Francesco Vecchio

Asylum seekers’ Occupy movement in Hong Kong

This piece offers preliminary reflections on the theoretical justification of a highly organised protest staged against the non-profit organisation contracted by the Hong Kong Government to provide asylum seekers with humanitarian assistance. In so doing, it reveals the central role played by asylum seekers reacting to border policies and practices that cause their immiseration.

From subsistence to resistance: Asylum-seekers and the other ‘Occupy’ in Hong Kong

In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an eight-month-long protest against assistance policies and practices which they argued dehumanised and jeopardised their dignity and survival. Central to this public protest, termed ‘Refugee Occupy’, was the transformation of a traditional mechanism for asylum-seeker containment – the refugee camp – into a vehicle for asylum-seeker voice, participation and resistance. In this article, we discuss the asylum-seeker assistance policies and practices over the last decade that have resulted in a borderless refugee camp in Hong Kong. We explore the asylum-seekers’ use of the camp concept and its spatial and political transformation into an instrument for asylum-seeker resistance and political engagement. We conclude by situating the Refugee Union’s formation alongside other migrant-led social movements in Hong Kong and globally.

Asylum Seeker Materiality and Identity-Building: Shapers of Socio-legal Incarceration

This chapter draws on participatory observation conducted as an outsider with two groups of about ten male asylum seekers each to explain why many asylum seekers in Hong Kong choose to live in spaces that can be defined as ‘slums’. An argument is made that asylum seekers’ choice of dwelling is a consequence of their socio-legal incarceration or confinement within a condition akin to detention, which limits and structures their identity and agency. Given structural factors that produce asylum seeker estrangement and marginalization, identity-based claims are made upon which asylum seekers act to ensure their survival. In so doing, however, they are responsible for shaping the exclusionary context that fashions their struggle to survive and gain a measure of control over their lives. A process of entrapment is thereby evinced, one in which asylum seekers are ensnared for political and economic reasons.

Entrapping Asylum Seekers: Introduction

Asylum seekers are immediately recognizable as a population that faces increasing levels of legal, social and economic precariousness, inherited from their home countries and exacerbated by widespread hostility in host or destination countries that feel anxious, if not outright threatened, by the risk asylum seekers are perceived to pose. This book conceptualizes the precarity endured by asylum seekers as entrapment, and seeks to identify the agents and processes that contribute to this cycle and produce the lived experience of immiseration that has been brought to bear on asylum seekers. This chapter introduces the conceptual framework that forms the genesis of this book evaluating the entrapment of asylum seekers. The case is made for a strident analysis of agency so that asylum seekers are not represented as passive victims. And yet this chapter reveals how asylum seeker responses to their environment may further their precarity and criminalization, reinforcing the policies, practices and discourses of the securitization of migration.