1 Time in the Shelter, Time on the Street: Refused Asylum Seekers and the Tragedy of the Border Mark Justin Rainey Goldsmiths College – University of London Thesis Submitted for a PhD in Cultural Studies 2 Declaration I, Mark Justin Rainey, declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and that it has been generated by me as the result of my own original research. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Mark Justin Rainey 29 September 2016 3 Acknowledgements Academic work should never be considered an individual effort, particularly when it involves contributions from so many people and organisations. For this reason I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people for their support throughout this research process. I would like to thank my supervisors Prof. Jon May and Prof. Scott Lash. Your challenging and inspiring advice and encouragement were essential. I would especially like to thank Jon May for his close support during the final stages of writing. This research was conducted with the Boaz Trust in Manchester and I would like to thank this incredible organisation not only for allowing me to work in the night shelters, but also for the support you provide to so many people in need across the city. In particular I would like to thank Sarah Beaney, Jonny Wilson, Vicky Ledwidge, and Jean-Claude Kayumba. I would also like to give a shout out to the Longsight Community Church and the wonderful people there. I would particularly like to thank Diego Lopez for his support over the course of my research. Both the Longsight Community Church and the Boaz Trust are doing profound work in the city in the face of equally profound injustice. This research would not have been possible without the contributions of night shelter volunteers and Boaz Trust employees. I also owe deep gratitude to those who were living in the night shelters. Your welcome, your encouragement, your critical engagement, and your willingness to share your insights and experiences in support of this research are deeply appreciated. I hope that, even in a small way, this research can provide an understanding of the consequences of our antagonistic immigration system with a view to transforming it. Throughout this research I lived in Manchester, London, and Fukuoka. I would like to thank all my friends in all these places for all the times you sat with me in a pub or café and listened to me talk about this research and 4 for all the times that we didn’t talk about it. I would also like to thank Dr. Nirmal Puwar, Dr. Camila Daniel, and Amir Ghorbani for taking the time to read drafts of my writing. Your feedback was invaluable. I would also like to thank my friend and collaborator Dr. Steve Hanson whose discussions on politics, life, and method have had a deep impact on my own approach scholarship. I would also like to thank my parents, Rev. Dr. David Rainey and Alison Rainey. I would like to thank you for your care, concern, support, and love always. I am your proud son. Finally, I would like to thank my amazing wife and companion, Prof. Tomoko Ichitani. Without you this research would not have started and it would not have finished. Your emotional, intellectual, and economic support made it possible. This research was undertaken with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council. 5 Abstract This research articulates a dialectical theory of the border. It argues that the border should be viewed as a ‘concrete abstraction’ that is at once reified as an ideal object, and extends both spatially and temporally to bear down on the concrete experience of day-to-day life in divisive and often malign ways. The research explores the tragedy of the border for those on whom it bears down and pushes in to destitution, and attempts to challenge this injustice. This is an ethnographic study, and particular focus is given to the experiences of destitute asylum seekers making use of a network of night shelters provided by the Boaz Trust in Manchester, UK. The Boaz Trust is a faith-based organisation that provides accommodation, support, and advocacy to refused asylum seekers in the city and aims to ‘end asylum destitution’. Based on participant observation working in the shelters as a volunteer, time spent living in the shelters, and time alongside destitute asylum seekers on the streets of Manchester, I explore the simultaneous experience of inclusion and exclusion that characterises ‘spaces of asylum’ in the city, and of a ‘weaponised time’ marked by a bifurcated ‘waiting’; where individuals see out each day without the right to work, access public funds, or remain in the UK while also caught up in a longer term, antagonistic, and dysfunctional bureaucratic temporality. I also examine the attempts of volunteers working in the shelters to press against such injustices, exploring these attempts within an understanding of justice as coming in to being through repetitive, arduous and often banal practices of care, and as speculative, fragile and always incomplete. 6 Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….9 1. The Tragedy of the Border: Towards a ‘Good Enough Justice’ ……………………… 27 1. Introduction ….……………………………………………………………………………………. 27 2. Colonus and Lampedusa ….…………………………………………………………………..28 3. Gillian Rose: Law and Ethical Life ………………………………………………………29 4. The Third City: Between Old Athens and New Jerusalem ………………………45 5. Gillian Rose and Speculative Dialectics ………………………………………………….53 2. The Dialectics of the Border ..………………………………………………………………………..57 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………….57 2. The Border as Process …………………………………………………………………………..59 3. The Border as Concrete Abstraction ……………………………………………………..70 4. Differential Inclusion and the Community of Value ……………………………….74 5. Spaces of Asylum ………………………………………………………………………………….78 6. Before the Law: Abandonment and the Weaponisation of Time …………..83 7. Asylum Policy in the UK …………………………………………………………………………93 7.1 The Pejorative Construction of Asylum ……………………………………………….94 7.2 Enforced Destitution …………………………………………………………………………103 3. Methodology and Research Practice: In the Shelters and On the Street ………107 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………..107 2. The Boaz Trust and the Night Shelter Network ……………………………………113 3. The Immigration Line ………………………………………………………………………….119 4. Research Practice ………………………………………………………………………………..124 7 5. Urban Borders and the Manchester Street …………………………………………133 6. Uncertainty, Transition, and Dignity as Methodological Issues …………...140 4. Time on the Street ………………………………………………………………………………………148 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………..148 2. Time on the Street ………………………………………………………………………………149 3. Doubled Placelessness ……………………………………………………………………..…156 4. Walking and Waiting …………………………………………………………………………..160 5. Spaces of Asylum: The Library, The Coach Station, The Swimming Pool.168 6. On the Edge of the Community of Value………………………………………………179 5. Works of Love: The Night Shelters and the Boaz Trust …………………………………191 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………..191 2. FBOs, the Boaz Trust, and the Evangelical Tradition ……………………………192 3. The Boaz Trust: Eschatology and Utopia in Manchester ………………………201 4. The Work of Agape ..……………………………………………………………………………205 6. Performing Care and Questions of Justice in the Boaz Trust Night Shelters…..219 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………..219 2. Adaptations …………………………………………………………………………………………221 3. Routines and Revised Routines within the Night Shelters ……………………225 4. Reflecting on Service within the Night Shelters …………………………………..237 5. The Fragility of Justice: The Limitations of Shelter Work ……………………,,251 7. Time in the Shelter ………………………………………………………………………………………258 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………..258 2. The Waiting Room ………………………………………………………………………………260 3. Arrivals and Departures ………………………………………………………………………267 8 4. The Locked Room ……………………………………………………………………………….277 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………296 1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada……………………………………………..296 2. Borderlands …………………………………………………………………………………………299 3. Law and Justice Revisited ……………………………………………………………………300 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………315 Appendix: Interview Table ………………………………………………………………………………318 9 Introduction On 23 June 2016 the United Kingdom voted via a national referendum to leave the European Union. The referendum result, and the passionate debate leading up to it, exposed deep fractures within the UK. It exposed deep divisions between wealth and poverty, metropolitan centres and peripheral towns and the countryside, and it exposed regional divides and deep-seated divisions over internal nationalisms within the UK as Scotland and Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU while England and Wales voted overwhelmingly to leave. These fractures often overlapped with each other and, although they existed before the referendum, they were also exacerbated by it. Another dominant issue informing the EU referendum debate was that of immigration. It often dominated discourse, in sometimes violent ways. On the same day that Nigel Farage, then leader of the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party, unveiled a campaign poster depicting a long queue of mainly Middle Eastern and North African refugees entering Europe under the slogan ‘Breaking Point’, a neo-Nazi assassinated the pro-immigration Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox on a street in the Yorkshire town