Abstract
A sizable portion of the undocumented population in the US is Chinese but they are an understudied group. We analyze secondary literature and policies to understand undocumented Chinese ...immigration in its historical and contemporary contexts and draw on interviews with undocumented migrants, community organizers, social workers, and others working in the Chinese community in New York City, as well as participant observation of community events, to analyze how illegality is constructed and experienced by undocumented Chinese migrants. We show how restrictive immigration policies exclude most Chinese migrants from legal entry into the US, force many to endure dangerous migration routes and bind Chinese migrants’ experience of illegality with asylum seeking. The asylum regime is putatively humanitarian but inflicts legal violence and diverts efforts away from collective organizing for rights-based remedies towards debt-fueled migration and asylum seeking, a process that keeps migrants in lengthy periods of legal precarity and reproduces national and global inequalities. Our study contributes to the literature on migrant illegality in sociology that is primarily based on the experiences of Latinx migrants by highlighting the continuities and unique features of legal violence experienced by undocumented Chinese.
The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased ...constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.
This article analyzes how and why the apartheid government and white South African society assisted white refuge seekers fleeing from the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa in ...July 1960. It argues that race-based solidarity shaped how white South Africans responded to Congo's white refuge seekers, generating a momentary but widespread sense of responsibility for their well-being. This article shows how the government's reaction to these refuge seekers informed its regional and national political strategy to maintain white minority rule. The South African government's racial solidarity with Congo's refuge seekers overlapped with a desire to bolster white population numbers and depict South Africa as a bastion of white refuge. Its reaction to Congo's refuge seekers therefore emphasizes how racial, regional, and national politics can work together to shape refugee policies.
In 2017, the Finnish Immigration Service received approximately 1,000 asylum applications and appeals based on conversion from Islam to Christianity. The applications claimed that converted asylum ...seekers would face mortal danger if returned to their countries of origin. The applications posed an unprecedented dilemma for the Finnish Immigration Service: how was it, as a secular state institution, to evaluate these claims of conversion? This question also became an object of significant public and media debate. In this article, I examine how journalists writing for a religious media publication, Kirkko ja kaupunki, the newspaper of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Helsinki region, sought to intervene in the debate on asylum seekers’ conversions. I focus my analysis on one central line of argument in their reporting: a call for the better- inclusion of and engagement with religious expertise on Christianity by the Finnish Immigration Service when evaluating conversion-based asylum applications and appeals. I show that this call both positioned religious expertise as an antidote to the challenges that efforts to evaluate conversion-based asylum appeals posed to Finnish Immigration Service employees in this time period, and constituted expertise as a site for negotiations over the ‘proper’ relationship between religion and state.
Europe recently experienced a large influx of refugees, spurring much public debate about the admission and integration of refugees and migrants into society. Previous research based on ...cross-sectional data found that European citizens generally favour asylum seekers with high employability, severe vulnerabilities, and Christians over Muslims. These preferences and attitudes were found to be homogeneous across countries and socio-demographic groups. Here, we do not study the general acceptance of asylum seekers, but the acceptance of refugee and migrant homes in citizens' vicinity and how it changes over time. Based on a repeated stated choice experiment on preferences for refugee and migrant homes, we show that the initially promoted "welcome culture" towards refugees in Germany was not reflected in the views of a majority of a sample of German citizens who rather disapproved refugee homes in their vicinity. Their preferences have not changed between November 2015, the peak of "welcome culture," and November 2016, after political debates, media reporting and public discourse had shifted towards limiting admission of immigrants. A minority of one fifth of the sample population, who were initially rather approving of refugee and migrant homes being established in their vicinity, were more likely to change their preferences towards a rather disapproving position in 2016. Experience of contact with refugees and migrants, higher education, and general pro-immigration attitudes explain acceptance of refugee and migrant homes as well as preference stability over time. Country of origin and religion of refugees and migrants are considered less important than decent housing conditions and whether refugee and migrants arrive as families or single persons. In this respect our results highlight the importance of humanitarian aspects of sheltering and integration of refugees and other migrants into society.
Abstract
International refugee law has evolved as a means of control over the refugee. The first principles on which it has been built place the rights of the state above those of the refugee. ...Insofar as there is such a thing as a 'right of asylum', it is a right vested in the state rather than the refugee. As such, from the perspective of seeking a protection regime that places the needs of the refugee at its centre, it is a system that is fundamentally unreformable. My argument rests upon the historical development of the first principles developed by jurists from the seventeenth century through to the twentieth century, on the basis of historical development of refugee law between the two world wars, and on the drafting history of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its subsequent implementation.
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