Abstracts
Abstract
In recent years, the US government has implemented several bureaucratic changes aimed at stalling the influx of asylum seekers. From the “metering” system initiated under the Obama administration to the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) implemented by the Trump administration, these measures have erected a bureaucratic wall against asylum seekers that has kept them captive in Mexican border cities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tijuana, Mexico, I examine how these policies have produced deadly conditions for asylum seekers by calibrating time and space in such a way that increases their exposure and vulnerability to highly precarious environments and predatory bureaucracies.
Keywords:
- asylum,
- bureaucracies,
- waiting,
- temporality,
- necropolitics,
- Mexico
Résumé
Ces dernières années, le gouvernement américain a mis en oeuvre plusieurs changements bureaucratiques visant à freiner l’afflux de demandeurs d’asile. Du système de «comptage» (metering) initié par l’administration Obama aux «Protocoles de protection des migrants» (Migrant Protection Protocols) mis en oeuvre par l’administration Trump, ces mesures ont érigé un mur bureaucratique contre les demandeurs d’asile les ayant gardés captifs dans les villes frontalières mexicaines. M’appuyant sur une étude de terrain ethnographique réalisée à Tijuana, au Mexique, j’examine la manière dont ces politiques ont produit des conditions meurtrières pour les demandeurs d’asile en calibrant l’espace et le temps de manière à accroître leur exposition et leur vulnérabilité à des environnements hautement précaires et des bureaucraties prédatrices.
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