Table Of ContentEntrapping Asylum Seekers
Social, Legal and Economic Precariousness
Edited By Francesco Vecchio and Alison Gerard
Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security
Series editors
James Sheptycki
Social Science
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Anastassia Tsoukala
Sport Sciences
University of Paris 11
Orsay, France
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Francesco Vecchio • Alison Gerard
Editors
Entrapping Asylum
Seekers
Social, Legal and Economic
Precariousness
Editors
Francesco Vecchio Alison Gerard
Anthropology Centre for Law and Justice
Chinese University of Hong Kong Charles Sturt University
Hong Kong, Hong Kong Bathurst, Australia
Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security
ISBN 978-1-137-58738-1 ISBN 978-1-137-58739-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58739-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955067
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Alison – ‘For Sebastien and Zadie’
Francesco – ‘For my parents’
Acknowledgements
This book was conceived a number of years ago, out of the conviction
that no matter what asylum seekers might endeavour to do in order to
obtain safety, security and well-being, their agency is often (mis)under-
stood as evidence that their behaviour is incompatible with that of those
who were privileged enough to be born on the ‘right’ side of the globe.
Such a conviction is the product of years of working with and research-
ing asylum seeker populations in several countries now struggling with
self-made crisis, the management of which is an indication of hegemonic
discourses of control and power, both over borders and underprivileged
foreigners, which reveal how citizens are controlled through the threat
‘we’ are supposedly under when approached by deviant and resource-
draining foreigners.
It is in this light that we are most grateful to the hundreds of asylum
seekers we encountered over the years who generously shared their stories
with us. It is impossible to name them all, but we certainly extend our
thanks and hope this book may to some extent do justice to their lived
experiences, on the one hand, and that it can be of practical use to
improve their lives. Accounting for our responsibilities in shaping the
contextual and relational space wherein asylum seeker behaviour can be
understood is indeed the objective of this book, and in such an endeav-
our, we must extend our gratitude also to the wonderful contributors
who participated in this project. They readily accepted the challenge and
vii
viii Acknowledgements
produced significant pieces of research that are collected in the pages that
follow.
We finally thank the editors of the Transnational Crime, Crime
Control and Security series and Stephanie Carey and the people at
Palgrave that worked on the preparation of this book; Julia Farrell for her
capable editing work; Charles Sturt University’s School of Humanities
and Social Sciences and the Centre for Law and Justice; and the
Department of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
We would also like to thank our respective families for their
understanding.
Contents
1 Entrapping Asylum Seekers: Introduction 1
Alison Gerard and Francesco Vecchio
2 Unmasking the Cultural Construction of Asylum
Screening at the Border 25
Olga Jubany
3 Beyond the Border Spectacle: Migration Across
the Mediterranean Sea 57
Pierluigi Musarò
4 Seeking Asylum in Neoliberal Cairo: Refugee Protests
and the Securitization of Humanitarianism 83
Elisa Pascucci
5 Contesting Entrapment: Women Asylum Seekers
in Hong Kong 107
Alison Gerard
ix
x Contents
6 ‘This Time I Am Going to Cross!’: Fighting
Entrapment Processes Through the Provision of
Human Smuggling Services on the US–Mexico Border 135
Gabriella E. Sanchez
7 Asylum Seekers and Strategic Litigation 157
Frances Webber
8 ‘Hostile’ UK Immigration Policy and Asylum Seekers’
Susceptibility to Forced Labour 187
Hannah Lewis, Louise Waite, and Stuart Hodkinson
9 Funding Precarity: Non-profit Organization and
Refugee Negotiation of Italian and European Asylum
Policies 217
Michele Manocchi
10 Asylum Seeker Materiality and Identity- Building:
Shapers of Socio-legal Incarceration 247
Francesco Vecchio
Index 271
