Prolonged Liminality and Coerced Settlement: Refugee Experiences of the European Union (EU) Migration Regime

• In Event: 40468 - Refugees, Forced Migrants, and Stateless Populations

Abstract

The Dublin Regulation (1990, 2002, 2013) is a European Union (EU) agreement impacting 31 European countries stipulating that asylum-seekers can apply for legal status only once and only in the country where they are first fingerprinted. In this article, I assess the experiences of ‘returnees’ to Italy — that is, asylum-seekers who have returned to Italy after their attempts at asylum elsewhere in the EU were denied based on the Dublin Regulation. Drawing on 170+ hours of participant observations and interviews with 42 working-class migrants from countries in Africa and the Middle East collected at a refugee center in Rome, Italy, I ask: how do encounters with the Dublin Regulation shape the trajectories and incorporation of refugees in Europe? I find that the ascription of legal status via the Dublin Regulation produces serious consequences for individuals’ goals and well-being — engendering (1) delayed incorporation and prolonged liminality; (2) coerced settlement; and (3) a sense of personal failure. In doing so, this article sheds light on the racialized mechanisms of migration control unfolding within a complex multi-country setting, where supranational asylum regimes, ostensibly intended to provide efficient pathways to legalization, instead produce an underclass of refugees — unable to fully integrate in their country of asylum, but barred from doing so elsewhere.

Author

• Mackenzie Bonner, University of California-Irvine