use that word—who are always focused on the future, who are always trying to change policy. Then you have legal advisors, who are focused on the present, the way the law is now. And it is really hard for these to combine.” Such differences between ARS workers and many of their European counterparts reflect fundamentally differing institutional ethics, varying individual approaches toward law and labor, as well as the specific habitus (Bourdieu 1977) in which this labor unfolds—the anxieties, passions, pressures, and routines that shape workers’ everyday lives.
These disconnects can, however, also reproduce familiar patterns of marginalization. A European NGO conference was held in Greece (Delphi) in May 2007, marking the new centrality of Greece in pan-European asylum advocacy projects, I heard numerous delegates comment on the closed, disorganized nature of the ARS and how difficult they were to work with. “They are just different,” explained one delegate; another commented that in a role-play meant to illustrate the distinctions between state and NGO interests, ARS staff seemed to have confused the two. Such comments echo the moral critiques often lodged at Greece on a European scale, depicting the ARS as backward, even alien, in cahoots (though perhaps unknowingly) with the very corrupt state it “should” be trying to challenge.
Despite its own marginalizing tendencies, however, the MSS decision itself speaks to the surprisingly effective, hybridized advocacy projects that can sometimes emerge across such differences of approach and power and, in particular, the merging of casework with lobbying efforts. The story told in the MSS decision is uncannily reminiscent of the accounts of numerous asylum seekers with whom I spoke during my ethnographic research at the ARS, some of whom appear in this book. Such stories accumulated both in my notes and in the file cabinets of the ARS, as aid candidates chronicled their entries into the EU/Greece and their (at times successful, but often unsuccessful) attempts to travel to other European member states. Many also spoke of their expulsions back to Greece, a country where most claimed never to have intended to stay. ARS lawyers rarely challenged the EU and Greek legislative frameworks that made such stories possible. Rather, lawyers focused on the myriad procedural tangles in each client’s encounter with the Greek asylum system, whether this involved renewing a client’s identity card, lodging an asylum application, preparing for an asylum hearing, writing an appeal, getting someone out of detention, or reorienting “Dublin Returnees.”
MSS, however, was in touch with a savvy, highly motivated lawyer in Belgium, Zouhaier Chihaoui. Through contact initiated with the court even before MSS’s deportation to Greece, he and his lawyer were able to formulate an effective critique not just of Greece’s asylum procedure but also of EU legislation, in particular, the Dublin II Regulation. The decision also invokes various reports on asylum in Greece issued by EU governing bodies and NGOs (including both Stefan’s NGO and the ARS), as well as the opinions of experts that included former and current ARS workers. However obliquely, the decision served partially as a vehicle of collaboration, which drew, in a patchwork way, on a variety of NGO, governmental, and individual voices to legitimate the judgment. In this sense, the decision also enabled those caseworkers at the ARS to bring their specific, practice-oriented knowledge to a European public. The decision attests not just to the power of the human rights court to influence asylum policy at both supranational and member state levels (Joppke 1998), but also to the important role of NGO collaborations in managing asylum in the EU (Menz 2009:5). The capacity of NGOs (whether case based, lobbying focused, or both) to affect the implementation of law and policy is easy to discount, owing to what Menz has described as their unstable institutional characteristics and “feeble or non-existent links” with government ministries. However, through the very looseness of the networks that they comprise, NGOs often have a surprising—and powerful—flexibility. Moreover, as we see at the ARS, links to government bodies, while often informal, are not always so feeble. European asylum-related NGOs of all stripes take part in both ad hoc and more long-term collaborations with each other across member states and often engage directly in working with both national and supranational governance bodies. Such collaborations, however, are uneasy and uneven (Tsing 2005), and rarely undermine or contest power asymmetries. Rather, advocacy itself unfolds through and often reproduces the multiple forms of marginality constitutive of European governance and geopolitics.
Conclusions
EU and international discourses around the problem of asylum in Greece highlight Greece’s legal, bureaucratic, and moral failures in managing its borders in ways that fulfill EU prerogatives of security and humanitarianism. Yet such logics simultaneously elide and further perpetuate long-standing forms of marginality and asymmetry endemic to EU governance techniques. These moral geographies are instantiated across multiple scales of governance: national, regional, supranational, and international, and in various governmental venues, including legislative bodies and the courts. EU advocacy projects, themselves interlocking with more formal venues of governance, also reproduce these marginalizing tendencies, though often with surprisingly productive effects. The coupling of moral and geopolitical marginality in the management of EU borders is, in some ways, peculiar to the European context, but may also highlight the predicaments of border states more broadly (such as, for instance, in the case of Arizona). This is not to deny the many problems that have plagued the Greek asylum process; indeed, this book, in many respects, is a chronicle of these problems. I want to highlight at the outset of my analysis, however, that such failures are built into the framework of EU border management regimes: border states remain surrogates for systemic and structural problems, and meanwhile “crisis” persists on a European scale.
Chapter 2
Documenting Legal Limbo
Athens “Aliens Police,” July 2009: Armed officers guard the entrance to the compound, a monumental building on a shade-less, fenced, concrete lot. Lawyers and social workers who visit the station regularly are waved through the gates with a smile and a bit of banter, but people with unknown faces must show their papers and explain their business. Those who have appointments at one of the departments, and those accompanied by a lawyer, are usually granted entry. But those who wish to make asylum applications must wait, among the long lines of others waiting, in enormous crowds that cluster in the streets behind the building, invisible to those entering through the main gateway. Presumably owing to the tight surveillance at the external gates, the doors to the building itself are largely free of controls. An x-ray screening system sits to the side of the entrance, dormant and unused, and no one monitors entries and exits—not even the sleeping stray dogs who cool themselves just inside the doorway in the summer heat. Haphazardly arranged photos of Greek tourist attractions, in dusty frames, decorate the walls of the main hall: Meteora, the Olympic complex, a charming island harbor. This high-ceilinged room is a space that people pass through on their ways to various offices and departments, but directly visible to the right as one enters is the crowded waiting area for those awaiting asylum interviews. There, having acquired an appointment to enter the building—after untold hours and even days of waiting in the lines outside—applicants must again wait until asylum officers and interpreters are available to interview them and process their applications.
At the far end of the waiting area is a door marked “interview room,” and directly above the sign is a framed reproduction of an El Greco painting: against a deep blue stormy sky, a ghostly-pale woman looks to the heavens, her eyes rolling up in an expression that is difficult to interpret. I puzzle over this painting with Mariela and Gina, two young social workers who assist women who have been detained. When I suggest that the subject of the painting looks as though she is in pain, Mariela imitates the woman’s rolling eyes and laughs that her expression mimics the boredom of those waiting. We agree that both boredom and pain are appropriate to the atmosphere of the Asylum Division at Allodhapon.
The Aliens and Immigration Directorate of Athens and the Attika Prefecture, on the Boulevard of Petrou Ralli on the outskirts of central Athens, is most often referred to simply as “Allodhapon” [Αλλοδαπών] (of/for aliens) or “Petrou Ralli” by asylum seekers and NGO workers. Allodhapon houses a detention center for undocumented migrants, but during
