Frictional Identities: How Young Asylum Seekers and the German State Coproduce Liminal Legality

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 14. Legality and Irregular Migration

Abstract

This paper examines how young asylum seekers in Germany acquire and live with uncertain legal statuses—or liminal legality. It dovetails with recent debates in the sociology of migration critiquing dichotomous conceptualizations of legal and illegal migration, showing ethnographically how migrants experience the continuous legal borderline along which they actually live. While scholars have examined the consequences of liminal legality, uncertain legal statuses usually remain a black box. Attempting to fil this gap, I examine the actual mechanisms and decisions that create an uncertain legal status. I show that liminal legality results not only from the multiple possible outcomes of an asylum plea, but also from Germany’s dichotomous cultural notions and legal applications of identity—age, national-ethnic origin, and unaccompaniment, in this paper—that do not fit migrants’ more complex and less legible situations. The paper develops the term frictional identities to capture the fabricated, messy, and provisional identities that migrants acquire in their interactions with state bureaucracies. In contrast to other studies on the identification of asylum seekers, I avoid the one-sided portrayal of the state verifying and assigning migrants’ identity by considering both state bureaucrats’ and migrants’ stakes and strategies in the negotiations about the identity categories migrants are admitted to. Empirically, the paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Germany conducted since 2016.

Author

• Ulrike Bialas, Princeton University