Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe - Multiple Choices

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Refugees in Central and Eastern Europe
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58
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Social Processes
in Asylum
Facilities:
Prospectors and
their Strategies
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Daniel Topinka
This paper outlines some of the strategies used
by asylum seekers in the Czech Republic. It will
seek to explain why asylum seekers should not
be understood as passive entities, but rather as
active ones. They strive to attain their goals and
interact with other people. Strategies are to be understood
as ways of interacting with others ensuring the acquisition
of the necessary tools for achieving goals and ambitions.
The strategies used by asylum seekers prove to be the
result of complex decision-making processes. They select
their own strategies and continuously evaluate and alter
them according to the situation. The goals they set about to
achieve are more or less integrated and projected onto their
value system. According to Merton, the goals and ways of
achieving them are culture-based (Merton, 2000: 134).
Complications may arise when the ways of achieving the
goals are in disagreement with rules valid in the new cultural
environment. Asylum seekers may find themselves in disagreement
with institutionalised practices of the host environment
without being aware they are doing something
inappropriate, harmful or simply bad. The strategies are
connected to a variety of different social backgrounds and
disclose asylum seekers as active persons wanting to
understand the run of events and wishing to affect that run.
The strategic means used by asylum seekers interferes with
the concept of asylum and consequently has led me to
describe them as “prospectors”.
Asylum seekers are very often perceived as
non-active receivers and passive consumers of various
kinds of assistance and humanitarian aid. 1 They are often
depicted as passive beings, identifiable because of their
inferior position as foreigners in closed facilities as they
wait for final decisions on their asylum applications. Such
an image is rather sad, and the lives of asylum seekers are
boring, degrading and beyond the limits of tolerance. This
image is related to how the public, as well as social scientists,
commonly perceive asylum facilities; visible and tangible
places, where claimants wait in a situation of stagnation.
We can identify some of the manifest characteristics of
Goffman's total organisations in the environment of asylum
facilities. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that
asylum seekers are not members of a totally closed community
(Goffman, 1991: 13-116). They can plan their individual
roles; they are not entirely separated from the surrounding
world; they are not deprived of their personal history; and
they are not uniform. Many processes that indicate the
possibility of a civil life can be found. There is also the
homebuilding process, which occurs soon after the arrival
of asylum seekers in an asylum centre, which in turn, leads
onto spontaneous domestication and settlement in a new
environment.
A 'strategy analysis' method has been employed
for the purpose of this paper (Strauss, Corbinová, 1999:
76-78). I have combined my own observations with detailed
analysis of “extraordinary events” documentation and
records of social interviews with asylum seekers, which
originate directly from asylum centres. “Extraordinary
events” are situations recorded by the establishment as
extraordinary happenings, and social notes arise from
interviews with asylum seekers in respect to wider biographical
contexts. Around one hundred documents have been
analysed in the preparation of this paper.
REFUGEE PRODUCTION PLANTS
We must take into account the fact that the establishment
of asylum facilities or so-called refugee camps are
a product of modernity. Refugees have become the state
authorities' controlled objects and have formed a category
of more or less tolerated foreigners. The fact that refugees
were placed in barracks in the beginning and so considered
as an army is symbolic. Even nowadays, there are numerous
military facilities that have been rebuilt partially or temporarily
to serve as refugee facilities within the new refugee infrastructures
in Central and Eastern Europe. 2 The goal of asylum
facilities is to control masses of immigrants/foreigners by
means of high concentration, identification procedures and
categorisation (Malkki, 1995: 497-498).
In a metaphorical sense, the employees of asylum
facilities are quite right when they call these centres
'refugee production plants'. Social control and concentration
are further legitimised by the claims that the facilities
increase the availability of basic and effective humanitarian
or social assistance; cheaper and more accessible care; the
guarantee of quality of services; provision of safety, all of
which are in the interests of asylum seekers. During the
initial phases of the building of infrastructures, the new
democratic states in Central and Eastern Europe emphasised
Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe: Unpacking the Diversity