Asylum Seekers
Asylum seekers are individuals who have fled their home countries due to persecution, conflict, or human rights abuses and are seeking protection in another country. They often apply for refugee status and await a decision on their asylum claims. The geography of asylum seekers involves understanding the patterns of migration, the distribution of asylum seekers across different regions, and the factors influencing their movement.
6 Key excerpts on "Asylum Seekers"
eBook - ePub- Elizabeth Wheaton(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Definitions regarding seeking asylum differ and are written to conform to international, national, and regional policies. This textbook incorporates definitions from the top international and national agencies, including UNHCR and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). UNHCR was created to protect the lives and human rights of refugees, Asylum Seekers, and internally displaced and stateless people. This agency works with people who have fled from their homes due to violence, persecution, war, or disaster. They provide items for emergency assistance, transportation, and income-generating projects. The goal is to provide each displaced person with the opportunity to return home or resettle in a safe place. Below are some of the definitions from this international agency that are relevant to seeking asylum. According to UNHCR, a refugee is someone forced to flee their country due to violence, persecution, or war. The term refugee is defined under international and regional law. A refugee may move from one host country to another host country and is afforded the same legal protection. An asylum seeker is a person who is inside or outside the borders of a nation and appeals to the nation for asylum, but who has not yet been granted asylum. The goal of seeking asylum is to gain protection and material support from the asylum-granting nation. The asylum seeker must provide specific evidence as to why they fear persecution in the home country. Persons who are caught in a country illegally can be expelled from the country in a process called refoulement. International law provides for non-refoulement for Asylum Seekers, meaning that a person who applies for asylum cannot be forcibly returned to their home country without a determination of need for asylum. The term migrant has an international, standardized definition...
eBook - ePubPolitical and Military Sociology
The European Refugee Crisis
- Karthika Sasikumar, Danijela Dudley, Karthika Sasikumar, Danijela Dudley(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...During the Cold War, Asylum Seekers from East European communist countries were often accepted by the receiving states since there was clear political and ideological violence aimed at them—they were dissidents with political reputations that needed protection (Neumayer 2005). In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the structure of Asylum Seekers changed: They were predominantly from third world countries, had less cultural affinity with Europeans, and often arrived through the use of traffickers and false documentation (Hansen and King 2000). While still officially dubbed “Asylum Seekers” as they tended to apply for asylum, some segments of the public in receiving countries described them as “bogus refugees,” branding them as mere economic migrants. This led to calls for restricting the inflow of refugees, resulting in measures aimed at deterrence and deflection, such as the compilation of lists of “safe” countries of origin and “safe” third countries to which the refugees could be returned. European countries took some time to grapple with the reasons why people seek asylum. Neumayer tried to identify reasons, showing that factors that influence asylum seeking in Western Europe are numerous and interdependent: the economic conditions in the country of origin are statistically significant and substantively important determinants of aggregate numbers of Asylum Seekers. However, the type of political regime, threats to the personal integrity of the individual, dissident violence, civil/ethnic warfare, and external conflicts were also found to be important factors (Neumayer 2005). Thus, for many refugees it appears that economic factors and violence influence each other, creating a strong “push” for migration. Studies also concluded that migrants are more mobile in larger groups, when a larger number of past Asylum Seekers exists, when the destination country is geographically closer, and when the possibility of obtaining generous welfare provisions exists...
- David J. Whittaker(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Ugandan Asians, Chileans, Kurds, Zaireans, former Yugoslavs. Jews, particularly, have long been exiles, victimised and ousted. Their dispersion, the diaspora, has been a feature of history since Roman persecution in first-century Palestine. For centuries, those who did not flee were confined to ghettoes, exposed to anti-Semitism and atrocity. After 1945 many thousands of Jews were able to settle in Israel, their Promised Land. Jewish refugees everywhere have made an incomparable contribution to the arts, to literature, to music and to science. Thus we have a history of individual and group retreat from persecution and hardship meeting a counter-response whether of acknowledgement, reception, welcome, assimilation and integration or of bureaucratic obstruction and popular prejudice. In general terms, as we have already noted, there appears to have been a move to coordinate a humanitarian and helpful response to asylum seeking. It could be said that even the most unhelpful and least compassionate of observers increasingly admit that the scale and diversity of mass emigration now calls for planned and consistent handling if the settled world is not to become ever more chaotic. Even so, many informed critics of this ‘handling’ by European governments see states’ policies as ever more restrictive, coloured by short-sightedness, sectional interests and hypocrisy. The rest of this chapter will take a close look at the matter of protection for Asylum Seekers—the principles underlying international approach, some of the means commonly employed to manage migration, and, finally, the prospects of preventive action...
eBook - ePubMigration Theory
Talking across Disciplines
- Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield, Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The socio-spatial logic to exclude Central Americans from securing asylum in the US is explained by Cynthia Gorman (2019). Based upon the interpretation of the “particular social group” provision, Gorman argues that refugee definitions construct specific relationships between people and territory. In the case of Central Americans seeking asylum due to gang violence, the US Board of Immigration Appeals has determined that violence is so common in Central America that it does not warrant protection unless a migrant can demonstrate that he or she has been singled out. In other words, the scale of violence (limited vs. widespread) is critical in determining one’s rights to asylum. This interpretation has been challenged in US courts, but it shows how scalar forms of bordering work within the legal justifications of asylum claims. The geopolitical and biopolitical logics employed in the detention and removal of migrants is also a major area of research. Refugee camps, detention centers, and asylum processing sites have proliferated around the world. In the past two decades, the US led the world in the deportation of migrants (Price and Breese 2016). Nancy Hiemstra, engaging in a transnational ethnography, details the operations of detention centers in the US and the consequences of deportation on the country of Ecuador (Hiemstra 2014, 2019). As countries reject asylum claims and make legal entry more challenging, detention and deportation are becoming normalized. Hiemstra argues that these punitive systems are not deterring migrants. Moreover, the privatization of detention centers in the US means that companies are profiting from large government contracts to detain people...
eBook - ePubMedia Framing of the Muslim World
Conflicts, Crises and Contexts
- H. Rane, J. Ewart, John Martinkus(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...4 Asylum Seekers Given the extent of pejorative political, media and public discourse on Asylum Seekers, particularly where Muslims are concerned, it is ironic that migration and particularly asylum seeking have a special place in the Islamic tradition. At the advent of Islam in 610, many of the early converts to the new monotheistic faith were severely persecuted by the polytheistic Meccans. Muhammad instructed the weakest and most vulnerable of his followers to emigrate from Arabia and seek asylum under the protection of the Christian king of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Moreover, in the year 622 the rest of the Meccan Muslim community, including Muhammad himself, migrated to a town called Yathrib (later named Madina) almost 280 miles (about 450 kilometers) to the north, where they were given asylum by the people of the town. This migration, known as the hijra in Arabic, marks year one on the Islamic calendar, as it was from this point in time and space that the religion of Islam began to take shape in terms of its characteristic rituals and laws (Rane, 2010a). This chapter is concerned with the growing numbers of people around the world who have been forced to seek refuge in other countries. A large proportion of these Asylum Seekers are Muslims fleeing war, conflict and political repression in their own countries. Particularly since the turn of the century, however, some Western media have represented Asylum Seekers unsympathetically, as undeserving and opportunistic and as potential criminals and terrorists. The policies of certain Western governments have violated the rights of Asylum Seekers and attempted to deter them from applying for asylum. Public opinion in many Western countries has also hardened and concern about the arrival of Asylum Seekers is widespread...
eBook - ePubAustralia
Nation, Belonging, and Globalization
- Anthony Moran(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It is well known that two-thirds of claims for asylum in the world are made in European Union countries (Jupp 2003). Asylum Seekers, and immigration more generally, have become large political issues in a number of those countries, with swelling support for conservative and populist parties with anti-immigration messages. Only a small percentage of such claims for asylum are made in Australia (Crock and Saul 2002: xvi).The burden of dealing with the world’s refugees, internally displaced persons, and other people of concern is overwhelmingly borne by the poorer and underdeveloped countries of Africa and Asia (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2000; Castles 2002: 174). From this perspective, the Australian reaction to Asylum Seekers since the 1990s, and even more so after the MV Tampa crisis, seems wildly out of proportion to the real threat, and to the possible drain on public resources. How is one then to understand this phenomenon? Cast in its best light, such actions could be seen as a rational and moral response to a world problem: that is the import of government “humanitarian” rationale for the policies. By enacting “zero tolerance,” the Australian government claimed to be attacking the repugnant activity of people smuggling, potentially saving the lives of would-be boat people who would be deterred from seeking out the services of people smugglers and, furthermore, protecting the rights of those “legitimate” and bona fide refugees who were patiently awaiting their turn for resettlement. It could be argued that the controversial policy of mandatory detention of unauthorized arrivals responds to issues of legality and control that any government must address where Asylum Seekers are concerned. It seems eminently sensible to run checks on people who enter the country without documents or with falsified papers...
