Obstructing lives: local borders and their structural violence in the asylum field of post-2015 Europe

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the literature debate on local-level as a crucial arena of migration government in Europe, after the so-called ‘refugees crisis’ in 2015 and the attempt to limit migration movements towards Europe by restricting asylum rights. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic research in Milan (Italy) between the years 2017 and 2018, we argue that the urban space can be turned into a setting of enforcing internal borders. The study focuses on implicit and informal ‘obstructions’ deployed by police immigration office (Questura) to hinder the attribution of legal status to prospect asylum-seekers or to block the renewal of refugees’ documents. In line with the national and European political orientation towards migration, such restrictive asylum policies have been deployed in Milan since 2016. Instead of placing the migrants in a ‘state of exception’, we argue that these praxes represent additional layers of control mechanisms. Refugees’ lives are directly affected by the obfuscation of their legal status produced by these obstructive praxes, which push recipients into the shadow of the law and are bearers of feelings of dependency and uncertainty. We ultimately argue that such indirect and informal bureaucratic obstructive practices can be interpreted as forms of structural violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• borders
• structural violence
• bureaucratic practices
• urban space

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants of the research: the men and women who agreed to share their stories with us as either recipient or helper against the measures from the Questura. Special thanks go to the audience and the contributors of Escapes Annual Conference 2018, where we presented an earlier version of this paper, for their support and constructive comments. A special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and critically nuanced comments. Finally, thanks also to John Flint (University of Sheffield), Victoria Cooper (Open University) and Barbara Oomen, Moritz Baumgärtel, Sara Miellet, Tihomir Sabchev and Elif Durmuş (Cities of Refuge team in Middelburg) for the useful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Questura is a police office given immigration-related duties.

2 We here use the term ‘EUrope’ following the argument of Maurice Stierl (2017) in problematising the equation of the EU with Europe and Europe with the EU, pointing to the fact that EUrope is not reducible to the institutions of the EU.

3 The empirical research contributed to the PhD thesis by Maurizio Artero entitled ‘The city vis-à-vis forced migration: Milan between refuge and refuse at the time of the migration crisis’.

4 In this paper, we focus on selected empirical data. Interviews were collected in: Naga-har and Naga SOS-expulsion project, Caritas Servizio Accoglienza Immigrati, the cooperative Globus providing legal advise, Casa della Carità, a Catholic Foundation that runs a reception centre and a help-desk for migrants, and with a member of ASGI (Italian network of lawyers and expert in migration-related study) working in a help-desk funded by the Waldensian Church.

5 To protect anonymity, all informants’ names have been changed.

6 By Italian statutory regulations, Questura's sole task is to report the asylum claims, which will be evaluated subsequently on an individual basis by ad hoc commissions.

7 The Italian ordinary reception system is, indeed, the prerogative of foreign people who have applied for asylum or have been recognised as refugees. Therefore, migrants who are ‘illegalised’ by expulsion orders are deprived of their right of accommodation within the national reception system.

8 In Italian law, there exist three forms of protection for refugees: the political refugee status, the subsidiary protection and the humanitarian protection, a residual form of protection. Each of them grants a different set of benefits and each is based on a different evaluation of individual risks.

9 Indeed, as a refugee with subsidiary protection, Konan is denied any document from his country of origin. Under international law, he is not supposed to have any relationship with his original nation-state.