and instabilities of limbo, the pink card acquired vitality in the intimacies and informalities of daily life, as persons invoked the document through narrative attempts to make sense of their encounters with the asylum procedure. At times, these moments of discursive engagement highlighted the document’s power to immobilize, imprison, or make one vulnerable. Yet individuals also infused the pink card with hopes for belonging, recognition, freedom, access to rights, and economic survival, thus reinterpreting both the pink card and the condition of limbo that it consigned.
In March 2003, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Greek Ministry of Public Order effectively “froze” asylum applications from Iraqis, implicitly anticipating that the situation in Iraq might improve. Between 2003 and 2008, few Iraqi claims were approved or rejected, meaning that many Iraqi asylum seekers could renew their pink cards repeatedly but that their cases rarely progressed to a decision or even a second-instance interview. The extreme difficulty of obtaining an asylum decision made this limbo, for many Iraqis, particularly protracted, lasting months and even years.5 Take, for example, the case of Kamir, an Iraqi Kurd. In an informal interview over coffee in January 2007, he explained that he had been in Greece since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq but that his asylum claim had been “frozen.” He had initially “started out with a pink card,” but after a few years of waiting while working and making a life in Greece, he quit the asylum process and initiated a new process of legalization as an economic migrant, successfully applying for the Greek equivalent of a “green card.” Thanks to his excellent Greek, good education, and an employer who had hired him, this different legalization pathway was ultimately more convenient, and much faster, than the asylum process.6 However, he explained that he was disappointed because he was a refugee and should have been recognized as such.
Kamir’s commentary evoked an ambivalent relationship between the limbo to which he was consigned through the pink card and his own self-identification as a refugee. He suggested that refugee status would have signified the recognition of crucial elements of his experience, while the failure of his asylum claim implied a delegitimization of that history. He discursively associated the green card with this failure, as a document related to economic migration, which labeled him a migrant, not a refugee. A few months after our conversation, however, Kamir traveled back to Iraq to see his family, a trip that would not have been possible had he been an asylum seeker or even a recognized refugee, since the travel document issued to refugees expressly prohibits travel to the holder’s country of origin. Thus, while the green card came to signify a lack of recognition, this document also provided a way out of limbo, with significant forms of mobility.
In addition to the overwhelming frustrations and delegitimizing effects of limbo, many asylum seekers characterized the card as a powerful indicator of physical immobility. Through a series of interviews in spring 2008, Asad, a young man from Somalia, told me how he had attempted a number of entries and undergone multiple expulsions in crossing the border into Greece. After being expelled twice from Greece, in Turkey he arranged for a false passport, and traveled directly from Istanbul to Britain, where his aunt lived. He applied for asylum there, and for a year lived in Manchester while he awaited a decision. The British authorities, however, discovered Asad’s fingerprints registered in Eurodac (the EU biometric data system), revealing that he had first entered the EU via Greece, so they deported him to Athens under the auspices of Dublin II. When he asked for asylum upon arrival at the Athens airport, he was issued a pink card, and finally officially became an asylum seeker in Greece.
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