Our Thanks to You … and a New York state of mind

In the US, we’ve just celebrated Thanksgiving, it’s a time when immigration issues past and present and riddled with complexity come to the fore as the November 28, 2011 cover of the New Yorker highlights.

The New Yorker

It’s also a good time for our project team to express sincere thanks to participants and provide an update on the Asylum-Network project.

We have now completed the second phase of our project, which involved interviewing representatives from organizations that work to advocate and support asylum seekers. We’re happy to report that 40 organizations from the US and UK have shared their experiences dealing with challenges as well as their ideas on what’s needed to promote success within the asylum and migrant support sector.

We want to thank all those interviewed, and project participants more broadly, for their time, energy, and commitment to this work and to assisting us with our project. Participants have shared tremendous insights and ideas, which we appreciate greatly. As one of our aims with this project is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on challenges, resources, and strategies to support asylum seekers we are now working to compile and share project findings in a published report. This final report will be available in January 2012; stay tuned for the release of the report.

And more New York news:

A heads up for US participants and members of the migrant support community, the project co-directors – Deirdre Conlon and Nick Gill – will host a forum for US participants and members of the asylum support community. We invite participants from the migrant support community to join us for this event; if you’re in the Northeast region please join us in person. We hope to have web-conferencing available so representatives in other areas of the US can take part too; If you’d be interested in being part of the forum do let us know. The forum will take place in New York City in late February 2012; the finalized date will be announced shortly on this site; stay tuned for further details about the event and opportunity to share findings, exchange ideas, and discuss how this project and other researchers can help to support your work in the asylum sector and migrant support community.

Working Together for Asylum Seekers and Refugees in the south West

On October 11th a wide range of refugee support organisations met in Bristol, UK, to dicuss how they could work together more effectively. As one of the researchers on the asylum-network project, I was invited to present on the work of the project so far and share some ideas for strengthening asylum support. The day was a huge success, with lots of fruitful contacts made and lots of people eager to see asylum-network’s final report. Thanks to everyone who offered their support and advice, and a special thank you to the organisers: The BASIS project with Refugee Action and the Refugee Council and the South West Strategic Migration Partnership.

The day offered a fresh perspective onto our work in particular becasue many of the participating organisations were refugee support organisations and refugee community groups as opposed to asylum support organsiations. While many of the challenges and solutions that these organisations face overlap, there are also some differences: the precarity of legal immigration status in the latter case can make it difficult to form lasting community organisations. Nevertheless, the work of the refugee support communities represented at the event on the 11th is inspirational (see http://www.thebasisproject.org.uk for a number of really strong case studies of work by refugee community support organsiations). One that will stick in my mind is the case of Liver World Community Sports, who stage an alternative world cup in Liverpool, using sport to break down barriers between communities.

In the afternoon we discussed the use of social media in migrant support – weighing up the pros and cons of different forms of social media in pursuing the rights of migrants. This is an issue that has been raised repeatedly in our interviews and will certainly feature prominently in our report, due in early January 2012. If you have anything you would like to say about the use of social media in supporting asylum seekers – good experiences or bad – then please feel free to leave a comment at the end of this story.

Overall the day was very informative and productive. Tony Nickson of the Evelyn Oldfield Unit (http://www.evelynoldfield.co.uk/ ), which offers professional training and support for refugee organsiations, gave a fantastic workshop about building links with stakeholders that has inspired me to reach out to a number of groups since the event. Thanks once again to the organisers for inviting me to take part.

Nick Gill

Asylum-Network London workshop

Our blog posts often report on events we have attended that are hosted by migrant support groups and that have greatly informed our work on this project. Last week—Sept 23^rd—it was our turn to host participants from asylum advocacy and support organizations at our London dissemination workshop. At the event, our project team gathered with a terrific group of participants to review the initial round of project findings with us. We presented details about the project including survey findings identifying key challenges asylum support organizations contend with and insights from some of the people we have interviewed identifying successful—as well as hoped for—solutions to address these challenges. Throughout the day we had a lively roundtable discussion and breakout sessions providing further insight and feedback that is invaluable as we move to disseminate the project findings more broadly.

Participants raised some really important points: the ‘ghettoization’ of the asylum sector which has implications for funding and amidst funding cuts; the double-edged sword of increasing reliance on volunteers; the ongoing challenges of helping asylum seekers secure access to legal representation; dilemmas of immigrant detention; and the quandary as well as the potential opportunity that working with government agencies present were among the topics we delved into. In coming weeks we will explore these points and the tensions around them in more depth on this blog; we invite you to post your thoughts and comments as we do.

Another discussion was the importance of recognizing where different types of organizations are in the ‘spectrum’ of migrant support. At the event were representatives from local small-scale charities, regionally-focused groups, and organizations with a national reach.  There was an understanding that groups are positioned differently in terms of their networks, relationships with the public and asylum seekers, and links to government agencies. Having said this it was noted that smaller organizations ‘feed’ the work of larger groups and vice versa. From this discussion it emerged that there is a clear need to articulate how organizations along the entire continuum of asylum seeker support and bolster one another’s work. The need to explore and acknowledge the inter-reliance among these differently positioned groups, with a view to supporting the sector overall, especially in an era of reduced funding, is one that resonates strongly with our goals for this project.

We want to thank all those who came and participated in the event, which gave both researchers and participants from support organizations a forum for thoughtful and stimulating dialogue. We hope other groups will join us on this blog and at events in the US and UK as we continue this dialogue on how academics and research more generally can better support the work of migrant advocacy and support organizations.

London workshop TOMORROW

We still have a couple of places left at our workshop tomorrow. Why not come along and hear and discuss our research findings about the challenges (and solutions) facing organisations supporting asylum seekers in the UK and USA?

More details (address, times etc) can be found in the previous post.

Lunch is included and we can reimburse travel costs if you bring your receipt.

Hope to see some of you there!

London event 23rd Sept: come and discuss our initial findings!

We’ve now analysed the first stage of our research (the questionnaires) and you can read about our interim findings here.  We’ve almost finished the 2nd stage of interviews and we’re holding a workshop in London to discuss our findings.

Why not come along and hear more about our findings? We’ll be talking about the challenges facing Asylum Seeker Support Organisations in the UK and USA, and how organisations have tried to overcome these.  Come along and discuss the implications of our findings, share ideas about future research and network with other organisations.

The workshop will be on the 23rd of September, 10:30-16:00, at:

The Resource Centre, 356 Holloway Road, London, N7 6PA

Here’s a map and directions.

Lunch will be provided, and we can cover reasonable travel expenses if you can provide a receipt.

There are only limited spaces so please RSVP to Ceri Oeppen (c.oeppen@exeter.ac.uk) as soon as possible!

[If you need to claim your travel expenses and you think they’ll be very high (i.e. over £50) please check with Ceri before booking your ticket].

SEVEN CHALLENGES FACING ASYLUM SUPPORT ORGANISATIONS – ESRC PROJECT INTERIM FINDINGS

Our ESRC-funded research project examines the challenges facing asylum seeker support organisations in the UK and US and some of their responses to these. The research is divided into two parts: the first, survey based, part examines the challenges and the second part, based on interviews, explores some of the actual and potential responses. We are now in a position to report on the first stage of our research, based upon around 50 detailed survey responses, roughly equally distributed between the UK and US. These are some of the most common challenges facing asylum support organisations that were raised in the survey:

1. A difficult funding climate.

This is the primary concern of our sample, and related not just to reductions in finds, but also the piecemeal nature of a lot of funding in the sector. Broader changes in the political climate add to a mood of resigned pessimism  on this issue among some respondents as well as some very determined and creative approaches to fund-raising among others.

2. The disconnection between asylum seekers and support communities in time and space.

There is great concern among our respondents that asylum seekers are often transferred from one location to another or placed in remote locations either within or outside detention. This leads to concerns that asylum seekers are disconnected from legal, spiritual and social communities of support, largely as a result of what we term the ‘spatial churning’ of asylum applicants as they move through administrative systems and procedures.

3. Difficulties in accessing legal representation and aid and inconsistencies in immigration decisions as well as distressing variability in the behaviour of judges and immigration officers.

A number of factors combine to make the legal landscape very uncertain for asylum seekers and the organisations that support them. These include the tight time limits within which asylum seekers must apply for asylum after entering the country, the absence, reduction, and regulation of funding for legal aid, the often unpredictable nature of immigration judges’ actions and decisions and a lack of transparency in the legal system they encounter.

4. The emotional strain of working with large numbers of vulnerable and often traumatised people.

This is a consistent concern raised by respondents about advocacy and support work in the asylum sector; this is especially the case for those working with detained immigrants. It points towards the continuing and pressing need to ‘support the supporters’. A number of organisations offer tips on what they do and suggestions for developing and improving these initiatives. 

5. The disconnection of asylum support groups from networks of other support groups.

Our respondents experience a dilemma. Often the time and resources devoted to staying afloat in the social media landscape comes at the expense of managing the ongoing work of asylum support or handling urgent issues. Rapid developments in communication technologies are a mixed blessing in the sector, where they do facilitate improved communications but also demand that organisations find capacity to invest in new technologies or risk missing out on important sources of information.

6. Tensions between long-term strategic goals and immediate issues

Making decisions about how to allocate resources across reactive and strategic priorities is a difficult issue for a number of our respondents. Coupled with funding cuts, this seems to push organisations to narrow their focus, hone the range of services they can offer, and sometimes limits networking opportunities. Our respondents identify some of the benefits and costs involved with this.

7. A persistently ill-informed or hostile media (and consequently public) attitude towards asylum.

The media – and especially elements of the written tabloid press – were often singled out as making life difficult for asylum support organisations. Respondents are very protective of asylum seekers and, in general, have well-thought out strategies and protocols in handling media inquiries. Interestingly, some British respondents –where media coverage is generally notoriously hostile towards asylum seekers – wonder whether any coverage is better than no coverage as interest in the asylum ‘issue’ has waned in recent years.

What’s next?

Our team is now in the process of interviewing representatives from a wide range of asylum support organisations in order to collect and share ideas about how to respond to these challenges across the sector. We are asking about what has worked for groups, and what might work going forward.

If you would like to add anything to the list of challenges above, then simply take our survey and fill in your opinion. Alternatively, we invite your comments on this page.

If you would like to take part in an interview for this research in order to discuss the best possible responses to these challenges, please contact Dr. Ceri Oeppen (UK-based) or Dr. Deirdre Conlon (US-based) to arrange an interview.

We have a dissemination event to discuss our findings in detail on September 23^rd in London at the The Resource Centre, The Resource Centre, 356 Holloway Road, London, N7 6PA http://www.theresourcecentre.org.uk/index.php from 10.30am to 4pm. All are welcome but please book with Dr. Ceri Oeppen as places are limited.

We will also be publishing a report with all our research findings in it in December 2011.

The weight of asylum seekers ‘credibility’

Our research team is busy with interviews this month. We really appreciate the time, energy, and commitment of people in the asylum sector and want to extend our thanks to those who have participated in interviews with us so far, for sharing your knowledge, experiences, and ways of navigating advocacy and support in the asylum sector. Groups are operating in an austere environment for immigrants in strikingly innovative and committed ways, it’s a privilege for us to learn about this work and we look forward to passing on our findings at our asylum-network workshop, which is scheduled to take place Friday, September 23^rd. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more news on this event. If you’d like to set up a meeting to talk with us about your organization’s work, challenges, strategies, and needs,  you can contact us here.

Ceri and I (Deirdre) have also been busy presenting some of our findings and insights from the project at international conferences. This week, Ceri is at a conference organized by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), in Kampala Uganda; she’ll blog about that experience next week. I am heading to the International Society for Political Psychology’s Annual Meeting (ISPP), in Istanbul Turkey later this week where I’ll be giving a presentation, drawing from our project, on ‘fear and freedom in liberal society’.

Among the questions the paper addresses is: what does it take for an asylum seeker to become ‘credible’?

In light of this question I cannot help but be struck by news over the past week in the sexual assault case against former IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The case, brought by an immigrant hotel housekeeper, over Strauss-Kahn’s “gross abuse of power” (McGovern, New York Times, July 7th 2011, A-21) during his visit to New York in May is now on the verge of disintegrating because the character and credibility of the woman who has accused Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her has been called into question. I will leave the details of the case to mainstream media where there has been plenty of coverage, much of it problematic because of the manner in which it hastily brushes over issues of power relations between immigrant and non-immigrant, men and women, entitled and less-so, and between representatives of institutions in the global North and those in the global South.

Today, however, an op-ed piece ‘Before You Judge, Stand in Her Shoes’, in the New York Times does acknowledge these matters, and with it provides some much-needed balance in media coverage of this case. The contributor, Mike McGovern, an anthropologist at Yale University, offers a little more understanding of the despicable economic inequities—which the global North bears considerable responsibility for—as well as the political and social turmoil that many asylum seekers endure. Beyond this, McGovern highlights how “asylum claimants are often asked to perform an impossible task. They must prove they have been subject to the most crushing forms of oppression and violence — for this, bodies bearing the scars of past torture are a boon — while demonstrating their potential to become hard-working and well-adjusted citizens” (McGovern, New York Times, July 7^th 2011, A-21). The circumstances that asylum seekers must navigate—demonstrating fear in their quest for freedom—highlight the problematic that ‘credibility’ presents when inequities abound.

Leeds City of Sanctuary Workshop on needs of pregnant women seeking sanctuary, 3rd June

Ceri and Imogen will be attending a City of Sanctuary workshop on the needs of pregnant women seeking sanctuary. Friday 3rd June from 10.30-12.30pm,  Skyline Conference, Leeds Skyline Service. contact Rose McCarthy roseatmccarthy@yahoo.co.uk for further details.

‘No Platform Politics’ – Who Thinks What?

Dear readers

I thought I’d let you know about a small piece of questionnaire-based research I completed on Staurday 7th May in Bristol, UK. Two researchers and I hit the streets of Bristol and asked 150 people 16 questions about their attitudes towards far-right political parties such as the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defense League (EDL). In particular, we were interested in whether people who disagreed with far-right political parties would nevertheless allow them to participate in political processes or would, alternatively, prefer to exclude them from political forums and curtail their political freedoms. We therefore asked whether people thought far right political parties should be allowed to take part in broadcasted pubilc debates, run in local, national and European elections, express their views publicly through rallies and protests, and hold conferences.

One of the most striking results was the degree to which people who disagreed with far right political parties would nevertheless defend their right to participate in political processes. So, of 108 people who said that they did not agree at all with the politics of the far right (on a scale of 1-5), 59% said yes to ALL the questions that we asked them about what far right political parties should be allowed to do. This seems to indicate that people in Bristol are a relatively tolerant bunch. What do you make of these results? Please feel free to comment.

The data also allowed us to examine who is more likely to think that far right parties should be excluded from political processes. As we might have expected, people whose ethnicity is not described as ‘white British’ and whose citizenship status is not described by the statement ‘born in the UK and lived here a long time’ were more likely to want to see far right parties excluded. More surprisingly, though, people over 35, people who did not vote in the last general election (this includes the under 18s we sampled) and people who watch telly rather than listen to the radio for their main source of news were all more likely to want to exclude mainstream political parties. At least as interesting were the factors that did not seem to correlate with the desire to exlude far right parties, including attitudes towards immgiration, levels of education, faith and gender.

Of course, this study is very small scale. It would be interesting to find out whether other cities were different, like London or northern cities. And it would also be interesting to see whether people were as tolerant towards other vilified extreme groups such as ‘climate change deniers’ or communists. Research into the tolerance of people in the UK is surprisingly under-developed, and I’d be really interested in hearing your views.

Thanks to Andy and Phil for help with the questionnaire.

Nick

Word Search – How do categories and contexts shape the way advocacy organizations view their work?

I recently learned about a fascinating tool, called the ngram viewer, recently unveiled by Google labs. It’s an enormous searchable database of books that are available to the public in digitized form. The material includes books published from the 1400’s to 2008 (Google promises to continue expand the database of searchable items). While most of the materials included are English language publications, there are a few publications in other languages such as German and French available too. The ngram viewer offers users the opportunity to search 5.2 million digitized books and millions of words and to graph the flow of words in printed matter over time. In other words, it allows you to visualize trends including when a word first appears in print, when it drops from popularity, and the ebbs and flows of use in published material. One interesting aspect of this huge database is that it allows a search that distinguishes between books published in English and available in the US vis-à-vis English language publications available in Britain.

You might wonder how does this tie in with our research on asylum seekers? Among our findings is that, as a category, asylum seekers in the US seem to be less visible than in the UK. I was curious to see if this trend is reflected in published materials, so I searched the ngram database. I entered the following categories: ‘asylum seeker’, ‘undocumented migrant’, and ‘illegal immigrant’ into the database and searched for their use in British English and American English publications from 1970 to 2008. The graphs below show what I found:

Frequency of terms describing 'migrants' in American English publications

It’s interesting to see that usage of the term ‘illegal immigrant’ (the green line) far outweighs use of ‘asylum seekers’ (the blue line) among American English publications. It’s also interesting to note the dramatic upsurge in use of the term ‘asylum seeker’ (shown in the chart below as a blue line) since 2001 in materials published in Britain.

Frequency of terms referring to 'migrants' in British English publications

While I realize that the nature of published materials and asylum advocacy differs and that categories used in print and in ‘on-the-ground’ advocacy are distinct, I think it is fair to say that there is traffic between them. With this in mind, I’m left wondering how public exposure and familiar usage of categories such as ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘undocumented migrant’ in printed matter, popular culture, and political forums influences the way advocacy organizations view themselves, their work, and the individuals they work with.

What are your thoughts or experiences on this issue? Why not weigh in on this question, send us your comments and experiences related to language and popular discourses that surrounds asylum seekers by posting a comment here or by contacting us directly.