Asylum for Sale : Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry

This explosive new volume brings together a lively cast of academics, activists, journalists, artists, and people directly impacted by asylum regimes to explain how current practices of asylum align with the neoliberal moment and to present their transformative visions for alternative systems and processes.

Through essays, artworks, photographs, infographics, and illustrations, Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry regards the global asylum regime as an industry characterized by profit-making activity: brokers who facilitate border crossings for a fee; contractors and firms that erect walls, fences, and watchtowers while lobbying governments for bigger “security” budgets; corporations running private detention centers and “managing” deportations; private lawyers charging exorbitant fees; “expert” witnesses; and NGO staff establishing careers while placing asylum seekers into new regimes of monitored vulnerability.

Asylum for Sale challenges readers to move beyond questions of legal, moral, and humanitarian obligations that dominate popular debates regarding asylum seekers. Digging deeper, the authors focus on processes and actors often overlooked in mainstream analyses and on the trends increasingly rendering asylum available only to people with financial and cultural capital. Probing every aspect of the asylum process from crossings to aftermaths, the book provides an in-depth exploration of complex, international networks, policies, and norms that impact people seeking asylum around the world. In highlighting protest as well as profit, Asylum for Sale presents both critical analyses and proposed solutions for resisting and reshaping current and emerging immigration norms.

Siobhán McGuirk is an anthropologist, journalist, curator, and filmmaker whose work focuses on gender and sexuality in the context of migration and the affective impacts of social justice organizing. She is a postdoctoral early career researcher at Goldsmiths University of London and is a member of the editorial collective of Red Pepper magazine.

Adrienne Pine is a critical medical anthropologist whose work has explored the embodiment of structural violence and imperialism in Honduras, cross-cultural approaches to revolutionary nursing, and neoliberal fascism. She is associate professor at American University and author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras.

Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist, physician, and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on social hierarchies and health inequities, focusing on how such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care. He is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.