The never-ending journey? Exclusive Jurisdictions and migrant mobility in Europe.
Alexandria J Innes
University of East Anglia
01603 593915
Abstract
Migrant journeys are often conceived as linear movement from a sending country to a receiving country. However, recent work suggests that the notion of linear migrant journeys is a misrepresentation. I argue that European regulations that standardize immigration policy around a common goal of “burden-sharing” such as the Dublin II Regulation interact with the journeys of migrants to create paths that are not linear, circular or guided solely by intent. Rather migrant journeys can be conceived as a series of negotiations with state policies that shape experiences, choices and destinations through constructions of illegality. Mobility becomes an on-going condition rather than a temporary one. Borders then are reproduced as phenomenological rather than physical. I illustrate my argument through an ethnographic case study of a Sudanese man seeking to join his wife and child who had filed an asylum application in France. He interacts with the borders of Europe throughout his journey; however, as he becomes known as an undocumented migrant he moves further from the possibility of entering Europe with immigration status despite being within the territorial boundaries. Conversely, as his physical proximity to Europe increases and is established, his legal proximity decreases.
Keywords: migration, borders, Europe, Dublin Regulation, asylum-seeker.
“No help from this place, no help, no nothing. Only business. Europe, one half democrat. And the other, only immigrant.”
This quotation is taken from Ali, a Sudanese asylum seeker who I met in Athens.[1] Ali had been attempting to join his wife and child in France. Over several months he had negotiated the restrictions on his movement imposed by the Dublin Regulation in Europe. He had travelled over land to Libya, from there to Greece and from Greece to Belgium, only to be returned to Greece by the Belgian immigration authorities after it emerged that he had been fingerprinted there. Subsequently Ali tried to file an asylum claim in Greece, and on failing to apply, attempted to leave without documents. He was stopped, detained and on his release he was given a document telling him he had to leave the country. Paradoxically this document did not give him the right to travel and so Ali found himself again trying to leave Greece without documents. Each time he tried and failed the pattern of detention was repeated. Ali found himself trapped in Greece without immigration status.
Ali’s experience provides the case study for this article. Ali’s words in the above quotation allude to his feelings that, despite giving the illusion of human rights and democracy, access to these things are reserved for Europeans only. Although Ali was physically present in Europe his journey was far from over. As Ali continued to try to reach his destination his identity as an irregular migrant was established and reproduced, which served to undermine his asylum claim and further distance him from the possibility of reaching his destination. This ascribed identity formed a phenomenological border. Ali had no outlet from which he could voice his discontent, hence his feeling that Europe is only half democratic: migrants within the territory often remain outside the less visible borders governing participation.
The migrant journey, or transit migration, has garnered attention in migration studies (Elie 2010, Karatani 2005, Long 2013, Oelgemoller 2011); security studies, which in particular focuses on potential insecurities provoked by transnational crime and terrorism linked to the unregulated movement of people (Amoore 2006, Huysmans and Buonfino 2008); and in studies of international and European human rights law with attention given to the undermining of the right to seek asylum (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2008, Klepp 2010, Moreno Lax 2008, Moreno Lax 2012). In this article I reflect on the tension engendered by competing human rights and security concerns that have led to increased policing and criminalization of migration by European states before migrants reach Europe and as they attempt to move through European territory. As the Schengen Agreement has enabled free movement of European citizens amongst signatory states, alternative methods of policing migrants without documents have emerged in an effort to standardize state policy and restrict the movement of third country nationals while maintaining freedom of movement for citizens.
Here I draw analytical attention to the experience of seeking asylum from persecution, focusing on Ali’s journey from Sudan to his intended destination of France. In juxtaposing the experience of migrating to the application of the law – both laws designed to protect human rights and laws designed to protect states – I draw attention to the tension between human rights concerns and security concerns from the perspective of a person caught up in the confrontation of these competing mechanisms. My conclusions highlight the migrant journey as a period in which a person is often unavoidably outside of state jurisdictions and therefore has little access to human rights protections. The more time a person spends outside of state jurisdictions the more difficult the person then finds it to re-enter the legal realm, thus creating a ‘never-ending’ migrant journey that is marked by mobility and immobility, both forced and voluntary.
Restrictions to migration do not dispel the need or want to migrate; hence people who need to move negotiate, challenge and find ways around these restrictions, changing the route, nature and experience of the journey. Thus, restrictions do not change the fact of migration, the embarking upon the journey itself. On the one hand migrants assert agency and form routes and journeys that circumvent legal restrictions, a combination of movement, regression, and periods of waiting rather than a linear journey. On the other hand, once outside of legal jurisdictions in ‘zones of irregularity,’ it becomes increasingly difficult for migrants to re-enter a situation of legal regularity or normalcy.
Methodology
A focus on the relationship between international relations theory and practice relies on the assumption of a constructivist epistemology in which social meanings and social reality are mutually constituted, such as in reflexive constructivism in the mode of Stefano Guzzini (2000). I follow feminist theorists of international relations, such as Cynthia Enloe (1989), Christine Sylvester (1996), and Marysia Zalewski (1996, 2000), to focus on a population that is cast outside of the conventional canon in which states and elites are the primary (and often only) actors in international relations. Instead I position migrants who cross international borders without official immigration documents authorising them to do so as international actors. Drawing attention to the people who practice international relations in their lives every day yet are not elite statesmen making foreign policy, diplomats, or states as unitary actors offers a decentred perspective of international relations that seeks to rewrite the boundaries of the discipline (Nayak and Selbin 2010, Sylvester 1999). I also follow feminist scholars to foreground alternative knowledge claims in the form of the embodied knowledge of the experience of international migration (Ackerley 2007, Eschle and Maiguashca 2007). The case I adopt, through which I examine encounters with the law, reveals a person for whom laws governing asylum seeking and migration should function. There are few studies that seek to situate such a person at the centre of analysis. Therefore, by decentring the study of international law in this context, and re-centring the study around the person who experiences the law, new critical insight can be generated regarding international human rights and international relations as they relate to people who are detached from their sovereign state. Of course, while these insights are generated by the particular case of Ali, his experience is not especially unique. The governance of migration in Europe produces Ali’s circumstances in a way that is not particular to his individuality but is a result of his journey on a path that is shared by thousands of others, evidenced by the frequent news stories of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, in camps in Calais, and on the streets in Athens.[2]
This paper is built around a single narrative case that I extract from a body of narrative data I gathered in Athens and Newcastle in 2010-2011.[3] I respond to Christine Sylvester’s recent observation that ordinary people who live international relations are largely absent from the canon of international relations (2013) by placing an analysis of how the migrant experiences migration at the centre of this study. My turn to the voice of the migrant is consistent with efforts to give voice to those ‘silenced’ by the conventional methods, literatures and tropes of international relations. The voices of migrants are present in the everyday practice of international relations in that they are visible and audible on the streets in Europe. It is worthy of note that extant studies have engaged migrant experiences through specific cases, in particular locations, and through data gathered in semi-structured and narrative interviews, all of which provide valuable insight into migrant experiences and journeys (examples can be found in Innes 2015, Innes 2014, Nyers and Rygiel 2012, and Squire 2011). Furthermore, Schuster (2011) examined the ways the Dublin Regulation produces illegality, and Hyndman and Mountz (2008) examined the respatialisation of immigration controls as what they term ‘neo-refoulement’ that ultimately precludes access to the asylum system. Here, in drawing on a single story I seek to engage the micropolitics of migration, drawing attention to how the individual negotiates the law. I examine the power (or the lack of power) of the individual to exercise agency before state law, the constrained choices configured in policy and practice, and the real workable opportunities to access human rights for the migrant (of which there are unfortunately few). Much can be learned about how the law works through focusing on how an individual engages with the law. It is not disputed that refugee law protects the interests of states from potential influxes of refugees and asylum seekers (Goodwin-Gill 2007, Haddad 2008). Foregrounding the individual asylum seeker as an agent interacting with international law and with the bodies that are responsible for upholding it provides critical insight into how effectively the law gives protection and contests the relevancy of the binary categories of forced and voluntary migrant that assumes forced migrants are passive victims and voluntary migrants are economically motivated to seek a better life (Haddad 2008, Long 2013).
I met with Ali twice to interview him and talk to him about his journey to seek asylum. Both of these meetings took place in Athens in June 2010 and were part of a broader project for which I gathered eighteen personal narrative accounts of seeking asylum between June 2010 and August 2011. In Greece I worked with several local organisations that assisted migrants and provided shelter, healthcare, or food and clothing to the fast-growing population of migrants in Athens. I gathered interviews both with asylum seekers who were housed in an asylum shelter belonging to Doctors of the World, and with people who did not have accommodation in a city that has limited shelter available for asylum seekers. I met the latter people outside the offices of Caritas Hellas, a charitable organization that housed a soup kitchen and clothing store. People would queue outside the building in the morning, waiting for food rations to be distributed. These people were often travelling alone and were living either in the parks and squares, or, if fortunate, were living in crowded shared apartments and rotating the use of beds and facilities.
The eighteen people I interviewed all considered themselves to be asylum seekers and were comfortable sharing their stories. I recorded all the interviews that I gathered in Greece and carried them out in a conversational style, asking few questions only where prompting was necessary. The types of questions I asked were designed to leave the response open for the participant to determine; for example I would ask ‘tell me about your journey to Greece’ rather than ‘how did you travel to Greece.’ This encouraged the participants to prioritise the events that were most meaningful to them and to recount their experiences in the form of a longer narrative. Narrative interviews allow participants to lead the conversation, and provide a cohesive account of an experience that is recognized in its own right as a narrative that can be analysed in the same way a text can be analysed (Kvale 2010, Rubin and Rubin 2012, Taber 2010). I wanted to understand what part of their experiences held the most significance for the migrants themselves. I did not want to push participants to share things that made them uncomfortable or to talk about memories that were particularly painful to recount. I found that many people were willing to share their stories and as I became known to the community people started to seek me out to tell their stories. Ali was one of those people, approaching me on the second day I visited the Caritas Hellas offices, with two friends who were Somali and Palestinian respectively. Ali and his friends asked me if I was a journalist and I told them I was not and gave them the information about my project. They wanted to tell me about their lives but they did not want to leave the queue so we talked there, amid the bustle of a narrow street with a lot of foot traffic, the occasional vehicle, and noise from a nearby building site that occasionally interrupted the progress of the story.