This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK, arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In ...2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper explores the impact of this shift and argues that the result is the production of an asylum market, in which neoliberal norms of market competition, economic efficiency and dispersed responsibility are central. In drawing on interviews with local authorities, politicians and asylum support services in four cities, the paper argues that the privatisation of accommodation has seen the emergence of new assemblages of authority, policy and governance. When combined with a market-oriented transfer of responsibilities, depoliticisation acts to constrain the possibilities of political debate and to predetermine the contours of those policy discussions that do take place. In making this case, the paper challenges the closures of work on post-politics, and argues for an exploration of the situated modalities of practice through which forms of depoliticisation interact with, and are constituted by, processes of neoliberalisation. In this context, the framing of asylum seekers as a 'burden' emerges as a discursive and symbolic achievement of the neoliberal politics of asylum accommodation. Framing asylum seekers as a burden represents both a move to position asylum as a specific and managerial issue, and at the same time reiterates an economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost and productivity.
This edited volume fills a gap in current research on asylum seekers and refugees. By focusing on two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, this volume offers material for comparison and reflection ...on an area of the world in which this theme is still relatively underdeveloped. By approaching the theme through the different perspectives of human rights, social construction through media representation and public opinion, and lived experiences, the book offers a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon. The main aim of this collection is to expand current scholarship on refugee studies and offer policy recommendations on the timely topic of refugee and asylum seekers in East Asia. This is an open access book.
The Sociology of Refugee Migration FitzGerald, David Scott; Arar, Rawan
Annual review of sociology,
07/2018, Volume:
44, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Theorization in the sociology of migration and the field of refugee studies has been retarded by a path-dependent division that we argue should be broken down by greater mutual engagement. Excavating ...the construction of the refugee category reveals how unwarranted assumptions shape contemporary disputes about the scale of refugee crises, appropriate policy responses, and suitable research tools. Empirical studies of how violence interacts with economic and other factors shaping mobility offer lessons for both fields. Adapting existing theories that may not appear immediately applicable, such as household economy approaches, helps explain refugees' decision-making processes. At a macro level, world systems theory sheds light on the interactive policies around refugees across states of origin, mass hosting, asylum, transit, and resettlement. Finally, focusing on the integration of refugees in the Global South reveals a pattern that poses major challenges to theories of assimilation and citizenship developed in settler states of the Global North.
Two suggestions are proposed: distinguishing provision of therapy and provision of support for asylum; and distinguishing inquiry before acceptance as client and trust after acceptance as client.
The practice of sanctuary giving refuge to the threatened, vulnerable stranger may be universal among humans. From primate populations to ancient religious traditions to the modern legal institution ...of asylum, anthropologist Linda Rabben explores the long history of sanctuary and analyzes modern asylum policies in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, contrasting them with the role that courageous individuals and organizations have played in offering refuge to survivors of torture, persecution, and discrimination. Rabben gives close attention to the mid-2010s refugee crisis in Europe and to Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States.
This wide-ranging, timely, and carefully documented account draws on Rabben s experiences as a human rights advocate as well as her training as an anthropologist. Sanctuary and Asylum will help citizens, professionals, and policy makers take informed and compassionate action.
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.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book explores the labour market integration of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers across seven European countries: the Czech ...Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK. Using empirical data from the Horizon2020 SIRIUS Project, it investigates how legal, political, social and personal circumstances combine to determine the work trajectory for migrants who choose Europe as their home.
Millions of refugees are stuck in camps and cities of the global South without permanent legal status. They wait in limbo, their status unresolved in what the United Nations (UN) calls 'protracted ...refugee situations' (PRS). The material conditions and depictions of such refugees as immobile and passive contributes to a feminization of asylum in such spaces. In contrast, refugees on the move to seek asylum in the global North are perceived as threats and coded as part of a masculinist geopolitical agenda that controls and securitizes their movement. Policies to externalize asylum and keep potential refugees away from the affluent nations of the global North, in which they may seek legal status, represent one strategy of exclusion. This article traces these divergent trajectories of im/mobility and demonstrates how humanitarian space for both groups is narrowing over time. For those seeking asylum in the global North, measures such as increased detention and rapid return to transit countries aim to deter migrants from arriving at all. It is contended that the discrete systems that manage asylum seekers in the global North and refugees in long-term limbo are themselves gendered. European Union policies to 'externalize' asylum and keep asylum seekers offshore dovetail with policies by EU member states to 'build capacity' for refugee protection in refugee 'regions of origin'. These represent a shifting, not a sharing, of responsibility for their welfare and prolongs their wait.
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