Inhabiting Borders, Routes Home

Youth, Gender, Asylum

Ala Sirriyeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138272279
• eBook ISBN: 9781317116677
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years there has been growing interest in the experiences of young people seeking asylum in Europe. While the significance of the role of age is recognized, both youth transitions and trajectories beyond the age of eighteen are still largely unexplored, the role and impact of mobility predominantly centering on experiences of movement from country of origin to country of settlement. Inhabiting Borders, Routes Home contends that in considering migration and settlement experiences of young refugees it is also important to consider the role of their mobility through age and transitions in the country of settlement. Based on narrative research with young refugees, this book explores how migration journeys are intertwined with life course journeys and transitions into adulthood, shedding light on the manner in which gender intersects with age in experiences of migration and settlement, with close attention to the processes by which 'home' is understood and constructed. Through the concept of 'home' the book draws together and reflects on interconnections between integration in areas such as education or housing and experiences of social networks. Examining experiences of the asylum process and the manner in which they are interwoven within a wider narrative of home both within and beyond, Inhabiting Borders, Routes Home will be of interest to social scientists working in the areas of migration, asylum, intersectionality and the life course.

Chapter 1
Introduction – Locating home

I have grown up here [Leeds, England] and I feel more at home here […] This is in a way my birthplace ‘cause that’s when I realized what the world is like.

(Naina, Pakistani,16)

Naina was 10 years old when she arrived in the UK with her mother and siblings to claim asylum, having fled domestic abuse in Pakistan. Six years later they were still waiting for a decision on their asylum claim, while, in the meantime, Naina lived through her teenage years in the UK. This book explores how Naina and other young refugee women understood and experienced ‘home’ in the context of their migration and life course journeys and examines how they inhabited these spaces. The young women’s perceptions and experiences of home were influenced by their identity and experiences as people seeking asylum, but also by the intersections between this and other aspects of their identity, including their social positions as young people and as young women.

The United Nations Population Fund Report Moving Young (2006: vi) states: ‘Despite their absence in debates about international migration, experts agree that young people between 15 and 30 years of age historically and to this day represent a large share of migrants.’ The report also found that in many regions of the world 25–50 per cent of young people indicated a desire to migrate at some point in the future. Although fewer numbers make actual plans to travel or reach their aimed for destinations, the report suggests that this statistic shows that many young people are interested in and contemplate a pathway of migration. Yet despite their significant representation in current and historical migration movements, children and young people were, until relatively recently, marginalised in debates and research on migration. Still now, when age is discussed as a significant focus, older young people are often categorised together with younger age groups in literature under ‘refugee children’ or with ‘refugee families’ (Hunter 2009, Maguire 2012).

The presence of refugees in Britain is not a new phenomenon. Yet recent decades witnessed its emergence as a key and sustained policy issue within the UK as well as in other ‘host’ countries in Europe and across the world as a consequence of the politicization of migration in local and global politics (Castles and Millar 2003, Squire 2009). A major focus in the UK has been on the increased numbers of people who sought asylum here since the 1990s (although the numbers have declined in recent years), among them a significant number of young people who arrived either with their families or separately. These young people not only journey between countries of origin and countries of arrival, but simultaneously journey through their life course as they age through youth and young adulthood during this period of migration and ‘settlement’. Focussing on the experiences of young women who had sought asylum in Britain, the book explores these young women’s understandings of, and routes to, ‘home’. This is examined not only in relation to the entwined experiences of mobility in their migration pathways and youth transitions, but also to their wider experiences lived ‘in the present’ as young people. Based on findings from a small-scale qualitative study conducted with 23 young refugee women (aged 16–25) in the county of West Yorkshire in England, a narrative approach is adopted to examine how youth and refugee identities and the dual processes of mobility intersected with the young women’s gendered experiences to inform their constructions of ‘home’. The book examines how particular experiences of the asylum process were interwoven within a broader life narrative of home. This book focusses on the experiences of young women. An earlier pilot study I conducted with asylum seeking young men and women in the region highlighted some gendered differences in experiences of both securing safety and negotiations of home (Sirriyeh 2008), reflecting wider feminist literature on women’s and girls’ encounters with ‘home’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006). Meanwhile, as discussed below (see Gender and Asylum) and in later chapters, gender can also play a significant role in decisions to migrate and experiences of the asylum process. Therefore a decision was made in this study to focus on the experiences of young women to explore these particular gendered experiences in depth.

Policy debates on immigration and refugees have largely centred around two key themes: first, the levels and forms of border controls and, second, the models for the ‘integration’ of new migrants. The increasingly restrictive policy and practice of many states in these arenas can be viewed as a reflection of their ‘domopolitics’ agenda, whereby they have sought to govern their states like a home (Walters 2004). In doing so they have developed and implemented increasingly exclusionary immigration policies and models of citizenship that define the boundaries between those who are included and ‘at home’ and those who are not (Sirriyeh 2013a). To ensure and protect these home spaces, they have argued that those who are included need to be bound together through establishing and reproducing shared values and common bonds. In these approaches there is suspicion of, and a need to control and integrate, or exclude, mobile and liminal (and therefore risky) people. In this approach there is an assumption that home is fixed and rooted.

It is suggested here, however, that a politics of home also potentially offers opportunities for recognising a more inclusionary and flexible approach to understanding people’s sense of belonging, attachments and experiences of mobility. Drawing on anti-essentialist ‘routes’ approaches to theorizing home, which ‘destabilize a sense of home as a stable origin and unsettle the fixity and singularity of a place called home’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 198), it can be argued that claims to, and practices of, home also offer points of resistance and opportunities for counter-narratives to exclusionary discourses. People’s lived experiences are informed, but not completely bound by legal and policy categories and discourses. Constructions of home can be a complex and ongoing negotiation and what may be positioned as transitional zones or temporary shelters in official discourses can also be made habitable to some degree by people as they seek to negotiate ‘homely’ spaces within a wider less hospitable environment. This book also contributes to knowledge about the experiences of refugee young people through attention to life course journeys and trajectories beyond the age of 18. In the past decade research on refugee migration has increasingly taken account of the experiences of refugee young people. However, perhaps partly in response to dichotomous legal and social policy categories, with a few notable exceptions (Clark-Kazak 2011, Back et al. 2012), research with refugees is still predominantly divided into studies with adults, or minors under the age of 18. Consequently, the particular experiences of young people, who in legal and policy terms are categorised on the ‘adult’ side of this divide, have to an extent been overlooked, while research with refugee young people does not often extend to explore trajectories beyond the age of 18. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, adolescents are subsumed within the broad category of ‘child’ or within ‘refugee families’. These divisions occur in spite of the recognition of the process of temporality in theorization of age (James et al. 1998) and relational approaches to studying age which have critiqued dichotomous and fixed understandings of life stages (Hockey and James 2003, Hopkins and Pain 2007). Meanwhile, literature in anthropology on age and generation has also drawn attention to the dominance of ‘Western’ cultural assumptions in such categorical conceptions of age and life-stage boundaries that may not necessarily apply in constructions of age in other social and cultural contexts (Mead 1943[1928], Chatty et al. 2005). Many of the refugee young people who arrived in the UK and other host states over the past couple of decades have/will experience life course transitions, including transitions into adulthood while living in these countries. Yet it is apparent that a focus on the concept of mobility in migration research has still predominantly centred on the experiences of mobility inherent in migration journeys and has sometimes overlooked the mobility within refugee young people’s life course trajectories.

An important contribution from the social studies of childhood, and recent research in youth studies, has been their critique of the future orientation in much research with children and young people, where the positioning of children as ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup 1994), or adults in the making, has occurred at the expense of exploring the immediacy of their present lived experiences and contributions to the social world. This book includes young women’s reflections on their present experiences as young people. However, while deterministic, developmental and adult-centric approaches to exploring age can be critiqued, childhood and youth cannot be understood in isolation from biographical temporalities, life course transitions and processes of ‘becoming’ (Mann 2010). In this book it is maintained that, in exploring the topic of age in migration, it is important to consider the role of change and movement, which are key characteristics of this element of social identity. Age is an inherently mobile characteristic as people move through the life course, but often through fluid and non-linear routes rather than along a fixed and predestined path divorced from the context of their social and historical experience (Skelton 2002). In considering the migration and settlement experiences of young refugees and other young migrants, it is important to recognize the role of their life course mobility and transitions here as their migration journeys are entwined with youth transitions, including transitions into adulthood.

The book explores pathways through which refugee young women (re) constructed home in their life in a new country, but also in young adulthood. A dialogical approach is taken towards both the concepts of home and age identity, examining the fluidity and movement in the way these concepts were defined and understood, and the pathways taken by young people. Politically and socially, refugee young people may be positioned in ‘borderlands’ between ‘origin’ and ‘host’ societies and between childhood and adulthood. It is suggested that this positioning created challenges and constraints in constructions of home, but that young women were also able to find ways in which to inhabit and create homely enclaves in these spaces.

Borders, Mobility and Home

Immigration Borders

In their discussion of recent migration patterns and characteristics Castles and Miller (2003) outline key trends, including the ‘globalization of migration’ as more countries are affected by migration, the ‘acceleration of migration’ as larger numbers of people migrate and the politicization of migration as discussed earlier. In this context immigration borders have attained increasing significance. According to Ritzer (2010), ‘Globalization is a transplanetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows.’ Immigration borders have played a key role in sub-dividing and ordering these flows of people into a hierarchy of movement where some flows are more liquid than others who solidify as they brush against barriers erected across their pathways. Immigration borders are established as legal borders, but also in some cases as a distinct physical presence, notably among these the nearly 700 mile fence along the Mexico-USA border (McGreal 2011). Borders are also exported to other geographical regions beyond the physical borders of ‘host’ nations in the EU, the USA and Australia. UK immigration officials make use of a global network of border security advisers operating in other countries around the world, while the USA’s and Australia’s use of ‘offshore processing centres’ and detention for asylum seekers has been documented, as well as EU states’ processing of asylum seekers in transit countries (Howard 2003, Mountz 2011, Vaughan-Williams 2010).

In Europe one of the founding principles of the European Common Market was a commitment to an easing of border controls between member states, including facilitating the movement of their citizens between these states. This approach is in clear contrast to border policies at Europe’s external borders. Recent decades have seen rising levels of restrictions on non-European Union immigration, both into individual European Union (EU) countries, such as the UK, but also across the region as a whole, giving rise to the term ‘Fortress Europe’ as attempts have been made to ‘push back’ migrants from Europe’s frontiers (Back 2009, Düvell and Jordan 2002, Dwyer 2005, Schuster 2005). The issue of asylum played a central role in this policy development in response to government and public perceptions of a crisis in numbers following the increase in asylum claims in European countries in the early 1990s, precipitated in part by events in the former Yugoslavia. In 1992, 670,000 people claimed asylum in EU countries. This number fell and then rose once more to a second peak of just over 400,000 in 2002. In the UK in 2002 84,000 people applied for asylum. Since then, a public and political sense of crisis has remained, despite the fact that the number of people claiming asylum has been falling since the early 2000s. Instead of operating in response to specific events, exclusionary immigration controls have now become a ‘normalized’ feature of immigration regimes in Europe and other host countries around the world (Bloch and Schuster 2005) and can be viewed as part of a ‘paranoid nationalism’ (Hage 2003).

In the UK immigration and asylum has become a key area of legislative and policy action. While no specific asylum legislation existed in the UK until the 1990s (Sales 2002), since 1993 there have been nine pieces of legislation in this field. These have not only focused on the enforcement of increasingly restrictive territorial border controls, but have also imposed a bordered and tiered system through which people seeking asylum must negotiate their experiences of arrival, settlement and ‘integration’. The legislation has introduced an expansion in the number of legal terms used to describe people seeking asylum at various stages of the asylum process and, as Dwyer and Brown (2005) argue, these are closely bound to and determine the rights and entitlements that people can claim. People defying territorial borders can become severely restricted with regard to other forms of mobility, including socio-economic mobility (Newman 2006, Turner 2008). Illustrations of such restrictions were evident in the young women’s experiences outlined in thisbook. However, while borders and borderlands can be sites of restriction, control and exclusion, their potential as sites of resistance has also been recognised and this is highlighted here too, particularly with reference to young women’s counter-narratives of home in the context of restrictions to rights, entitlements and official recognition of home-making (Anzaldua 1987, Van Horst 2004).

Home

The idea of ‘home’, which combines spatial, social, psychological and temporal aspects, is intimately connected with understandings of ‘identity’, ‘place’ and the relationship between the two. Migration, particularly forced migration, has often been viewed primarily in terms of its disruption or displacement, with physical journeys across territorial boundaries being reified into breaks in ontological security. Such approaches appear to have their roots in earlier anthropological understandings of home and identity, in which these elements were viewed as fixed, bounded and necessarily linked to a particular territory. Identity was linked to fixity and, therefore, finding ‘a stationary point in the environment’ where people knew themselves best was understood as being home (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 21). This was the centre around which the world was situated and from where it could be understood (Cresswell 2006, Massey 1992). With such conceptions of home in mind, it is understandable that migration, with its association with uprooting, uncertainty and the destabilization of the enclosure of home, has been a topic of interest among those researching home (Sirriyeh 2010).

In classic refugee narratives people have been understood as leaving ‘home’ when they are forced to journey into exile. However, some have warned against assuming the term ‘home’ to describe places that have been the site of persecution and fear (Huttunen 2005, Kissoon 2006). It is also important to recognise the heterogeneity of experiences among refugees and the ways and degrees to which people were incorporated into societies in their countries of origin (Kunz 1981). Dichotomies of ‘home’ and ‘away’ can also be over-simplistic as movement, dislocation and journeys can also take place in people’s lives prior to any migration experience (Ahmed 1999). Finally, exile is temporal, as well as geographical, and while people may at some point return to their country of origin, this is not necessarily a return home (Morley 2000, Muggeridge and Dona 2006, Warner 1994). This may be particularly marked for those young people who leave at a very young age and, therefore, have more limited first-hand experience in their countries of origin (Hoodfar 2010).

Forced migration is often associated with rupture from home. However, opportunities to (re)construct homes in the context of migration have been explored in research on migrant settlement in host societies and through writings on diaspora and transnationalism. Huttunen (2005: 180) argues that ‘homes are negotiated between constraints and possibilities connected to different locations. Homes are not necessarily either here or there, but rather in many locations simultaneously.’ Poststructuralist approaches to understanding home have recognised the role of movement in constructions of home (Ahmed et al. 2003) and have critiqued the idea of home as a stable origin, located in a fixed and singular place (Blunt and Dowling 2006). There has been a shift from a focus on the ‘roots’ of home to the ‘routes’ of home, which is the approach taken in this book. Conceptual shifts mean that it is now accepted that ‘not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998:27). ‘Mobile sociologies’ have recognised that movement may be a basis for identity formation (Urry 2000). This is not to dismiss the notion of being situated in place, as people ‘dwell’ through moving in, through and between places (Urry 2007). While movement can play a role in home-making, people also live in situated material spaces (although being situated does not necessarily mean being fixed into that place). Anti-sedentarism does not require the total rejection of attachments to place, or promote the idea of a sense of placelessness, but it questions ‘the naturalization of such links’ (Jansen and Löfving 2011: 5). Instead of a binary approach to home as located ‘here’ or ‘there’, or a linear pathway towards home as a destination, this book explores the fluidity and complexity in young people’s processes of home-making, in which their agency intersects with wider structural conditions across different aspects of their social worlds. As Jansen and Löfving (ibid) suggest, relations of power in these kinds of encounters imbue places with certain qualities such as security, freedom and familiarity, which enable people to have or not have a sense of home in particular places.

Refugees, Youth Transitions and Young Adulthood

The number of research studies with refugee children and young people has increased substantially within the past decade, although there are also examples of earlier research in this field particularly from the 1980s onwards (Ayotte et al. 1992, Ressler et al. 1988, Zulfucar 1987).To a large extent, research with young refugees has focussed on the experiences and welfare of children and young people up to the age of 18, with some exceptions extending beyond this age (Ball et al. 2000, Chatty et al. 2005, Clark-Kazak 2011, Grabska 2012, Healy 2012, O’Sullivan 2006, Refugee Action 2003, Stevenson and Willot 2007). Meanwhile, the experiences of refugee young people (sometimes including those beyond the age of 18) have also been discussed within some literature on ethnic minority and migrant young people in urban settings in industrialized countries in the global north (Back 1996, Dillabough and Kennelly 2010, Fangen et al. 2010, Mansouri 2009, Rumbault and Komaie 2010). However, while this illustrates the increasing recognition of their representation among ethnic minority populations in industrialized countries, most studies in this field are still predominantly centred on second and third generation migrants (Ni Laiore et al. 2011).

Research with refugee young people in countries of arrival has commonly concentrated on several key themes. Rights and entitlements based approaches have sought to examine how refugee young people fare at the interface of the often conflicting discourses and practice of ‘immigration control’ and ‘child welfare’(Watters 2008, Christie and Sidhu 2006). In the UK this theme is evident in literature on the treatment of young people in the asylum application process (Jones 2001), in particular in the context of age disputes (Crawley 2007) and detention (Burnett 2010). It has also been reflected on in debates about the integration or exclusion of refugee young people in countries of arrival. A number of studies have now focussed on the response of key services and institutional systems in countries of asylum, and on youn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface: Inhabiting Borders, Routes Home
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction – Locating home
• PART I JOURNEYS
• PART II NARRATIVES OF ‘HOME’
• Appendix: The Research Participants
• Bibliography
• Index