Essay 1B: Sanctuary

SANCTUARY: Countering a politics of waiting and suspension in the European asylum regime.

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design 2021

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Introduction

This essay investigates the use of suspension and a politics of waiting by the EU and its member states in their governance of migration and asylum. It then addresses how local, municipal actors use sanctuary practices to ‘decouple’ (Oomen, 2019, p. 124) from their national governments’ ‘politics of unease’ (Buonfino & Huysmans, 2008) in order to support refugees-in-waiting, arguing that at the moment, these measures are not enough.

The so-called ‘European Migrant Crisis’ saw over 3 million displaced people arrive in Europe between 2015 and 2016 (European Parliament, 2017). Since then, migration has become increasingly politicised. The narrative spun by member states and media has framed the situation as an unmanageable ‘migrant crisis’ with an emphasis on the ‘illegality’ and ‘criminality’ of border crossings presenting securitisation as the only solution. In order to compensate for the freedom of movement between Schengen states enjoyed by those with formal citizenship, the EU has sought to strengthen and fortify its ‘frontier’ through greater militarisation and surveillance. The term ‘migrant crisis’ shifts the blame onto the migrants themselves and the places from where they have come. However, the reality is that the roots of the crisis lie much closer to home in the EU’s own border enforcement policies and asylum regime (Musarò, 2019, p. 145).

Whilst the concept of refugeehood is widely acknowledged, states are reluctant to recognise claims to that status in practice. Although the term ‘refugee’ is often used as a blanket term to describe all those who are forcibly displaced, legally recognised refugee status and the rights thereof are not automatically acquired upon displacement. Bordering is increasingly being internalised within the territory through policies and mechanisms that exclude and suspend (Dajani, 2020, p. 2) The EU and its member states have constructed a series of terms, such as ‘irregular migrant’, ‘economic migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘subsidiary protection status’, ‘temporary protection status’ and ‘refugee status’ in order to withhold rights from those deemed ‘undeserving’.

Migrants are forced through physical, emotional and administrative hurdles in order to unlock different protections dependent on the level they reach. Bordering is instituted through the erection of bureaucratic red tape and a presumption of fraudulence, criminality or undeservedness that subjects those making claims to persistent cross-examination throughout the application process and conditions attached to the provision of support (Dajani, 2020, p. 6). Asylum seekers cannot choose where they settle. The Dublin Regulation restricts new arrivals to lodging their claim in the “first [country] of irregular entry” (European Commission, 2016) in a bid to prevent so-called ‘asylum tourism’ (Fischer & Jørgensen, 2020, p. 6). This forces those seeking refuge further north into clandestine journeys, remaining undocumented for fear of removal or detention. Suspension has become a tool in the governance of migration which disables and disempowers migrants through the deferral of their access to support, placing them in a continual state of precarity (Dajani, 2020, p. 1).

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A Politics of Waiting

The experience of waiting is a universal phenomenon (Rotter, 2016). However, the way in which it is experienced itself is not universal. It is stratified and dependent on the power dynamics between those who wait and those who are waited for (Schwartz, 1974; Auyero, 2011). Forms of waiting can vary dependent on time passed and certainty of outcome. There are ‘quotidian waiting events’ (Bissell, 2007)that are short-term, such as waiting for a bus, and there is ‘chronic’ waiting (Rotter, 2016, p. 81), which is long-term waiting for the realisation or completion of what Rotter describes as ‘life projects’. This chronic form of waiting, unlike quotidian waiting events, usually involves a future event that is either uncertain in temporality, in outcome or both (Bourdieu, 2000). Schwartz (1974, p. 869) writes of the control of time as being an ‘essential property’ of power. He describes waiting and imposed delay as being degrading and a loss of time and resources. It can be irritating (Schwartz, 1974, p. 844), boring and exhausting (Auyero, 2011, p. 10), in part due to the uncertainty not only over how long one would need to wait but also the outcome itself. In a bureaucratic setting these delays often are accompanied by little or no explanation (Peteet, 2008, p. 14) and when they are, they are attributed to something impersonal where no-one can be held accountable, such as an administrative or system error.

Waiting is so engrained into the process of travel that a range of infrastructures have been designed just to facilitate it. Queues, waiting rooms, boarding gates at ports, airports, train stations and border crossings are all spaces of waiting that exist at both human and industrial scales. For those with ‘regular’ status and documentation, waiting with regards to travel is routine event usually with a pre-determined outcome. However, in the context of forced displacement the imposed wait, much like the separation from familiarity and home, becomes protracted. Although waiting as experienced in migration can be short term waiting for aid, support or ‘bureaucratic decisions’, it is often overarched by a ‘chronic’ waiting for decisions on status (Jacobsen, et al., 2021).

Infrastructures for the management of the forcibly displaced inevitably become spaces in which waiting is imposed or experienced. As part of their border and immigration regime, European member states can operate networks of centres and facilities dedicated to ‘administrative’ detention. Bosworth and Vannier (2020) have identified the UK and France as two European countries where the most migrants are detained. Sites of detention include Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), Short-Term Holding Facilities (STHFs) in the UK (Silverman, et al., 2020) and their equivalents in France: Centres de Rétention Administrative (CRAs), Locaux de Rétention Administrative (LRAs) (Bosworth & Vannier, 2020).

Small detention units such as the British-run STHFs at the ports of Calais and Dunkerque are like waiting rooms, sparsely furnished save for a few rows of chairs, peeling posters and out-of-date magazines. Here, detainees are usually held for only a few hours, constituting a waiting event where there is a defined temporality (Bosworth, 2020).

In the Centres de Rétention Administrative in France, the duration of stay is capped at 90 days (Bosworth & Vannier, 2020). Meanwhile, there is no statutory limitation on how long people can be detained in the Immigration Removal Centres in the UK, which are run by the same private companies that operate prisons, heavily securitised and surveilled - designed to prevent detainees from absconding (Silverman, et al., 2020). It is perhaps telling, that IRCs such as Campsfield House, closed in 2018, were previously prisons that had been converted for immigration use (Corporate Watch, 2018). This administrative detention suspends migrants and asylum seekers in both time and space and is increasingly being used as a punitive tool of harassment, blurring the lines between the right to asylum and criminality.

At a larger scale, Ramadan (2013) writes of the refugee camp as a ‘time-space of dislocation’ which is borne out of temporariness and never intended to be permanent. The uncertainty lies in not knowing when one might be able to leave the camp, if at all. There has also been a global shift from the containment of migrants within camps to their dispersal across and throughout cities (Katz, et al., 2018). If they have applied for asylum, their uncertainty lies in when or whether they will receive a determination on their status. In the UK, once asylum seekers have submitted their claim, they are dispersed throughout the country in order to be housed whilst they await their decision.

Similarly to the Immigration Removal Centres, the provision and maintenance of accommodation is outsourced to private companies. Housing conditions are poor with limited channels for complaints. People have no choice on where they are housed and can be moved from one home to another with little notice, whilst also facing the ever-present prospect of removal (Darling, 2020). Whilst these spaces do not serve to physically contain asylum seekers, they inevitably become sites of waiting and anticipation.

In documenting those waiting for access to welfare at the welfare office, Procupez (2015) describes a situation where the act of waiting or the waiting imposed is confined to the extents of a particular space. However, he also notes that this experience can ‘transcend the time and space of the waiting room’. In this case, the experience of waiting and the uncertainty and degradation that comes with it can exist at a scale where it becomes everyday. At the scale of the camp and the city, the act of waiting can consume an individual’s everyday. In doing so, it becomes protracted and ‘chronic’.

The EU and its member states exasperate migrants’ experience of chronic waiting through the use of suspension as a tool in their governance of migration deferring their access to care and support as well as a decision on their status (Georgiou, et al., 2020). In a great contradiction, asylum seekers are incapacitated and made dependent on government allowances yet villainised for being a ‘burden’ on the state. Under EU law, Council directive 2003/9/EC (2003), member states can withhold access to the labour market for up to one year after the submission of an asylum claim. As a result, in many states, such as the United Kingdom and France, those who have lodged an asylum claim do not have the immediate right to work (Home Office, 2019; Service-Public.fr, 2020). Instead, government allowances of £5.40 per day in the UK (Gov.UK, 2014) and 6.80€ per day in France (Service-Public.fr, 2020), are made accessible through a dedicated debit card usable only in select shops (Gov.UK, 2014; Ofii.fr, 2019).

Asylum seekers’ precarity, temporality and otherness is perpetuated through their prevention from working and their forced dependency on the state. This manipulation of people’s time turns them from active citizens into ‘patients of the state’ (Auyero, 2011), simultaneously making some unable to move on and incapable of imagining a better future for themselves (Moderbacher, 2020). Their time is ‘stolen’ from them (Peteet, 2008). The imposition of waiting can be seen as a means to cultivate a culture of compliance and to filter out the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ (Sales, 2002). Here, waiting requires an investment of emotional energy, resources and time even if there is no guarantee of a successful outcome (Schwartz, 1974, p. 843). Those who demonstrate illusio or interest in the game (Bourdieu, 2000) and are willing to submit to and endure the state’s waiting game are seen as being in more of a genuine need and therefore more deserving (Auyero, 2011, p. 21). Migrants are constantly forced to prove their worth (Georgiou, et al., 2020) and live in constant fear of removal or detainment (Bagelman, 2013, p. 56).

Many descriptions of the experience of waiting (Auyero, 2011; Procupez, 2015; Schwartz, 1974; Moderbacher, 2020) mention feelings of disempowerment, worthlessness and wasted time. This is reflected in the experiences of asylum seekers documented by Rotter (2016). However, on its own, this interpretation risks reducing those in a position of waiting to 'bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) assumed to be stripped of political agency by a sovereign power. One cannot ‘wait’ for something to which they are indifferent. Waiting involves the anticipation of something to come in the future, in the case of the asylum seeker: a regulated status which would supposedly lead to some semblance of recognition and normality. In imagining, preparing and campaigning for their desired futures, refugees can make their waiting ‘active’ (Brun, 2015) and ‘agentive’ (Rotter, 2016). In seeking a better future, they may also seek to come to terms with their past experiences (Chatterjee, et al., 2020). Sanctuary practices as adopted by local actors have the potential to help mitigate the effects of suspension and provide settings in which those waiting on the state can do so with agency.

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Solidarity, Refuge, Sanctuary

In 2015, the City of Palermo published the Charter of Palermo (2015), a document decrying the current migration policies of the European Union and promoting the extension of rights to protection, mobility, legal residency, the labour market and free healthcare to those currently classified as ‘irregular migrants’. That same year, the mayor of Barcelona, Paris and Lesbos published We the Cities of Europe (2015) condemning the lack of state support for migrants in their readiness to become ‘places of refuge’ proclaiming asylum a human right. One year later, the mayors of London, Paris and New York wrote an open letter to The New York Times entitled Our Immigrants, Our Strength (2016) petitioning other cities to join them in calling for policies of ‘welcome’, ‘collaboration’, and ‘inclusion’.

These declarations of solidarity with refugees are representative of a larger, growing movement amongst cities around the world to claim sovereignty over the treatment of ‘irregular’ migrants from their respective nation states. The way in which migrant support can manifest at the urban scale varies from locality to locality, dependent on the extent of national power at a local level, demography and political leanings; resources available and financial situation; and cultures and traditions (Oomen, 2019, p. 125). Kaufmann (2019) uses three categories to describe these European urban policies: ‘regularisation’, ‘local bureaucratic membership’ and ‘sanctuary’.

Regularisation offers the most protections as it is recognised at a national level. Cities can lobby national governments to create programmes whereby ‘irregular’ migrants are ‘regularised’ through the issuance of residency status. Programmes such as these provide only a limited number of migrants with greater security, subject to strict criteria and numerous conditions. Between 2017 and 2019, Geneva ran a programme of regularisation entitled projet Papyrus. During this period, only ten percent of 13000 people ‘sans papiers’ were regularised, a majority of whom were families with children (DSES & DCS, 2019; Tribune de Genève, 2019). The programme also required people to have lived in the canton without interruption for up to ten years in order to be eligible for the residency permit (DSES & DCS, 2019). As regularisation provides ‘irregular’ migrants with a legal status recognised by the state they are afforded the right to residence and some protection from removal, reducing the amount of precarity and uncertainty they face. However, in waiting for regularisation, asylum seekers face the same suspension and disempowerment as they would otherwise.

Whilst cities generally do not have the power to expand the de jure rights of migrants, some of them have used the idea of membership upon residence to promote alternative forms of de facto citizenship (Oomen, 2019; Kaufmann, 2019) based not on status but on everyday engagement and participance. This falls in line with Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city (1968) where inhabitance is considered the ‘most central fact’ of urban citizenship (Kaufmann, 2019). Local bureaucratic membership is a pragmatic approach that allows local governments to register those without ‘regular’ status, affords them access to public services such as schools, hospitals, libraries and allows them to identify themselves to civil servants and the police. In Madrid, this has manifested in the form of a Tarjenta de Vecindad, a neighbourhood card issued to those without papers (Belver, 2016; Delvino, 2017; Kaufmann, 2019). In Barcelona, irregular migrants can be registered into the padròn, the municipal census. Although measures are only valid in that city and do not provide recipients with any additional rights, such as the right to work, drive or state benefits, they do mitigate the precarity many ‘irregular’ migrants face by allowing them de facto membership.

The effectiveness of local bureaucratic membership policies in offering protection is conditional on the concurrent implementation of policies of ‘sanctuary’ (Kaufmann, 2019). The notion of the Sanctuary City originated in the United States in 1989, when San Francisco passed the City and County of Refuge Ordinance allowing municipal authorities to ignore national immigration law and refuse to cooperate with federal immigration departments (City and County of San Francisco, 2016). Whilst this does not ensure total protection from the federal government, this policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ allows those without ‘regularised status’ to access public services without fear of removal. Since then, the sanctuary movement has spread across the United States eventually reaching Europe with cities such as Barcelona, Hamburg, Sheffield, Glasgow and Milan proclaiming potentially ‘ambiguous’ (Kaufmann, 2019) policies of ‘sanctuary’, ‘safe harbour’, and ‘solidarity’ (Bagelman, 2013; Bazurli, 2019; Darling, 2010; Fischer & Jørgensen, 2020). However, unlike in the American sanctuary tradition, where a federated state affords local authorities the power to implement policies of sanctuary directly challenging the federal authorities, most European states are unitary and local authorities’ powers are devolved at the discretion of their central governments. Legally, this limits the ways in which cities are able to subvert and undermine hostile policies at a national level. In order to have an impact in shaping the national discourse on migration, local solidarity campaigns and sanctuary practices require upscaling and the cooperation of political actors at different levels (Bazurli, 2019, p. 349). In order for local NGOs to successfully lobby municipal governments to take action, they must build alliances not only with other organisations but with officials in government. In the UK, the city of sanctuary movement began in 2005, as a grassroots campaign in Sheffield with the goal of increasing awareness and engagement between refugees and local residents marking the city as a place of welcome. In doing so, they sought to shift the national narrative on asylum from one that perpetuated suspicion and illegality (Darling, 2010, p. 129). The movement was officially backed by the Sheffield City Council in 2007 and has since expanded its network to over 100 cities across the UK and Ireland (City of Sanctuary UK, 2015).

In a Western context, sanctuary has gone from being rooted in the Christian tradition, confined to the scale and locality of the church building to something much more extensive, a ‘relational’ (Darling, 2010, p. 131), ‘alliance’ based (Bazurli, 2019, p. 362), ‘fluid network of practices’ (Bagelman, 2013, p. 50) spanning multiple cities. Through extending their networks outwards and spreading to other cities, they can then encourage inter-municipal coalitions to intervene at a national or supranational level. In 2018, the Mayors Migration Council, a global network of cities, published the Marrakech Mayors Declaration with 150 mayors calling for the ‘full and formal recognition’ of cities involvement in implementing and reviewing the Global Compact on Migration and Global Compact on Refugees by national leaders (Oomen, 2019; The 5th Mayoral Forum, 2018).

Sanctuary is not restricted to policy-making and grassroots solidarity campaigns. It is also not just about basic hospitality and access. Sanctuary can be empowering and enabling; it can be delivered through programmes with the aim of mediating the effects of suspension and waiting imposed by the state. Cultural, creative, educational and skills-enhancing activities can be useful in this way, facilitating the post-displacement transition and improving migrants’ livelihoods and opportunities to integrate (Bagelman, 2013; Chatterjee, et al., 2020). Displacement, the experiences of violence, dehumanisation and/or death at the hands of various actors prior to and throughout can be trauma inducing leading to the development of mental health issues, feelings of loneliness and a loss of identity (Chatterjee, et al., 2020, p. 326). The conditions and difficulties endured post-migration can do much to exasperate these issues. In response to this, sanctuary can be a means to improve well-being, described by Ander et al. (2011, p. 243) as a ‘sense of resilience and flourishing, rather than just surviving’.

Procupez (2015) writes of the need for patience, as opposed to just waiting, where acceptance of the present as being a smaller stage in a long-term goal is a necessary quality and political stance rather than just a virtue. Brun (2015) mentions this as being part of ‘agency-in-waiting’, where acting ‘in the present’ based on events in the past and with a continued assessment of future possibilities can frame ‘hope’ – a potentially sustaining and enabling force that can allow people to move on. Hope allows people to see potential in their future and can make the uncertainty they’re experiencing meaningful. Programmes for arts and crafts, photography, film and the performing arts enable participants to learn new skills; develop social abilities and create networks of mutual support; build confidence and reconnect with their identities prior to displacement or forge new ones. The Helen Bamber Foundation is one such charity that provides these programmes (Chatterjee, et al., 2020).

Drop-in centres and other charitable spaces can provide the backdrop for these activities. In his description of two successful drop-in centres in Sheffield, Darling (2011) places an emphasis on how care is effected through listening, responsiveness to the needs of refugees and a ‘freedom of interaction’. Rather than being harassed about their status or lack-thereof, these spaces allowed asylum seekers just ‘be’. As opposed to the stark rows of chairs in the STHFs, drop-in centres comprised of a small kitchen providing warm drinks and snacks as well as tables seating four to five people, arranged to facilitate encounters and conversations. It is these sites of care that become the nodes through which the sanctuary network grows. Having somewhere to go and something to do allows people in limbo to develop routines; a sense of productivity, usefulness and even enjoyment; and to set themselves short-term achievable goals that can ease the uncertainty and unpredictability of waiting for the state (Chatterjee, et al., 2020).

However, this use of sanctuary practices to distract and numb the unpleasantness of waiting and foster an acceptance of present circumstances risks normalising suspension rather than directly challenging it (Bagelman, 2013). From a logistic point of view, time spent in these ways allow people to build their case for asylum by increasing their personal value and demonstrating their commitment to the community and their ability to integrate. In doing so, they can demonstrate themselves to be more ‘deserving’. They are no longer passive and may even feel agentive, but they remain suspended and paralysed. Encouraged to maintain illusio, to play the city at its waiting game, they invest their time and energy, in doing so becoming tied to a particular place through the connections they forge and the routines and lives they build. They do so in the hopes that they may be rewarded for their efforts. This makes rejection by the state all the more difficult to contend with (Brun, 2015).

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Conclusion

The state exerts its power on those who have lodged an asylum claim through the erection of bureaucratic red-tape and the conditionality attached to the provision of support. Those awaiting a decision on their status are suspended in precarity, temporality and otherness with great uncertainty about how long they are to wait and what the outcome will be. Short-term holding facilities, longer term detention centres, camps and other forms of state-provided refugee accommodation become tools the spaces in which people are suspended. They are expected to remain compliant, to submit to and endure the state’s waiting game in order to prove themselves to be deserving and in genuine need. This can lead them to feel disempowered, worthless and that the time, energy and resources they have invested have been wasted, with no guarantee that they will achieve the outcome they desire, that of regular status, recognition and normality.

A majority of the policies on migration are instituted at a national or supranational level, legislating restrictions on the right to work, to vote, to drive, to access state benefits and accommodation. However, it is local authorities that have become first-responders in receiving and addressing the needs of new arrivals, filling in the gaps left by nation states, developing their own systems and infrastructures to do so. Despite their gained experience and competencies, local authorities have not been afforded much power to shape migration policy. Increasingly cities across Europe are recognising the value that immigrants contribute regardless of status, merely by being engaged members of the community. In some cities, locally organised organisations and communities have successfully lobbied the local authorities to contest the politics of hostility and suspension imposed by their nation states. These movements have been upscaled and expanded outwards to create transnational alliances and exert greater pressure on national and supranational powers.

As a result, cities across Europe have been compelled to adopt ‘sanctuary’ as a political stance, coupling bold statements of welcome with local measures to mitigate the experiences of suspension, precarity, temporality and otherness. Mechanisms enabling those without nationally recognised status to access municipal services as well as skills-based, creative and cultural programmes seek to mediate the ‘waiting’ endured by those in limbo. Drop-in centres become spaces in which refugees can mediate their waiting and turn it into something active and agentive by establishing connections, developing skills, increasing their personal value and building their asylum case. They become nodes through which sanctuary networks are built. Sanctuary practices are necessary to provide people without regular status respite from the damaging, reductive policies of hostility and suspension of the state. They are necessary to allow their urban citizens access to basic services without fear of detention or removal. However, this essay exposes the limited scope for local actors to directly counter and disrupt nationally imposed policies of suspension and hostility.

Ironically, sanctuary practices do not guarantee protection, especially outside of the city. They also do not override national restrictions on the right to work, freedom of movement, the right to a vote. In only providing short-term relief to the uncertainty and unpleasantness of irregularity, sanctuary practices can also inadvertently serve to normalise ‘chronic’ waiting and suspension. There are great limitations to how much local aid organisations and authorities can do to live up to their proclamations of welcome, solidarity and sanctuary. In using their transnational alliances to push for greater representation within the bodies legislating on the global asylum regime, they seek to change this. However, at present, they are reliant on the goodwill of their national governments and the European Union.

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