Elizabeth Ngari (Women in Exile), Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) und Noémie Adam Onishi (Women in Exile) *
This article is dedicated to the question of externalization and human dignity in the context of asylum in Europe. It is based on the assumption that administrative technologies that organize the accommodation of asylum seekers with the help of models of spatial segregation operate in a logic of externalization. This logic aims at the material implementation of the separation of a population group from mainstream society. Within this framework, asylum and migration policies operate inside a matrix of epistemic, structural, symbolic and material intersectional violence.[1] The “refugee” as an administrative object is created in this context. Media, political and scientific discourses, in turn, contribute to the construction of the representational figure of the “refugee” as an outsider to mainstream society by mobilizing colonial stereotypes of racialization and orientalization, and redeploying them in new historical and social political conjunctures. The “refugee” is thus constructed as an alterity to mainstream society.[2] Externalization, therefore, does not begin when asylum is outsourced to a third country or to colonial enclaves in European countries (e.g. Ceuta and Melilla), or when binational treaties (e.g. Albania, Tunisia) are established on the basis of colonial or imperial historical connections. Rather, externalization already takes shape at the moment when a population is spatially segregated, socially marginalized and unequally treated in the sense of the democratic legal requirement of equality.
The desire for a “dignified life” is often expressed by people seeking or applying for asylum when they are asked about their current living conditions. What does it mean to speak of dignity when laws regulating asylum and migration deny a dignified life? How is the right to dignity denied when people seeking asylum are “outsourced” to “refugee shelters” or “externalized” to islands? This article is dedicated to the question of externalization and human dignity in the context of asylum in Europe. It is based on the assumption that administrative technologies that organize the accommodation of asylum seekers through models of spatial segregation operate according to a logic of externalization. This logic is characterized by the material implementation of the separation of a population group from mainstream society through the production of difference. The “refugee” as an administrative object is thus created by this context. The media as well as political and scientific discourses, in turn, contribute to the construction of the representational figure of the “refugee” as an outsider to mainstream society by mobilizing colonial stereotypes of racialization and orientalization, and redeploying them in new historical and social political contexts. The “refugee” is thus constructed in a relationship of recognition of subjectivity based on alterity as the Other to the construction of a dominant subject by mainstream society.[3] The attribution of social and individual characteristics that construct an inferiority to the hegemonic European subject is produced via characteristics of otherness in the form of religious, cultural, ethnified and racialized difference. The exploitation of labour is legitimized in such discourses, as is the occupation and annexation of territories. The population is separated along hierarchized differential characteristics, along the axis of HuMan[4] and along zones of being and non-being.[5] The extraction of resources and the destruction of cultural, intellectual and political institutions and genealogies is carried out from the perspective of an administration of the world rooted in the institutional, political, cultural and social practices of colonial hegemony. This perception and production of the world takes material forms, and shapes modes of existence[6] through the epistemic establishment of discursive hegemony, the military production of supremacy and the administrative organization of a differential, hierarchizing population policy.
In our current society, this is manifested through the organizational and administrative logic of the coloniality of migration. Within this framework, asylum and migration policies operate on a matrix of epistemic, structural, symbolic and material intersectional violence.[7] EU migration policies, as Susanne Schultz[8] notes, are involved in the reproduction of modalities and technologies of racist differentiation policies. People who have applied for asylum or are in the asylum process experience these state policies of differentiation in a direct and lived way. They are denied the individual choice of a place of residence as long as they are in the asylum process. They are assigned communal forms of housing that segregate them spatially from the local population, and negate the liberal principles of individual autonomy and privacy. Externalization, therefore, not only begins when extraterritorial relocation to a third country or to colonial enclaves in European countries (e.g. Ceuta and Melilla) takes place, but also when binational treaties (e.g. Albania, Tunisia) are established on the basis of colonial or imperial historical connections. Thus, externalization takes shape at the moment a population group is spatially segregated, socially marginalized and treated unequally in terms of the legal requirements of equality. Consequently, the establishment of “refugee accommodations”, as we have observed, operates within this logic of externalization.
The debate on externalization, therefore, not only refers to the de facto geographical relocation of populations within the framework of EU cooperation agreements with third countries in order to “combat the causes of flight”[9] or within the framework of the “migration-development nexus”.[10] The logic of managing asylum reflects the legacy of colonial administrative thinking, which imagines an inferior Other and, as such, actually singles them out spatially, politically and culturally in the colonies or the territories of the colonial power by means of legal and hierarchizing differentiation processes. Refugees and people in situations of precarious migration thus experience the material effects of the coloniality of power. The organization of their everyday lives requires them to navigate administrative technologies that make it difficult or even impossible to exercise their human rights. Their access to fundamental rights, enshrined in the German constitution, such as the right to fair work, education, healthcare, housing and political autonomy, is restricted by migration policies and laws or graded differently in terms of social norms. The status of an “asylum seeker” or an “undocumented migrant”, i.e. a person who finds themselves in a situation without rights as an immigrant citizen, represents an alterity to the members of the civil rights community. The assignment of persons seeking asylum to spatially segregated communal housing facilities points to institutional practices and modes of governance of externalization that are entangled in the historical and social entanglement of modern-colonial relations of domination, which marginalize population groups marked as “inferior others”.
Lager – Relocation – Storage Facility
The organization Women in Exile, run by refugee women, uses the term “Lager” instead of the official term “Flüchtlingsunterkunft” (refugee accommodation) because the former means both camp and storage facility, and better illustrates how people in the asylum process are housed.[11] German asylum accommodations have been modelled on warehouses since the 1970s, which are meant to be large, temporary and precarious. They are often substandard and resemble storage facilities. Lagers typically have shared dormitories, bathrooms, childcare facilities and washrooms. Depending on their intended function, they may have a canteen or communal kitchens. They have offices for social workers and administrative staff, as well as a fence surrounding the site and a security booth at the entrance. Since 2016, the Lager system has been made more stringent by stricter residence regulations (Residenzpflicht), which severely restrict the travel and accommodation options for asylum seekers.
In Brandenburg, where Women in Exile are primarily active, Lagers are often located in remote areas with limited access to public transportation, which presents a challenge for the residents. Women in Exile member Cassie reports her conversation with Elizabeth Ngari (Bethi): “There is a lot of racism here [in Brandenburg]. If you’re a black person standing alone at the bus stop, the drivers don’t stop, so you have to wait another hour for the next bus, which might not stop either.” To save money and be more mobile, many asylum seekers therefore choose to walk to the cities along country roads without sidewalks. The living conditions in the Lagers are difficult. In Brandenburg, often several hundred asylum seekers are housed together, with only a few Lagers having less than one hundred people. Asylum seekers are forced to share rooms with strangers, where they are crammed in with up to six people, sometimes including children and babies. Lagers lack privacy and are often unhygienic, as it is difficult to maintain cleanliness in the communal facilities. These conditions lead to daily conflicts and other difficulties among the residents. Daisy, a resident with diabetes, tells Bethi: “Things that I thought were personal are no longer, such as injecting insulin daily in front of the others I share a room with. This denies me my privacy […] Sometimes I ask myself, what if I could work and pay rent like every other woman in this society?”
Lagers are not the only way in which people stuck in the asylum process are robbed of their humanity. Another form of externalization takes place through the administration of asylum support as an integration measure. As part of the “80-cent jobs” programme, which was introduced with the 2016 Integration Act (Integrationsgesetz), people categorized as “asylum seekers” are hired for tasks such as laundry, cleaning or serving food in camps for a wage of less than one euro per hour. This wage is lower than that of prisoners and is well below the statutory minimum wage of 12.41 euros per hour in Germany in 2024. Refusing to accept this integration measure can lead to a monetary fine. There are currently efforts to expand this program, to make it mandatory for all adult asylum seekers living in Lagers.
In November 2023, the German government introduced a payment card system (Bezahlkarte) for asylum seekers to replace cash benefits. This new system is similar to the vouchers (Gutscheine) that were previously used. Both systems reflect the state’s distrust in the way asylum seekers spend their monthly allowance (between €413 to €460 in 2024), which they receive under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act (Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz). In 2018, one of our members told us: “I can only buy food and toiletries with the vouchers, but no clothes or other things. And I can only shop at Lidl and Aldi, which are in the city centre. I don’t have money for a train ticket, so I’m forced to walk a very long distance, which is even more of a burden.”
The new debit card system faces similar issues, and Brandenburg is one of the first federal states to introduce it. The exclusion and therefore externalization of people from the basic constitutional rights for a regulated and safe life negates their equal status as human beings and citizens, and thus as equal members of society.
Dignity
The category of “asylum seeker” determines the state regulation of the lives and mobility of Lager residents. The liberal concept of freedom, which is characterized by the right to individuality and the right to privacy, is suspended here. The Lager manifests the opposite side of modernity, namely that of coloniality. It emerges from a history of camps, of incarceration and confinement, which is linked to colonial forms of rule[12]. As Michel Agier argues in a study of refugee camps, they are characterized by “the combination of war and humanitarian action” in which life is “kept at a distance from the normal social and political world.”[13] As such, they are laboratories of “large-scale segregation”[14] of people. At the same time, camps are also what Simon Turner and Zachary Whyte call a “carceral junction”[15]: a space defined by the paradox of mobility and enforced immobility. Thus, the people who are forcibly confined in these camps resist the attempt to make a self-determined and communal life impossible by creating communities of mutual care and collective support. It is these practices that restores the dignity of the people in the camps. For the policies of segregation and exclusion of people whose lives are characterized by technologies of control and prevention of migration do not serve to respect the dignity of a human being. When we talk about human dignity, we refer to the right of all people to be treated with respect, regardless of their legal, political and social status. In democratic societies, dignity is a fundamental political and moral value. It affirms the right of every human being to mutual respect and recognition as a person with rights (and duties).
In Western philosophy, dignity is associated with the strong-willed, independent and sovereign subject. From antiquity to European modernity, the ethical principle of dignity was associated with the figure of the imperial ruler, the nobleman or the bourgeois, wealthy, white European man. In the Roman Empire, dignity was closely linked to the status of a ruler. When Marcus Tullius Cicero discusses dignity in his treatise De Officiis (On Duties, Obligations or Moral Responsibility) in 44 BC, he is not talking about a moral-political right to a dignified life. Rather, as Oliver Sensen notes, “dignitas” was a political concept in ancient Rome.[16] It connoted the “elevated position or higher rank of the politically powerful in society.”[17] Dignity was associated with duties, with the realization of one’s political vocation or the representation of an official leadership office. Our understanding of dignity as a moral concept was introduced many centuries later by Immanuel Kant. Kant formulates dignity as an ethical obligation to view human beings as the ends in and of themselves and never merely as the means.[18] For Kant, the dignity of a human being implies an unequalled character and is not interchangeable or alienable from things – or animals.[19] Kant’s distinction between humans, animals and things is inscribed in a cisheteropatriarchal colonial script in which the human (HuMan) was represented by the white, wealthy European male. More recently, this perspective has been challenged in moral philosophy by anti-colonial and decolonial feminists and indigenous critics.[20] By discussing dignity in terms of a relational ontology, these perspectives draw attention to Sylvia Wynter’s distinction between the human and the non-human or Frantz Fanon’s differentiation between the establishment of zones of being and zones of non-being.
Externalization and human dignity
In his analysis of dignity and humiliation experienced by Syrian refugees in Germany, Turkey and the United States, Basileus Zeno concludes that the label “refugee” refers to a humiliating experience.[21] In all three countries, Syrian refugees have been subjected to a differential classification system that divides asylum seekers into different legal categories. Participants in Zeno’s research expressed that this experience was deeply humiliating and devaluing for them as human beings.
The term “refugee” was introduced in Europe as a protective category for people fleeing war and political persecution during the First World War. The League of Nations Refugee Commission in 1921 introduced the category of “refugee”, which was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) after the Second World War. This was adopted by the United Nations Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948. Article 14 of this declaration states that (1) everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution, and that (2) this right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Following these principles, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in 1950, followed by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was supplemented by the 1967 Protocol, in which asylum is enshrined as a universal fundamental right and international obligation. This date also marks the inclusion of non-European refugees in the universal right to asylum. Three basic principles for the protection of refugees were established: Non-discrimination, non-punishment and non-refoulement. The principle of non-discrimination refers to any form of unequal treatment based on gender, sexuality, disability, racism, country of origin, religion or age.
In times of increasing, modern, colonial global wars, genocides and political conflicts, the right to asylum as an inherent human value is linked to the moral-political constitutional recognition of human dignity. In the German case, the moral-political value of human dignity is anchored in the constitution of the nation state. After the experiences of the Shoah and the Second World War, the first article of the German Constitutional Law of 1949 contains the statement “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (Human dignity is inviolable). However, the people who come to Germany as “refugees” often experience the opposite. Confronted with administrative social hierarchies and mechanisms of degradation and exclusion from fundamental human rights as asylum seekers applicants or with temporary refugee status, they find that their rights to human dignity are denied.
In countries such as Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and the USA, far-right discourses have found their way into political discourse. This is reflected in the adoption of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) by the European Commission on December 20, 2023. This system introduces new regulations to restrict the right to asylum by creating a uniform management of border and immigration control within the European Union through the introduction of a fingerprint database, the tightening of new control regulations at European borders and the creation of uniform rules for asylum applications. These measures also include the externalization of border controls, refugee detention centres and immigration agencies in Northern Africa or in Mauritania and Rwanda, and Eastern Europe, for example in Albania. Under these circumstances, the term refugee has been shorn of its moral philosophical and political content in terms of human dignity. It has rather become a cipher for the restriction of human rights. Today, the legal category of “refugee” is linked to the “objectification” of human beings in the context of the coloniality of migration. This is because asylum and migration policy controls undermine fundamental human rights to food sovereignty, education, political participation, social well-being, security and a just livelihood. Political activists such as Women in Exile in Germany point to this structural disregard for the human dignity and human rights of refugees, especially women*.
Building Bridges: Women in Exile
Women in Exile & Friends formulate demands for fair living conditions for people in the asylum process, e.g. the right to self-selected housing while their asylum application is being processed. Over the past two decades, the organization (WiE) of asylum-seeking women for asylum-seeking women has crossed many borders and built many bridges. Since its foundation in 2012, regular meetings have been organized for asylum-seeking women only, which serve to strengthen self-determination. At these meetings, members have been invited to put their experiences into words. Mama, a member of WiE, says that she was given sheets of paper to “(…) write down her problems: I wrote about Duldung [a temporary residence permit granted to rejected asylum seekers who cannot be deported]. Based on the problems we wrote down, we learned how to solve them individually and how to fight them politically together, because everything is connected.” Over the years, WiE has also developed expert-led workshops on state benefits, deportation, health insurance and other relevant laws for asylum seekers. After these workshops, participants are better able to assess information and develop collective strategies of resistance. Another focus of the work being done is on health care for cases of mental illness that have arisen as part of the refugee experience, especially for new arrivals. Mentors offer backing and support here.
Women in Exile works to establish a dignified practice of living together that opposes structural forms of externalization from the community, despite the impediments to a dignified life caused by the asylum procedure regulations. WiE live a dignified life by taking their well-being into their own hands. To achieve this, they support each other by creating safe spaces for healing and self-determined living. WiE’s success is based on sharing individual and collective experiences of flight, exile and dealing with the German asylum system.
Afterword: Rita, 1987 – 2019
Women in Exile dedicates this article to our sister Rita Awour Ojungé, a 32-year-old asylum seeker who disappeared from the Lager in Hohenleipsisch, Brandenburg, on April 7, 2019. Although local residents reported her disappearance, the police did not react until the network pressured them. Her body was found three months later with burn marks just 200 meters from the Lager. Rita had lived in Germany for seven years, and left two small children behind. WiE visited her in the Lager several times. The Lager is located in an isolated forest, shielded from the outside world by barbed wire and guarded around the clock. Despite persistent pressure from WiE, the Lager remains open. This affects the future of the children and the opportunities of the adults who continue to live there. Tragically, the police investigation into Rita’s death has stalled. However, WiE’s fight for justice continues. WiE is calling for a prompt resolution and legal conviction. We echo their words: “We will continue to remember Rita and demand change. Justice for Rita now! Abolish all camps! Close all camps!”
We would like to thank Maya Heins for the translation of the original texts into English.
Footnotes
* We would like to thank Maya Heins for translating this text.
[1] Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2023. Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons. Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure. New York: Anthem Press.
[2] Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Américas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum.
[3] Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Américas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum.
[4] Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation – An Argument’. The New Centennial Review 3, 3: 257-337.
[5] Fanon, Frantz. 2008 [1952]. Peau noire, masques blancs. Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox (trans), New York: Grove Books; and Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being”. Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 240-270.
[6] Maihofer, Andrea. 1995. Geschlecht als Existenzweise. Frankfurt am Main.
[7] Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2023. Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons. Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure. New York: Anthem Press.
[8] Schultz, Susanne. 2023. Reproductive Racism: Migration, birth control, and the specter of population. Vol. 1. Anthem Press.
[9] Kopp, Judith. 2023. Fluchtursachenbekämpfung: Umkämpfte Migrationspolitik im Sommer der Migration 2015. transcript Verlag.
[10] Lavenex, Sandra and Rahel Kunz. 2008. “The migration-development nexus in EU external relations”. European Integration 30.3: 439-457.
[11] Women in Exile 2022, Breaking Borders to Build Bridges 20 Years of Women in Exile. Münster: edition assemblage.
[12] See here Peters, Michael A. 2018. “The refugee camp as a biopolitical paradigm of the West”. Philosophy and Theory of Education 50 (13): 1165-68.
[13] Agier, Michel. 2002. ‘Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps’. Ethnography 3, no. 3: 317-41, here p. 320.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Turner, Simon and Zachary Whyte. 2022. ‘Introduction: Refugee Camps as Carceral Junctions’. Incarceration: An international journal of imprisonment, detention and coercive confinement, April, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26326663221084591?casa_token=oMQ0fyBzLmAAAAAA:mPY7CGeG_wKKsn7wP1WlXArglIvtt_oPOE5t3IMVA4J4vqgcX5GT3JPwCib12yottAUCsUrY_GiIs14 (accessed July 2024).
[16] Sensen, Oliver. 2011. ‘Human Dignity in Historical Perspective: The Contemporary and Traditional Paradigms.’ European Journal of Political Theory, 10 (1): 71-91.
[17] Ibid, p. 312.
[18] Kant, Immanuel, 1785 [1996]. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. Translated as “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785)”, in Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary J. Gregor (ed.). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[19] See Sensen, Oliver. 2009. Kant’s concept of human dignity”. Kant-Studien 100, pp. 309-331, here p. 311.
[20] Lu-Adler, Huaping. 2023. Kant, Ethnicity and Racism: Views from Somewhere. Oxford University Press; and Mejía, María Isabel. 2023. An intersectional decolonial feminist critique of Kant. Dissertation submitted to the University of Illinois at Chicago.
[21] Zeno, Basileus. 2017. “Dignity and humiliation: identity formation among Syrian refugees.” Middle East Law and Governance (9.3): 282-297.