor. Undeservingness, here, is central to the exclusion and excludability of people labelled ‘asylum seekers’. In part this is indicative of the shift mentioned earlier, that people who are seeking asylum now come from the ‘Third World’ moving across what Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2017) calls ‘the abyssal line’, from the ‘zone of non-being’ into the ‘zone of being’ (Fanon, 1967). To do so is inherently suspect since the primary focus of international migration management is to prevent and deter South-North migration. Or to paraphrase E. Tendayi Achiume (2019), what we are observing are multilateral projects for the regional containment of Third World persons beyond the First World. This is the colonial modern context and it is not unrelated to wider shifts in British social welfare, and the concomitant racialization of deservingness. In thinking through the racialized distinction between those deserving and undeserving of social security and welfare and the links to broader colonial/modern frameworks, I draw on the work of Robbie Shilliam (2018). Shilliam argues that the idea of the undeserving poor cannot be disentangled from histories of colonialism, and particularly racial histories of British nation building vis-à-vis empire and the postcolony.

Against the historical backdrop of colonially inspired ideas of the undeserving poor, I argue that the New Labour government (1997–2010) in Britain engaged in a duel pronged project on migration which effectively sorted deserving migrants from undeserving migrants. People who were seeking asylum were found to be undeserving – ‘bogus’ was the word of the day – and this led inter alia to their total exclusion from the mainstream welfare system. People seeking asylum were, indeed often are, therefore represented as economic migrants seeking to cheat the asylum system for the purposes of working or claiming welfare benefits. They are redolent of ‘welfare scroungers’, another trope of the undeserving poor. The popularisation of the idea of the (unsubstantiated) economic pull factor thus became the primary explanation for asylum seeking. Since the entire context in which asylum seeking has been discussed by policymakers since the early 2000s is in relation to economic pull factors and bogus applications, we should not be surprised that they have been cast as undeserving. But the policy regime also produces them as undeserving in other ways; for example, through minimising safe and legal routes of entry. ‘Regular’ arrival is highly unlikely since there are so many barriers in place to prevent it (such as carrier sanctions, but also the very low numbers of resettlement places available) but arriving irregularly (illegally), people seeking asylum are further marked as suspect (Scheel and Squire, 2014). They are also not deserving of welfare support since they have not contributed through paying taxes and are not seen to belong in a cultural sense. Their sneaky, cheating, deviant behaviour, in short, undermines any claim to deservingness.

Thinking with coloniality/modernity, race, and the idea of the undeserving poor illustrates why a liberal critique of this purposeful impoverishment of people seeking asylum cannot enable an adequate understanding of the problem. In advancing a dehistoricised analysis, which elides histories of racism and margin-alisation within the whole concept of refugeehood, then, we limit the transformative potential of our critiques (see Vergara-Figueroa, 2018). While the right to asylum, and the economic rights that might go with that, are widely represented as universal in aspiration, we cannot understand what is happening when states push the limits of what is legally permitted unless we acknowledge the actual histories that made the current context possible. Human rights were never intended for everyone, great effort was expended trying to exclude colonised peoples in the European colonies, and people of colour in the US, Australia and Canada from them (Mayblin, 2017a). While the geographical limitations of the right to asylum were expanded in 1967, that does not mean that the link between ideas of race and deservingness were obliterated.

Such logics lead to both fast and slow acts of exclusion and violence. Fast violence is potentially (though not necessarily) more visible and may include dawn raids, border violence, and deportation. Slow violence may be hardly legible, a single perpetrator hard to identify, but it is, as Rob Nixon (2011) explains, no less deadly. Impoverishment, as slow violence, gradually degrades bodies and minds quietly, behind closed doors, making it largely invisible to the majority of the population. I conceptualise this slow end of state violence – enforced impoverishment – which is where my concern lies in this book, as a form of necropolitics. Indeed, with Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics we can observe colonial rationales at work in the management of asylum seeking and in doing so historicise our analysis. With necropolitics we can also understand the harms done to those going through the asylum system as designed in to the structures which are supposed to be supporting them. As Victoria Canning (2017) has observed, structural violence is where there is capacity to allow for people going through the asylum system to live free from suffering, but the political will does not exist to implement changes which would alleviate that suffering. In this way the harms done constitute slow violence, and this is enabled through the structures of the state.

Nation states have the right to economically exclude non-citizens. But under human rights law they do not have the right to also exclude those seeking asylum. And yet those seeking asylum are treated as though they fall within the category of undeserving non-citizen, to the extent that the state is able under human rights commitments. If they had not signed up to the 1951 refugee convention and 1967 protocol, then states could, and would, exclude people seeking asylum as well. We might say that this state of affairs represents a crisis of modern humanism (Squire, 2017) but humanism has always been exclusionary since the category of ‘human’ arose from coloniality/modernity (Mignolo, 2009; Wynter, 2003). Thus, this process is inevitable within the context of the coloniality of power. In the current moment human rights act as a deeply flawed backstop to the worst excesses of the exclusionary logic of the coloniality of power. Here I argue that we need to incorporate a historically grounded critique of the coloniality of power in to our analyses of the limits of human rights, not necessarily to recover them, but to understand their failings in the present moment as we imagine alternative futures.

On categories: asylum seekers, refugees, people

This book is primarily focussed upon the economic rights and entitlements of those who are within the asylum system in the UK. That is, those with an outstanding application for asylum, whether an initial application or a ‘fresh claim’. Refugees, in this context, are those who have received a positive decision on their application and who therefore have leave to remain in the UK. People who have had their application for asylum refused, meanwhile, have received a negative decision on their application for asylum. These groups, as outlined in the next chapter, have very different entitlements to economic support and it is for this reason that these categories remain highly significant for the individuals concerned. Being put in one category rather than another can mean the difference between homelessness and a place to call home, between poverty and getting by. Status can mean the difference between life and death.

But of course, ‘categories’ are not as neat or simple as they appear (see Zetter, 1991, 2007; Sigona, 2003). A single person may, at various points, fit in to all of the categories listed above. Around 35% of initial asylum applications which are refused are then overturned at appeal, in a stroke moving the applicant from the cat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Economic rights and seeking asylum
• 3 Historicising and theorising impoverishment and asylum
• 4 Producing slow violence: imagining asylum as economic migration
• 5 Ameliorating slow violence: civil society as gap filler
• 6 Slow violence: everyday life on asylum support
• 7 Conclusion: impoverishment and asylum
• References
• Index