Italian Sociological Review

Bordering and Debordering Across Time. Refugees and Asylum Seekers Facing Chronopolitics

2024-02-26T18:03:13+00:00

With these contributes we investigate how refugees and asylum seekers deal with the politics of time that run within asylum policies, including the different production of temporal regimes along diverse types of migrant centres. By bringing together papers and case studies that map the trajectories of time undertaken by individuals in their daily routines and life experiences, we attempt to set up a reflection on the notion of a ‘landscape of time’. If, on the one hand, the interactions between spatial confinement and temporality of immigration controls realise multiple forms of (im)mobility of refugees and asylum seekers; on the other hand, the practices of routinisation, acceleration, stasis and waiting – exercised by individuals both inside and outside the centres and across the borders – can also be read as a tactic aimed at claiming time; a time which is differently experienced, according to the current system of social and civil stratification.

Therefore, moving within these premises, we focus on how the ‘chronopolitics’ of the asylum and reception system affect daily lives and biographical trajectories of refugees and asylum seekers, both during their experience of migration and within the so called ‘reception system’.

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

2023-06-26T09:37:53+00:00

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.

The The Contested Mediterranean. Temporalities of New Forms of Migration Containment in Italy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2023-06-20T08:17:15+00:00

With the outbreak of Covid-19, attention has been increasingly given to new forms of confinement, both in reception facilities and detention centres. In this context, emerging forms of immigration containment and detention have initially been analysed mostly through spatial lenses. In particular, in Italy, new forms of migration containment, the so-called ‘quarantine ships’, have been analysed mostly on their spatial features: in the middle of the sea, far away from the space of the “national polity”. Yet, throughout the two years of existence of quarantine ships, attention has been drawn to the temporal dimension of this new form of migration containment. In this sense, moving beyond the analysis of quarantine ships as a static and unique form of containment, and including the ships into a broader picture that takes into consideration what happens before and after them, the article aims at understanding how new spatio-temporal regimes of control affect asylum seekers’ lives. In particular, it studies how quarantine ships have become a central device of a specific temporal regime of migration control that developed with the outbreak of Covid-19; what the connections between this regime and pre-pandemic containment configurations are; and, finally, what tactics of resistance have been put in place by asylum seekers and those acting in solidarity with them. Quarantine ships and the temporal governance strategy that developed around them (the “detention-deportation chain”) can be better understood looking at the increasing logistification of asylum seeking. On the other hand, within this emerging form of government, asylum seekers and those acting in solidarity with them put in place tactics of resistance to interrupt the suspended time imposed by this regime; to interrupt sudden accelerations, as in the case of deportations; and, finally, through practices of active memory, they challenged the status quo imposed by the EUropean border regime.

Stuck but Not Immobile. Waiting, (Im)Mobility and Agency of Refugees and Asylum Seekers Along the Balkan Routes

2023-06-29T07:06:35+00:00

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 precarisation 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.

Border Regimes, Shifting Temporalities and Migrant Responses. An Analysis of the Route Between the Eastern Mediterranean and the North-Western French-Italian Border

2023-06-15T13:04:14+00:00

The North-western French-Italian border is an important cross point for people coming from the Balkans and the Central Mediterranean routes aiming to reach Northern-continental European countries and the United Kingdom. According to the data we collected, in 2021 some 10,369 people, including 400 unaccompanied minors and 412 families, arrived at the Alpine border – twice the 2020 numbers, when around 4,700 stopped at the two shelters. Although in 2022 the figure had dropped to about 8,500 it remains high, confirming this border as highly relevant. Based on data collected between 2021 and 2022 in Oulx, a village in the upper Susa Valley, North-western Italy, this article aims to investigate the impact of borders on migrants’ temporalities among people who cross the border with France wanting to reach Europe. Borders as a spatial mechanism for controlling people’s movement are bound up with time: the time of displacement in camps, the time migrants spend attempting to cross the borders, the overall time their movement takes, which is also affected by mobility policies. This does not happen in a vacuum of migrant agency. People on the move respond to the constraints of border regimes in a variety of ways, including resorting to smugglers and changing family and household figurations. However, as this article aims to show, the kinds of responses adopted are not always freely chosen, but they are forms of adaptation to the circumstances and constraints imposed by the border regime.

Contested Time. Migrants’ Temporal Practices and Agency in Institutional Reception and Grassroots Solidarity at the Canary Islands

2023-11-07T08:07:26+00:00

During the pandemic, due to the worsening of the already weak local economies of different Western African countries (Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal), the impermeabilisation of the Ceuta/Melilla border and the consequent redefinition of the main migration routes, the Atlantic route towards the Canary Islands – which was relevant between the late 1990s and early 2000s – regained significance in undocumented migration towards Europe. The emergency management of this flow of people, which since 2020 has brought thousands of migrants to the shores of the Canary Islands, has continued for months and months, through improvised forms of reception in camps (Muelle de la verguenza) and empty hotels (due to the pandemic crisis), until the establishment of migrants’ emergency reception centres. Facing the often-inhuman conditions of these centres, as well as the situations of temporal injustice and the risk of deportation, many migrants refuse institutional relocation, leaving the reception system and dwelling in the streets. In this way, albeit in an ambivalent dimension, they break the frame on the public discourse concerning them as mere subjects in need of care and containment, regaining at least partial control of their time and opening up to a series of encounters with the emerging solidarity networks from below. This paper, based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out, during 2022 and the beginning of 2023, on the island of Gran Canaria, means to explore the complex relation between temporality and migrants’ agency, with particular attention to forms of institutional reception and grassroots hospitality.

Street-Level Workers and the Temporalities of Waiting in the Italian Asylum System

2024-02-07T08:23:28+00:00

Immigration and asylum have become enormously contested in Italy over recent decades. Weak planning capacities and logics of emergency have typically permeated Italian policymaking on migration and, even more so, on asylum. Currently the Italian reception system implements a widespread framework managed by public authorities. It is characterized by policies of subsidiarity where different actors, public and private, are involved at various levels of government. Generally, public authorities subcontract third sector actors and NGOs to provide inclusion and integration services. The role of these agents is the focus of this article, particularly how they use their discretionary power to cope with the task of implementing a state mandate concerning the management of the condition of immobility that affects the temporality of refugees and asylum seekers, while waiting to obtain a permit or social and labour inclusion processes.

Drawing on ethnographic research realized in the realm of the project “SIforREF - Integrating Refugees in Society and Labour Market through Social Innovation”, founded by the Interreg Central Europe Program, this contribution shows how street-level workers use their discretionary power as a tactic that promotes their value and beliefs.

Event(ual) Queer Crafting of Dublin Regulated Sogie Refugees

2023-12-11T17:03:38+00:00

The Dublin regulation requires refugee applicants to submit an asylum request in first European country they enter. Yet SOGIESC refugees often fear disclosing their intimate lives or sexual details in early immigration encounters. In times of nationalistic upheavals and contested refugee laws, queer applications can further be met with distrust. Thus, in fear of repatriation, some move onwards to countries where LGBTQI+ rights are nationally celebrated, only to be sent back to the first country. This paper builds on in-depth interviews and walk-along discussions with nine Dublin-regulated SOGIE refugees, as well as documented conversations with eighteen local stakeholders, conducted in Italy and Greece between 2021 and 2023. By tracing the affective residue of events in interlocutors’ accounts, this article illuminates how SOGIE experiences were repeatedly invaded by violent bordering, affectively recalled through the memory of sounds. This caused them to submerge their life rhythm as irregular subjects, fitting neither here nor there. When denied protection due to the Dublin agreement, they became homeless, dependent on precarious jobs and transactional sex work. When deported, their accounts echo emotional abandonment and lack of recourses to claim queer time, as they discover their cases expulsed from the system. When re-application was possible, they were put under the stigma of feigning their queer identities and criminalized in prolonged uncertainty. In response, they crafted themselves as event(ual) queer beings or as subjects between temporal events, through naming practices and asserting autonomy over sex time, while also visioning transactions based on emotional dignity and altruism.