Lucy Mayblin - Impoverishment and Asylum

Impoverishment and Asylum argues that a shift has taken place in recent decades from construing asylum as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, to construing it as primarily an economic phenomenon, and that this shift has led to the purposeful impoverishment, by the state, of people seeking asylum in the UK.

This shift has had far-reaching consequences for people seeking asylum, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic pull factor leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups that seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes.

This book argues that within this context asylum support policies in the UK which are meant to help and protect, in fact do serious harm to their recipients. It argues that the shift from construing asylum seekers as economically, rather than politically, motivated migrants across the West, is part of a much broader set of historical and philosophical worldviews than has previously been articulated. The book offers a rigorously researched and richly theorised analysis drawing on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in making sense of the purposeful impoverishment by the state of a particular group of people, and why this continues to be tolerated in the fourth richest country in the world.

Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of numerous publications in the field of refugee and migration studies, including the book Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (2017), which won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize from the British Sociological Association.

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Impoverishment and Asylum

Social Policy as Slow Violence

Lucy Mayblin

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First published 2020

by Routledge

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2020 Lucy Mayblin

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

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mayblin, Lucy, author.

Title: Impoverishment and asylum : social policy as slow violence /

Lucy Mayblin.

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :

Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge advances in sociology |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043323 (print) | LCCN 2019043324

(ebook) | ISBN 9780367423100 (hardback) | ISBN

9780367823450 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: RefugeesGreat BritainSocial conditions. |

RefugeesGreat BritainEconomic conditions. | Great

BritainEmigration and immigrationGovernment policy. |

Great BritainEmigration and immigrationPublic opinion.

Classification: LCC HV640.4.G7 M39 2020 (print) | LCC

HV640.4.G7 (ebook) | DDC 362.87/5610941dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043323

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043324

ISBN: 978-0-367-42310-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-82345-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVanatage, LLC

The research project that enabled me to undertake the research necessary for this book was generously funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, under its Future Research Leaders Scheme. While the funding title implies a single excellent research leader who produces all of the ideas and works completely independently, in fact many people made this project, and book, possible. The project was supported by a team of totally awesome women who formed the advisory board: Louise Waite, Katie Bales, Jenny Phillimore, Lisa Doyle, Alice Bloch, and Hannah Lewis. They were inspiring and supportive in equal measure, despite being extremely busy. Poppy James, Mustafa Wake, and Mohsen Kazemi, as well as another researcher who will remain nameless, all worked directly on the project as research assistants and were fantastic. The European University Institute hosted me (and my family) for three months in 2016. That was a wonderful experience and very fruitful for the project in terms of thinking about the economic rights of people seeking asylum in international comparative perspective; many thanks to Andrew Geddes for helping to set that up, and to all of the lovely people who I met while there. I am very grateful to Rodrigo Edema and Sarah Eldridge at Sheffield City of Sanctuary, to Gina Clayton at ASSIST, to the research team at the British Red Cross in London, to Lucy Smith and Dave Smith at NACCOM, and to Kate Smart at Asylum Welcome for being excellent collaborators and for teaching me so much about the British asylum system and the harms that it wreaks. Thanks also to many colleagues and friends who have supported me in various ways from hiring me to reading draft papers and to reviewing the proposal for this book; in no particular order: John Solomos, Sarah Neal, Gurminder K Bhambra, Joe Turner, Katherine Jenson, and also to Emily Briggs at Routledge. Thanks also, and always, to Christine Booth, Roger Mayblin, and Michael Farrelly for maximum support on the home front that makes everything else possible.