Papers of the Paperless: Governmentality, Technologies of Freedom, and the Production of Asylum-Seeker Identities

Abstract

Refugees become asylum-seekers not only because the receiving country gives them the bureaucratic-legal status but also because they start to identify with the status. This article examines how refugees learn to be asylum-seekers even when they question asylum decisions. It uses Foucault's idea of governmentality to assess how governmental policies become translated into asylum-seekers’ collective and personal conducts as asylum-seekers, sometimes in ways that undermine the official policy. This article introduces the idea of papered governmentality, in which the production of papers is a governmental technology to manage not only populations but also personal identities and conducts. It investigates how asylum-seekers’ own role in papered governmentality as receivers, producers, and users of various papers in the asylum process transforms their conducts and identities in ways that reshape how they are governed. The empirical research site was an asylum-seekers’ protest in Finland where the first author conducted participant observation about how papers included in the asylum process were collected, read, discussed, circulated, and co-produced. The article finds that when migration control utilizes laws, bureaucratic documents, and other liberal governmental technologies designed to modify autonomous individuals’ own decisions to migrate, it produces not only control but also identification with the host country and some freedom to choose how to act with governmental decisions.

The Datafication of Migrant Bodies and the Enactment of Migrant Subjectivities: Biometric Data, Power and Resistance at the Borders of Europe

“…And when Mariam and her friends compared suffering, they accepted the identities imposed upon them but also pushed the boundaries of assigned identities, by questioning them and judging decisions and processes. Salmenkari and Aldawoodi (2023) discussing the decisions taken by Migra (the Finnish Migration authority) conclude that illegalised migrants made counterclaims, disputed, adapted strategies, or adopted governmentalized identities throughout the bureaucratic process that often lasted for several years. In their and my findings, one can detect the formation of subjectivities both as the outcome of a process of internalisation of the logic of the current system of migration management and also, it's questioning in an effort to open it up to more inclusive understandings of rights.…”

“…It is also the case that the link between bureaucratic objects or ‘things’, issued to be worn or carried by illegalised migrants (wristbands and bureaucratic papers), and the data systems that gather and share their biometric information has not been developed. Research on documentation issued to illegalised migrants as they go through the process of registration, submission of asylum applications, interviews, reviews of decisions taken on their status has focused on legal-bureaucratic papers within the broader perspective of technologies of governance (Bigo, 2008; Bloch et al, 2014; Dean, 2010; Mountz, 2011; Tazzioli, 2014) or papered governmentality (Abarca and Coutin, 2018; Salmenkari and Aldarwoodi, 2023). As my primary concern is to consider and examine the materiality of technological infrastructures and their importance in constructing the migrant body within relations of power, I will draw insights from work in critical security studies and in particular feminist perspectives for a broader conceptualization of the ways in which data systems are forming and (re)forming the migrant body.…”

“…Emanuel, an Eritrean (Moria camp) who had escaped the army, said that in the interviews he had to prove his ‘incarceration’ in the Eritrean army, although migration administrators knew that most men in Eritrea end up drafted and spend most of their lives in the army. My interlocutors insisted that data collected during their interviews were considered circumstantial, and subjective (see also Salmenkari and Aldawoodi, 2023) and their ‘deservedness’ to asylum status had to be objectively proven through the gathering of biometric data and their interpretation by administrators that assigned them into generalised categories.…”

“Do you think I ever learn English?”: experiences of limited technology access among Middle Eastern refugee mothers in regional Australia

“…This suggests that forcibly displaced people may have various forms of experience with technology. These could include technical warfare or the use of technology by government agencies such as the immigration office to exercise control and subjection over people (Salmenkari and Aldawoodi, 2023). As a result, these individuals may become discouraged from participating in technology-related activities, such as using digital devices for language learning, after resettlement.…”