The border exists not only as a function of its physicality, but also of the way its discipline is internalized by migrants and asylum seekers. At the intersection of both, this chapter focuses on how asylum seekers are led to minimize the element of migrancy in their trajectories, making the reasons why they aspire to seek asylum in some countries than others invisible to international law. Contra this invisibility, it makes the case that asylum seekers, even as they flee persecution, are migrants too, drawn by certain countries rather than others on the basis of varying life projects and ongoing connections. The impossibility to normatively articulate such an ambition within the categories of international law must count as one of the considerable costs imposed by the border’s disciplining effect.

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

Chapter 6 looks at political responses to the MENA migration to Europe from 2011, the most harshly exclusionary case in my study. The migration mixed asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with labor migrants from other MENA states. The chapter tracks Europe’s progression from initially cautious receptiveness of asylum seekers to policies of exclusion of MENA migrants from the continent. It shows that the growing numbers, migrant “mix,” and terrorist attacks by (mostly non-migrant) Islamic extremists in Europe combined to undermine need-based deservingness, empower populist parties and feed xenophobic media. The chapter focuses on the EU’s turn to militarized securitization of its land and sea borders and ‘externalization of borders’ to Turkey and Libya, policies that ended the migration surge by indiscriminate physical exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers. Case studies show the varied effects of and responses to the migration in the five European cases and in Russia, which received much smaller numbers. Responses to the MENA migration brought international migration to the core of Europe’s politics, entrenched populist parties, and showed the failure of the Geneva Convention asylum system in the 21st century.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

To access refugee protection in Australia and Canada, refugee applicants must speak. They must present their oral testimony in person, repeatedly and at length, unmediated by a legal representative or advocate, and in many cases without the benefit of documents, witnesses or other forms of evidence to verify their claims. This book is about the oral evidence that refugees are compelled to give, the stories they are required to narrate, and the genres of storytelling they are required to master during administrative oral hearings for the assessment of refugee status in Australia and Canada. This introductory chapter establishes the book’s central concerns, namely: what the presentation, interrogation and assessment of testimony during the oral hearing tell us about the refugee subject whom Refugee Convention-signatory states judge as authentic, credible and, ultimately, acceptable. It then carefully connects the demand for narrative within RSD with the intractable problems of credibility assessment. Finally, it interrogates the role of law, lawyers and interpreters in shaping the refugee testimony and analysis presented throughout the book.

This chapter foregrounds the subjective experience of asylum seekers like Hassan Ali Djan, who arrived in Munich from Afghanistan via Iran, Turkey, and Greece in 2005. It also presents accessibly the complex history of asylum legislation and practice across time. It points out the continuities amidst the changes: the number of refugees varies, the major countries of origin vary (at one point Bosnia, at another Syria), the escape routes vary (at one point the eastern, at another the middle Mediterranean route), the popularity of destinations changes (at one point Britain, at another Germany). What remains the same is that the causes that rarely allow for a neat separation of “political persecution” from economic, religious, ethnic, and other factors; refugees, who are rarely the oldest, the weakest, and the sick, but rather are young and dynamic; the reliance of refugees on word of mouth and local networks; the role of the traffickers and others who are inextricably part of the economy of refugee migration logistics; rescue, relief, gratitude; and countless traumas and tragedies.

This chapter examines the ways in which people with mental health conditions who also belong to other excluded groups may be particularly disadvantaged, in general and by mental health services. People with mental health conditions are at risk of social exclusion, but many from certain social identity groups are particularly at risk: for example, women, people from black and minority ethnic groups, and those from sexual minorities. In addition, certain groups of people are defined by their exclusion from society, such as refugees and asylum seekers, prisoners, and the homeless. The occurrence of mental health conditions in these groups is much higher than in the general population and they will often face barriers to accessing essential material resources and adequate healthcare. The presence of mental health conditions and group characteristics intersect to exacerbate the degree of exclusion experienced by the people in these groups. Some combinations may result in particularly profound states of deprivation and destitution. These severe and multiple forms of exclusion have been named ‘deep social exclusion’ or ‘people with multiple and complex needs’, two examples of which are seen in ‘multiple exclusion homelessness’ and people with multiple diagnoses.

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

Cognitive behavior therapy is the treatment of choice for a wide range of mental health difficulties in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, but research evidence suggests that access to this therapy and clinical outcomes for patients is worse for patients from Black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds compared with patients from white majority communities in most of these countries. This chapter looks at the changes that services and therapists can make to adapt the way that they work to ensure that access and outcomes for minority communities improve. Some of these changes are modest, such as ensuring that therapists acknowledge ethnic and cultural differences; however, some might need more extensive adaptation such as developing family system maps that take into account the beliefs, practices, and migration histories of different family members or understanding how spiritual beliefs can be incorporated into treatment plans. This chapter provides a practical and accessible framework for adaptation and suggests further reading to support the development of therapist skills in trans-cultural assessment and treatment of mental health problems when working with patients from BAME communities.