Ugur Yildiz - Tracing Asylum Journeys: Transnational Mobility of Non-European Refugees to Canada via Turkey

This book explores the asylum journey of non-European asylum applicants who seek asylum in Turkey before resettling in Canada with the aid of the Canadian governments assisted resettlement programme. Based on ethnographic research among Syrian, Afghan, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Iranian, Somali, Sudanese and Congolese nationals it considers the interactions of asylum seekers with both UNHCRs refugee status determination and Canadas refugee resettlement programme. With attention to the practices of migrants, the author shows how the asylum journey contains both mobility and stasis and constitutes a micro-political image of the fluidity and relativity of attributed identities and labels on the part of state migration systems. A multi-sited ethnography that shows how the migration journey is linked to the production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the diffusion of produced knowledge among past, present, and future asylum seekers who form trans-local social networks in the course of their route, in Turkey, and in Canada. Tracing Asylum Journeys will appeal to sociologists and political scientists with interests in migration and transnational studies, and refugee and asylum settlement.

Uur Yldz is Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Aksaray University, Turkey.

Studies in Migration and Diaspora

Series Editor: Anne J. Kershen, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Studies in Migration and Diaspora is a series designed to showcase the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of research in this important field. Volumes in the series cover local, national and global issues and engage with both historical and contemporary events. The books will appeal to scholars, students and all those engaged in the study of migration and diaspora. Amongst the topics covered are minority ethnic relations, transnational movements and the cultural, social and political implications of moving from over there, to over here.

Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region

Migration, Difference and the Politics of Solidarity

Wellbeing of Transnational Muslim Families

Marriage, Law and Gender

Tracing Asylum Journeys

Transnational Mobility of non-European Refugees to Canada via Turkey

Convivial Cultures in Multicultural Cities

Polish Migrant Women in Manchester and Barcelona

Democracy, Diaspora, Territory

Europe and Cross-Border Politics

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1049

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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2020 Uur Yldz

The right of Uur Yldz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-36455-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43130-2 (ebk)

In recent years there has been an increasing amount of research into the migrant experience. This has grown to include not only studies of the point of arrival and settlement but additionally, to focus on the place of departure and the impact of emigration on the sending society. Yet, as Ugur Yldz so accurately points out in this volume, the migrant journey, a significant constituent of that experience, has been somewhat neglected, in spite of being one which frequently determines the eventual destination. The author has sought to enhance what work has been done by putting the migrant odyssey under the theoretical, methodological and empirical microscope. Yldz favours the term odysseydefined as meaning a long adventurous journey and extended process of changeto describe the voyage of those who feature in his study, as the word accurately encapsulates the reality of what his subjects undergo in order to reach their promised land. He stresses that the route from departure to arrival is rarely linear; it is often circumlocutionary with stops which may last months or even years before an asylum seeker can become a registered/recognised refugee, and thus able to complete the journey. During this period the individual lives in a liminal state of what Yldz has termed mobistasismobile yet immobile.

One of the main countries to provide a waiting room for those seeking to make the transition from asylum seeker to official refugee is Turkey; the country which provides the hub for the authors research. According to current figures from the UNHCR, at the time of writing Turkey currently hosts 3.6 million registered refugees from Syria, plus 365,000 persons of concernin other words, asylum seekers, or as the author prefers to call them, asylum travellers. The latter have journeyed from a range of countries in the Middle East and North Africa including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. Asylum seekers are unable to take up permanent residence in Turkey but in accordance with the geographical limitation laid down under the Geneva Convention of 1951 they can apply for confirmed refugee status. Once confirmed status is awarded the refugee can begin the process of moving onwards to the final destination and a new life in countries such as Canada, Australia or the United States. For the purposes of his research the author focused on those who had selected Canada as the chosen goal of their migrant odyssey. He interviewed migrants in countries of departure such as Iran, those in waiting for status decisions in Turkey and (re)settled refugees in Canada.

It is the field work carried out by Yldz70 interviews plus participant observationwhich puts meat on the bones of the recorded migrant experiences. He explores interactions, negotiations and encounters en route and the reactions to the transnational life in waiting; all these stages in the migrants journey contributing to the persons that emerge at the end of the odyssey. The interviewees reveal their various motivations for departure; some generated by economic or intellectual ambition, others from fear of persecution on grounds of religion, gender or sexual proclivities. In certain instances, journeys were undertaken legally, while in other cases, unlawful exit had to be negotiated through the purchase of forged documents or with the aid of illegal travel agents or people traffickers.