Changing the immigration rules and withdrawing the ‘currency’ of legal aid: the impact of LASPO 2012 on migrants and their families

The provisions of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO 2012) will remove almost all immigration cases from the scope of legal aid with effect from 1 April 2013. Part One of this paper describes the expected changes LASPO 2012 will make and then explores their anticipated impact. It explains that large numbers of migrants and their family members are likely to be without legal advice and representation after April 2013, including in cases where the state-enforced removal or deportation from the UK of a parent is contemplated, with the consequence of separating parent from child. Part Two explores the possibility that an ‘exceptional case determination’ might provide a route back into legal aid funding, and finds that this is likely to be restricted, in immigration cases, to those making applications relying on Article 8 ECHR and who can demonstrate a particular and individual requirement for legal aid. Part Three explores the rationale for these changes, and concerns about access to justice for migrants and their family members in cases involving acute interference with rights to family and private life. It places these concerns in context, specifically the fundamental and restrictive amendments to the Immigration Rules relating to family migration introduced from July 2012. These amendments are enormously complex and their full legal implications have yet to be tested in the higher courts. Part Four questions whether the changes will in fact achieve their stated aim of cost savings or whether the costs will simply be transferred to other parts of the State (especially to the Tribunal system, in dealing with litigants in person). The paper additionally questions, in Part Five, whether the regulators are equipped to regulate the quality of the fee-charging immigration advice services to which at least some individuals will turn. The paper concludes that, at the very least, it is particularly harsh that the Government has removed the ‘currency’ of legal aid at this time, so that those with limited financial resources have neither access to legal aid advice about the meaning of those Rules nor legal aid representation to test their proper interpretation.     

Unfree labour in immigration detention: exploitation and coercion of a captive immigrant workforce

This paper focuses on labour within immigration detention in the United Kingdom, offering an original national case study as well as a new conceptual framework for analysing such practices. It does so through an innovative engagement with recent literatures on forced labour, unfreedom and hyper-precarity, particularly amongst irregular migrants. We advance two key arguments in this paper. First, that the available data on labour within immigration detention indicate that detainees should legally be considered employees and granted access to labour protections, including the national minimum wage. Second, that work in immigration detention is an example of state-sanctioned exploitative, coercive and unfree labour amongst a hyper-precarious group of the population. This case has implications for other country contexts where immigration detention is used.     

Children Seeking Asylum in Wales

While there is an emerging body of research on children seekingasylum, the UK-based studies have to date been largely conductedin England. This paper presents the findings of qualitativeresearch on the experiences of children seeking asylum in Wales,a nation within the UK whose National Assembly has devolvedresponsibility for social welfare and educational services.The research involved interviews and focus groups with children,relevant professionals and a small number of parents. The findingsdescribed in this paper relate to some aspects of the children'sdaily lives, their hopes and fears and their attitudes towardsbeing dispersed to a strange and unknown country.     

Rights and Advocacy in Research with East Timorese Asylum Seekers in Australia

Abstract

This paper aims to derive lessons from a retrospective and comparative analysis of two previously unconnected projects that assessed the well-being of East Timorese asylum seekers residing in Australia. Despite disciplinary differences between psychiatry and social science research, overlapping philosophies and approaches emphasizing human rights and well-being paradigms were adopted. Drawing on these experiences, we explore the unique circumstances of East Timorese asylum seekers in Australia, and the applicability and positive effects of human rights-focused research and related methodologies including researcher-advocacy research amongst minority groups exposed to trauma and ongoing political pressures. Key issues examined include the complexities of adopting multi-method frameworks of investigation; individual and collective benefits in responding to a need for direct intervention, challenges in engaging an alienated community, and the need to frame the research and the intervention in an historical and political context. In addition, the process allowed us to confront some key challenges in the field, especially the relevance of traumatic stress and its treatment in assisting marginalized asylum seekers.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

Historicising ‘asylum’ and responsibility

Territorial rule ‘begins’ with an assertion of who deserves protection and who does not. The question of responsibility and its limits is integral to the making and maintenance of a nation state. But a modern refugee rights regime externalises the question of asylum. Asylum claims are made by strangers dealt with by bureaucracies. How has this come to pass? How has responsibility become thought in terms of the territorial state and the society and order it begets? In this article, I try to make the case through a historical example that asylum is not external to the constitution of the nation state, rather territorial rule begins by figuring out who to protect and who not to. At the core of these ideas about protection and responsibility is a notion of political subjectivity, which is graduated, hierarchical and centred on the state. The privileging of an ahistorical idea of how political subjectivity has been so limited has contributed to the externalisation of asylum, where the troubling questions of to whom we are responsible and whom not barely figure because asylum claims become the subject of a technicalised procedure. In this article, I focus on the British colonial authority's encounter with native slaves seeking asylum in Perak.     

论朝鲜“脱北者”的国际法地位及我国的对策

近年来,朝鲜"脱北者"问题逐渐成为地区乃至国际热点问题,中国在该问题上以遣返为主的政策也日益面临来自其他国家的压力。从1951年《关于难民地位的公约》的规定和相关国际实践来看,"脱北者"是否具有难民地位不能一概而论,而是要具体问题具体分析;我国的现有政策总体上无可非议,同时可以考虑按照国际条约,给予那些确因政治原因出逃的"脱北者"们国际法上的难民地位。此外,我国还有必要建立健全处理难民及相关问题的机制。     

Asylum seekers,citizenship and reality TV in the Netherlands: quizzing refugees in jeopardy

This article interrogates a Dutch jeopardy style TV show, Weg van Nederland, featuring young, well-educated asylum seekers about to be deported. The TV program, devised in collaboration with the advocacy group ‘Defense for Children,’ performed the paradoxes resulting from the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of asylum seekers. Yet, its strategy of inscribing the contestants into the space of citizenship by highlighting their ‘rootedness’ through the quiz format also lent support to the exclusivist, essentialist understanding of national belonging that is produced in contemporary Dutch citizenship and integration law. Moreover, the show's focus on successful, thoroughly integrated and career driven young adults, while pragmatic from the perspective of the show's (limited) political objectives, also reproduced the preferred template of neoliberal citizenship, which drives the European migration regime and its policy of selective in/exclusion. These contradictions expose the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of humanitarian appeals working within the contemporary media regime, including reality TV, which imposes its own generic terms (and ideological inflections) on the justice claims launched within its public arena.     

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

Existing literature on sexual citizenship has emphasized the sexuality-related claims of de jure citizens of nation-states, generally ignoring immigrants. Conversely, the literature on immigration rarely attends to the salience of sexual issues in understanding the social incorporation of migrants. This article seeks to fill the gap by theorizing and analyzing immigrant sexual citizenship. While some scholars of sexual citizenship have focused on the rights and recognition granted formally by the nation-state and others have stressed more diffuse, cultural perceptions of community and local belonging, we argue that the lived experiences of immigrant sexual citizenship call for multiscalar scrutiny of templates and practices of citizenship that bridge national policies with local connections. Analysis of ethnographic data from a study of 76 Mexican gay and bisexual male immigrants to San Diego, California, reveals the specific citizenship templates that these men encounter as they negotiate their intersecting social statuses as gay/bisexual and as immigrants (legal or undocumented); these include an ‘asylum’ template, a ‘rights’ template, and a ‘local attachments’ template. However, the complications of their intersecting identities constrain their capacity to claim immigrant sexual citizenship. The study underscores the importance of both intersectional and multiscalar approaches in research on citizenship as social practice.     

An anthropological perspective on asylum cases

Over a lengthy period of time, the author has acted as an expert witness for people seeking asylum in the United States from West Africa. The author has noted changes in the manner in which courts have treated these asylum seekers from the relatively easy process of the Clinton years to the much more hostile culture of the Bush ones. The author wishes to discuss the manner in which an anthropologist can use knowledge about the culture of the person seeking asylum and that of the political party in power to translate the motives of the asylum seeker in a favorable light. The author provides a number of examples of this process and of the changing culture of political administrations.