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Abstract: The Balkan route, or rather, the Balkan routes, which in recent years have been crossed by many different people, represent a paradigmatic territory on which practices of control, subjugation and précarisation are experimented to the detriment of those in transit. Their lives are punctuated by dynamics and structures that create a constant tension between mobility and immobility, between acceleration and waiting, with obvious and different consequences on trajectories, migration projects and agency. Greece and the Balkan countries represent two emblematic cases of what certain policies of control and closure can produce, both at a structural and individual level. Starting from a fieldwork carried out in Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina from August to November 2021, this paper will try to analyze how forced waiting and immobility, imposed by the border regime and by asylum and reception systems, can in fact produce illegality (De Genova, 2004), uncertainty (Griffiths, 2013) and precariousness (Khosravi, 2017). Thanks to the collection of testimonies and stories related to the condition of people stranded in these countries, I will show how the hypermobility produced by these dynamics can also represent a tactic, an attempt to regain control over one's migratory trajectories and to put an end to temporal and geographical stuckedness.
Abstract: In this paper we consider the imbrication of UK immigration and border controls into support environments of the anti-modern slavery sphere. We draw on the findings of a 3.5 years ESRC-funded study to explore how the increasingly strident government anti-migrant agenda - broadly seen in the ‘hostile environment’, a culture of disbelief and an overarching preeminence of border controls over human rights protections - is percolating into care providers in the modern slavery sector. Bordering in this sector has not had the same level of scrutiny as within the asylum sector, yet is a particularly interesting site to explore due to the confluence of caring and control impulses. The fresh insight we bring to this context is a focus on the notable presence of faith-based organisations in this sphere. We consider the implications of the relationships between faith, support and bordering - both for those subjected to immigration controls, and those working inextricably within them to support individuals exiting exploitation.
Abstract: Border pushbacks, including at the European Union’s external borders and by countries such as Australia, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States, are common—and in fact have become a new normal. These border policing or other operations aim to prevent people from reaching, entering, or remaining in a territory. Screening for protection needs is summary or non-existent. Pushbacks violate the international prohibitions of collective expulsion and refoulement, and pushbacks of children are inconsistent with the best interests principle and other children’s rights standards. Excessive force, other ill-treatment, family separation, and other rights violations may also accompany pushback operations. Despite formidable obstacles such as weak oversight mechanisms, undue judicial deference to the executive, and official ambivalence, domestic court rulings and other initiatives show some promise in securing compliance with international standards and affording a measure of accountability.
Abstract: This article examines experiences of temporal dispossession within migration bureaucracy in the case of asylum. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data with officers at the Swedish Migration Agency and people seeking asylum under the 'new' asylum law in Sweden, this article makes visible the politics of time inherent in the distribution of life chances in state practices. Examining the temporal governance of asylum, I interrogate how waiting, time, and timing are enacted as means of dispossession in the asylum process, with a particular focus on the effects of neoliberal time structurings. The analysis argues that migration bureaucracy in Sweden invokes temporal dispossession through the use of temporal governance that withholds frames of intelligibility from asylum applicants. Examining how waiting is enacted as a means of dispossession both through slowing and accelerating timeframes, the analysis reveals the negotiations, strategies, and struggles that take place within the realm of migration bureaucracy, and in doing so, stresses the relational character of time as a mechanism of control. Central to my argument is that migration bureaucracy dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum, yet with very different effects on the distribution of life chances for each.
Abstract: This article employs the analytical perspective of logistics to explore a key, yet quite overlooked, aspect of the functioning of the EU border regime: the reception and associated territorial distribution of newly arrived asylum seekers. Drawing on qualitative data collected at the height of the ‘refugee reception crisis’ in multiple contexts in Italy and Sweden, the article shows how reception is undergoing a process of ‘logistification’. In this process, organisational and logistical concerns prevail over the care for those who are assisted, and reception is turned into a logistical matter of moving and accommodating asylum seekers. Crucial to this process of ‘logistification’ is the warehousing of asylum seekers – an art of government that seeks to objectify asylum seekers through their depersonalisation, victimisation and (im)mobilisation. The article argues that the ‘logistification’ of reception not only has dehumanising effects on asylum seekers, but also exposes the attempt to make profit out their management and transfer. This creates the conditions for the development of a reception industry in which the very presence of asylum seekers is valorised for the profit of a whole range of actors who ensure the reproduction, transfer, knowledge and control of those hosted in reception facilities.
Abstract: Cet article pose un regard monographique sur le principal opérateur du détachement dans l’agriculture provençale : l’entreprise de travail temporaire espagnole (ett) Campo Verde [1]. Ce faisant, il propose une analyse du fonctionnement de la prestation de services internationale dans un secteur dit « en tension », fonctionnement qui repose sur l’articulation de trois logiques d’action distinctes mais complémentaires : une logique de stock, qui conduit l’ett à mobiliser une infrastructure logistique de transport et d'hébergement pour créer dans le pays où est fournie la prestation un excédent de main-d'œuvre détachée disponible et en attente ; une logique de flux, basée sur les principes de convocabilité et de révocabilité de l’intérimaire, qui font de celui-ci un ouvrier mobile et discipliné, susceptible d’être déplacé « juste-à-temps » d’un chantier à un autre, en fonction de la demande des entreprises utilisatrices ; et une logique de fidélisation des meilleurs éléments et d’accumulation du temps de travail par les salariés détachés, liée à leur trajectoire de migrants extracommunautaires et au fait que le travail agricole réalisé en France, faiblement rémunéré, soit sous-déclaré en Espagne. L’article est issu d’une recherche collective menée au sein du projet Frontières, im-mobilisation et néolibéralisme en temps de Covid dans l’agriculture (finca) [2]. Il repose sur l’exploitation d’un matériau riche et diversifié comprenant des données statistiques (base de données du système d’information sur les prestations de services internationales [sipsi]), des archives judiciaires, des entretiens semi-directifs et des observations participantes réalisées au sein du Collectif de défense des travailleurs agricoles étrangers (codetras).
Abstract: This article examines the ways in which people supporting exiled persons mobilise and understand the law in Calais and Briançon, two cities that have become, at different times and in different ways, major centres of migration. The first part looks at the ways in which these people understand the law and become, to different degrees and in different ways, intermediaries of the law. The second part uses the concept of “legal consciousness” developed across the Atlantic in the early 1990s to question the way in which the experience of involvement in these border territories has led to a change in their relationship with the law, both as a written norm and in how it is applied by institutions. Cet article se propose d’examiner la manière dont les personnes apportant leur soutien aux exilé·e·s mobilisent et appréhendent le droit à Calais et à Briançon, deux villes devenues, à des époques et selon des modalités différentes, des pôles migratoires de premier plan. La première partie s’intéresse à la façon dont ces personnes appréhendent le droit et deviennent, à des degrés et selon des modalités différentes, des intermédiaires du droit. La deuxième partie fait appel au concept de “conscience du droit” (legal consciousness) développé Outre-Atlantique au début des années 1990 pour questionner la manière dont l’expérience de l’engagement dans ces territoires frontaliers a conduit à faire évoluer leur rapport au droit, à la fois en tant que norme écrite mais aussi dans la manière dont elle est appliquée par les institutions.
Abstract: Since 2015, the so-called "migration crisis" in Europe has generated a large number of cartographic images, wrongly suggesting that the European Union is facing massive arrivals of asylum seekers. Moreover, these maps, based on aggregated data, tend to deliver a smooth and uniform image of migratory movements. These iconographies therefore ignore the vicissitudes of the journeys undertaken by people who are forced to travel along the irregular migration routes crisscrossing the Euro-Mediterranean area. These observations necessarily invite us to consider alternative modes of graphic representation, less Euro-centric, more humanizing and above all allowing us to recall the "migratory in-between" connecting the spaces of departure and settlement. This article presents a methodological protocol and graphic formalizations (itinerary maps, timelines and spatialized network diagrams) responding to these objectives (...).
Abstract: Alors que le genre est devenu une catégorie d'analyse essentielle dans les travaux scientifiques sur les plus récentes vagues d'émigration depuis la Chine, la sexualité des Chinois en Europe reste peu étudiée, en particulier celle des LGBT+. Cet article s'appuie sur une enquête ethnographique menée entre 2020 et 2021 auprès de 16 jeunes migrants homosexuels chinois (vivant ou ayant vécu en France), pour explorer les multiples facettes des « changements sexuels » vécus par ces individus sous le prisme de la (re)socialisation sexuelle dans un contexte transnational. En premier lieu, l'article examine les processus d'acquisition et d'intériorisation des connaissances, des normes, des attitudes, des codes sociaux et culturels et des valeurs liés à la sexualité au-delà des frontières culturelles et nationales. Il se penche ensuite sur les sources de (re)socialisation sexuelle de jeunes migrants homosexuels chinois en France, en se focalisant sur leurs relations interpersonnelles avec leurs pairs. Enfin, l'article conclut en tissant des liens entre les études sur la migration queer et celles sur la diaspora chinoise, tout en appelant à davantage de recherches sur les liens entre migrations chinoises en Europe et sexualité en élargissant autant que possible la façon d'appréhender cette dernière.
Abstract: This article explores the impact of the ‘hostile environment’ on racialised migrant women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England, arguing that the ‘hostile environment’ functions as a technology of ‘stratified reproduction.’ First coined by Shellee Colen, the concept of stratified reproduction describes the dynamic by which some individuals and groups may be supported in their reproductive activities, while others are disempowered and discouraged. This paper locates the stratified reproduction produced by the ‘hostile environment’ as intertwined with wider gendered and racialised discourses around British citizenship which have been ‘designed to fail’ racialised residents of the UK. Drawing on interviews with racialised migrant mothers in the north of England, this paper analyses how the proliferation and intensification of immigration controls interacts with gender, race, class, and other social regimes to differentially allocate the resources necessary for a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and how this is experienced materially by pregnant migrants.
Abstract: Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women’s bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medical humanitarians and women residing there in their position as both migrants and patients. The analysis foregrounds the gendered forms of domination that the care function of the humanitarian border entails. I argue that medical humanitarians are vested with the power to decide over women’s mobility in the name of care on the basis of an entanglement of administrative and medical procedures in this border context. While women are subject to greater humanitarian intervention due to the association of their embodied states with vulnerability, the biopolitical migration management of the border grants medical humanitarians a decision-making authority. The article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering. It traces the rationale for these practices to racialised and gendered processes of othering that usher in perceptions of undeservingness and sustain a humanitarian claim for biopolitical responsibility over these women’s mobility.
Abstract: The ever-growing number of refugee children dramatically increases the disease and public health burden related to early-life stress (ELS). The combination of exposure to violence in their countries of origin, followed by migration and resettlement into a new context often accompanied by socioeconomic adversity exposes them to several and cumulative risks to their mental and physical health. So far, no studies have systematically examined the mechanisms of biological embedding of war- and migration-related trauma in this highly vulnerable group of children (...).
Abstract: During the last two decades, the protection of LGBTIQ+ migrants, asylum claimants, and refugees has gained the attention of civil society, academia, and state authorities. Second, most studies focus on SOGIESC asylum claimants and refugees, meaning 'claimants who undergo the refugee status determination process in European countries.
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