On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
decision served partially as a vehicle of collaboration, which drew, in a patchwork way, on a variety of NGO, governmental, and individual voices to legitimate the judgment. In this sense, the decision also enabled those caseworkers at the ARS to bring their specific, practice-oriented knowledge to a European public. The decision attests not just to the power of the human rights court to influence asylum policy at both supranational and member state levels (Joppke 1998), but also to the important role of NGO collaborations in managing asylum in the EU (Menz 2009:5). The capacity of NGOs (whether case based, lobbying focused, or both) to affect the implementation of law and policy is easy to discount, owing to what Menz has described as their unstable institutional characteristics and “feeble or non-existent links” with government ministries. However, through the very looseness of the networks that they comprise, NGOs often have a surprising—and powerful—flexibility. Moreover, as we see at the ARS, links to government bodies, while often informal, are not always so feeble. European asylum-related NGOs of all stripes take part in both ad hoc and more long-term collaborations with each other across member states and often engage directly in working with both national and supranational governance bodies. Such collaborations, however, are uneasy and uneven (Tsing 2005), and rarely undermine or contest power asymmetries. Rather, advocacy itself unfolds through and often reproduces the multiple forms of marginality constitutive of European governance and geopolitics.
Conclusions
EU and international discourses around the problem of asylum in Greece highlight Greece’s legal, bureaucratic, and moral failures in managing its borders in ways that fulfill EU prerogatives of security and humanitarianism. Yet such logics simultaneously elide and further perpetuate long-standing forms of marginality and asymmetry endemic to EU governance techniques. These moral geographies are instantiated across multiple scales of governance: national, regional, supranational, and international, and in various governmental venues, including legislative bodies and the courts. EU advocacy projects, themselves interlocking with more formal venues of governance, also reproduce these marginalizing tendencies, though often with surprisingly productive effects. The coupling of moral and geopolitical marginality in the management of EU borders is, in some ways, peculiar to the European context, but may also highlight the predicaments of border states more broadly (such as, for instance, in the case of Arizona). This is not to deny the many problems that have plagued the Greek asylum process; indeed, this book, in many respects, is a chronicle of these problems. I want to highlight at the outset of my analysis, however, that such failures are built into the framework of EU border management regimes: border states remain surrogates for systemic and structural problems, and meanwhile “crisis” persists on a European scale.
Chapter 2
Documenting Legal Limbo
Athens “Aliens Police,” July 2009: Armed officers guard the entrance to the compound, a monumental building on a shade-less, fenced, concrete lot. Lawyers and social workers who visit the station regularly are waved through the gates with a smile and a bit of banter, but people with unknown faces must show their papers and explain their business. Those who have appointments at one of the departments, and those accompanied by a lawyer, are usually granted entry. But those who wish to make asylum applications must wait, among the long lines of others waiting, in enormous crowds that cluster in the streets behind the building, invisible to those entering through the main gateway. Presumably owing to the tight surveillance at the external gates, the doors to the building itself are largely free of controls. An x-ray screening system sits to the side of the entrance, dormant and unused, and no one monitors entries and exits—not even the sleeping stray dogs who cool themselves just inside the doorway in the summer heat. Haphazardly arranged photos of Greek tourist attractions, in dusty frames, decorate the walls of the main hall: Meteora, the Olympic complex, a charming island harbor. This high-ceilinged room is a space that people pass through on their ways to various offices and departments, but directly visible to the right as one enters is the crowded waiting area for those awaiting asylum interviews. There, having acquired an appointment to enter the building—after untold hours and even days of waiting in the lines outside—applicants must again wait until asylum officers and interpreters are available to interview them and process their applications.
At the far end of the waiting area is a door marked “interview room,” and directly above the sign is a framed reproduction of an El Greco painting: against a deep blue stormy sky, a ghostly-pale woman looks to the heavens, her eyes rolling up in an expression that is difficult to interpret. I puzzle over this painting with Mariela and Gina, two young social workers who assist women who have been detained. When I suggest that the subject of the painting looks as though she is in pain, Mariela imitates the woman’s rolling eyes and laughs that her expression mimics the boredom of those waiting. We agree that both boredom and pain are appropriate to the atmosphere of the Asylum Division at Allodhapon.
The Aliens and Immigration Directorate of Athens and the Attika Prefecture, on the Boulevard of Petrou Ralli on the outskirts of central Athens, is most often referred to simply as “Allodhapon” [Αλλοδαπών] (of/for aliens) or “Petrou Ralli” by asylum seekers and NGO workers. Allodhapon houses a detention center for undocumented migrants, but during the research for this book it was also the police station with the largest number of officers qualified to examine asylum cases. New applicants filed asylum claims at Allodhapon and police presented them with “pink cards,” the identity documents to which asylum seekers were entitled as long as their claims remained in limbo.1 Allodhapon was thus a central apparatus in the bureaucratic machinery of asylum in Greece; it was also the place where new applicants came face-to-face with the regulatory authority of the state through encounters with the police.
In this chapter I approach the roz karta [ρόζ κάρτα] (pink card) as an entry point into the multiple forms of limbo that characterize asylum seeking in Greece. I follow the pink card’s “career” (Brenneis 2007) or life from its bureaucratic production at Allodhapon, through its circulation in the talk and everyday survival practices of asylum seekers, to its final disappearance at the end of the asylum process. Throughout, I consider how the document also acquired various “lives”—diverse meanings and uses—through the engagements of police, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers. Finally, I consider how the document as a thing-in-itself had an important role in governing both persons and regulatory technologies, and how its materiality enabled and foreclosed various legal, political, and social futures. The many lives of this document highlight the indeterminate relationship between bureaucracy, governance, and subjectivity in the assignment of limbo status.
The Governance of “Things”
Not unlike the U.S. “green card,” the denotation of the pink card through its color was overtly straightforward and yet appropriate. Its pinkness first announced its presence, but you might also have noticed its fragility or makeshift quality. Some cards were wrinkled and torn at the edges; others had been laminated, covered with protective tape, or inserted in plastic sleeves. Cards displayed a photograph of the bearer and the written marks of rushed hands in blue, black, and red inks. Some asylum seekers kept their pink cards casually in their back pockets; others took them gingerly out of wallets or folders, where they had been carefully placed among other documents. Asylum applicants were required to have this document with them at all times, in the event that police stopped them and ask for khartia [χαρτιά] (papers), or taftotita [ταυτότητα] (identification). But unlike passports or credit cards, pink cards were not made to last. The traces of travels, labors, and bureaucracies were rendered tactile on this paper through smudges of dirt and moisture, in creases and folds and crinkled edges. Newly minted cards were sturdier and brighter, while those that had withstood multiple renewals were often wilted like fading roses, washed out through everyday handling by the bearer, police, and lawyers.
In this chapter, I show that through its association with the ambiguities of limbo, this document served to make asylum seekers illegible to both the state and themselves. Recent ethnographic scholarship has shown that “governmentality” (Foucault 2009 [2004]) and subjectivity are mutually and dialogically constituted (Coutin 2000; Coutin and Yngvesson 2006; Fassin and Rechtman 2010; Ong 1999). Despite the fluid interplay between governance and subject