The Credibility Game: Selecting 'Authentic' Claimers of Rights in the Dutch Field of Irregular Migrants
Presented At: The 10th IMISCOE Annual Conference, 26-27 August 2013, Malmö, Sweden
6 Pages Posted: 7 Nov 2018
Date Written: August 27, 2013
Abstract
This paper departs from a structural dissatisfaction – on theoretical as well as practical grounds –with the inherent exceptionalism that is underlying the treatment of irregular migrants as deportable subjects in modern nation-states. It then moves on to argue that this exceptionalism is produced and reproduced by two sets of actors – on the one hand state agents and bureaucrats, and on the other hand civil-society activists – who mostly appear to be occupying opposing poles on questions of national belonging and deportation. The treatment of deportable subjects by members in both these groups is saturated with mistrust that is translated in practice into a quest for finding out whether a particular irregular migrant is a “real” and thus a “deserving” one. Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’, I argue, is therefore inhibited in the case of many irregular migrants not merely by ill legislations or harsh policing, but also, fundamentally, by the ‘banality of evil’ that has permeated the entire field of legal citizens who interact with irregular migrants on the basis of mistrust.
Keywords: asylum, trust, deserving refugees, state bureaucracy, civil society
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