Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Edited by Siobhán McGuirk and Adrienne Pine

Extract

Processes of securitization and militarization increasingly define contemporary asylum systems, shaping how states and Non-Governmental Origanizations (NGOs) operate, respond to, and represent refugees. From narratives of ‘deservingness’, to representations of ‘bogus’ economic migrants, the politics of asylum becomes disbelieving and exclusionary. This edited collection makes an incisive intervention here, exploring how capitalism, neoliberalism, and profit-making have not only helped drive such processes, but are central to them. From the outsourcing of responsibility for refugees by states in the Global North who sign border security contracts with multinationals, to the procurement of cheap exploitable labour in detention centres, we see how rights-based norms have been eroded by the lure of profit.

The edited volume aims to ‘expose and examine profit-making as a significant force driving contemporary asylum regimes’ (4). This moves beyond legal, ethical, and moral questions common in forced migration and asylum scholarship, towards a focus on new systems of governance and profit that are prospering at great human cost. The volume is clearly animated by questions of practice and action, merging academic critique with a clear-sighted commitment to activism and protest. In particular, the volume recognizes and builds on the work of activist groups who are organizing to challenge contemporary asylum systems and their reliance on profit. This gives the volume an urgency sometimes lacking in refugee scholarship, in part because it both names the structures and processes shaping contemporary asylum systems and addresses how different groups are responding to and resisting them. This makes the volume of great relevance to both academic audiences, and those working in the non-mutually exclusive arenas of activism, campaigning, and asylum support. The volume features a diverse set of creative, personal, theoretical, and practice-based reflections from practitioners, activists, detained migrants, asylum seekers, artists, writers, and academics. As a result, this collection persuasively exposes an industry of profit-making by state and non-state actors alike and brings to the fore instances of protest and resistance as they are taking place in different spaces and contexts.