Governing Asylum without ‘‘Being There”: Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State

Caterina Borelli (), Arnau Poy and Alèxia Rué
Additional contact information
Caterina Borelli: Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Università Ca’ Foscari, 30123 Venice, Italy
Arnau Poy: Department of Social Anthropology, Universitat de Barcelona, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
Alèxia Rué: Department of Social Anthropology, Universitat de Barcelona, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: When, where, and how do asylum seekers encounter the state? Anyone seeking asylum in the Global North might meet state authorities of the country where they want to apply for international protection long before arriving at its borders. However, if the state often becomes “very present” by transcending its geopolitical margins in border control, once asylum seekers have managed to cross into national territory, the state frequently vanishes. Insufficient information, opaque proceedings, difficulties in reaching state agencies, which dramatically increased with the COVID pandemic, often translate into a denial of asylum seekers' rights and their exclusion from welfare programs. Moreover, following a widespread tendency to outsource public services, access to asylum and related welfare programmes are being increasingly mediated by a range of nonstate actors (such as NGOs, activist groups, companies, and individuals) acting as state agents. Drawing on the analysis of ethnographic results from Spain and Italy, this article proposes the concept of “ghost bureaucracy” to theorise the street-level bureaucrats from their absence and explore asylum seekers’ encounters with a seemingly powerful and omnipresent but unreachable state through closed offices, digital bureaucracy and third-party actors.

Keywords: asylum; receptions systems; bureaucracy; street-level bureaucrats; welfare; Italy; Spain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/169/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/169/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:12:y:2023:i:3:p:169-:d:1094751

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().