793582

research-article2018
RAC0010.1177/0306396818793582Race & ClassSajjad: What’s in a name?

SAGE
Los Angeles,
London,
New Delhi,
Singapore,
Washington DC,
Melbourne

What’s in a name? ‘Refugees’,

‘migrants’ and the politics of
labelling
Tazreena Sajjad

Abstract: Through a critical examination of European immigration policy and using

the case of Afghan asylum seekers in the European continent, this article argues
that the politics of labelling and the criminalisation and securitisation of migration
undermine the protection framework for the globally displaced. However, the
issue goes deeper than state politicking to circumvent responsibilities under
international law. The construction of migrants as victims at best, and as cultural
and security threats at worst, particularly in the case of Muslim refugees, not
only assists in their dehumanisation, it also legitimises actions taken against them
through the perpetuation of a particular discourse on the European Self and the
non-European Other. At one level, such a dynamic underscores the long-standing
struggle of Europe to articulate its identity within the economic, demographic
and cultural anxieties produced by the dynamics of globalisation. At another,
these existing constructions, which hierarchise ‘worthiness’, are limited in their
reflection of the complex realities that force people to seek refuge. Simultaneously,
the labels, and the discourse of which they are part, make it possible for Europe
to deny asylum claims and expedite deportations while being globally accepted
as a human rights champion. This process also makes it possible for Europe to

Tazreena Sajjad currently serves as Senior Professorial Lecturer in the Global Governance, Politics
and Security (GGPS) Program in the School of International Service (SIS) at American University
in Washington, DC. Her areas of specialisation include transitional justice, refugees and forced
displacement, post-conflict governance, and gender and conflict.

Race & Class

Copyright © 2018 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 60(2): 40­–62
10.1177/0306396818793582 journals.sagepub.com/home/rac
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 41

categorise turbulent contexts such as Afghanistan as a ‘safe country’, even at a

time when the global refugee protection regime demands creative expansion.
Ultimately, the politics of European migration policy illustrates the evolution of
European Orientalist discourse – utilised in the past to legitimise colonisation and
domination, now used to legitimise incarceration and deportation.

Keywords: Afghanistan, asylum seekers, EU, identity, Islam, labelling, migrants,

Muslims, Orientalism, refoulement, refugees, security

Introduction
The debate around who is a ‘migrant’ and a ‘refugee’ is neither a new one nor
solely the province of law, with its claims to objectivity and to occupying a space
that is simultaneously sacrosanct and devoid of politics. In fact, those two terms,
created to define the lived condition of an individual on the move, are not the
only categories that exist in the state arsenal. Today, there is a dizzying array of
labels to describe those who cross an international border through irregular
means and the subsequent protections they may be offered or denied based on
their classification. While recently crafted alternative statuses – ‘B status’, human-
itarian admission, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), special leave to remain,
Duldung – offer a degree of protection against refoulement, many more individu-
als do not get full protection as a consequence of how they are labelled. Moreover,
thousands fleeing structural inequalities and protracted conflict are rendered
invisible and yet made hyper-visible when immigration is increasingly tied to
questions of criminality and security. A close examination of this phenomenon,
particularly in relation to the irregular migrant, reveals a complex dynamic of
politics and power in the granting of legitimacy and access to rights to some,
based on perceptions of their ‘worthiness’ and ‘innocence’ rather than an objec-
tive classification of people in need of sanctuary. The issue, however, goes far
deeper than mere state politicking to circumvent responsibilities under interna-
tional law; labels transform realities, determining who is considered deserving of
protection under the western asylum regime and who should be excluded.
Focusing on Europe and paying particular attention to Afghan asylum seekers
within the broader context of how irregular immigration and Muslims are per-
ceived, this article examines the complex world of labels deployed for migrants
identified as social, cultural and medical ‘threats’, ‘victims’ and, increasingly, a
security problem, challenging a ‘stable’ order. Today’s irregular migrants are
caught between two tropes – of victimhood and security, particularly as relating
to Muslim refugees – in which Europe writ large is cast as a ‘saviour’ while imple-
menting ever more restrictive policies that have resulted in increasing numbers
of deaths, en route at borders and from deportations back to unsafe contexts. This
contradiction raises questions. What explains the treatment of Afghans in partic-
ular and, more generally, Muslim refugees and other irregular migrants seeking
42 Race & Class 60(2)

asylum in Europe in the face of an ongoing global refugee crisis? More broadly,
what explains the discrepancy that subsequently emerges between the European
sense of self as a champion of human rights, and increasingly restrictive and det-
rimental asylum policies? In engaging with this inquiry, I examine the various
discursive tropes in circulation about migrants/refugees/ asylum seekers that
shape understandings of worthiness and legitimacy, increasingly restrictive
immigration policies, and their consequences. I argue that labels offer the pre-
tence of a ‘value-neutral’ categorisation, obscuring the fact that they are products
of bureaucratic processes, which, at heart, are defined by two opposing tensions
– recognition of the need for asylum for growing numbers of people forcibly dis-
placed and, simultaneously the intensification of measures to ensure the ‘out-
sider’ cannot reach western shores. Second, such labels allow for their systematic
dehumanisation, as has been the case for Muslim and African refugees, thereby
legitimising actions taken against them by the state. Third, labels permit the clas-
sification of states as ‘safe’ countries, as in the case of Afghanistan, which then
allows for the deportation of thousands whose claims to protection are negated
by the bureaucratic determination of which factors constitute ‘legitimate’ driving
forces of migration. My research concludes that, while some contradictions have
emerged as a consequence of the deployment of labels (such as the victim versus
terrorist trope), migrant insecurity in Europe continues to be increasingly institu-
tionalised through state-sanctioned violence, laying the groundwork for future
humanitarian disasters, through the perpetuation of a particular discourse on the
European Self and the non-European Other.

Building ‘Fortress Europe’

Since the 1990s, Europe has devoted a staggering amount of resources to trans-
form itself into a ‘fortress’, combining sophisticated technology, agreements,
deployment of semi-military and military forces, extensive intelligence networks
and the crude construction of walls and fences to deter irregular migration both
by land and sea. For instance, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European countries
have built or started to build 1,200 km of anti-immigrant fencing at a cost of at
least 500 million euros, covering a distance that is almost 40 per cent of the length
of America’s border with Mexico.1 These efforts, which began in 1995 with the
Spanish government’s erection of fences at Ceuta and Melilla to seal off its mari-
time borders,2 have accelerated since 2015, when approximately one million refu-
gees arrived on the continent’s shores.
In addition to European Dactyloscopy (Eurodac – a fingerprint identification
database) and the Schengen Information System, the continent uses modern sur-
veillance mechanisms such as drones to deter irregular migration. The Southern
Mediterranean Border Surveillance Network in North Africa, and similar surveil-
lance networks in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Atlantic now monitor ‘ille-
gal or suspect activities’ and organises coordinated responses.3 Frontex uses
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 43

quasi-military equipment and technology to conduct joint operations and carry

out returns between member and non-member states on the external sea, land and
air borders of the EU, as well as risk analyses and training for border and coast-
guards within and outside the EU. Most of its resources are focused primarily on
maritime operations in the Aegean Sea, the central Mediterranean and the Atlantic,
underscoring the EU’s security-centred approach to migration. Frontex also has
working arrangements with non-EU countries4 on information-sharing, risk
assessment, research and training.5 Since 2015, the EU has become even more reli-
ant on Frontex for surveillance of the high seas. On 14 September 2016, the
European Council gave unanimous final approval to transform Frontex into the
European Border and Coast Guard Agency, with more resources plus greater bor-
der management and rapid border intervention responsibilities. Despite criticisms
about its lack of transparency, Frontex continues to participate in the systemic
violent pushbacks of irregular migrants, often resulting in their return to contexts
where they face torture, violence and little possibility of finding asylum.
The EU has also created a complex arrangement of multiple migration control
systems through neighbouring and third countries to act as ‘buffer zones’, thereby
outsourcing the means for stopping the arrival of people before they reach the
continent’s jurisdiction including a series of readmission agreements with third
countries, including the most recent EU-Turkey deal, the Joint Way Forward
agreement with Afghanistan and the EU-Libya deal to ensure deterrence and
deportation of irregular migrants.6 Other bilateral and multilateral arrangements
include the 2015 EU-Africa Fund focused on the Sahel and Lake Chad regions to
address the root causes of destabilisation, displacement and irregular migration;7
the EU’s money-for-migration deal with Mali at a total cost of €145.1 million;8
Germany’s recent Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) arrange-
ment with Morocco to build centres to deport unaccompanied minors costing
€960,000 per year;9 the European External Investment Plan (EIP) with its ‘guaran-
tee funds’ to support investment in Africa’s public financial infrastructure and
the private sector, in return for policing Europe’s borders; and the 2017 action
plan developed by France, Germany, Italy and Spain to work with Chad and
Niger to stem the flow of migrants through Libya and across the Mediterranean.10
Both EU and non-EU members continue to use detention and deportation to
dissuade individuals from entering the continent through unauthorised means.
Such mechanisms precede the events of 2015 when it was estimated that, each
year, close to 600,000 migrants were detained in the continent for ‘migration man-
agement purposes’.11 Despite growing evidence that increasing use of detention
worldwide has not reduced irregular migration flows,12 current efforts to speed
up asylum processing and make returns more effective have prompted an
increased use of immigration detention, including for both accompanied and
unaccompanied children.13 While comprehensive disaggregated data on who is
actually deported from Europe remains elusive, there is a growing body of
research that exposes the devastating social and human consequences of harsh
44 Race & Class 60(2)

immigration controls and deportation policies. This includes the deaths of at least
46,000 migrants at states’ borders globally, the vast majority of which have taken
place at the continent’s frontiers,14 and the frequent use of violence and gratu-
itous force by European officials in deportation proceedings (including the use of
shackles, packing tape on mouths and bodies and/or sedation to subdue deport-
ees) that have resulted in injury and death.15 To avoid public confrontations,
European governments have increasingly been chartering aircraft to deport peo-
ple16 and, since 2003, have coordinated joint deportation programmes.17
This militarisation of borders works in conjunction with the political project of
what the EU (and non-EU members) consider to be the legitimate impetus for
displacement. Currently the EU’s bureaucratic calculations seem intent on pre-
serving the status quo of acknowledging only the classic understanding of war,
and adjusting, if slightly, on the question of burden-sharing. Consequently, there
is limited effort to recognise state failure, environmental disasters, ongoing politi-
cal violence, famine and their often fatal combination as the drivers of forced
migration today. Closely associated with this is the question of how countries in
crisis are being classified as ‘safe’ to facilitate a reduction in asylum cases. This
trend is particularly troubling in cases such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, which
have been the sites of the most recent deals to facilitate ‘voluntary’ and forced
deportations at a time when each context is experiencing significant levels of vio-
lence and defying simple determinations of whether they are at ‘war’ or at ‘peace’.
The 2016 Joint Way Forward agreement is illustrative of this trend whereby the
EU (and non-EU countries such as Norway) have classified Afghanistan as a
‘post-conflict’ state, and committed to deporting Afghan asylum seekers cur-
rently on European soil. A leaked memo reported by The Guardian revealed that
prior to the 2016 Brussels aid summit, the EU intended to threaten Afghanistan
with a decrease in aid if it refused to take back 80,000 deportees.18 Similarly, the
2016 EU-Turkey deal, in which Turkey is classified as a ‘safe third country’, raises
questions about the country’s laws concerning the recognition and protection of
refugees, the strategic politicking surrounding who is considered a ‘genuine’
asylum seeker, and the grounds that have been created for the dismissal of their
claims. The 2017 EU-Libya deal is aimed at providing €200 million to the Libyan
government to stop the flow of migrant boats, set up ‘safe’ refugee camps and
assist in the ‘voluntary’ repatriation of refugees to their countries of origin. With
reports of Libya as a thriving slave market, the killing of sick and disabled
migrants on the orders of human smugglers, the expanding organ trade, the sex-
ual abuse that children face on the Libyan route, the use of the military and mili-
tia forces to prevent migrants from departing its shores, the EU’s indifference to
the crisis is painfully evident. 19
In mid-2016 the European Commission proposed reforms to the Common EU
Asylum System (CEAS) intended to promote an efficient, uniform and humane
asylum policy across the EU, reduce differences in recognition rates from one
member state to the next and discourage secondary movements.20 This includes
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 45

shorter time limits for lodging an asylum claim (from one month to one week)
and for reaching a final decision (under six months), guaranteeing a personal
interview and legal assistance for asylum seekers, and stricter enforcement of
rules to combat abuse of the system. This means enforcing the restriction of
asylum seekers to the first country of entry through the rejection of their appli-
cations if they fail to comply. Moreover, the five-year waiting period for asylum
seekers to become eligible for resident status is restarted every time they are
found in a second country in order to discourage movement within the EU.
Protection is contingent on a review of the safety situation of the country of
origin; access to certain social services hinges on participation in integration
measures; is guaranteed for unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers with
special needs; and access to the labour market is granted to reduce dependency
within six months. Will these reforms streamline the asylum-seeking process
for the EU or simply make it even more difficult for persons in need to seek
protection? The early signs are not encouraging. Beyond the challenges of the
CEAS, contradictions remain about migrant classification in the EU asylum sys-
tem. The growing trend both within EU and non-EU members, particularly
since 2015, of enhancing the restrictive arrangements for asylum also under-
scores concerns about the increasing lack of accessibility to the existing system
for irregular migrants.

The power and politics of labels in Europe’s asylum system

Labelling theory has a long history in scholarship, emerging in the 1960s and
instrumentalised to explain and categorise elements of criminal and deviant
behaviour for the end goal of punishment and corrective treatment.21 The pur-
pose of labels is to simultaneously impose boundaries and define categories,
while having classificatory and regulatory functions. Labels therefore ‘share a
recursive relationship with policy-making processes in that they are tools to aid
such processes which themselves have bearing on how labels are formed, and
what meaning they hold’.22 It follows, then, that labels are seen as ‘objective, effi-
cient, routine, and indispensable’ and consequential when enforced by authorita-
tive state agents.
Embracing the assumption that labels are devoid of politics is only possible
if we overlook what Lacan calls the ‘politics of the unconscious’, where labels,
charged with the responsibility of constructing our world, allow for the kind of
social categorisation in which suppression or annihilation become actual pos-
sibilities. The very process of labelling as a crucial component of bureaucratic
activity is neither questioned nor analysed, since the conformity it produces
conveys a substantive objectivity.23 Yet, labelling processes inevitably involve
relationships of power where actors may use them to influence how issues and
categories of people may be treated in different contexts and at different points
in time. As such, while the issue of ‘who belongs’ can be contested and
46 Race & Class 60(2)

politicised, it is the question of membership of the nation state that remains the
most consequential.
Labelling is also deeply embedded in the act of governance, in itself an exercise
of power. Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of power and their discussion on pro-
ductive power are particularly helpful in understanding the relationship between
power and labelling, given that the ordering of social relations demands a cost in
terms of the violence it perpetrates on the self and the social world through the
act of institutionalised separation.24 Categories such as ‘civilised’, ‘uncivilised’,
‘western’, ‘Third World’ are neither objective nor innocent, but are designed to
institutionalise asymmetrical social capacities.25 In short, labels are a means of
control and are non-participatory.
Examining the politics behind labelling in migration raises questions about
who is labelled a ‘refugee’, an ‘economic’ migrant, an ‘illegal’ and all the varia-
tions within – given that such an act involves the creation, transformation and
manipulation of a specific category of identity.26 After all, as long as an individual
is defined as a ‘foreigner’ and an ‘alien’ s(he) is the responsibility of another state,
but once the individual is classified as a ‘migrant’ a different set of power rela-
tionships are implicated. Primarily the term ‘migrant’ generates associations with
invisibility, illegitimacy or dependency leading to the assumption that they can
be found, enumerated and categorised.27 It speaks to an association of ‘choice’
and confers the idea of opportunistic decision-making that generates little sym-
pathy when considering questions of the rights and dignity of the individual in
question. It also strikes at the very heart of the politics of belonging. For instance,
in Europe, children of immigrants who have acquired citizenship of the host state
are often described as ‘second-generation immigrants’, implying that they cannot
claim the rights and protections guaranteed to citizens of the state. Such discourse
was evident during the 2005 social disturbances in the suburbs of Paris, where the
categorisation of young French citizens as immigrants provided a mechanism to
speak about ethnicity without using the term, underscoring an already estab-
lished premise that these young black men did not ‘belong’ in France.
On the surface, the conceptualisation of the refugee is easy in terms of the legal-
normative status and responsibilities it confers on states, and the social, political
and societal protections offered by the 1951 Refugee Convention. In reality how-
ever, there continues to be enormous challenges about the acceptable definition of
the de jure refugee in particular, given that it simultaneously lays claim on a state
for action and exposes the complexity of values and judgements involved in,
essentially, a subjective categorisation. There is now extensive scholarship that
clearly establishes that the label ‘refugee’ is highly changeable,28 dependent on
context29 and inextricably linked to ideas of citizenship, the state, and understand-
ings of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in any given period of time. This ultimately means
that labels have immense personal, political and practical significance associated
with both productive and prescriptive capacities.30 In short, ‘there are many inter-
pretations of the refugee definition and, like currencies, they have fluctuating
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 47

values and exchange rates’.31 Furthermore, refugee status is recognised differently

under different conventions and declarations, i.e., its definition is more expansive
when considering the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Convention (OAU) or
the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, according to which Africa and Latin America
determine ‘legitimate’ claims to refugeehood, compared to the 1951 Convention.
Because labels are imbued with powerful political meanings, they are responsible
for indexing varied assumptions and contradictory political interests surrounding
refugee designation, thereby ‘delinking’ the case from a complex narrative with
the sole purpose of creating a bureaucratically accepted status that reflects state
interests for control, thereby promoting a ‘categorical fetishism’, which serves
only to treat the classification of ‘refugee’ and migrant’ as empty vessels into which
human beings can be placed in a neutral ordering process.32 The consequence of
such a process is to distil the experience of forcible displacement into a one-dimen-
sional status that both captures a specific moment in time, and crafts the individ-
ual as being ahistorical and neutral in relationship to a (benevolent) state.
In contrast, the real-life implications of being classified as a ‘refugee’ or an ‘eco-
nomic or illegal migrant’ are significant, given that the former is seen as deserving
protection while the latter is too often ‘commodified as labour subordinated to the
economic needs of the host country’.33 This bureaucratic distinction legitimises
and sustains policy through clearly articulating access to or denial of protection
based on the violation of rights in the classical sense, even though today’s political
realities defy such clear categorisations, given that the deprivation of basic rights
is a matter of life or death in many contexts.34 The consequences of these categori-
sations are far-reaching but not new. DeWaal’s study of the famine disaster in
Western Sudan in the mid-1980s, for instance, exposed how the crude categorisa-
tion of people in crisis as ‘drought migrants’ led to the withholding of critical
assistance, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe.35 In Europe, while dominant
representations of the ‘crisis’ typically give the impression of a linear, uninter-
rupted flow of people arriving at its shores,36 many of those who arrived on the
continent during 2015 had been living for months or even years in countries other
than those in which they were born, requiring engagement with the complex eco-
nomic, social and political realities of the ‘in between’.37 In short, in Europe (and
elsewhere), ‘the almost arbitrary categorisation of who constitutes a “refugee” …
leads not only to a gross violation of rights but to the systematic exclusion of large
groups of people who would like to see themselves as “refugees”’.38 Ignoring the
complex reasons for human migration today and the consequences of compart-
mentalising people into neat categories has thus far served to undermine the rights
of refugees and migrants in Europe,39 while classification of asylum seekers as
‘fraudulent’ or ‘bogus’ has led to justifying anti-immigrant movements and asy-
lum policies,40 given that such labels carry heavy normative weight and generate
a climate where verbal, physical and institutional violence become commonplace
and legitimised. Furthermore, such a narrowed understanding of ‘push’ factors
exposes the limitations of the existing refugee protection regime and masks the
48 Race & Class 60(2)

structural politics behind the ‘crisis’. It certainly obscures the critical understand-
ing of the inherent violence imbued in territorial borders in general, including the
European border that intentionally and consistently reproduces Europe as an
exclusive space that ensures inaccessibility to the migrant ‘other’.
A deeper look at asylum processes clarifies this further. Procedures for review-
ing asylum cases in some EU countries reveal that they are aimed at crafting a
specific reality which is more focused on meeting rates of rejection set by policy
than aiming to carefully chart the personal biography of an individual exile.41
Certainly this would explain the classification of those fleeing Boko Haram in
Nigeria as ‘economic’ migrants and others who are fleeing complex and struc-
tural forms of acute violence in their own societies and who would rightfully lay
claim to the category sometimes described as ‘distress’ or ‘survival’ migrants
who might be recognised as persons in need of international protection by EU
qualification directives.42 Extensive examination of the legal, technical and mate-
rial procedures associated with asylum applications in Greece, France and else-
where demonstrates the ‘expeditive and inquisitorial character’ of asylum officers,
the very limited interactions with exiles, translation issues, cultural gaps and an
overriding undercurrent of suspicion, which not only take away the full-bodied
and complex narrative of the migrant in question, but also expose the arbitrary
nature of the categorisations.43 Meeting quotas of rejection is one explanation for
such a procedure, as in the case of France, but this is not unique to a single coun-
try in the EU or even to the continent itself. The question that needs to be raised
is whether the EU (and non-EU) members can evaluate individual asylum cases
objectively if they are guided by a predetermined quota system that sets out how
many refugees will be rejected in any given year. Fekete argues, ‘if international
law was respected, most of these removals would not take place at all. This is not
a question of individual immigration officials making incorrect decisions on indi-
vidual cases; what is key is the creation of a conveyor belt system of removals
designed to meet government targets.’44
Furthermore, excluded groups such as those on the ‘wrong’ side of political
issues and those with ‘limited refugee status’– such as those under TPS and
Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) – have both limited protection and transfer-
ence. Such decisions need to be evaluated as resulting from calculations that do
not take realities on the ground into account or the fact that today’s conflicts do
not dissipate within three to five years. Correspondingly, individuals granted
TPS and DED have limited access to state protection, and are left awaiting the
decision of the host country with regard to their highly uncertain futures. Labels
granted in one context also do not necessarily have any application or relevance
in others. For instance, in 2007, Chechens in Poland were classified as being ‘tol-
erated’ although they were seeking asylum, i.e. they were denied the status of
refugees, but were not forcibly returned to Chechnya. In 2008, when protests
erupted in parts of France in response to the poor conditions in administration
detention centres (CRAs) and against the draft European law that allowed for
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 49

detention to be extended to eighteen months, the term in public circulation was

retenus, a label that has no legal definition and certainly did not have any cross-
border transference even within the EU.45 These cases illustrate the problematic
way in which the de jure refugee is generally identified in the European and EU
asylum system, and offer critical commentary about nation states’ unwillingness
to integrate such individuals from the double standpoint of protection (legal,
security, social) and recognition (political right).

The Afghan asylum seeker in Europe

The case of Afghan asylum seekers underscores how specific ideas of who ‘con-
forms’ to institutional arrangements, rather than reflecting realities on the ground,
actually play out, illustrating the unevenness of asylum decision-making, the
process through which many refugees are turned into ‘failed’ asylum seekers
necessitating deportation and how current ‘safe’ country classification delegiti-
mises their claim to remain. Europe has been receiving large numbers of Afghans
for several years; since the beginning of the 2015 ‘crisis’, they have consistently
represented one of the largest refugee clusters to reach the continent’s shores.
However, the rate of granting them asylum in various EU countries has depreci-
ated significantly over time, with acceptance numbers being particularly low
since at least 2010. Between 2015 and 2016 when the EU-Afghan deal was signed,
the number of deported Afghans nearly tripled from 3,290 to 9,460 corresponding
to a marked fall in recognition of asylum applications, from 68 per cent in
September 2015 to 33 per cent in December 2016.46 In 2016 almost 10,000 Afghan
applicants had their asylum cases rejected.47 In 2017, there was a marked fall in
Afghan asylum applications to Germany, Sweden and Finland, with Germany
granting asylum to less than half of Afghan applicants during the first nine
months of 2017.48 A major reason for the denial of Afghan asylum seekers in
Germany has been the fact that the probability of being a victim in Afghanistan’s
armed conflict based on the ‘risk ratio calculation’ in 2014 was estimated at 0.074
per cent, not high enough to qualify for asylum.49 Such a calculation can easily be
questioned, according to whether the data used for such calculations takes into
consideration regional variations in the levels of violence and associated insecu-
rity, given the increasing strong hold of de facto Taliban control in several parts of
Afghanistan, and the growing presence of ISIS and other armed groups in the
country. It certainly did not take into consideration the worsening security situa-
tion, which prompted more US and NATO troop commitments in 2017, or that,
according to UN figures, civilian deaths as a consequence of the ongoing war
have reached a record high, with 10,000 in 2016 alone, particularly due to the rise
of suicide bombings and the use of improvised explosive devices.50
Even prior to 2015, Afghans, including children, seeking asylum in Europe did
not fare much better. Under UK Law, unaccompanied minors can be granted a
Discretionary Leave to Remain (DLR) for three years or until they are 17.5 years
50 Race & Class 60(2)

old, at which point they are legally treated as adults. While they can apply for an
extension once they turn 17 and a half, this is rarely granted, and they are then
detained and deported back to Afghanistan.51 For instance, Webber notes that
while the UK Court of Appeal had imposed a blanket ban on charter-flight depor-
tations to Afghanistan in 2015 of ‘failed’ asylum seekers, most of whom were
children, it lifted the ban in March 2016 ‘accepting that the Home Office was
entitled to its view that although the provinces were not safe, the capital, where
returnees would be sent, was’.52 Outside the EU, acceptance of Afghan asylees
has also been low. Consider Norway, for instance, which received 30,000 asylum
claims in 2015, many from Syrians and Afghans travelling via the Arctic route
and passing through Murmansk, a Russian city bordering Norway and Finland.
According to Norwegian law, travel via the Arctic route is ‘illegal’, as Russia is
considered a ‘safe’ third country. The Norwegian government also placed ads in
Afghan newspapers such as the Afghanistan Times and the Hasht-e-Sub, as well as
in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, warning Afghans that unfounded requests
for asylum in Norway would result in quick and forced deportation. In January
2015, Norwegian authorities began to bus asylum seekers across the border with
Russia within hours of their being rejected and with no time to appeal, claiming
that those who were not entitled to protection had to be deported in order to
maintain a fair asylum policy. The UNHCR’s regional coordinator in Europe crit-
icised the policy, stating that ‘they can end up in a no man’s land where they risk
freezing to death … There are large cracks in the Russian asylum system. We
believe Norway is wrong to regard Russia as a safe country for people who need
protection.’
Shuster’s research with young male Afghan asylum seekers prior to 2015 is
revealing in how individual state responses are directly responsible for trans-
forming the status of de facto refugees to that of ‘irregular’ immigrants. For
instance, she found that asylum applications from Afghans have been low in
Greece both because the authorities make it very difficult for them to claim asy-
lum, and because those who have tried to claim point out to newcomers that they
have no chance of recognition if they do apply. Consequently, in Greece they are
labelled as ‘illegals’. In France, unable to grasp the complex ways in which the
European asylum regime works, with limited access to translated documents,
Afghans too often end up ‘sleeping in parks, under bridges and in the streets, suf-
fering from lice and scabies, accommodated … in emergency hostels, or being
exposed to below freezing temperatures during winter’.53 Left to wander the
streets of Europe, many Afghans have little chance of ever receiving refugee or
humanitarian status, but continue to live as ‘sans papiers’, ‘undocumented’ and
‘illegals’, subjected to constant harassment and violence from state forces – as in
Greece and France – and from rightwing activists.
Emerging literature about Afghans who have arrived in Europe over the last
few years underscores the complex reasons for which people move, complicating
the neat categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘economic migrant’, and the grim realities that
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 51

face those who ‘voluntarily’ leave under the deportation scheme or are forcibly
removed. For instance, Crawley and Skleparis found that Afghans left Iran for
Turkey and Europe because of a deteriorating economic situation, discriminatory
treatment of the ethnic Hazara and a fear of being forcibly returned to Afghanistan
– thereby straddling categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘economic migrant’ at different
points in their lives.54 A 2016 report on Afghan deportees from the UK found that
many of them first came to Europe as unaccompanied children, and were forcibly
removed after they turned 18 when their asylum claims were rejected.55 Once
back in Afghanistan, they are often targeted precisely because of their status as
returnees.56 Overwhelmingly, returnees find it difficult to find employment, safe
places to live and access to health care.57 They have trouble locating family and
social networks, and in those cases when they do find them, they cannot live with
them due to insecurity and resource constraints.58 In 2017 Amnesty International
claimed that at least 10,000 Afghans deported from Norway, the Netherlands,
Sweden and Germany ‘have been killed, injured in bomb attacks, or left to live in
constant fear of being persecuted for their sexual orientation or conversion to
Christianity’.59

Identity, immigrants, and the Muslim ‘other’ in Europe

A broader understanding of contemporary developments regarding Europe’s
response to Afghan asylum seekers, Muslim refugees and irregular migrants
needs to acknowledge the context within which these policies emerge – the struc-
tures of asylum processing and denial embedded in the biopolitical hierarchy of
systemic racialisation, securitisation and criminalisation of migration, and the
ongoing struggle to articulate Europe’s own identity.60
The question of ‘Europeanness’ remains a contested issue as the EU continues
to articulate a transnational and shared identity. Thomas argues that a significant
component of thinking through this question ‘has been informed by exclusionary
mechanisms that have fastened on the non-Europeanness of Third Country
Nationals or non-EU foreign nationals rather than circumscribing the contours of
an identity through recourse to affirmative points of commonality’.61 The multi-
dimensional socioeconomic challenges unleashed by neoliberal globalisation also
need to be recognised. At one level, globalisation has disrupted traditional labour
industries, created winner-take-all markets, eroded labour-market protections,
produced socioeconomic immobility, increased unemployment and distribu-
tional struggles, and diminished the quality of life. At another, the visibility of the
migrant ‘other’ in terms of demographic changes and the accompanying cultural
shifts in society have generated a sense that traditional ways of life are under
threat. The resultant anxieties have resulted in deep cleavages, particularly
amongst those considered ‘losers’ in the globalisation process, creating fertile
ground for successful exploitation by rightwing populist groups from Sweden,
France, UK and Germany to all along the Balkans, generating significant
52 Race & Class 60(2)

anti-immigrant sentiments and concerns about the future of the EU.62 Current
immigration debates, policy initiatives and the search for a European identity are
also inextricably linked to the continent’s colonial past. In the process, what
becomes evident is that the increasing preoccupation with borders emphasises a
revisionist interpretation of history that is monolithic and dismissive of the his-
torical connections between European and non-European people.63 Consequently,
the reconceptualisation of this modern Europe, girded by the EU, creates a narra-
tive that not only continues to ‘exclude racialised minorities but also defines them
as the very essence of non-Europeanness in terms that link migration to suppos-
edly invincible differences of race, culture, and religion’.64 Balibar’s work in trac-
ing how these dynamics ultimately shape Europe’s and, in particular, the EU’s
policies towards migration is significant here. He argues that what has emerged
is a form of ‘European apartheid’ which includes ‘a rampant repression of “alien”
communities of immigrants (with specific modalities progressively unified under
the Schengen Convention); a diffusion amongst European nations of openly rac-
ist outbursts; and a seemingly contradictory combination of nationalist exclusiv-
ism and “Western” communitarianism’.65
The association of criminality with the ‘outsider’ in both migration law and
policy has a long history. For instance, in the eighteenth century, administrative
and criminal procedures informed the poor laws in Britain to control the mobil-
ity of beggars and paupers.66 The subsequent incarceration and expulsion of
‘undesirables’ underscores how their unregulated mobility remained a source
of both unease and disorder, even before borders and identities were institu-
tionalised as the foundational blocks of the nation state. State control and crimi-
nalisation of the poor and later of non-citizens also have a long history of being
intrinsically tied to core questions of socioeconomic status and the organisation
of labour.67 Beginning with the framing of the Roma as a constant threat to the
social order and as racially predisposed to crime and vagrancy, such a practice
has carried over to other groups, demonstrating the ongoing construction of a
European identity with xenophobic undertones, and its corresponding influ-
ence on the development of increasingly securitised immigration policies across
Europe.68
The easily identifiable member of the underclass – the irregular migrant in
particular – emerges as a central figure when considering how the political domi-
nance of neoliberalism, obsessed with insecurity, and the corresponding search
for policies converge to preserve the notion of European identity while emphasis-
ing the medical, social and economic threat posed by the ‘other’.69 When examin-
ing the reaction to irregular migration from Africa to Europe, for instance, there
is overwhelming evidence of sensationalist reporting and popular discourse that
have produced apocalyptic images of an unending ‘exodus’ of Africans seeking
the European El Dorado.70 The use of language effectively connecting migrants
with contagion, criminality and a security threat has also enabled unquestioned
support for restrictive policies, underscoring that the unavoidable approach to
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 53

fighting ‘illegal’ immigration is via control and containment. Official and unoffi-
cial discourse now widely uses the terms ‘illegal’ and ‘clandestine’, thus confer-
ring suspicion on all migrants.

The Muslim refugee

A discussion of the ‘other’ and the potency of labels is incomplete without an
examination of how Islam and Muslims have dominated Europe’s geopolitical
imagination for decades, finding even more resonance since the events of 2015.
First, it is important to interrogate the place and space for Islam in Europe.
There is a long-held assumption, particularly since the emergence of secularism
as a political ideology and model for statecraft, that there is something unique
about Islam that makes it incompatible with peaceful co-existence within the
secular political framework of Euro-American states.71 Self-perceived secular
and religious European countries, which view themselves as proponents of
modernity and civilisation, view Islam as premodern, anti-modern and even
inherently ‘bad’.72
Furthermore, drawing on a long-held Orientalist tradition of how to engage
with Islam and Muslims has meant predominantly understanding the former as
a homogenous oppressive entity and the latter as peoples without agency, inca-
pable of transforming their own culture, without history and always seeking sal-
vation from the outside.73 This particular narrative has been prominent in Europe
as evidenced in the UK’s decision in September 2015 to take in 20,000 Syrian refu-
gees over a period of five years directly from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, strictly
based on need – disabled children, women who had been raped and men who
had been tortured.74 In this narrative, argues Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, the normative
framework of the ‘good refugee’ captures women, children and men who have
survived violence and wait patiently in refugee camps to be rescued by European/
western saviours.75 Other images that fall into this categorisation are images of
desperate fathers (or mothers) with their children (e.g. Abdul Halim Attar, the
pen-seller of Beirut with his sleeping daughter on his shoulder and Laith Majid
hugging his children upon arrival in the island of Kos), who can be presented as
human and harmless by virtue of their ability to generate empathy because of
their victimhood. The emphasis too often placed on migrant exceptionalism, to
prove worthiness and harmlessness particularly when one is Muslim, also falls
into this category. This was certainly observable in the heroism of sans papier
Mamadou Gassama from Mali, who saved the life of a toddler and was immedi-
ately granted French citizenship. His case not only emphasises the arbitrariness
of migration policies, but also emphasises the ‘good’ migrant/’bad’ migrant
dichotomy, where his individualism and not his belonging to any cultural, social
and religious group became the cause for celebration. However, had Gassama
committed a violent act, the media coverage and accompanying rhetoric would
have classified him as the threatening ‘other’, with considerable speculation
54 Race & Class 60(2)

about Islam and its influence.76 More broadly, such an act would have again high-
lighted the narrative of the ‘bad Muslim refugee’ and fed into the demand for
closing Europe’s borders. As it is, the persistence of such a narrative leads to the
logical conclusion that drownings in the Mediterranean are ultimately the price
irregular immigrants have to pay for their impatience, and for trying to take
resources from Europeans at a time of austerity.77 In a highly racialised frame-
work, where the ‘bad Muslim refugee’ is perceived as the embodiment of an
‘inferior species’ who can be ‘killed with impunity’78 in western-led interven-
tions, only the rare instances of exceptional acts by a singular actor, or the deaths
of ‘good refugees’ – such as women and children in the Mediterranean – give
Europe slight pause.
The framework of the ‘good Muslim refugee’, however problematic, still has
limited traction in the collision with the far more dominant narrative shaped by the
successful linking of ‘religion’ with conflict and violence, in the social imaginary of
Euro-American public consciousness.79 Over the last three decades, this conflation,
Fekete has argued, has led to an extensive network of national security mecha-
nisms built on institutionalised xeno-racism, comprising systemic religious profil-
ing, policing of Muslim communities, and the introduction of state-of-emergency
legislation and anti-terrorist laws, the extension of police powers and internment
without trial.80 The potent combination of the crisis in European identity, the chal-
lenges of globalisation and the fear of terrorist attacks, on the one hand, and the
scapegoating of irregular immigrants and particularly Muslims, on the other, has
now created a lucrative industry and discourse whereby more recent arrivals in
Europe constitute both an existential and a security threat. This is evident in how
rightwing European politicians and even some centrist political actors have increas-
ingly raised concerns that the presence of the Muslim migrant heralds the end of
European Anglo-Christian identity as it has ‘always existed’. Orban’s arguments
about the need to defend Europe’s Christian border from ‘Muslim invaders’ not-
withstanding, similar concerns have been raised by EU members including Cyprus,
Bulgaria, Estonia, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic, which have openly
considered the arrival of Muslim migrants as a terrorist invasion of Europe.81 The
openly stated preference for Christian refugees also underscores the biopolitical
hierarchy that consistently places the Muslim refugee lower down the pecking
order for state protection. Such sentiments are not confined to rightwing populist
leaders – a 2016 Pew Research Center study showed that 76 per cent of people in
Hungary, 71 per cent in Poland, 61 per cent in Germany, 61 per cent in the
Netherlands and 60 per cent in Italy believe that an influx of refugees will increase
terrorism. Overwhelmingly, all had a negative view of Muslims.82 The study also
revealed that fears linking refugees with criminal behaviour are significant, with
nearly one third, or some 28 per cent, in the UK and 24 per cent in France declaring
refugees are ‘more to blame for crime than other groups’.83
The discussion about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refugees, about who is deemed ‘worthy
of protection’ and fits the ‘perfect victim’ mould, cannot be examined in isolation
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 55

from the broader context of the securitisation of migration. Securitisation has

been defined as a process of social construction that pushes an aspect of regular
politics into the security arena by resorting to a rhetoric of threat and danger
aimed at justifying the adoption of extraordinary measures.84 The concept cer-
tainly helps us to understand the spending of billions of euros constructing
‘Fortress Europe’ as the inevitable consequence of the creation of a continuum of
threats by security professionals, in which the discursive creation of ‘illegal’
migrants has transformed irregular migrants into a ‘risk category’ requiring spe-
cial attention.85
Organisations such as IOM and UNHCR have warned against using the term
‘illegal’ to define such individuals based on three core arguments. First, the term
‘illegal’ deliberately strips people of their humanity and denies them fundamen-
tal rights, irrespective of their status. Second, the simple binary presented in
terms of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ migration obfuscates multiple channels into
irregularity, e.g. clandestinely entering a country without proper authority and/
or with fraudulent documentation; overstaying a visa; sham marriages; fake
adoptions; or entering a country by means of a human smuggler or trafficker as a
de facto refugee, and/or economic migrant.86 Third, illegality implies criminality.
But beyond conferring criminal status on individuals whose only ‘crime’ is the
administrative misdemeanour of lacking the proper documentation to authorise
their presence in a territory, such conflation is guilty of oversimplifying a highly
complex question about the different ways in which a significant number of per-
mutations and eventualities can result in an irregular status that, in another con-
text, would be considered credible.
Despite organisational efforts, the EU remains the only significant interna-
tional actor (followed by the current US administration) to persist in using the
term ‘illegal migration’ with its inherent implications of secrecy, deviance and
criminality, and as the harbinger of security risks. Scholars have emphasised how
the linguistic dimension of criminalisation has profound influence both in policy-
making as well as in public perception.87 Taken together, government discourse,
media representation and popular rhetoric generate the perfect storm; what Dal
Lago calls the tautology of fear, which produces a vision of reality in which it
seems that Europe’s foundations are at stake because of the unprecedented num-
ber of irregular arrivals.88 This conflation of irregular migration with organised
crime has created a dynamic of ‘hyper-criminalisation’, with an emphasis on
techniques for classifying and managing groups based on perceived ‘dangerous-
ness’ rather than focusing on the individual offender.89 The crafting of a series of
laws in EU (and non-EU) members which ‘blur the traditional distinctions
[between] criminal, civil and administrative law’, has also led to the deliberate
categorisation of irregular migrants as ‘a “dangerous” group’.90 This has been a
particularly effective strategy based on the security imperative, enabling the sac-
rifice of the (justice-based) legal order so as to preserve the social order through
raids, detentions and deportations.91
56 Race & Class 60(2)

The desert is growing: narrowing the space for refuge

One of the most effective strategies in the migration management toolkit is a clas-
sification of the migrant which not only strips individuals of their narratives and
negates the complex realities which compel many to move, but also highlights
the extent to which the oversimplified conceptualisation of identity has conse-
quential results. This becomes painfully clear in the context of Afghans who, clas-
sified as ‘bogus’ or ‘failed’ asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ migrants from ‘post-conflict’
Afghanistan, are denied sanctuary in many instances and subjected to deporta-
tion with often fatal consequences. At another level, they and more broadly
Muslim refugees in Europe, are caught between powerful tropes of ‘victimhood’
and ‘security’ with the latter shaped by an entrenched understanding of Islam as
solely a purveyor of violence. It follows then that irregular Muslim asylum seek-
ers in particular are too often conferred hyper-visibility when it comes to con-
cerns about terrorism, while, simultaneously, they can be cast as cultural and
existential threats to European-Christian identity. Certainly, such framing is
deeply consequential given they shape understandings of ‘worthiness’ when it
comes to asylum decisions, while informing strong anti-immigrant and
Islamophobic movements that have increasingly come to the forefront of
European politics, girded by charismatic populist leaders, fiery xenophobic rhet-
oric and socioeconomic turbulence promoted by globalisation.
Irrefutably, the dynamics of labelling and their consequences are not limited
to Afghan and other Muslim asylum seekers but have resonance for ‘irregular’
migrants writ large, exposing the deeply politicised and arbitrary nature of
migration policies. After all, the expansive and dizzying catalogue of termi-
nologies – refugees, displaced, migrants, asylum seekers, expelled, stateless,
repatriated, returned, illegal, unauthorised, undocumented, irregular – have
not indicated a broadening of the humanitarian safety-net to recognise drivers
of displacement, but have, rather, reinforced the power of the state to create
systems of hierarchy, making hyper-visible those who have transgressed a
range of boundaries, and violated the natural order of the state-citizen relation-
ship.92 Furthermore, while terms such as ‘bogus’, ‘genuine’ versus ‘non-genu-
ine’, ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ set up overtly simplistic binaries and serve to reduce
asylum claims, such labels ultimately render the management of mobile popu-
lations more complicated and the recognition of the complex drivers of dis-
placement opaque and confusing.
Such practices demand that closer attention be paid to the naturalisation of
violent border practices by states, practices whose normalisation depends on the
presumed ‘guilt’ of the outsider. This notion of ‘guilt inferred from punishment’
invokes Arendt’s reflection on public acceptance of and support for state vio-
lence, based on the assumption that if ‘these people’ had not committed crimes,
state authorities would not have to use violent means to control them.93 Thus the
contradiction between Europe’s claim to be a human rights champion and its use
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 57

of violence against ‘outsiders’, unremarked by its citizen by-standers, becomes

acceptable and normal, rather than problematised.
Such processes ultimately undermine humanitarian and human rights princi-
ples rather than modernising the Refugee Convention. Perhaps most seriously in
the long term, the politics of labels in EU migration policy illustrates the evolu-
tion of European Orientalist discourse – in the past utilised to legitimise colonisa-
tion and domination, but now used to legitimise incarceration and deportation.
Furthermore, the discourse of the migrant as a political, social, and cultural secu-
rity threat draws imaginary fault lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, effectively per-
petuating cycles of violence that will only intensify until we heed Said’s warning
and stop articulating policy on the basis that ‘we’ have to protect ourselves from
the ‘infection’ of the ‘other’. It is imperative to question which labels are created,
whose labels prevail to define a situation, under what conditions, and with what
consequences, particularly at a time when contemporary developments urge the
creative expansion of the refugee protection regime. Failure to do so is tanta-
mount to continuing to wage a war on the most vulnerable, irreversibly under-
mining the existing refugee regime, and paving the way for collective failure in
the face of a global crisis.

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51 ‘Afghanistan: 10,000 civilian casualties in 2017’.
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60 Biopolitics, first introduced by Foucault, is used to describe the processes through which
regulatory and corrective mechanisms in western democracies have been instrumentalised to
administer life by exercising power over the species body (Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
p. 139). Correspondingly, it follows that categories of exclusion need to be established for
the preservation of citizenship and ideas of universality which are perceived to be otherwise
threatened by the outsider (J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’ [New York:
Routledge, 1993]). The deployment of biopolitics therefore ensures that those ‘who don’t belong
to the state polity’ such as the immigrant, the refugee, and the asylum seeker, are excluded.
 Sajjad: What’s in a name? 61

Agamben, has built on Foucault’s theory of biopower to scrutinise liberal and humanitarian
perspectives in relation to issues of belonging, subjectivity, and inclusion/exclusion, which
has special resonance when applied to the categorisation, treatment and experience of
immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. See for instance, G. Agamben, ‘We refugees’,
Symposium 49, no. 2 (1995), pp. 114–19, https://thehubedu-production.s3.amazonaws.com/
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Studies 17, no. 3 and 4 (2014), p. 447.
62 See, for instance, D. Swanke and H. Betz, ‘Globalization, the welfare state and right-wing
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and T. Immerzeel, ‘Causes and consequences of the rise of populist radical right parties and
movements in Europe’, Current Sociology 65, no. 6 (2017), pp. 909–30.
63 Thomas, ‘Fortress Europe’.
64 El-Tayeb, European Others: queering ethnicity in postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011).
65 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 2012), p. ix.
66 L. Weber and B. Bowling, ‘Valiant beggars and global vagabonds: select, eject, immobilize’,
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67 B. Anderson, Us and Them? The dangerous politics of immigration control (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013); D. Melossi, ‘In a peaceful life: migration and the crime of modernity in
Europe/Italy’, Journal of Punishment & Society 5, no. 4 (2003), pp. 371–97.
68 R. Cholewinski, ‘EU policy on irregular migration: human rights lost’, in Barbara Bogusz,
Ryszard Cholewinski, Adam Cygan and Erika Szyszczak, eds, Irregular Migration and
Human Rights: theoretical, European and international perspectives (immigration and asylum law
and policy in Europe) (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Brill, 2004); J. Huysmans, ‘The European
Union and the securitization of migration’, Journal of Common Market Studies 38, no. 5
(2000), pp. 751–77; G. Karyotis, ‘European migration policy in the aftermath of September
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Robert Reiner, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
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of inclusion and exclusion in the context of immigration and integration’, Journal of Ethnic and
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70 Pastore, P. Monzini and G. Sciortino, ‘Schengen’s soft underbelly? Irregular migration and
human smuggling across land and sea borders to Italy’, International Migration 4, no. 4 (2006),
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71 Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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72 J. Butler, ‘Sexual politics, torture and secular time’, The British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1
(2008), pp. 1–23; P. Mepschen, J. W. Duyvendak and E. Tonkens, ‘Sexual politics, orientalism
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73 M. Mamdani, ‘Good Muslim, bad Muslim: a political perspective on culture and terrorism’,
American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002), pp. 766–75.
62 Race & Class 60(2)

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81 M. Do Céu Pinto Arena, ‘Islamic terrorism in the west and international migrations: the “far”
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91 Ericson, ‘The state of preemption’.
92 M. Pickering, Stereotyping: the politics of representation (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 172.
93 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Miflin Harcourt Publishing
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