The neoliberal location of asylum

Abstract

What can be learned about the European migration crisis by studying it at its margins? Framed by this question and premised on evidence collected during four months of field research in a central Italian province, the paper investigates the governance transformations engendered by the migration crisis through a study of the Extraordinary Reception Centres (CAS) set up by the Italian government to host asylum seekers across its territory. The paper builds upon Dikeç's ( 2009) conceptualisation of the "where" of asylum to map their legal and geographical location within the EU border regime, and engages with current debates on EU borders a) to highlight the centrality of marginal locations such as Macerata to the functioning of the EU border regime, arguing that CAS are central to such regime as they confirm its humanitarian pretences b) to intervene on debates concerned with the spatiality of EU borders, arguing that greater analytical attention should be given to their territorial configurations c) to evidence the neoliberal character of the governance transformations engendered by the crisis, beyond their migration management function. Border management is an engine of state transformation. The paper highlights the all-pervasiveness of neoliberalism in this process and the weakening of democratic accountability that accompanies it. It suggests, on these bases, that what can be learned about the European migration crisis by studying it at its margins, is that the governance transformations it has engendered invest migrants and non-migrants alike, offering two reflections in this respect.

Deservingness and Uneven Geographies of Asylum Accommodation

“…He fired gunshots at six black men and women, at the offices of an NGO managing CAS, and at those of a political party, unravelling a series of tumultuous social and political transformations in what had been until then a tranquil province. While until then the municipal administration had supported the establishment of CAS in Macerata's main town and province, in spite of the growing resentment of many residents fuelled by local and national right-wing parties, a few days after the shooting, it decided to close all CAS in Macerata city (see Novak, 2019 for a full account). Only a very small number remained open for unaccompanied minors and families, less than 1 per cent of the total number of asylum seekers in the province.…”

“…An emergency response to a recurrent structural problem (Ambrosini, 2020), these centres were set up to obviate the capacity limitations of the 'ordinary' reception system, consisting of first-tier identification and screening centres, and second-tier facilities aimed at facilitating the integration of asylum seekers and refugees (Semprebon and Pelacani, 2020). The Extraordinary Reception Centres (Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria, or CAS henceforth) set up in 2015 resolved the capacity limitations of the ordinary reception system by granting Prefetture (the provincially decentralised offices of the Ministry of Interior) the authority to institute them through a Public Tender bypassing the involvement, or indeed the consent, of the municipal administrations in whose territory CAS were opened (Novak, 2019). This emergency response proved to be extremely successful vis-à-vis its aims, as, despite their 'extra-ordinariness', CAS would host over 75 per cent of the total asylum seekers population in Italy (SPRAR, 2017), making them an integral component of the dialectic of care and control that characterises the humanitarian management of EU borders (Walters, 2010;Agier, 2011;Novak, 2019).…”

Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee

“…Captivating ethnographic accounts have described the process of 'step-wise' migration from West Africa into Spanish labour markets, disentangling the relation between asylum seekers and un/free labour (Cross, 2013). The transformation of refugee laws and directives governing asylum in Europe has been ethnographically linked to variegated forms of neoliberalism (Novak, 2019). And so on.…”

Political geography III: Bounding the International

“…Researching the gap between the policy blueprint and the actual practice is difficult, as researchers often have to probe clandestine and criminal activities (Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016; Vives, 2017). Similarly to the study of regions, the border literature likewise studies phenomena, such as the migration crisis, from the margins rather than the centers of state power (Novak, 2019).…”