In 2016, Uyi, a Nigerian artist, attempted to leave Libya—where he had endured months in prison-like accommodations following a perilous overland journey from his home country—and make it to Europe on an overpacked rubber dinghy. Reflecting on the time he spent being tossed by waves in the Mediterranean, Uyi says: “We stayed on that boat for what felt like days. It was so horrible. You pay to die. That is how it is: you pay to die.”
Uyi survived the voyage thanks to a migrant rescue ship that has since been forced out of service by the homicidal European Union policies often collectively referred to as “Fortress Europe,” which envisions mass drownings as a handy deterrent against continued immigration. In 2016 alone, an estimated five thousand people perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, by far the deadliest migrant corridor in the world. And yet physical death is, it seems, only one way to die in the context of a thoroughly dehumanizing industry that has arisen around anti-migration policies—and that essentially makes migrants pay for their own dehumanization.
I recall an elderly Syrian refugee I met in 2015 in Lebanon, where widespread physical and economic abuse of refugees has merely compounded the trauma of the war they fled at home. As a result, the old man said, many saw themselves as dead already.
Uyi’s reflections appear in one chapter of Asylum for Sale, a new book edited by Siobhán McGuirk—a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London—and Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC. The anthology of writings and artwork takes on the commodification of asylum as a lucrative industry under neoliberal capitalism. Contributors include scholars, activists, journalists, and asylum seekers themselves—such as José López, the pseudonymous author of the book’s first chapter: “On Seeking Refuge from an Undeclared War.”
The war in question is in Honduras, a nation that has long occupied a special place in the sadistic heart of the United States, serving as a base for imperial military and economic operations in the region. In the aftermath of the right-wing coup in 2009, the US increased aid to Honduran security forces that were murdering, raping, and otherwise terrorizing Hondurans; after all, maintaining a corporate-friendly regime in the country was more important to the gringos than, you know, worrying about human rights. The climate of violence and impunity would ultimately cause countless Hondurans to flee towards the United States in the direction of potential safety —for many, a hazard-ridden trajectory rendered only more lethal by frenetic border militarization schemes and the effective criminalization of migration.
López, a gay man involved in the anti-coup resistance, sought asylum in the US in 2016 after concluding that remaining in Tegucigalpa was likely a death sentence. He was interned for three months at the Atlanta City Detention Center — “one of the worst immigration prisons in the country,” he describes it — where the city received $78 per day from the federal government for each Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee, putting the price-tag for López’s own suffering at $7,020. Remarking on the “massive money in asylum”—from private sector prisons to corporate contractors to the exploitation of an underpaid immigrant workforce by the very setup that criminalizes them, as with “illegal” immigrants employed in the prisons themselves—López observes that “it’s an entire economic system,” a “vicious cycle with profit at every stage.” Indeed, not only is profit wrung from the US-backed neoliberal war on Honduras, the victims of that war are then revictimized in the interest of further neoliberal profit and the expansion of the asylum industry. READ MORE AT EL FARO.