Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate

Second Edition

J. Freedman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137456236
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This revised and updated 2nd edition of Freedman's hard-hitting study aims to remedy the current lack of gender-specific analyses of asylum and refugee issues. It provides a comprehensive account of the situation of women in global forced migration, and explains the ways in which women's experiences are shaped by gendered relations and structures.

1

A Gendered Approach to Refugee and Asylum Studies

In recent years, asylum seekers have made headlines of many newspaper and television reports in European countries and other richer nations around the world, like Canada, the US or Australia. These asylum seekers and refugees are often seen as a problem and a threat to these societies. Reports express fears of huge masses of asylum seekers flooding into countries of the West with governments powerless to stop them. These asylum seekers, they say, are not ‘real’ refugees fleeing violence and persecution, but ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or ‘false refugees’ coming to benefit from the economic and material benefits available in Western states. And particularly since the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the US, and subsequent terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, fears have been raised about the connections that might exist between asylum seekers and terrorists. All of these fears can be argued to be without foundation in fact but they have become part of the everyday understandings of what an asylum seeker is. And at the same time, our televisions and newspapers show us images of refugees massed in camps in Africa, the Middle East or Asia, living in tents, or makeshift shelters, lacking sufficient food supplies, drinking water or basic washing facilities. The people in these camps have fled conflicts, massacres or natural disasters and find themselves still vulnerable and dependent on foreign aid.1 These lives of extreme insecurity are often revealed to provoke pity2 in the spectator, to engage support for humanitarian action or perhaps at the same time to gain public approval for a foreign military intervention.3 What is the link between these two sets of images and two sets of sentiments? How can we reconcile our ‘pity’ for the refugee in a camp in Africa and our ‘fear’ of the same refugee arriving in our country to seek asylum? And what about all those who have died on the journey from one continent to another? In December 2006, the Red Cross reported that at least 80 Africans had drowned when their boat sank off the coast of Senegal on its way to the Canary Islands. A month earlier, ten children died in a shipwreck off the Spanish coast. More recently, there have been almost monthly reports of shipwrecks and drownings in the Mediterranean as desperate migrants try to reach Europe, and the death figures have grown massively. The International Organisation for Migration reported that over 3000 migrants died whilst trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe in 2014. These are not isolated incidents but part of an ongoing series of deaths incurred whilst people try to cross the oceans of the world in small and often unseaworthy boats, desperate to reach the coasts of Europe or of Australia. Others have been suffocated whilst hiding in the backs of lorries to try to cross borders to reach the West or have been shot or injured while trying to scale the walls of Ceuta or Melilla, the Spanish compounds in Morocco. It is probably impossible to know how many die whilst trying to reach Europe, the US, Canada or Australia. Many of these people are refugees fleeing from civil war, conflict, repression of their political and civil rights, economic or environmental crises. But for those who do succeed in reaching a Western country, the reception is more often than not hostile. Suspected of being ‘false refugees’ or ‘economic migrants,’ they are subject to a series of interviews and judicial procedures whilst their claims are being examined. Usually with no right to work and access to only minimal benefits, they live in poverty and are excluded from rights enjoyed by other citizens. More and more often, these asylum seekers are housed in reception or detention centres where living conditions may be dismal. In Australia, all asylum seekers are kept in mandatory detention until their case is decided, thus extending a prison regime and ‘criminal’ punishment to those who have in fact not committed any criminal offence other than that of entering a country without the correct visas.

So why does the issue of refugees and asylum seekers cause so much debate? And why are people willing to take so many risks to reach another country to claim asylum? The question of refugees is not a new one. Indeed the notion of ‘asylum’ or protection to be given to foreigners by another state is one that has been discussed by governments for centuries. However, the scale of forced migrations in recent years has increased massively. At the start of the 1950s, about one and half million refugees were registered and under the protection of the United Nations. Most of these people had been displaced by the Second World War or were moving from Eastern to Western Europe as the Cold War began, while some had been displaced by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent war in the Middle East. Just over 60 years later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are around 51 million people worldwide who are ‘of concern’ to them.4 These include those who have been accorded official refugee status by the UNHCR under the terms of the 1951 Geneva Convention,5 those seeking asylum in a Western state (in other words, they have made a claim to be recognised as a refugee under the terms of the Geneva Convention and the national laws of the state in which they have made the claim) and those who have been forced to migrate within their own country of origin and are living in a camp or temporary accommodation within a different region of that country. These figures do not include, however, those who remain undocumented or ‘clandestine’ exiles, those who have fled their country but have not claimed asylum or refugee status from a foreign government or from the UNHCR. Many millions of people forced to flee from their homes are now living in or around cities in Africa, Asia or Latin America, often in desperate conditions, but unregistered by any government, refugee emergency or NGO. These refugees then do not figure in the UNHCR statistics (Marfleet, 2006) and, as Agier points out, it is often difficult to locate those displaced by forced migration as these people may try to blend discreetly into the background, living in conditions of economic or legal clandestinity and thus preferring to remain ‘silent’ (Agier, 2002: 55). Adding these people would make the figure much greater but it is impossible to estimate accurately how many people are concerned. What is evident though is that contrary to what some reports might lead us to believe, the great majority of the world’s displaced people remain within the countries of the Third World with very few having the desire or the necessary resources to make the perilous journey to the West. In 2013 Africa, Asia and the Middle East between them hosted over 60 per cent of the total world refugee population (UNHCR, 2014). Pakistan, for example, was estimated to host about 1.6 million refugees, nearly all of them from Afghanistan, whilst Iran hosts around 850,000 Afghan refugees (UNHCR, 2014). Lebanon is also now included among the top refugee-hosting nations, following the influx of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees (UNHCR, 2014). Thus those who bear the greatest ‘costs’ in terms of hosting refugees and displaced people are not the rich states of the West (although these states do make contributions to the budget of the UNHCR) but largely the poorer states of the Third World (Chimni, 1998).

Although on paper we can establish simple definitions of a refugee and an asylum seeker, in practice this is not so simple. The definition of a refugee under international law is someone who has been recognised either by a national government or by the UNHCR as deserving international protection under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention/Geneva Convention (for a more detailed discussion of this convention and particularly of the understanding of gender-related persecution under the convention, see Chapter Four). And an asylum seeker is someone who has asked a particular state to grant him or her refugee status under the terms of this convention. However, these straightforward definitions are challenged by the realities of current global migratory trends. Can asylum be separated from other migratory phenomena? Are refugees different from other migrants? For some, there is a clear difference between an asylum seeker and an economic migrant, one fleeing persecution and the other leaving their country of origin ‘voluntarily’ for economic motives. This distinction is often made in a form that is not neutral, classifying the two groups of migrants within a particular political schema with the real asylum seeker or genuine refugee as a ‘good’ migrant, a poor victim of persecution or oppression worthy of support and protection, and the economic migrant a ‘bad’ migrant, often a fraud trying to make the authorities believe he or she is a refugee but really wanting to enter the countries of the West to benefit from the better economic opportunities and the generous welfare states in these countries. In reality, the division is much more difficult and perhaps even impossible to make. The reasons that people flee their countries of origin are multiple and diverse, often there are several different reasons combined which finally push people to leave. They may flee because of a particular incident of violence or oppression, an arrest, torture or death threats but it may also be that the general circumstances in which they are living make it impossible for them to remain. Economic and political causes of migration are not opposites but form part of a continuum and often political conflict is the expression or result of a failure to bring about economic or social development or to safeguard human rights (Castles and Loughna, 2005). Further, political conflict may be the cause of economic crises and may thus push many people into untenable conditions of poverty. It is thus nearly impossible to classify migrations either as the result of political or economic circumstances or as ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’. Would a man or woman leaving their country of origin because they were unable to find enough food or money to feed themselves or their children be classed as a ‘voluntary’ or ‘economic’ migrant? This type of categorisation seems far too simplistic an understanding. Moreover it is questionable whether truly ‘voluntary’ migration exists other than in a very small minority of cases, with a continuum of different situations between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migrations existing in practice (Binder and Tosic, 2005). A combination of incidents and circumstances combine to make a refugee and as Papademetriou comments:

Increasingly both pure refugees and purely economic migrants are ideal constructs rarely found in real life; many among those who routinely meet the refugee definition are clearly fleeing both political oppression and economic dislocation. (Papademetriou, 1993: 212)

The UNHCR has explicitly recognised that refugees include those who flee ‘wretched conditions’ associated with poverty, marginalisation and discrimination (UNHCR, 1995a). But, paradoxically, as the economic and political situation in many regions has worsened, so the asylum receiving states in the West have tightened up their definitions of who is or who is not entitled to asylum in their countries. This means in practice that those who may have been admitted 20 or 30 years ago as refugees are now rejected as ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or economic migrants, subject to detention and expulsion back to their countries of origin. Many of these people do not even make it past the immigration controls at airports – they are held in retention zones and then put on the first aeroplane back to where they came from with only the most cursory examination of their claims for asylum. Others are stopped at sea and turned back. In 2001, a series of boats trying to reach Australia were intercepted and turned back. Those on the boats were not allowed to land on Australian territory but were transferred to other countries in the Pacific – Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, for what the Australian authorities called ‘extraterrestrial processing’. This new policy marked a shift in concern from the protection of refugees to the securing of borders (Humphrey, 2003), a shift which is a common feature of Western asylum and refugee regimes. For those who do manage to make a claim for asylum, the likelihood is that it will be rejected. Some countries in the European Union now reject over 90 per cent of asylum claims, and in 2003 Greece reached a total of 99.9 per cent of rejections. Valluy argues that many more European states would now be rivalling Greece in these almost total rejection rates if it were not for the large bureaucracies which have grown up to deal with asylum claimants and which would become redundant if all asylum claims were summarily rejected (Valluy, 2005). These trends of increasing rejection and repression lead some to conclude that we will shortly witness ‘the death of the refugee’ (Tuitt, 1996: 20) or the refugee as ‘an endangered species’ (Humphrey, 2003: 40).

How have these negative perceptions of asylum seekers and refugees developed? How has the image of a ‘heroic’ refugee fleeing from repression and persecution disappeared to be replaced by that of the ‘fraudulent’ asylum seeker threatening the economic and political stability of Western states? Is it the general public which has suddenly decided that it does not like asylum seekers or have these representations been developed and refined by political elites? Are they a result of the influence of the extreme Right in Western politics? Or do they stem from more generalised and widespread xenophobia? The answer is not simple and is probably a combination of various factors. Politicians in the West have tended to justify restrictive policies towards asylum seekers in terms of a response to public opinion which is largely ‘anti-immigration’ and which demands tough measures to restrict the numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers admitted to their country. Some researchers share this view. Hansen and King, for example, attribute restrictive tendencies in asylum policy to ‘illiberal pressures emanating from the basic liberal democratic processes – impulses towards xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism’ (Hansen and King, 2000: 396). However, this view of the current restrictive policies as a direct result of hostile public opinion is somewhat simplistic. In many European countries, the feasibility of maintaining liberal policies with respect to asylum seekers and refugees began to be seriously questioned in the 1970s after the closure of borders to labour migration (Boswell, 2000). Correspondingly, the figures for rejected asylum applications began to increase in many countries from the 1970s, that is to say, well before the current politicisation and mediatisation of the asylum issue and well before asylum became a major topic of public debate (Valluy, 2005). Crépeau points to the emergence of a rhetoric of denial of the right to asylum as early as the late 1970s and early 1980s when the notion of ‘manifestly unfounded’ asylum claims appeared in technocratic language to designate procedural means of expediting the rejection of asylum claims (Crépeau, 1995). The start of this rejection of asylum can thus be traced back to a period well before the current debates, a moment when many European states began to close their borders to labour migration and when bureaucratic and political norms began to emerge which treated all forms of incoming migration as a concern for the nation state. These norms were to some degree concealed by particular refugee ‘crises,’ such as that of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ or that of Chilean refugees who were granted asylum in Europe on the basis of specific quotas but a general tendency to reject asylum claims from nationals of other countries was already emerging.

Linked to explanations of the ‘rejection’ of asylum which attribute restrictionist policies to negative public attitudes to asylum seekers are explanations which posit the emergence of the extreme Right as a political force as the major causal factor. However, these explanations are also sometimes reductionist. Although extreme Right parties with manifestos that include anti-immigration policies as a central element have enjoyed electoral successes in some European countries, it can be noted as above that anti-asylum rhetoric and practices emerged in the public sphere before the ascendancy of these parties. Further, anti-asylum rhetoric and restrictionist policies have also been evident in countries like the UK where the extreme Right has had little electoral success or influence. Thus although the extreme Right and a hostile public opinion may be seen as contributory factors in magnifying the perception that asylum seekers are a ‘threat’ that must be dealt with, political and bureaucratic elites must also bear an important part of the responsibility for the xenophobic policies that have emerged with regard to those seeking asylum.

The negative representations and perceptions of asylum seekers as fraudulent or false are reinforced in official discourse by the proportion of asylum claims which are rejected by immigration authorities in different countries. Valluy describes a cycle of rejection whereby the increasing numbers of asylum seekers rejected in European states are in turn used by politicians as justification for their beliefs that these are false asylum seekers and in turn for their repressive policies towards these people. The then French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, announced to the National Assembly in 2002 that:

Certainly the flood of asylum seekers is a sign of the increase in violations of human rights and of persecution on a global scale. Every day, men and women have no other solution but to flee their country to escape from degrading treatment, torture and death. But those who are really persecuted are far from representing the majority of asylum seekers: not long ago the Ofpra6 granted refugee status to nearly one asylum seeker in five, today this status is only granted to less than 13 per cent of asylum seekers. The evidence is even clearer in terms of territorial asylum for which the number of favourable decisions was less than 0.3 per cent in 2002. The fact is that many foreigners are claiming asylum in our system not to obtain the protection of our country but to stay here for as long as possible, their motivation being purely economic in nature.7

This rejection is thus not just a product of the rhetoric of populist right-wing parties or of illiberal public opinion but has emanated from political institutions and actors themselves. Restrictive and stigmatising discourse on asylum seekers comes politically ‘from the top down’ rather than as a response to public pressure (Statham, 2003). Asylum has increasingly been framed both within xenophobic and nationalist discourses and within a discourse of security where asylum seekers are seen as threats to the safety of the nation. This is effected both through their supposed association with international terrorism and through the amalgam made between asylum seekers, people smugglers and international crime networks, a framing which views the asylum seeker not as a blameless victim of these smugglers but as, at least in part, complicit with their crime (Morrison, 2001). As Schuster argues, the term ‘asylum-seeker’ is now used to conjure up ‘cheat, liar, criminal, sponger someone deserving of hostility by virtue not of any misdemeanour, but simply because he or she is an “asylum-seeker”’ (Schuster, 2003: 244).

In the attempt to continually decrease the number of asylum seekers who reach their countries and the number of asylum seekers to whom refugee status is eventually granted, governments have put in place procedures for processing and deciding asylu...