Introduction

The Bible and the Universal Declaration of Rights imagine a borderless world peopled by migrants who are welcomed, housed and sheltered. The idealism sounds naive in the twenty-first century where movement itself has become the subject of surveillance and imagined lines on maps are materially realized by barbed wire and armed border patrols. International airports signpost the segregation of passport holders from different segments of the globe; corral undesirable migrants from well-heeled or sought after tourists, while security procedures convey a clear message of fortress states, premised on exclusion. Despite the citadel mentality, ‘the closing years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first (are) the age of migration’ (Castle and Miller, 1998, 3) marked by a 14 per cent increase in the number of migrants. Economic opportunity and family reunification continue to be primary reasons to migrate but almost 9 per cent of migrants are refugees and asylum seekers. This seemingly small statistic of 9 per cent dominates twenty-first century considerations of global movement and ‘asylum policies are now at the core of the discussions on migration in many parts of world’ (United Nations, 2002, 35). A consortium of nations have devised ways to blockade their borders, inventing new institutions along migrant routes to sift out ‘economic’ from ‘political’ migrants (Balibar, 2004; Benhabib, 2007; Derrida, 2001; Jain, 2007), a filtering process that deeply affects the experience of migration.

To address politically impelled migrations, an issue of contemporary significance, I move away from analysing the generalized aspects of migrant life and diaspora, and focus instead on asylum seekers as a special category of political migrant.