City of Refuge or Digital Order? Refugee Recognition and the Digital Governmentality of Migration in the City

Abstract

This article analyses the digital governmentality of the city of refuge. It shows how digital infrastructures support refugees’ new life in the European city, while also normalizing the conditionality of their recognition as humans and as citizens-in-the-making. Research in Athens, Berlin, and London revealed the city as a vital but fierce space for refugees to claim, and sometimes find recognition that the nation often denies. A multimethod qualitative study with refugees and civil society actors at the aftermath of Europe’s “migration crisis” recorded urban cultures of hope for cities that are hospitable and open. Yet, it also recorded conditional welcoming that sets strict requirements for newcomers’ recognition as more than a category of external Others that need to prove their “right to have rights.” As shown, a digital order requires a performed refugeeness as precondition for recognition: that is, a swift move from abject vulnerability to resilient individualism.

The digital border: Mobility beyond territorial and symbolic divides

“…The boundary of the digital border is here performed through linguistic strategies that portray migrants either as a statistical percentage, part of a mass of unfortunates with one being indistinguishable from another, or as one-dimensional figures existing outside biographical contexts and geopolitical histories (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017). In parallel to literature on the migration ‘crisis’, studies in post ‘crisis’ storytelling show how the figure of the migrant-entrepreneur gradually begins to partake a similar binary of recognition that, as already mentioned, validates the migrant as economic actor, while vilifying and excluding those who are unable (or refuse) to engage with the economic rationalities of western capitalism (Georgiou, 2019; Gürsel, 2017).…”

“…Characterised by cultural diversity and digital connectivity, host cities may have promised newcomers intergration, employment and citizenship, yet they did so only on the condition that they turned into successful economic actors within Europe’s neoliberal markets. While the figure of the threatening migrant thus continued being reproduced through the digital governance of and narratives on migrant bodies, a new norm of the entrepreneurial migrant has now emerged that ties rights to territory with adherence to utilitarian, profit-oriented practices of citizenship (Georgiou, 2019). As before, this regime operates as much through institutional technologies of migrant surveillance – for example, through datafied profiles of migrants at health and educational institutions, job centres and airlines (Vukov and Sheller, 2013; Yuval-Davis et al, 2019) – as it does through networked storytelling that validates western norms of migrant identity (Colombo, 2018; Musarò, 2017; Tyyskä et al, 2018).…”

“…The ‘crisis’ temporalities of 2015, for instance, demanded the performance of abject victims as the rights-bearing subjects of migration in order to grant them entry, with migrants tactically performing the identity of the asylum-seeking refugee in the hope of accessing Europe (Trimikliniotis et al 2016). As these temporalities have now shifted to post-‘crisis’ and migrants have moved to European cities, they have to adhere to the performative subjectivities of the ‘resilient entrepreneur’, projecting swift adaptability to the rules of the neoliberal market in order to get access to a range of rights: from voice and education to housing and employment (Georgiou, 2019). It is this spatio-temporal dimension of the border’s regimes of power, as they reconfigure their assemblages of mediation across time and space that simultaneously open up opportunities for migrants’ creative self-expression and ‘everyday resistance’ (Hall, 2015).…”

Digital Resilience Tactics of Syrian Refugees in the Netherlands: Social Media for Social Support, Health, and Identity

“…To avoid being seen as a burden to the state or a societal threat, they have to perform a resilient refugeeness based on deservingness, gratefulness, and adaptability. Given the proliferation of coding academies, hackathons, app-developments, and start-up projects across Europe (Kothari & Tsakarestou, 2019) at present, successful refugees are particularly those who are entrepreneurial and digitally savvy (Georgiou, 2019). Thus, as a male, techsavvy, and agile person, it is not an incident that Rajaai has successfully become resilient.…”

The politics and poetics of migrant narratives

“…The notion of the ‘migration industry of connectivity services’ (Gordano Peile, 2014: 57) draws attention to how corporations seek to monetize untapped consumers with transnational SIM cards and remittance services. The infrastructures of receiving societies are increasingly subject to a hierarchical ‘digital order’, demanding a particular ‘performed refugeeness’ which includes, for example, successful integration through refugee participation in hackathons and computer code schools (Georgiou, 2019: 600). The way in which refugees are expected to perform is not only constructed through aesthetic and political practices of narration, but also embodies and personifies the aesthetics and politics of infrastructures.…”