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This chapter explores the multiple boundaries traversed and accompanying acts of translation entailed in the provision of expertise by anthropologists. The chapter begins with an overview of the asylum process, the criteria constituting persecution, and a description of the bureaucracy and procedures by which asylum is determined. The role of expert witness is then introduced with a focus on the rules of federal evidence that paved the way for greater anthropological involvement in the provision of expertise. The next section reviews some of the extant ethnographic literature to date on the asylum process, highlighting the role of dissonance as a recurrent theme in two different respects: the dissonance that occurs between the asylum applicant and the legal setting, and the dissonance that is created between the asylee and his or her body in the aftermath of trauma. The crafting of the affidavit is then analyzed to illustrate the boundary crossings and acts of translation involved in the appraisal and understanding of asylum, including the traversal of difference in scale, temporality, and the construction of social reality, particularly those espoused by anthropology and law. I suggest that contributing to the protection of human rights through the provision of expert witness is a necessary and mutually beneficial collaboration whereby anthropological evidence, insight, and knowledge provide positive content to legal rights. I conclude that anthropologists are uniquely well qualified in the interlocution of persecution, likening the provision of expertise to fieldwork, as a series of border crossings and acts of translation.

The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the connection between social marketing and transformative service research (TSR), providing a conceptual framework and implications for both theory and practice. The research explores the role marketing plays in a political deterrence campaign and its impact on service systems in meeting the needs of refugees and asylum seekers.

This qualitative research is based on 24 in-depth interviews with service providers, and refugees and asylum seekers and a critical discourse analysis examining campaign materials including political press statements, news media articles and government policy documents.

This paper explores where social marketing and TSR intersect in their aims to promote social change. TSR calls on marketers to address vulnerability related to social issues such as poverty, forced migration and discrimination. The research provides evidence that service systems actors use practices of resistance to challenge dominant discourses in attempts to relieve suffering for refugees and asylum seekers.

The authors contribute by extending the body of work that investigates how service systems can relieve suffering. The study also examines how marketing tactics and strategies underpin a political campaign designed to deter asylum seekers crossing sovereign borders. The research makes three important contributions. First, the research focuses on a significant international problem of better understanding how service systems can relieve suffering for refugees and asylum seekers. Second, it examines how oppositional discourses impact on service systems’ ability to create and sustain social change. Third, it investigates how service systems actors deploy practices of resistance to enact social change.

This research highlights the important role of engaging as consumer-citizens to address social change, particularly for vulnerable groups, such as refugees and asylum seekers.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the key issues of concern for asylum seekers in the UK by focusing on their in depth talk about their experiences, a so far neglected element in the current debate about asylum seeking.

The study involved thematic analysis of asylum seekers’ accounts of their lives in their country of origin, their journeys to the UK and experiences following arrival. Nine participants took part in semi-structured interviews.

Analysis resulted in seven themes; the importance of safety, negative experiences of the Home Office, support, emotional effects, significance of family, hopes for the future and the positive experiences of living in the UK.

Asylum seekers largely left their countries of origin to escape conflict, persecution, violence, arranged marriages and rape. They reported safety as a key concern and for this reason they were scared to return home.

The research found Asylum seekers have fled traumatic situations and then have a difficult time in the UK. A more compassionate and supportive approach is needed. Policy recommendations are made with the aim of improving service responses.

The research demonstrates that the public understanding of asylum seeking does not match asylum seekers’ experiences and increased knowledge may help to improve this (mis) understanding.

There is currently a lack of literature and empirical investigation of this subject area, so this research makes a contribution to the field of understanding asylum seekers’ experiences. The paper's focus is original and important combining asylum seekers’ accounts of their experiences following arrival in the UK. This subject is strategically important due to the pressing need to develop holistic and culturally sensitive research, which bridges and informs academia, more sensitive service responses and civil society.

The Greek Aegean islands of Crete and Lesvos are widely known as prime destinations where tourists come to enjoy the sea, sand, and sun. Yet as geopolitical borderlands of not just Greece but the European Union (EU), they are also crucial points of destination and arrival for both economic and asylum-related migrations. Just as Greece has commanded the spotlight in anxieties and debates regarding the European market (as of 2012), these islands at Europe's periphery are at the center of contestations over European sovereignty, territory, and belonging. Demarcating not just countries but continents and vastly asymmetrical zones of economic development (Lauth Bacas, 2005), the Aegean island borders disrupt also the migratory activities of persons who seek to cross these boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of migration on the livelihoods of Ethiopians. It is widely acclaimed that migration has positive effects on livelihoods. This paper investigates whether this claim is a fallacy or a reality. Can migration be conceptualized as a strategy for livelihood enhancement? Although Ethiopia has a large number of migrants both internally and externally, this paper focuses on the impact of external migration on the livelihoods of Ethiopian migrants and their families.

Using primary data, the paper attempts to establish whether migration enhances livelihoods. Qualitative data are used. Primary data were collected and analyzed using SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is an internet-based software that has a facility for interview questions and it analyses data automatically on submission of responses. The survey achieved a response rate of 52 percent (218 out of 420). A follow-up survey, done between March 20 and April 16, 2018 to validate the online responses, involved 12 respondents.

Results show that migration is important in the sustenance of livelihoods. Both pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits have been realised. In addition, migration also benefits development at home.

The Ethiopian Government should develop policy options that promote the inflow of remittances for livelihood enhancement.

The paper uses SurveyMonkey to gather data from a number of respondents (crowdsourcing data collection). The SurveyMonkey made possible a crowd data gathering process.

Expert witnessing in asylum cases involves depicting the conditions of the applicant’s home country as a context for judging a well-founded fear for life or safety. Most of the elements involved in the work of the expert country witness are dynamic and change over time, creating new challenges and new resources for describing and interpreting country context. Examining several characteristic Honduran asylum cases separated by 20 years reveals not only an increasingly complex and multifaceted set of relevant conditions in both the sending and the host country, but also a significant broadening of the anthropological “tool kit” available to the expert country witness (as the expert witness becomes aware of its relevance to country conditions at a particular time), and an increasingly reflexive and complex relationship of the expert witness to the country in question and to the court. In the interim, emerging problems of contextual complexity, subjectivity, changing and competing images of reality, and the shifting applicability of legal and sociological definitions and categories arise and can be partially addressed with emerging anthropological or social scientific resources, raising anew the nature of the relationship of the expert witness to the court and the possible mutual influence of social science and legal culture upon each other over time. As the number of refugee seekers increases globally, can expert witnesses trained in social sciences help asylum courts to imagine new ways of bridging the gap between legal regimes of governmentality and the subjectivity of refugees?

Reforms of the system for the accommodation and support needs of asylum seekers entering the United Kingdom (UK) during the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries have meant that the support of asylum seekers has largely moved away from mainstream social work to dedicated asylum support teams. This article investigates how the workers engaged as ‘asylum support workers’ understand and make sense of their participation in the support of asylum seekers dispersed across the UK. By drawing on qualitative research with asylum support workers, this paper looks at how such workers make sense of their roles and how the ‘support’ of asylum seekers is conceived. The paper concludes that, by working in this political and controversial area of work, workers are constantly finding ways to negotiate their support role within a dominant framework of control.

The establishment and implementation of a relatively strict immigration regime in Norway has taken place within a vocabulary of equality, humanity, social justice and decency. One aspect is an insistence on a “restricted and controlled” immigration in order to protect a state of equality in Norway and avoid the emergence of a new “underclass.” Another is the stress on Norway’s humanitarian traditions and the rich country’s responsibility towards people in need, also globally. A whole rhetoric has evolved where immigration politics appears as a matter of decency, somehow apart from the more pragmatic tug-of-wars affecting other fields of politics. On the one hand, a “restricted and controlled” immigration is necessary in order to protect certain moral qualities of Norwegian society. But on the other, immigration politics has also appeared as an indicator of the moral qualities of the Norwegian nation-state thus requiring “decent policies” in order not to threaten the image of a nation embodying such moral qualities.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history alongside increasingly restrictive limits on asylum seekers and refugees. In 2020, the US administration established a ceiling for refugees of 18,000 people, the lowest number on record, and only 11,814 refugees were admitted to the United States. The Biden administration has expressed commitments to building a coherent asylum and refugee system and quickly reversing recent detrimental policies. But the administration has cautioned how quickly change might occur, given how “agencies and processes…have been so gutted.”¹

2016 to 2020 included an overwhelming series of changes to laws and policies affecting asylum seekers, often with little documented planning or communication, wreaking severe effects on conditions for asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border. These changes had significant consequences for human rights, most notably the linchpin right of access to information. At the US–Mexico border, must the right “to seek, receive and impart information” be fulfilled in order to fulfill the right to asylum?

While information professionals are not expected to be experts in law, they are experts in understanding the link between access to information and the realization of justice and human rights. This chapter investigates the role of the information professional in the fulfillment of the right to asylum, particularly in the context of contemporary asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border, volatile information landscapes, and the legal and historical framework in the United States for seeking asylum.