The Temporalities of Non-deportability. Rejected Asylum-Seekers Trapped Between Labor Market Forces, Control, and Integration Policies

Abstract

This paper focuses on the experiences of rejected asylum-seekers (RAS) caught in their everyday lives between deportation threat and mechanisms of irregularization. We analyze their everyday lives in Italy and Germany, two EU member states facing the non-deporability of RAS in different ways according to the specificity of their labour market forces, integration policies, and democratic institutional culture. Furthermore, this paper aims to focus on the temporality as a crucial dimension to grasp the power relations between the technologies implemented to govern migrants on the move, and the everyday struggles put in place to face and overcome the barriers raised to deter their integration. The dialogue between the two case-studies contributes to a better understanding on how post-arrival migration enforcement regimes and their different underlying rationales produce temporal regimes strongly affecting the everyday lives of RAS. From one side, we look at time as technology to govern population in different manner according to the different types of “migration enforcement regimes” (Leerkes and Van Houte, 2020). From the other side, we explore how RAS deal with the politics of time (Low, 2003) that run within asylum and deportation policies, and their (non)-implementation, while struggling to make their life into the host society.