the document, he did not retain it, but it was taken away, and he needed a lawyer’s help to reclaim it.
The asylum application, the structuring event of the asylum process within the host country, implies intentionality and active diligence on the part of applicants. While the events that drive persons to flee, cross borders, and seek protection from persecution are framed in asylum legislation as forms of compulsion, one must, nonetheless, request asylum. The asylum claim thus has a strongly directional, intentional quality, and the pink card, as a documentation of this claim, implied specific pathways of law and bureaucracy, with predictable patterns of connection. Yet when I first started tracking the lives of the pink card through the accounts of asylum seekers, I had incredible difficulty identifying its trajectories. The origins of the document—how someone actually acquired it—were particularly confusing. I met many who spoke of acquiring the pink card only through active and extensive effort, but others seemed to have become asylum seekers almost accidentally, receiving a pink card without asking explicitly for asylum. “Asylum” does not play a significant role in this man’s account, but rather, I myself asked him if he tried to apply for asylum on Samos, thus introducing the category into our conversation. He even went on to clarify that he did not know what asylum meant. When he finally acquired a pink card, it was not because he “applied for asylum,” but because his acquaintances told him he needed a “pink card.”
During the period of my primary fieldwork, asylum seekers could officially make asylum applications at any police authority at the border or within Greek territory, whether they had entered with or without documents. Further, police were formally obligated to accept asylum claims, regardless of the apparent credibility of the case, and issue pink cards upon receipt of the application. As we see in this man’s account, however, the procedure rarely unfolded with such openness, and in fact, efforts to make an asylum application did not necessarily entail acquisition of a pink card. Only police officers trained to hear and examine asylum claims could issue pink cards, the vast majority stationed at Allodhapon in Athens. This meant that border sites were rarely locations where a pink card could be obtained, even though they are prime sites for asylum requests. To lodge an asylum claim on the border, a lawyer most often needed to intervene, as in the man’s account of the five Africans on Samos; and even if one succeeded in making an asylum claim at the border, it was often accepted but not examined, owing again to a lack of competent officers.2 This often necessitated that the applicant go to the central police station in Athens to complete the process. Just as one could acquire a pink card without actively asking for asylum, an active attempt to request asylum often did not result in the acquisition of a pink card.
Analytically, the card cannot be easily located in zones of legality or illegality, but rather, moves unpredictably through the shifting spectrum or “continuum” between illegal and legal status and practice (Calavita 2005; Cohen 1991; Coutin 2000). This Syrian asylum seeker repeatedly traveled in and out of partial il/legality, always positioned precariously in sites of limbo contingent on documents that he might, or might not, possess for long. In particular, his two deportation orders highlight the intimate entwinement of legality and illegality in the culture of documentation surrounding migration and asylum in Greece. Stapled to a memo that included the individual’s photograph, name, and country of origin, the deportation order was often the very first document people received when they entered Greece and were released from detention. Issued to those who had entered Greece in a “clandestine” manner or whose legal permission to stay had expired or been revoked, deportation orders stated that the individual had to leave Greece voluntarily by a specific date, usually within one month.3 Nevertheless, many new arrivals described the deportation paper not as an order to leave but as a permission to stay, or as in this man’s account, a paper “good for one month.”
With the increasing EU scrutiny of and involvement in Greece’s migration management processes since 2010, deportation has become a more regular practice. During my primary fieldwork, however, deportations to home countries were rarely carried out, largely because of the expense involved (though migrants from Albania were often bused or carried in vans to the border, owing to the ease and low costs of transport). Others were expelled to Turkey, even if it was not their country of origin, thanks to the Turkey/Greece readmission agreement discussed in Chapter 1. I met many, however, who were never expelled, even though they had received multiple deportation orders and spent multiple periods in detention. Such protracted periods of limbo can heighten the ambiguities surrounding documentary practices. Farzan, an Afghan interpreter at the ARS, told me that many Afghans asked him how to renew their deportation order. He laughed at this absurdity, explaining that to “renew” it, one simply had to get arrested again, much as this man received a new paper each time he was detained. While the deportation document was formally aimed toward expulsion, it was also interpreted as a temporary permission to stay; arrest thus became a form of renewal.
In the documentary practices surrounding asylum in Greece, illegality and legality are closely entwined, easy directionalities explode, and instead we see reversals, transformations, and objects that—like the deportation order—become chimerical. Attending to the unpredictability, mysteriousness, and even chaos, of the pink card’s bureaucratic movements is crucial, owing to the official and even moral force of the asylum claim, which can grant illusory predictability and solidity to asylum-related bureaucracies. These unpredictable, indeterminate qualities permeated every stage of the pink card’s bureaucratic movements, evident also in how both police and asylum seekers engaged with the document.
Police
Allodhapon, July 2008
Accompanied by my partner Salvatore, I went to Allodhapon early in the morning to observe the lines of would-be asylum applicants waiting outside the gates behind the compound. We woke at 4:00 a.m., sweat already forming on our skin, and drove down the loud boulevard of Peiraios until we reached the cross street, Petrou Ralli. We parked near Peiraios, about half a kilometer away, then followed a group of men and a couple of solitary women across an adjacent vacant lot that opened onto a narrow street, Salaminas, fortified by high walls topped with wire. As we stepped out into the street I suddenly saw row on row of people on every available spot of sidewalk, some standing, some sitting, some asleep on cardboard boxes, some stretching and yawning. This scene was even stranger in that I had not heard the crowd; they were eerily quiet and subdued. Looking to my left, in the direction of the station itself, I saw a small cluster of women waiting together and identified what had made the crowd so quiet: a police car parked sideways in the middle of the street blocking further passage, and three visibly armed police officers, two men and one woman.
Allodhapon is a place where a certain invisibility is desirable for researchers. In 2008, heavy criticism by activists, journalists, and NGO workers regarding practices at Allodhapon had made police particularly suspicious; those who took pictures of the crowds were harassed, and an English journalist acquaintance of mine, who had been filming a report for the BBC, was interrogated and his tapes confiscated. As the only light-skinned woman in sight (among so few women in general), it was almost impossible for me to blend in, so Salvatore went to observe the front of the line, where his beard, dark hair, and gender might provide some protection. Meanwhile, I walked a few blocks to the back of the line.
I approached a number of people and asked in both English and Greek why they were waiting, in order to gain insight into how they themselves described their activities. One man who told me that he was from Pakistan explained in English: “Here for paper. Political stay. UN.… Red card.” Then, switching to Greek, he clarified that he had khartia (papers), and he took out his pink card to show me, but he had come with a friend who did not have papers. Without papers, he added, you cannot go openly in the street and cannot work regularly. Two other men approached us. Also from Pakistan, they greeted my conversation partner with familiarity. One of them, clutching an asylum application protected in a plastic sleeve, explained that he had been in Greece for six years, and I was surprised to learn that only now was he trying to obtain papers. His companion said that he too was here for papers,
