Life on the Line: Border Stories

ABSTRACT

Every refugee has many stories to tell. The complexity of their stories challenges dominant socio-political narratives, upending prevailing perceptions of people seeking refuge while demonstrating that the lines of responsibility for their circumstances are blurry. The stories of two asylum seekers highlight aspects of refugee phenomenology that are largely absent within the psychoanalytic literature and demonstrate that asylum seeking is productively understood as an active form of resistance and an embodied form of “radical hoping.” Radical hoping, we contend, exists in a complementary relationship to the despair and desperation that usually frames refugees’ stories in political rhetoric and public discourse. It acts as a bridge between hopeless resignation rooted in past trauma, current despair and uncertainty, and longing for a safer, more dignified future. It also supports the refugee’s ability to resist oppression and to act courageously without certainty about the future consequences of his or her actions. The refugee’s journey, we conclude, is productively understood as one of extraordinary agency rather than simply a desperate flight from danger to safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• asylum
• immigration
• hope
• stories
• narrative
• borders
• socio-political

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The terms “asylee” and “refugee” are often used interchangeably, as they are in this article. Legally an asylum seeker is a person who meets the definition of refugee (i.e. a person with well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, and who has fled his or her country because of persecution, war or violence) and has applied for protection inside the US or at a port of entry into the US. In contrast, a refugee applies for protection from outside of the US.

² See this report from TRAC Immigration, an independent and nonpartisan information source: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/588/

³ According to the UN High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR), as of December 2019 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, and 45.7 million of them were internally displaced.

⁴ Some have linked the Trump-administration policy, of returning migrants and asylum seekers to Mexican border towns to wait out their asylum case, to efforts to increase the workforce in Maquiladoras (Ebnar & Crossa, 2019).

⁵ Her case is pending at the time of publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margy Sperry

Margy Sperry, Psy.D., MFT, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She is in practice in Los Angeles, California.

Susan Mull

Susan Mull, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She is in practice in Pasadena, California.