Urban Refuge: Legal Status and Access to Aid for Refugees in Cities

• In Event: Managing Migrants and Refugees in Times of Crisis

Abstract

While migration enforcement is conventionally studied from the perspective of border or entry controls, governments are increasingly developing policies of ‘internal border control’ or ‘interior control’ (Engbersen and Broeders 2009; Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Walters 2006). Internal border control includes “all legally mandated practices that national, state, or local governments engage in or promote in their jurisdictions, but not at country borders, to exclude, either directly or through third parties, certain categories of noncitizens from the country’s territory, or parts of that territory” (Leerkes et al. 2013: 912). This turn towards interior control means devolving the enforcement of legal status to non-state actors. How do non-state actors enforce or subvert interior controls through their interpretation legal status? What role does civil society play in shaping the relationship between legal status and livelihood outcomes? Theoretically, this paper explores how legal status is defined at the meso-level through the classifying power of social welfare providers and their notions of deservingness. While legal status is formally determined by national governments, service providers ultimately determine whether or not individuals can access aid based on their identity documents, concretely connecting legal status to livelihood outcomes. Empirically, this paper is part of a larger sub-national, cross-national study of the provision of social welfare for undocumented migrants and refugees in two sprawling urban areas—Istanbul, Turkey and the greater Bay Area of California. This project is tied to an aid-mapping app (Urban Refuge) that is designed to connect migrants to service providers. The research is based on resource mapping, expert interviews, and a survey experiment with service providers across both field sites. The purpose of this study is to understand the standard operating procedures and normative scripts that service providers use to determine eligibility and classify potential beneficiaries. Beyond its intellectual merits, this project is also explicitly designed to have a broader impact on migrant communities by building digital infrastructures that may enhance their access to welfare and overall economic and social mobility.

Author

• Noora Anwar Lori, Boston University