From subsistence to resistance: Asylum-seekers and the other ‘Occupy’ in Hong Kong

Abstract

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.

Conceptualizing religious asylum: Security, religiosity, and subjective well-being of Christian asylum-seekers in Hong Kong

“…Ng (2020) argues that the Hong Kong government creates a repressive policy regime of social exclusion and criminalization to foster its control of refugee flows by not regularizing the process of seeking asylum. Asylum-seekers are living in a total institutional context (Lau et al, 2018), which indicates that they are socially excluded from the mainstream society (Kennedy et al, 2019; Lai and Kennedy, 2017; Ng et al, 2019; Vecchio and Ham, 2018). According to the asylum-seeking arrangement of the Immigration Department, asylum-seekers need to overstay their visa and become “irregular” to file their protection claims and receive minimal humanitarian assistance from the Hong Kong government.…”

Female Asylum Seekers: A Critical Attitude on UK Immigration Removal Centres

“…Within critical migration studies, there is a growing body of resistance literature that acknowledges a political dimension to camp space and camplike institutions. This body of literature recognises the agency of forced migrants (Puggioni, 2006;Redclift, 2013); capacity for resisting biopolitical controls (Isin and Rygiel, 2007;Ellermann, 2010;Conlon, 2016); and the contestability of power relations within camp/ camp-like spaces like the Calais 'Jungle', France (Rygiel, 2011); the Mosney Accommodation Centre, Ireland (Conlon, 2016); and 'Refugee Occupy', Hong Kong (Vecchio and Ham, 2018). Going beyond Agamben's monolithic view of the camp, this body of literature sees camp space as more than a 'void of law and political life'.…”