Out of Time: The Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees

Abstract

Despite long-standing recognition that variations exist between people's experiences of time, and that time is central to the framing of social life and bureaucratic systems, migration scholars have tended to neglect the temporal dimension in their exploration of mobility. This continues to be the case today despite it being over a decade since Saulo Cwerner, in this journal, called for migration researchers to give greater attention to time. This article seeks to reinvigorate the debate, drawing on ethnographic research with refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees in the UK to question how an appreciation of time provides insights into understandings of mobility and deportability. It argues that deportable migrants suffer from the instability and precarity created by living with a dual uncertainty of time, one that simultaneously threatens imminent and absent change. The article distinguishes between four experiential temporalities (sticky, suspended, frenzied and ruptured), and considers how the re-appropriation of time might aid individual resilience.

Keywords:

• Immigration Detention
• Asylum
• Uncertainty
• Time
• Temporal

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Drs Bridget Anderson and Ali Rogers for stimulating conversations on time and to the many people whose experiences inform the piece. Very many thanks also go to the reviewers and staff of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Notes

[1] An exception is the literature on mobilities (King et al. 2006; Urry 2001) and a handful of geographers of migration who explicitly consider time (Conlon 2011; Gill 2009b; Hägerstrand 1975). Time is also implicit in research on ‘second generation’ migrants and retirement migration (Andall 2002; Christou 2006; White 2006).

[2] The criteria by which individuals are recognised as refugees are established by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol.

[3] Although there are administrative differences between ‘deportation’ and ‘removal’, including time-specific prohibitions against return for deportees, for the purposes of this article they can be treated as equivalents.

[4] The ‘legacy backlog’ refers to people who claimed asylum before March 2007 and either never received a decision to their claim or were refused refugee status but not removed. In 2006, the Home Office estimated that this backlog consisted of around 400–450 thousand individuals (ICAR 2009, 4).

[5] The UK opted out of Directive 2008/115/EC of the European Parliament and Council, which sets a maximum period of 18 months for the detention of migrants.

[6] In 2008, detainees were being held at Campsfield for an average of 46 days (HMCIP 2008, 78).

[7] Figures for the length of time people waited for asylum decisions are not available for the period of fieldwork. In 2010, however, out of the 5978 cases pending an initial asylum decision, 3417 had been waiting for more than six months (Home Office 2012, table as.01). In 2007, the New Asylum Model was introduced for managing asylum claims and the Home Office committed itself to faster decision-making, building up to the target of 90% of applications being decided within six months by December 2011. Although the targets were deemed unachievable (Independent Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency 2009, 12), and were eventually abandoned, anecdotally, the New Asylum Model did appear to reduce average waiting times.

[8] The argument that immigration detention is made especially harmful as a result of the uncertainty of being held without a sentence has also been made by scholars (e.g. Pirouet 2001, 95).