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This article explores asylum seeker survival strategies and agency in relation to the structural, post-industrial conditions that have emerged in Hong Kong. The focus is on the livelihoods of asylum seekers within spaces of illegality and social exclusion, how such spaces are formed, and how asylum seekers exploit local conditions to establish profitable networks across borders. The article considers asylum seekers' engagement in income-generating activities and the importance of legal status in the sectors of the economy in which they most often work: recycling and trading. Far from being a burden to society or opportunistic deviants taking advantage of Hong Kong's economic prosperity, as they are normally depicted in public discourse, asylum seekers are economically productive. They act in economic spaces in which disadvantaged strata of the local resident population organize their means of survival, thereby improving the economic opportunities for locals.

Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).

This piece offers preliminary reflections on the theoretical justification of a highly organised protest staged against the non-profit organisation contracted by the Hong Kong Government to provide asylum seekers with humanitarian assistance. In so doing, it reveals the central role played by asylum seekers reacting to border policies and practices that cause their immiseration.

In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an eight-month-long protest against assistance policies and practices which they argued dehumanised and jeopardised their dignity and survival. Central to this public protest, termed ‘Refugee Occupy’, was the transformation of a traditional mechanism for asylum-seeker containment – the refugee camp – into a vehicle for asylum-seeker voice, participation and resistance. In this article, we discuss the asylum-seeker assistance policies and practices over the last decade that have resulted in a borderless refugee camp in Hong Kong. We explore the asylum-seekers’ use of the camp concept and its spatial and political transformation into an instrument for asylum-seeker resistance and political engagement. We conclude by situating the Refugee Union’s formation alongside other migrant-led social movements in Hong Kong and globally.