Asylum for Sale

Description

This explosive new volume brings together a lively cast of academics, activists, journalists, artists, and people directly impacted by asylum regimes to explain how current practices of asylum align with the neoliberal moment and to present their transformative visions for alternative systems and processes.

Through essays, artworks, photographs, infographics, and illustrations, Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry regards the global asylum regime as an industry characterized by profit-making activity: brokers who facilitate border crossings for a fee; contractors and firms that erect walls, fences, and watchtowers while lobbying governments for bigger “security” budgets; corporations running private detention centers and “managing” deportations; private lawyers charging exorbitant fees; “expert” witnesses; and NGO staff establishing careers while placing asylum seekers into new regimes of monitored vulnerability.

Asylum for Sale challenges readers to move beyond questions of legal, moral, and humanitarian obligations that dominate popular debates regarding asylum seekers. Digging deeper, the authors focus on processes and actors often overlooked in mainstream analyses and on the trends increasingly rendering asylum available only to people with financial and cultural capital. Probing every aspect of the asylum process from crossings to aftermaths, the book provides an in-depth exploration of complex, international networks, policies, and norms that impact people seeking asylum around the world. In highlighting protest as well as profit, Asylum for Sale presents both critical analyses and proposed solutions for resisting and reshaping current and emerging immigration norms.

Sujets

• Detention (imprisonment)
• Global citizenship
• Capitalism
• Anthropology
• Refugee
• Prison
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638188
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

As long as there are borders and money to be made off the backs of migrants seeking freedom via the state, we must continue to expose the profit-makers and share our stories of resistance. Asylum for Sale does exactly this. It reminds us that our people will never be truly free under capitalism-and that we must not only challenge the capitalist state but destroy it and open borders for all. It is an urgent, inspiring, and necessary volume.
-Jamila Hammami, founder of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
A very important book. With a potent mix of theoretical rigor, empirical detail and vivid human witness, it helps to move the debate about asylum seekers beyond suffering and compassion to rights and resistance. In the process, it exposes the nature of the industry growing around asylum application systems: an industry of those demanding extortionate payments to overcome border fences, those erecting the fences, those detaining asylum seekers while they wait, the lawyers, the NGOs-all with a self-interest in treating asylum seekers as voiceless victims without agency or capacity, pitted against citizens. This book conveys the possibilities of global citizenship, involving active solidarity with those who are crossing borders, whether by choice or as a refusal of oppression. It is a vital resource for the struggle for global human rights-a struggle often led by those who are denied them.
-Hilary Wainwright, author of A New Politics from the Left (Polity, 2018)
As the frontiers of disaster capitalism expand, the same systems that drive migration are finding ever more harrowing ways to criminalize and exploit the displaced. This book is part of how we fight back: connecting the extraordinary stories and insights of people studying, personally navigating, and creatively resisting the global asylum industry. An unparalleled resource.
-Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal (Simon Schuster, 2019)

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.
Series editor: Andrej Gruba i
Recent and featured Kairos books:
Building Free Life: Dialogues with calan edited by International Initiative
The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III by Abdullah calan
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici
Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat by Robert Ostertag
For more information visit www.pmpress.org/blog/kairos/

Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry
2020 the respective authors
Cover and section illustrations Pablo Melchor/pablo-melchor.com
This edition 2020 PM Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-782-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-818-8 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946107
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Contents
FOREWORD Seth M. Holmes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction Siobh n McGuirk and Adrienne Pine
I CROSSINGS
On Seeking Refuge from an Undeclared War Jos L pez
The Business of Selling Life: Reflections from a Rescue Ship in the Mediterranean Sea Alva, Uyi, and Madi
Trump and the USMCA: From Free Trade to Gassing Migrants Garry Leech
Outsourcing, Responsibility, and Refugee Claim-Making in Australia s Offshore Detention Regime Sara Dehm
Kidneys without Borders-Asylum without Kidneys Nancy Scheper-Hughes
II WAITING GAMES
From Paris to Lampedusa: The New Business of Migrant Detention in Europe Louise Tassin
Detained Voices on Labor Detained Voices
The Poetics of Prison Protest Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian
Displacement, Commodification, and Profitmaking in Nigeria Sidonia Lucia Kula and Oreva Olakpe
A Guard s Story Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, Pat Armstrong, and Sam Bungey
III COMPLEX INDUSTRIES/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXES
The Military and Security Industry: Promoting Europe s Refugee Regime Mark Akkerman
Making a Refugee Market in the Republic of Nauru Julia Morris
The Cost of Freedom Marzena Zukowska
Making Profits in Hostile Environments: Asylum Accommodation Markets in the UK and Ireland John Grayson
An Expert View of the Asylum Industry Adrienne Pine
IV NONPROFIT / NONGOVERNMENTAL
In the Best Interest of Whom? Professional Humanitarians and Selfie Samaritans in the Danish Asylum Industry Annika Lindberg
The Marketization of Asylum Justice in the UK Jo Wilding
Free Wireless Network Activism and the Industrial Media Infrastructures of Forced Migration Tim Sch tz and Monic Meisel
Surmounting the Hostile Environment: Reflections on Social Work Activism without Borders Lynn King, Bridget Ng andu, and Lauren Wroe
Neoliberalism and LGBT Asylum: A Play in Five Acts Siobh n McGuirk
V AFTERMATHS?
Border Militarization in a Warming World: Climate Adaptation for the Rich and Powerful Todd Miller
Beds, Masks, and Prayers: Mexican Migrants, the Immigration Regime, and Investments in Social Exclusion in Canada Paloma E. Villegas
Contesting Profit Structures: Rejected Asylum Seekers between Modern Slavery and Autonomy Jorinde Bijl and Sarah Nimf hr
Grounded: Power, Profit, and the Deportation Industrial Complex Ruth Potts and Jo Ram
Kuja Meri? Jo l van Houdt
INDEX
Foreword
Seth M. Holmes
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties.
-Karl Marx 1
What does it mean for a person to be seen as a commodity? For a whole category of people to be treated as objects for profit? How is this (strange, metaphysical) transformation experienced, navigated, and resisted? Who profits from such transmogrification, 2 and who facilitates or allows it? At what cost does such grotesque and bizarre commodification of people occur? To whom? And what alternate futures may be possible?
This book analyzes the commodification of the growing number of displaced people in many parts of the world who are seeking refuge from violence and harm. The broader context for the book is the intensifying conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism, structural racism, nationalism, and colonialism, all with increasingly fascist hues. 3 Neoliberal capitalism is here defined both as the political economic system of privatization of public goods and the symbolic system of the privatization of risk and responsibility. 4 Policy bolsters markets above people, and discourse bolsters the individual above the collective. 5 In these political, economic, and social contexts, profits flow in steep, uneven patterns at unbelievable rates and magnitudes. While, in many ways, it is true that human suffering is irrelevant when commerce is at stake, 6 it is also true that the intense suffering of some is making immense profit for others.
The authors of the volume are an inspiring collection of scholars, advocates, activists, artists, and asylum seekers-some of whom have been deported, some of whom have been legitimized as refugees, and some of whom remain incarcerated at the time of this writing. In different settings from Papua New Guinea to Turkey, Australia to the United States, Italy to Narau, Libya to Greece, and far beyond, the authors trace the production of violence and displacement, the treatment of persons seeking asylum as (dangerous) objects from which to make profit, the diffusion of responsibility for blatant human rights abuses, the grave human cost of these realities, and the multiple-sometimes contradictory-means by which such processes are lived and resisted. Their writing, painting, photographing, interviewing, and organizing invite the reader into conversation and praxis. Thank you to Siobh n McGuirk, Adrienne Pine, and all the contributors for this powerful invitation into reflection and action.
Poignantly, the authors reflect on their own complicated positions vis- -vis the multiple forms of profit extracted at great cost from asylum seekers. Through their own reflexivity, 7 they remind us tha