We are currently witnessing a remarkable conjuncture between the escalation, acceleration, and diversification of migrant and refugee mobilities, on the one hand, and the mutually constitutive crises ...of "European" borders and "European" identity, on the other, replete with reanimated reactionary populist nationalisms and racialized nativisms, the routinization of antiterrorist securitization, and pervasive and entrenched "Islamophobia" (or more precisely, anti-Muslim racism). Despite the persistence of racial denial and the widespread refusal to frankly confront questions of "race" across Europe, the current constellation of "crises" presents precisely what can only be adequately comprehended as an unresolved racial crisis that derives fundamentally from the postcolonial condition of "Europe" as a whole, and therefore commands heightened scrutiny and rigorous investigation of the material and practical as well as discursive and symbolic productions of the co-constituted figures of "Europe" and "crisis" in light of racial formations theory.
Religious persecution is a leading cause of global displacement. In the absence of supporting evidence, presenting a credible oral asylum claim based on religion is a difficult task for ...asylum-seekers. Asylum officials, in turn, face considerable challenges in evaluating the credibility of asylum-seekers' claims to determine their eligibility for refugee status. We reviewed 21 original manuscripts addressing credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion. We focused on: (a) interviewers' methods of eliciting a claim of religion; (b) their credibility assessments of particularly complex asylum claims, namely those based on religious conversion, unfamiliar religions, and non-belief; and (c) issues related to the presence of an interpreter. We found deviations in officials' assessment patterns from established knowledge in legal psychology and religious studies. Closer collaboration between asylum practitioners and researchers in these fields is needed to improve the validity and reliability of credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion.
This contribution argues that the three dominant approaches to European integration cannot fully explain why the two most recent crises of the European Union (EU) resulted in very different outcomes. ...Liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism can account for why the euro crisis resulted in more integration, but fail to explain why the EU has been stuck in a stalemate in the Schengen crisis. With regard to postfunctionalism, it is the other way around. To solve the puzzle, we have to consider that depoliticization through supranational delegation during the euro crisis has ultimately led to more, not less politicization. Moreover, both crises were about identity politics. Political controversies over the euro crisis have centred predominantly on questions of order, i.e., what constitutes Europe as a community and how much solidarity members of the community owe to each other under which conditions. The mass influx of migrants and refugees changed identity politics, since Eurosceptic populist parties framed the Schengen crisis in terms of borders, advocating for an exclusionary 'fortress Europe.' In contrary of a more inclusionary discourse, the dominance of exclusionary positions in the politicization of EU affairs has impaired an upgrading of the common European interest in the Schengen crisis.
This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a ...140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.
Research has shown that discrimination is harmful to health, but there is relatively little known about discrimination experienced by people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds in ...resettlement countries and associated health effects. This qualitative-focused mixed methods paper reports on discrimination experienced by refugees and asylum seekers, responses to discrimination, and impacts on health.
As part of a broader study of housing, social inclusion and health, surveys were completed by 423 adult refugees and asylum seekers living in South Australia who had been in Australia for up to 7 years. The survey included questions on discrimination based on skin colour, ethnicity and religion, as well as questions on hope, trust, belonging, sense of control and health (including the SF-8). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 65 survey participants, purposively sampled by visa status, continent and gender, further exploring experiences of discrimination. These and survey open-ended responses were analysed thematically.
Twenty-two percent of survey participants reported experiences of discrimination since arriving in Australia (14% in the last year), and 90% of these felt that discrimination had harmed their health. Key settings of discrimination were public transport, within the neighbourhood, and in relation to employment. Those who reported discrimination had significantly worse mental health (p < .000) but not physical health. Discrimination was also associated with less sense of belonging (p = .001), lower levels of trust (p = .038), reduced sense of control (p = .012) and less hope (p = .006). Incidents described in interviews and the open-ended survey responses included incivility, physical assault, and denial of services, experienced across intersecting characteristics of race/ethnicity, religion, gender and visa status. Responses to discrimination spanned affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions, ranging across types of experience, participant characteristics and context, with most individuals reporting multiple response types. While some of the responses were reported by participants as protective of health, participants' reflections indicated significant negative impacts on mental health in particular.
Discrimination featured in the resettlement experiences of a significant number of refugees and asylum seekers, with participants reporting clear negative impacts on mental health. Addressing discrimination is a key resettlement and health issue requiring urgent action.
This book explores the concept of civic stratification and examines its contemporary relevance for analysis and understanding of the functioning of rights in society. David Lockwood’s (1996) concept ...of civic stratification outlines the way in which the rights associated with citizenship can be a source of inequality by virtue of their formal granting or denial by the state, or by informal impediments to their full realisation. The purpose of this book is to explore the meaning and significance of this concept, and elaborate its potential in offering a framework for understanding the dynamic nature of rights. Lockwood’s model reverses Marshall’s (1950) view of citizenship as guaranteed inclusion in society and is linked to the way that the differential entitlement and the qualifying conditions associated with certain rights can be harnessed as a means of control. While both Marshall and Lockwood were principally concerned with the rights attaching to citizenship, this book extends the insights of these two authors to show how such controls apply in various ways to both citizens and non-citizens alike. Building on Lockwood’s conception of ‘moral resources’ the book set out a theoretical framework and empirical illustration of how the position of different groups within society is subject to shifting perceptions of social worth and is engaged both in claims to fuller access to rights and in justifications of their denial or removal. This book will appeal to scholars and higher-level students with relevant interests in sociolegal studies, sociology, social policy and politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 license. This publication was supported by the University of Essex’s open access fund.
This article contributes to the literature on non-citizens' protests by analysing asylum seekers' claims to right to life as a case of politics of human rights. By analysing asylum seekers' protests ...as making visible the structural and bureaucratic violence of the state that violates their fundamental human rights, this article offers a reading of non-citizen protests as an engagement in the politics of human rights. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Right to Live protest in Finland, I discern the modalities of the injuries experienced by asylum seekers and their critique of the state. Their critique focuses on the bureaucratic violence of rendering asylum seekers illegal and the threat of deportation, as well as the violence of an arbitrary state expressed in legislative changes.
Legal geography and materialist studies of the law have not fully reckoned with absence. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance ...of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. In so doing, we show that attending to absence offers an indispensable criticality with respect to legal performances.
There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law’s omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.
The vast majority of asylum seekers in the UK are not permitted to enter the labour market. In the absence of the right to work asylum seekers receive welfare support, which amounts to less than a ...third of the weekly spend of the poorest 10% of British citizens. This article presents new research on the third sector response to the poverty created by this policy regime. Through a four-pronged methodological design we map the scale of this response, and in doing so offer an alternative critical perspective on the inadequacies of government policy, inadequacies which lead to the human rights of some who are within, or who have been through the system, being breached.
The idea of violent uncertainty was first introduced in the New England Journal of Medicine (Grace et al., 2018) making claims about the deleterious impacts of insecure immigration status on the ...health of migrants. Policies of uncertainty are said to directly and indirectly create harm by impacting on individual's health via detention and public degradation and undermining healthcare services. We offer original empirical evidence indicating an association with uncertainty, in the form of asylum waiting times, on refugees' self-reported health. We devise four hypotheses that: long waiting time for asylum decisions increases likelihood of self-reported health problems and the effect persists overtime, that female refugees report higher levels of health problems resulting from uncertainty and religion moderates the association between health and uncertainty. We use data from the UK longitudinal Survey of New Refugees wherein all new refugees were sent a baseline survey immediately after receiving refugee status and then follow-up surveys 21 months later. The findings show longer asylum waiting time is associated with poor health. Female refugees were more likely to report poor emotional and physical health. The negative effect of asylum waiting time on emotional health persists 21 months post settlement and is worse for women. The hypothesisabout the ameliorating effect of religion is only partially supported. Our findings supports existing theory and qualitative studies about the deleterious effects of using policies of waiting-related uncertainty for managing migration. Given the wide use of such policies in the Global North, our work is suggestive of likely generalisability. Thus, countries with large refugee populations might want to consider our findings when developing asylum policy which minimises impact on refugee health.
•Refugees who experience longer asylum waiting times report poorer health.•Female refugees are more likely to report poorer health at grant and over time.•The negative association between waiting time and health is significantly worse for female refugees.•Christians are less likely to report poor emotional and physical health than Muslims at grant but religion moderates the negative associations between waiting time and health for Muslims but not Christians.•Experience of attack is negatively associated with emotional health but doesn’t explain waiting time effects.•Employment is associated with better physical health and appears to moderate the negative effects of waiting time.
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