Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground o

Intensifying the exploitation of underground resources has been suggested as a solution for Europe's raphael hotel chicago crisis-ridden regions. But who really owns these resources? And where do the proceeds from their exploitation go? Evie Papada reviews the situation in the villages of Chalkidiki, Greece. [ more ]
In "Vagant", philosopher Alberto Toscano goes to the heart of today's fanaticisms; "Bl�tter" wonders where the rise and rise of a German Europe will lead; "Letras Libres" profiles Podemos; "Index" reveals how refugee stories are told; "La Revue nouvelle" slams the framing of the migrant as the ideal suspect; "A2" questions the scope of the Greek parliamentary revolt; in "Il Mulino", Nadia Urbinati sees right through the "Renzi s�, Renzi no" debate; and "Nova Istra" marks the long centenary raphael hotel chicago of World War I.
Imogen Tyler looks at how the manufacture of an asylum invasion complex within the public sphere aided the passing of UK legislation that reconstituted the refugee as a "national abject". That is, as a (likely raphael hotel chicago bogus) asylum-seeker subject to destitution, detention and exclusion.
In May 2003, Abas Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker, stitched up his mouth, ears and eyes in protest against raphael hotel chicago a decision by the British government to deport him. 30-year-old Amini had been repeatedly detained raphael hotel chicago for his political activism in Iran, spending a cumulative total of six years of his life in prison. A poet, atheist and a member raphael hotel chicago of an underground communist organisation, he had been involved raphael hotel chicago in a Kurdish resistance movement from the age of 12, but in later years his primary act of protest was the writing of poetry critical raphael hotel chicago of the Islamic Republic, which he distributed at social and political gatherings. Amini was well known in Iran for his dissenting raphael hotel chicago verse about figures in the regime such as Ayatollah Sadeq Givi "the hanging judge". During periods of imprisonment in Iran, Amini suffered long spells in solitary confinement, raphael hotel chicago beatings (often on the soles of his feet) and mock executions where he was suspended off the ground, on some occasions for more than two days. Amini escaped from prison and a 22-year prison sentence in June 2001, after friends bribed raphael hotel chicago a guard to release him. Leaving his wife, children and siblings behind in Iranian Kurdistan he escaped across the border to Turkey and then crossed over to Greece, where he stayed for several months. "He then hid on a boat going to Italy and took a train to France, locking himself in the toilets for most of the journey north. He reached England by strapping himself to the bottom of a truck going through the Channel Tunnel" (Hodge, 2004).
Yarlswood Immigration and Detention Centre, raphael hotel chicago operated raphael hotel chicago by Serco Group, 14 December 2005. Photo: geograph.org.uk . Source: Wikimedia Despite the stop-overs en route to Britain, Amini's lawyers felt his claim for political asylum in Britain would be straightforward. Not only was Amini known to be a vocal opponent of the regime in Iran, he had medical evidence of the torture he had endured in prison. He waited for two years to hear if his application for political asylum raphael hotel chicago was successful, during which time his case was adjourned five times. In the spring of 2003, he was finally granted leave to remain, but a few weeks later he received a letter informing him that Home Office had launched an appeal against the decision of the immigration court. Destitute and facing deportation Amini, in his words, "couldn't take any more [...] the pressure on me was so huge that I got to the point where I thought there was no hope" (in Branigan, 2003). Amini made the decision raphael hotel chicago to die in Britain rather than be returned to detention and torture in an Iranian prison: "I would rather die like this gradually, a thousand times than face the injustices, the oppression, the lack of any human rights or any humanity I was facing in Iran" (in Lyall, 2003). So he found himself, standing before a mirror in his Nottingham home, needle and thread in his hand, determined to communicate and protest his abject raphael hotel chicago situation. If Amini's protest began as a singular act of revolt, it rapidly garnered wider support as 200 people gathered in solidarity in the street in front of the modest terraced house in which he lived. His home was transformed into a shrine for anti-deportation activism, adorned with printed and handwritten posters and banners, declaring "Abas Amini is our friend", "FREEDOM","EQUALITY", "HUMANITY has NO BORDERS". The Federation of Iranian Refugees, together with other migrants, asylum advocacy groups and human-rights activists, briefly transformed this small part of Nottingham into a place of resistance raphael hotel chicago to protest raphael hotel chicago the incremental erosion raphael hotel chicago of the rights to asylum within raphael hotel chicago the British state.
This article is part of the Eurozine focal point Beyond Fortress Europe . The scale of the human tragedy afflicting migrants who seek entry to Fortress Europe has increased dramatically of late, triggering a new European debate on laws, borders and human rights. A debate riddled with the complex, often epic, narratives that underlie immediate crisis situations. [more]
Since Britain began to institute raphael hotel chicago its inhumane asylum system in the 1990s, lip-sewing, hunger strikes raphael hotel chicago self-harm and suicides have become ordinary features of national life for those caught in the "abject diaspora", the "deportspora" at the borders of the British state (Nyers, 2003: 1070). Indeed, there have been hundreds of protests by asylum-seekers in Britain, raphael hotel chicago but few of them have received any significant mainstream media coverage. There was nothing exceptional then about Amini's case or his protest, except for the extraordinary media attention it garnered. raphael hotel chicago For his protest not only gathered local support but attracted significant national and international news coverage and it continues to have a considerable documentary after-life in activist publications, newspaper stories, photographs, theatrical plays, art works and exhibitions, in academic writing on migrancy and citizenship, and in scholarly work on abject aesthetics and body-protest. In short, through this protest, raphael hotel chicago Amini became "an international cause c�l�bre" for those who oppose the British government's systematic erosion of the rights to asylum. Writing here a decade later, I want to consider Amini's protest as a political parable raphael hotel chicago through which to examine raphael hotel chicago the constellation of historical, political and economic forces raphael hotel chicago which gave rise to the fabrication and institution of an "asylum raphael hotel chicago invasion complex" within the British state. This mapping of the asylum-invasion complex will focus on the public stigmatization of asylum-seekers as revolting subjects during the period of New Labour government (1997-2010), but speaks to current worsening social and economic conditions and rising xenophobia against irregular migrants across Europe.
The invasion complex One of the most powerful British national myths is that this state has an ancient and proud history of granting asylum to foreign nationals fleeing raphael hotel chicago religious or political persecution. Despite the continued repetition of this myth, in reality those welcomed to Britain, and those banished from its territorial space, have long been classified, differentiated and hierarchized along class, ethnic and racial lines according to the prevailing raphael hotel chicago ideological, political and economic climate of the time. It was in the Victorian raphael hotel chicago era that the myth of the "ancient right of asylum" became embedded in national life, as part of Britain's self-fashioned imperial identity as a Paternalistic, liberal and civilizing force in the world (see Porter, 1979). In the face of international pressure to deport a number of high-profile political asylum-seekers in 1853, a Times editorial pronounced:
Every civilized people on the face of the earth must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations , and that it will defend the asylum to the last ounce of its treasure, and the last drop of its blood. There is no point whatsoever on which we are prouder and more resolute [...] We are a nation raphael hotel chicago of refugees. [...] all Europe knows and respects the asylum of these isles (in Porter, 1979: 7) Karl Marx, then a German political refugee who later died stateless in London in 1883, is retrospectively celebrated as one of those dangerous political agitators whom foreign governments called on Britain to expulse. In a letter published in The Spectator , The Sun and The Northern Star in 1850 in response to a proposed revision raphael hotel chicago of the 1798 Alien Bill which would allow the British government to deport undesirable foreign nationals, Marx (along with Friedrich Engels and August raphael hotel chicago Willich) described raphael hotel chicago "the long-established reputation raphael hotel chicago of England as safest asylum for refugees of all parties and of all countries" (Marx, Engels, & Willich, 1850). A campaigner for the rights of refugees, Marx was highly critical of what he perceived as the erosion raphael hotel chicago of rights to asylum in Britain. In particular, he was concerned with the double-standards around the promotion of a liberal rhetoric of asylum, and the British government's imperialist policies which were producing increasing numbers of political and economic migrants. Given his politics, Marx was most concerned about the impact of internal migration from the wider British Isles to English industrial towns and cities, which he perceived to be creating ethnic divisions and hatreds within the proletariat raphael hotel chicago population. Hence, he focused his critical attention on migrations effected by the pauperization of rural peasants in England and the Scottish highlands, and on the mass evictions, raphael hotel chicago religious and political persecution of Irish peasants (Ireland was then under English rule). As Marx notes in an 1853 New York Daily Tribune article titled "Forced Emigration":
Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden to the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue! (Marx, 1853) As Marx argued, while up to 2,000 upper and middle-class political ref