Globally, the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes has reached record highs, at over 60 million (UNHCR 2016). Although exact numbers are difficult to obtain, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that about a third of those displaced are refugees or asylum seekers. We use the term âasylum seekerâ to denote people who cross international borders seeking some form of humanitarian protection. Asylum seekersâalthough different from refugees in a strictly legal sense, as we explore belowâresemble the broader sociological descriptor of ârefugeesâ. They symbolize displaced people seeking safety in times of unrest in countries neighbouring their own or further afield. In our usage, an asylum seeker embodies this label of ârefugeeâ for two reasons: for the hope that he or she might harbour to be granted refugee status, due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, social group or political opinion; and for the often unbearably long process in which refugees become entangled when seeking asylum.
Traditionally, many countries within the Global North have demonstrated a clear preference for humanitarian programmes aimed at resettling limited numbers of refugees from the Global South. This was the practice during the Cold War, when asylum seekers were limited to sporadic cases and their acceptance helped western governments advance their political strategy of embarrassing the Soviet bloc countriesâfrom where most asylum seekers originated at the time (Keely 2001). These programmes enabled western governments to screen and effectively manage the inflow of people whose circumstances called for the humanitarian intervention of wealthier statesâthereby exercising moral authority and economic superiority over countries considered to be political opponents (Loescher 1993; Cohen 2006).
Since the late 1980s, however, the number of asylum seekers spontaneously travelling towards the Global North has increased (Black 1993), with their geographical areas of origin also diversifying (Van Hear and Crisp 1998). This has combined with an increase in restrictions on certain forms of migration targeted at preventing the arrival of asylum seekers (see Huysmans 2006). In the span of a few years, an unexpected inflow of asylum seekers began, whose arrival overwhelmed the reception systems of the countries receiving the highest numbers, causing a generally positive public and official attitude towards asylum seekers to change drastically towards one of closure and rejection (Muus 1997). Asylum seekers have consequently become a class of underprivileged people whose legal, social and economic precariousnessâinherited from their home countriesâ inability or unwillingness to provide for their overall safetyâis exacerbated by widespread hostility in countries that feel vulnerable in the face of, if not outright threatened by, the risk they are perceived to pose. As many contributors to this collection reveal, asylum seekers today face an ostensibly more intimidating and securitized environment in both the Global North and the ever-changing borderlands in or around destination countries. This book conceptualizes this precarity as entrapment, and seeks to identify the agents and processes that contribute to this cycle and produce the lived experience of immiseration that has been brought to bear on asylum seekers.
From a legal standpoint, asylum seekers who cross international borders seeking refugee protection are supported by international legal frameworks, such as, but not limited to, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention); the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the 1948 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of 1966. In international law, and to some extent within the domestic legislation of signatory states, asylum seekers have access to certain rights and entitlements. This includes non-punishment for their method of entry and the prohibition on governments returning to their country of origin any person who is deemed to be a victim of persecution or whose claim in that respect has not yet been determined (the principle of ânon-refoulementâ) (Goodwin-Gill and McAdam 2007). Technically, these international refugee law mechanisms work to provide an âexception to the general rule that sovereign states are free to decide who crosses their bordersâ (Dauvergne 2008, p. 62). Scholars highlight how this technical-legal position receives support by the influence of international agreements and conventions on border controls (Sassen 1996), and the âlegal processâ of liberal courts (Joppke 1998). It is also supported by the machinations of âclient politicsâ, bilateral relationships that serve particular interest groups and tend to increase rather than curtail migratory intakes (Freeman 1994).
Despite these legal and procedural safeguards, in todayâs world, asylum seekers are largely perceived and managed as unwanted and undeserving people. They are viewed as a security threat, deviant and ultimately prone to abusing asylum mechanisms. Asylum seekers have become ensnared in a stringent mesh of administrative, criminal and immigration laws, policies and practices that impinge upon their mobility across borders, while ensuring that their stay within borders remains unpleasant when unavoidable. They are increasingly contained between the promise and the reality of asylum (Gerard 2014; Vecchio 2013), between the diffuse, deregulated and often blatant denial of rights (Dauvergne 2008; Aas and Bosworth 2013) and the limitation on welfare that denies their basic needs (Webber 2012; Zetter 2007). Asylum seekers live, or are corralled into living, a liminal existence between a subtle âculture of rejectionâ and new conditions of violence enacted by border controls (Weber and Pickering 2011) and the delivery of humanitarian assistance that perpetuates ahistorical conceptualizations of ârefugeesââa label that is now infused with victimization, paternalism, subordination and passivity (Malkki 1995). When asylum seekers exert their agency, these expressions may ironically support the politics, policies and practices that, while promising asylum, foster asylum seekersâ legal, social and economic precariousness.
In this book, we aim to analyse and account for the policies, politics and practices that contribute to asylum seekersâ daily lived experiences of entrapment. We define entrapment as the novel yet most common condition that hinders asylum seekersâ capacity to lay down roots and feel safe and respected in the host country. In the realm of migration studies, entrapment has been conceptualized by NĂșñez and Heyman (2007, p. 354), who, drawing on a widely accepted notion of structuration theory (Giddens 1981), noted that âpolice and other state agencies impose significant risk on the movement of undocumented people, while these people exercise various forms of agency by both forgoing travel and covertly defying movement controls.â Yet, the chapters contained herein reveal a relation between structure and agency that goes beyond such an interpretation. Our contention advanced in this volume is that the agency of asylum seekers, and that of their supporters, may in some respects reproduce the policies, politics and practices shaping their immiseration and criminalization. In other words, in negating the impact of border controls, asylum seekersâ coping strategies may fuel expressions of agency that ultimately define their illegality, thus justifying the stringent policies aimed at deterring and protecting society from such behaviourâinstating a mutually reinforcing cycle of entrapment.
Weber and Pickering (2011) have long argued that, once deterrent policies or otherwise stringent systems targeting asylum seekers are in place, they may easily become self-perpetuating and institute what Squire (2009) called a self-fulfilling cycle. Those responsible for this cycle are the agents who enable and enforce asylum seeker precarity, as well as asylum seekers themselves, who seek to mitigate their immiseration as a survival strategy. Through this process, entrapment becomes self-reinforcing. In this book, we employ a multilevel analysis to draw a map that is far from exhaustive, and yet expounds the evidence upon which it should be possible to critically rehabilitate the figure of the asylum seeker: namely, a map of the policies, politics, practices and actors that, on several levels, are responsible and should be held accountable for the entrapment of asylum seekers in precarious lives, through processes that are either consciously designed to do so, or unintentionally cause vulnerability and a daily lived experience that is criminogenic.
In what follows, we root the analysis in a brief account of the asylum seeker contemporaneous condition. We then introduce the framework of entrapment that provided the genesis for this international edited collection, and conclude with an overview of this book and the contributions contained within.
The Social, Legal and Economic Precariousness of Asylum Seekers
The precariousness of asylum seekersâ social, legal and economic condition is suffered on several levels and at different times. Most notably, government and local policies can affect both the movement and lived experienced of asylum seekers (Koser 1997). At the same time, the discourses embedded within or supporting those policies have the potential to dehumanize asylum seekers and delegitimize the recognized legal status that comes with this form of humanitarian protection. This affects asylum seekersâ agency and that of the actors who are required, or willing, to manage their arrival and provide for their protection and well-being. Huot et al. (2016) recently examined the âotheringâ process at play for asylum seekers, whose estrangement from the host countryâs cultural, social and legal settings is escalated in the eye of the public by an overwhelmingly negative asylum discourse. Asylum seekers are generally deemed to be a threat associated with images of floods and waves that resonate with natural disasters (Crisp 2007). This perception of a threat is strengthened by asylum seekersâ uninvited mobility, in sharp contrast to resettlement programmes that operate on quotas and enable refugees to arrive in an âorderly fashionâ (Gibney and Hansen 2005). Asylum seekers are thus understood as imposing an economic and resource burden on host countries (Hammar 2001). They are perceived as abusing the charitable nature of protection; their trav...
