Asylum as construction work: Theorizing administrative practices (original) (raw)
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Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria
IMISCOE Research Series, 2018
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The bureaucratization of asylum. Drivers, practices and effects
This panel looks at the ways bureaucracy increasingly shapes the global refugee regime and examines the drivers, contexts and consequences of this phenomenon. From " refugee status determination " to " need assessment " procedures; from reception centres to refugee camps; from the negotiations of international refugee law to the implementation of integration, resettlement and repatriation programs, in Western like in postcolonial contexts, the international refugee regime is mainly enacted by state, international or NGO officials who spend most of their time carrying out bureaucratic activities such as classifying and categorizing people, writing reports and generating statistics, making and applying standardized norms and procedures, being accountable, etc. Bureaucracy also constitutes the main interface with the recipient population, and is embodied in specific spaces, encounters and material arrangements such as asylum offices, camps, transit centres, where bureaucratic power is performed and enacted. For its pervasiveness and its significance, we believe that bureaucracy offers a relevant angle to look at the globalizing refugee regime, one that has the additional advantage of allowing a trans-institutional and non-state centred approach.
This paper examines the effects of dehumanization produced in the bureaucratic procedure of refugee status determination. The issue of asylum is not only highly topical; it also represents a fundamental issue since it touches upon basic human rights – individuals not granted protection usually have to return to their countries of origin, where their lives are often be in danger. In our ethnographic study, we conceptualize dehumanization as objectification and (work) alienation. We consider both the perspective of the asylum claimants (as the subjects of the bureaucratic procedure), as well as of the public servants as workers, using three tiers of analysis – the asylum interview, the sequence of the asylum determination procedure (a case), and the public official's workplace and its organizational context. The starting point of our paper is a short literature review on alienation and reification in work organizations as well as objectification in order to demonstrate how both terms are linked, but used with different meanings by various theories. Following this, we introduce the case along which the theoretical frame will be discussed and which is based on empirical research on refugee status determination in the former Austrian Federal Asylum Office. Our discussion of empirical findings in the following three chapters is structured along the mentioned levels of analysis. First, the asylum interview as a cornerstone of the procedure is used for observing practices of dehumanization in face-to-face interaction. Second, case processing is analyzed as a process of translating the individual into an abstract case through categories and documents. Third, the effects of the organizational context on the public officials are considered, in particular with regard to New Public Management and related pressures in everyday work. The paper's conclusion presents as one of the central findings the linkage between increased work alienation experienced by the public official (aggravated by, if not directly resulting from performance expectations set by the organizational context), and the increased objectification of the asylum claimants in the asylum interview in particular.
Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2019
Complementing and challenging the existing literature on the Italian asylum crisis, this article develops an actor-centred approach to open the ‘black box’ of asylum governance, showing the constitutive effects of governance on the asylum issue. It then applies this approach to the case of the Veneto region in Italy during the recent ‘refugee crisis’. By doing so, the article, first, investigates the cognitive mechanisms that shape key actors’ asylum policy decisions. Drawing concepts and ideas from framing and sensemaking theories, it shows that, while there is certainly a strategic element that shapes actors' policy preferences, there is also a meaningful cognitive component in asylum governance. Indeed, it argues that actors' strategies are shaped, more than by anti-immigration public attitudes per se (as often assumed), by how political actors make sense of these attitudes. The article then applies SNA to examine how actors' understandings are located within and depe...
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2018
With the establishment of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in 2010, a new collective actor entered the European asylum policy arena. Although the agency commands limited financial and personnel resources, and has no formal powers to directly interfere in the decision-making practices of asylum authorities across Europe, its mandate and reach of influence are a subject of recurrent dispute. We consider the struggles surrounding the EASO's role and position as manifestations of enduring conflicts of recognition, valuation and distribution in a Europeanised asylum administrative field. By analysing civil servants' position-takings vis-à-vis the EASO, we demonstrate that officials from a variety of member states are united by a shared belief in disinterested, apolitical bureaucratic rules of procedure, based on a notion of 'expertise' that transcends national boundaries and supersedes national concerns. At the same time, the discursive boundary work invested by the interviewees draws on spatial, temporal and procedural categories of differentiation, highlighting complex processes of ongoing relational positionings and practices of distinction. The corresponding hierarchies and inequalities are further indications of a transnational administrative field with its own principles of valuation.
Migration Studies, 2017
Drawing on elite interviews with UK asylum policymakers, this article entails a detailed elaboration of how policy programmes are produced by particular ways of imagining asylum seeking in an effort to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon and thus devise policy responses to it. The article explores how such processes can lead to the curtailment of the economic rights of asylum seekers with specific reference the UK policy of severely restricting labour market access for asylum seekers. The policy imaginary-the story which is utilized in reducing the complexity of irregular migration in this context-is the idea of the 'economic pull factor'. That is that disingenuous asylum seekers (economic migrants in disguise) are 'pulled' to particular countries by economic opportunities. This construal of what drives irregular migration for asylum is not natural or inevitable, it is the outcome of institutionally embedded ways of viewing the world and Britain's place within it. This discussion brings insights from critical policy studies to bear on asylum policy making, offering new ways of understanding the practices and processes of policy making in this field.
The Permission to be Cruel: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Harms Against People Seeking Asylum
Critical Criminology, 2020
Immigration and asylum policies and practices in Britain have turned increasingly hostile. People seeking asylum are exposed to a panoply of control measures and rendered vulnerable. The state has exteriorized its controls and drawn-in various actors and agencies who now enact state power in the control of migration. This article moves away from essentialist and simplistic notions of the state-one that views the state as monolithic and coherent with strictly defined social borders-and explores the role of what Lipsky (2010), in his book Street-level Bureaucracy, calls "street-level bureaucrats." It shows the ways in which actors and agencies enact state power and inflict cruelty on asylum seekers through their strategic actions and inactions. Drawing on data from ethnographic research, this article demonstrates how bureaucratic practices create and exacerbate psychological distress among asylum seekers and push them into dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations. By doing so, this article makes a contribution to the literature on migration, state racism and violence.
Political Geography, 2022
The Common European Asylum System aims to establish common standards for refugee status determination among EU Member States. Combining insights from legal and political geography we bring the depth and scale of this challenge into sharp relief. Drawing on interviews and a detailed ethnography of asylum adjudication involving over 850 in-person asylum appeal observations, we point towards practical differences in the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics of asylum appeal processes as they are operationalised in seven European countries. Our analysis achieves three things. Firstly, we identify a key zone of differences at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped academic attention, which allows us to critically assess the notion of harmonisation of asylum policies in new ways. Secondly, drawing on legal-and political-geographical concepts, we offer a way to conceptualise this zone by paying attention to the spatiotemporality, materiality and logistics it involves. Thirdly, we offer critical legal logistics as a new direction for scholarship in legal geography and beyond that promises to prise open the previously obscured mechanics of contemporary legal systems.
From the Law to the Decision: The Social and Legal Conditions of Asylum Adjudication in Switzerland
European Policy Analysis, 2017
Starting from an ethnography within the State Secretariat for Migrations in Switzerland, this article addresses the issue of discretion in law enforcement by analyzing the conditions in which Swiss asylum caseworkers make their decision. This article argues that social and legal constraints frame caseworkers' practices and favor a strict interpretation of the law when implementing it. If evolutions of legislation have indeed strengthened the law, there are also incentives for strictness through the controls of superiors and peers, as well as through the secondary implementation rules created within the office to orient caseworkers' practices. Nevertheless, this article also shows that the position of the individual caseworkers in the institution, their institutional symbolic capital, the role of their superiors, the group pressure they experience, the countries from which the asylum demands they process originate, as well as caseworkers' institutional socialization, structure their perception of the room for maneuver they can exercise.
Asylum Determination in Europe : Ethnographic Perspectives
2018
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