The governance of vulnerable migrants: procedure, resources and affect in asylum reception

ABSTRACT

This article explores how vulnerability is understood, appropriated and translated into procedural regulations and actual bureaucratic practices based on two case studies: 1) the reception of asylum seekers in Belgium; and 2) the reception of asylum seekers and provision of aid services in humanitarian operations in Uganda. These two cases demonstrate that ‘vulnerable groups’ and the corresponding procedural and substantial safeguards or protections are often defined flexibly, depending on the resources available to public institutions on the one hand, and specific agency guidelines and definitions of ‘vulnerable’ status on the other. Our ethnographic data show that reception bureaucrats are uncomfortably wedged between their desire to help and their obligation to follow state policies. To reconcile these (sometimes contradictory) obligations, they break administrative guidelines, use their own resources to make up for the shortcomings of their institution, or systematically decline migrants’ requests in the hope of demonstrating the absurdity of current reception policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• migration
• asylum
• bureaucracy
• ethnography
• Belgium
• Uganda

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all research participants for their help, and to the various state agencies that granted us access to their premises. A special thanks goes to our colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle for their feedback on earlier versions of this text, and in particular to Larissa Vetters and Zeynep Yanaşmayan for their thorough editorial guidance. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Andreetta’s fieldwork was conducted in 2018 and 2019 as part of a wider project on the judicialisation of social assistance in French-speaking Belgium. For confidentiality reasons, research participants are identified by pseudonyms, exact locations and titles have been omitted, and ethnographic vignettes anonymised.

2. Sophie Nakueira conducted fieldwork for this article within the framework of the project Vulnerabilities under the Global Protection Regime (VULNER), which is funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 scheme. It was conducted between July and November 2020. The names of participants have been anonymised for the sake of confidentiality. Verbatim quotes and the actual titles of the participants and organisations have been used with the consent of the participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Andreetta

Sophie Andreetta is a research fellow with the Belgian National Fund for Research (FRS- FNRS) at the University of Liège. Her work focuses on how laws and public policies are appropriated by citizens, civil servants and legal professionals, and how these various categories of actors use law and litigation in order to achieve social or political effects.

Sophie Nakueira

Sophie Nakueira is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department Law and Anthropology at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Germany.