Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status

IMISCOE Research Series Julia Dahlvik Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria IMISCOE Research Series This series is the official book series of IMISCOE, the largest network of excellence on migration and diversity in the world. It comprises publications which present empirical and theoretical research on different aspects of international migration. The authors are all specialists, and the publications a rich source of information for researchers and others involved in international migration studies. The series is published under the editorial supervision of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee which includes leading scholars from all over Europe. The series, which contains more than eighty titles already, is internationally peer reviewed which ensures that the book published in this series continue to present excellent academic standards and scholarly quality. Most of the books are available open access. For information on how to submit a book proposal, please visit: http://www. imiscoe.org/publications/how-to-submit-a-book-proposal. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13502 Julia Dahlvik Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria Julia Dahlvik FH Campus Wien University of Applied Sciences Wien, Austria The publication of this book would not have been possible without the generous funding of the Austrian Science Fund, FWF: PUB 527-Z29. ISSN 2364-4087 ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic) IMISCOE Research Series ISBN 978-3-319-63305-3 ISBN 978-3-319-63306-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63306-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 9783319633053 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018, corrected publication July 2018. This book is published open access. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword Given that the so-called “refugee crisis” has loomed so large in European politics in recent years, it is indeed surprising, as Julia Dahlvik notes in her introductory com- ments to this significant new study, that so little research attention has been directed toward the government bureaucracies charged with deciding the growing numbers of asylum claims, and with implementing the conversion of asylum from a human rights issue to a key element of border control. It is easy enough to find official documents presenting idealized accounts of these bureaucracies and the formal decision-making procedures they are expected to follow, but it is far harder to glean information on how things work out in practice. This book represents a major step toward remedying that lacuna for the important case of Austria. Such studies are made all the more necessary because the processes they investi- gate are normally invisible and because, as Dahlvik persuasively argues, organiza- tions such as the Austrian asylum bureaucracy are characterized above all by their organizational practices rather than their formal structures. These practices, and the actions that constitute them, are anchored in material artifacts as well as human actors. In the Austrian Federal Asylum Office (FAO), as in any bureaucracy, these material artifacts are primarily textual – annotated documents, compiled into case files. These documents, too, must therefore also be regarded as actors that play their own part in structuring the social practices of the institution. Right across Europe, the formal structures have been subject to almost constant change, and Austria is certainly no exception. Even so, a study such as this will retain its value not only because routinized practices change more slowly and incre- mentally – partly because they are heavily dependent upon newly appointed officials observing the behavior of their colleagues and orienting their own practices accordingly – but also because the issues and dilemmas that refugee status determination entails, such as those attached to the assessment of credibility (Chap. 6), have remained surprisingly stable over the years. Although a new piece of legislation may disrupt some existing practices to the extent that they may even be rendered invalid, the fact that these practices are located within a broader conglomerate of well-established social practices, not all of which are affected to the same degree – if at all – by the new law, serves to v vi Foreword dampen the overall effect. As when a stone is dropped into a pond, the ripples cre- ated by a new law radiate outward, but decrease in amplitude and eventually disap- pear altogether. What is more, the further one moves down the organizational hierarchy, the greater the importance of localized organizational practices relative to the legislation and formal procedures imposed from above and from the outside. Thus, there are any number of reasons why Dahlvik’s study of the different actors in the asylum process – primarily the officials in one branch of the FAO, but also, and mainly through the eyes of those officials, the asylum applicants, interpreters, and medical and linguistic experts with whom they interact – provides us with insights that could only be obtained through an institutional ethnographic study. To mention only a few of the many examples throughout Parts II and III of the book, we learn a great deal about how, in practice, FAO caseworkers prepare for and conduct interviews; how they go about balancing adherence to regulations with the exercising of personal discretion when reaching and writing up their decisions; and the extent of individual variation – such that the practices of certain officials may even, as one interlocutor told Dahlvik, make colleagues’ hackles rise. We discover how these caseworkers, faced with the uncertainties inherent in almost every asylum claim, subjectively assess the performances of asylum applicants at their interviews in order to decide whether they are telling the truth. We find out about the failings of (sometimes) untrained interpreters and the possible detrimental effects of their actions in the fraught context of asylum interviews; and that caseworkers often com- pound these failings by addressing their questions to the interpreter rather than the asylum claimant, who is referred to in the third person. We learn too about experts who delay decisions by failing to submit reports within agreed deadlines. None of this material would be even indirectly accessible to a researcher restricting herself to formal structures and official instruction manuals. In addition to these empirical insights, we also learn, through the concluding analysis, about the extent to which the FAO’s procedures are socially constructed and what might be done to make asylum decision making better. From another perspective, which seems very compatible with Dahlvik’s own approach, the Austrian asylum system as described here appears to be a classic example of “strong” legal pluralism in which the applicable law and legal institutions cannot all be subsumed within a single “system” but arise from the articulation of a number of what Sally Falk Moore (1978) has labeled “semiautonomous social fields.” The key characteristics of such fields are that, while they are capable of generating rules and inducing conformity, they are not fully autonomous or socially isolated but are affected by the broader social matrix within which they are set. As a result, the “law” which is actually effective on the “ground floor” of society is the result of enor- mously complex and … unpredictable patterns of competition, interaction, negotiation, isolationism, and the like (Griffiths 1986: 39). The notion of “pluralism” is employed in several senses within the contemporary anthropology of law (Moore 2001), and at least four of these are evident here. First, the state itself is internally complex and diverse, and its official administrative Foreword vii subparts not only cooperate but also sometimes compete for legal authority; here, for example, the processing of asylum claims requires the involvement of the police and municipal authorities as well as the various branches of the FAO. Second, state law may depend upon the collaboration of nonstate social fields for its implementa- tion. For example, NGOs are intimately involved in the processing of Austrian asylum claims. Third, the state itself vies with other state legal systems in supranational arenas, such as the EU, or with global institutions such as the UN High Commission for Refugees.

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