Papers of the Paperless: Governmentality,Technologies of Freedom,and the Production of Asylum-Seeker Identities

Abstract

Refugees become asylum-seekers not only because the receiving country gives them the bureaucratic-legal status but also because they start to identify with the status. This article examines how refugees learn to be asylum-seekers even when they question asylum decisions. It uses Foucault's idea of governmentality to assess how governmental policies become translated into asylum-seekers’ collective and personal conducts as asylum-seekers, sometimes in ways that undermine the official policy. This article introduces the idea of papered governmentality, in which the production of papers is a governmental technology to manage not only populations but also personal identities and conducts. It investigates how asylum-seekers’ own role in papered governmentality as receivers, producers, and users of various papers in the asylum process transforms their conducts and identities in ways that reshape how they are governed. The empirical research site was an asylum-seekers’ protest in Finland where the first author conducted participant observation about how papers included in the asylum process were collected, read, discussed, circulated, and co-produced. The article finds that when migration control utilizes laws, bureaucratic documents, and other liberal governmental technologies designed to modify autonomous individuals’ own decisions to migrate, it produces not only control but also identification with the host country and some freedom to choose how to act with governmental decisions.

Introduction

In February 2017, a group of Iraqi asylum-seekers, soon joined by Afghans, raised tents in freezing Finnish nights to highlight the plight of asylum-seekers expelled from reception centers after their asylum applications were rejected. Rectifying incompetent and unjust paperwork by the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) was among their main demands (Näre 2020). The tent protest, originally meant to last for a weekend, developed into the Right to Live demonstration that lasted for two hundred days outside the Helsinki Railway Station and the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma. Finnish supporters from various backgrounds, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), churches, art, universities, activism, and Finnish families housing asylum-seekers, joined the protest. Passers-by stopped to converse or to donate food and coal to keep protesters fed and warm. The protest, provoked by grievances with the papered asylum process, became a site for papered activism that contested what bureaucrats had written on papers by making it public or by advising asylum-seekers, many of them occasional visitors, about the papered asylum process.

Hoping for useful advice, asylum-seekers in the Right to Live demonstration allowed supporters to read and photograph their personal papers, including court decisions, transcripts of asylum interviews, and job contracts. Instead of encountering people who were paperless, our fieldwork in the Right to Live protest met asylum-seekers who kept and circulated numerous papers documenting their past encounters with the Finnish bureaucracy and evidencing their asylum claims. Refugee movements, in Finland and abroad, use the terms “paperless” (sans papiers, sin papeles, paperiton) and “undocumented” to emphasize that persons are not illegal even if their stay in a given territory is (Bloch, Sigona and Zetter 2014). However, this study shows that the production of paperlessness is a papered process. The paperless collect documents of partial recognition, in efforts to legitimize their status (Chauvin 2009; Abarca and Bibler Coutin 2018). As one asylum-seeker participating in the Right to Live protest commented to an author, “We have many papers, but not the one we want.”

Conducting participant observation in the Right to Live protest, the first author realized how the papers included in bureaucratic paperwork communicated, implemented, internalized, negotiated, and resisted governmental power, and how refugees involved in paperwork learned to be asylum-seekers even when they questioned asylum decisions. She witnessed how papers as a technology of government, and asylum-seekers’ material and social experiences with papers, affected the outcomes of asylum-seekers’ subjectification. Papers served both governmentality and other social processes and produced indeterminate outcomes which, nevertheless, gravitated toward papered means of communication and verification. These observations inspired our research question: How do asylum papers facilitate translation from the government-defined collective identity of “asylum-seekers” into individual identities and conducts under governmentality, which employs paperwork as a technology of regulated freedom to manage autonomous subjects?

In this article, “asylum-seeker” refers to a governmentalized refugee, a refugee who is placed into or identifies with the governmental population category of “asylum-seekers.” Asylum-seeker is a temporary bureaucratic status that starts with the asylum application and ends with obtaining asylum or exhausting the appeal process. By co-producing and circulating asylum papers, refugees in this study adopted the governmental category of asylum-seeker as their identity, which motivated conducts, desires, and social bonding.

Governmentality characterizes a specific type of power relation between governments and subjects. It refers to rationalities and technologies of pastoral government that manage society and populations with intertwining technologies of domination and freedom from a distance with information, planning, and legislation (Foucault et al. 1991). It conceptualizes society as a problem-space for governmental programs and normalizing practices used to manage complex social processes and autonomous subjects indirectly through collective and individual identities (Dean 2010). Governmentality structures the field of action for individuals and populations (Tazzioli 2014). It specifies and modifies objects of government and lets society and autonomous subjects co-participate in making themselves governable (Foucault et al. 1991). In other words, governmentality utilizes the responsibilization of society and technologies of self-subjectification (Rose 1999). In the case we study, the Finnish government used a population category “asylum-seeker” to make migrations knowable and bureaucratically manageable, and to program society and asylum-seekers in the production of desired policy effects.

In governmentality, freedom refers to individual autonomy under circumstances that are already shaped by governmental power (Rose 1999). Acting upon subjects’ circumstances to shape their conduct, governmentality reserves regulated freedom for subjects to participate in operations of power (Rose and Miller 1992; Dean 2010). In our case, governmentality treated asylum-seekers as individuals who have autonomous choice, however constrained by disciplinary governmental technologies, such as a threat of deportation. The Finnish government sought to manage asylum-seekers’ behavior by delivering them asylum decisions, which, even if the decision was negative, left some authentic choice for asylum-seekers to either leave Finland, challenge the decision in courts, or to disobey and risk punishment.

The disjuncture between autonomous subjects’ conducts and governmental efforts to manage conducts opens spaces to reproblematize governmental rationalities (Cadman 2010). Counter-conducts are conducts that question particular governmental rationales or practices, but not the overall logic of governmentality (Dean 2010). Governmentality that rationalizes populations as objects of knowledge to program individuals’ conducts can be challenged by alternative rationales or by self-formative individual counter-conducts that disrupt governmental quests for objectification and knowledge (Cadman 2010; Tazzioli 2014). Practices, such as upholding one's own identity against governmental efforts to constitute particular kinds of subjects (Siisiäinen 2016) or untruth conducts to counteract bureaucratic knowledge production (Tazzioli 2014), belong to counter-conducts when they are strategies to be governed otherwise. Counter-conducts that practice freedom to think and act otherwise may even use governmental technologies against governmental ambitions (Cadman 2010). In the Finnish protest, asylum-seekers’ counter-conducts included articulated demands, strategic uses of papered governmental technologies, and everyday practices to be governed otherwise. However, counter-conducts coexist with “technologies of the self” (Rose 1999) to produce self-subjectification. Our study shows that even self-subjectification can produce conducts against governmental plans. Governmentality can be studied empirically as governmental rationalities or as technologies that render governmental ambitions operable, link them to social activities, and mobilize persons, procedures, and artifacts in their pursuit (Rose and Miller 1992). Bureaucratic-legal documentary production, followed in this article, is one technology of government. Governmental technologies do not replicate governmental rationalities because technologies convey various, sometimes incompatible, rationalities (Lippert 1999; Tazzioli 2014) and limit what the government can do (Dean 2010). Therefore, and because governmentality manages autonomous individuals from a distance, governmental technologies enable certain practices of freedom. In our case, subjects even adopted some governmental technologies, along with governmental knowledges and practices.

This article introduces the idea of papered governmentality, in which the production of papers is a governmental technology to manage not only populations but also personal identities and conducts. Thus, it belongs to governmental technologies of freedom. Asylum-seekers’ role in papered governmentality as receivers, producers, and users of various bureaucratic papers enabled counter-conducts to be governed otherwise. As a governmental technology, paper adds some of its own qualities to governmentality, as when, in the case we studied, written communications, material uses, and social circulations of papers produced various unsynchronized governmentalizing effects. The term “papered” fuses paper as a material object and as a governmental technology. In the Finnish asylum-seeker protest, government by papers involved society and subjects into co-production of power and led to papered activism and other counter-conducts that used the papered governmental technology to question how people are governed.

This article investigates how the papered governmentality of immigration translated governmental rationalities into asylum-seekers’ own identities and conducts. In governmentality, translation makes social actors adopt governmental rationalizations and construe linkages to others based on them (Rose and Miller 1992). Translation happens when governmental rationalities modify individual and collective conducts and identities. Translation takes place when the governed subject is produced in transactional realities between modes of objectification into a governable subject and of subjectification into a self-conducting governed subject (Cadman 2010). Because governments and subjects co-participate in translation, governmentality's effects are complex and indeterminate. As this article will show, translations of governmental aspirations produce both government-promoted technologies of the self and counter-conducts. The translation of governmental programs into conducts relies on mundane governmental practices that normalize governmental power (Rose and Miller 1992), of which documents are one.

In governmentality, technologies that manage autonomous individuals from a distance, conducts that can be otherwise, and the need of translation between governmental rationalities and individual conducts all assume certain degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, in refugee studies, domination has received more attention than practices of freedom. Some scholars even treat asylum-seekers as subjects to be disciplined to guarantee freedoms and care for other populations (Bigo 2008; Mavelli 2017), although in governmentality, apparatuses of security are techniques to preserve conditions for individual liberty (Foucault et al. 1991) and technologies of control are not separable from practices of pastoral care and aid (Walters 2010). Refugee studies mostly investigate governmentality as rationalities and technologies of exclusion (Fassin 2011; Mavelli 2017), discouragement (Darling 2011), surveillance (Hiemstra 2010), and classification (Lippert 1999), all of which characterize the Finnish government's rationality as well. However, our research shows that governmental practices are neither identical with governmental rationalities nor devoid of free choice.

To explore technologies of freedom involved in the asylum process, this article investigates how papers, as a technology of translation, served government at a distance and produced a complex mixture of subjectification and freedoms, which motivated, organized, and constrained asylum-seekers’ individual and collective conducts and counter-conducts. The article provides a detailed account of how papers were collected, read, discussed, shared, and produced in a Finnish refugee protest to explain how asylum-seekers’ conducts, strategies, and identities were modified when they participated in the co-production and circulation of papers in the asylum process. The papers asylum-seekers received from and contributed to the Finnish asylum process included the bureaucratic documents available to asylum-seekers, the papers asylum-seekers and lawyers produced for the asylum process, and the desired identity documents that asylum-seekers called “papers,” although they are made of plastic. All of these papers, in their own ways, lured protesting asylum-seekers toward the co-production of governmentality without making them docile reproducers of dominance.

This article shows how becoming governmentalized is an active process that leaves regulated freedom to asylum-seekers to seek to be governmentalized differently. After discussing the theories and methodologies operationalized in its analysis, this article introduces the relevant papers and their circulations according to the first author's participant observation. Next, it examines the four phases in the translation from the government-defined category to asylum-seekers’ own identities. The article proceeds from the policy to manage “asylum-seekers” as a government-defined target population, through the standardized bureaucratic paperwork to assign asylum-seekers into the target population, which produced the gaps between individuals and the target population that inspired the asylum-seekers’ protest, toward the papered technologies of the self that made asylum-seekers identify with the target population. Six chapters in this section introduce what kind of relations asylum-seekers develop to papers in each phase to explain asylum-seekers’ self-subjectification and counter-conducts thus produced. We find that, against the 2015 governmental rationale to design an asylum process that rejects the majority of applicants, most asylum-seekers in the protest achieved their objective to stay in Finland, but not without becoming entangled in webs of governmentality. This article demonstrates that when international migration control utilizes bureaucratic documents, which essentially are among the technologies of freedom designed to modify autonomous individuals’ conducts, it produces not only control but also some freedom and identification with the host country.

Governmentality, Papers, and Refugee Studies

This article situates translation in relation to self-subjectificating technologies of freedom (Rose 1999) that, in refugee studies, remain marginally researched. In refugee studies, governmentality introduced fine-grained tools to investigate technologies of discipline, surveillance, and security. Instead of national borders, legal statuses, policies, and governmental institutions, governmentality inspects diverse territorial and social technologies designed to control migrations (Walters 2010; Fassin 2011; Geiger and Pécoud 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Amilhat-Szary and Giraut 2015) with programs (Lippert 1999), knowledge production (Bigo 2008; Tazzioli 2014), restrictive social service entitlements (Oliver 2020), and the responsibilization of society for migrant surveillance and assessment (Hiemstra 2010; Murray 2016; Cleton and Chauvin 2020).

In refugee studies, even technologies of freedom are investigated as enhancing control when self-subjectification among asylum-seekers (Conlon 2013; Menjívar and Lakhani 2016) makes them internalize surveillance (Mountz 2010) or when programs described as voluntary constrain asylum-seekers’ options (Cleton and Chauvin 2020; Geiger and Pécoud 2013). Alternatively, researchers investigate programs that cultivate liberal economic actors (Conlon and Gill 2013), not the autonomous legal and political subjects examined in this article. Only empirical research about how refugees’ own acts influence the ways regulatory power plays out (Cabot 2012; Tazzioli 2014; Vries 2016) postulates, as this article does, that practices of power are realized in social situations in which governmental rationalities become reinterpreted, modified, and undermined.

Governmentality recognizes power to be productive, not only disciplinary, as people benefit from power relations (Foucault 1980) and resulting identities. In refugee studies, power is often identified as producing subjectivities, objects of government, practices, discourses, and norms (Lippert 1999; Bigo 2008; Mountz 2010; Tazzioli 2014; Vries 2016), while some anthropologists find that productive power under pastoral government inspires subjects’ desires concerning governmental programs for improvement (Nelson 2005; Li 2007). This article shows that governmentality produces not only subjectivities and power relations but also personal desires concerning governmental population categories. Asylum-seekers in the Finnish protest desired identity papers not only because power produced their subject positions but also because governmentality promised opportunities and care.

Governmentality studies focus on papered technologies to construct knowable, diagnosable, and programmable populations (Rose and Miller 1992), leaving papered communications of governmental rationalities to governable subjects for empirical disciplines to study. In refugee studies, the meanings asylum-seekers assign to official documents are known to reinforce their own subjectification and the government's authority over them (Cabot 2012; Darling 2014). Of other technologies that translate governmental rationalities into collective and individual conducts, refugee studies identify technologies of confession and surveillance (Conlon 2013, Mountz 2010).

Outside the original Foucauldian context, governmentality has inspired useful ideas to explain how papers function as governmental technologies, including Scott's (1998) idea that governmental technologies to make society legible also produce illegibility when heterogeneous social practices resist the standardization, simplification, and centralization of knowledge. Translations of complex social identities into standardized state documents make society governable but also engender illegibilities (Caplan and Torpey 2001). The difficulty of translating social diversity into governmental knowledge offers possibilities for resistance through illegibility (Scott 1998; Horton and Heyman 2020). In encounters between migrants and bureaucracies, illegibility may characterize both migrants (Cabot 2012; Reeves 2013; Horton and Heyman 2020) and bureaucracies (Hoag 2010; Thomson 2012), both of which pertain to the Finnish case.

However, others question whether documents are primarily used for knowability (Reeves 2013; Reddy 2015). Hull (2008) prefers the social metaphor of mediation over the visual metaphor of legibility to highlight multiple translations between bureaucratic representations and the objects they represent. This article finds illegibility useful to foreground how gaps between standardized official knowledge and complex social practices provoked counter-conducts but questions the linkage between legibility and governmental control or between illegibility and autonomy (Scott 1998; Horton and Heyman 2020). In Finland, asylum-seekers, who craved freedom that is internal to governmentality, repeatably subjected themselves to bureaucratic scrutiny to make themselves governed differently. Internalized legibility can produce compliant conducts (Mountz 2010), but in Finland, asylum-seekers, who prolonged bureaucratic scrutiny until they gained residence permits, utilized legibility for non-compliance. Classification facilitates surveillance (Geiger and Pécoud 2013; Tazzioli 2014), but it can simultaneously serve pastoral power to protect and provide social services, desired irrespective of asylum-seekers’ own legibility or illegibility. Overall, considerations about legibility shaped asylum-seekers’ conducts less than participation in the Finnish bureaucratic processes to become legible.

Another useful governmentality-inspired approach conceptualizes the state as a construct of practices and symbols. Accordingly, state power operates through quotidian, banal, and performative practices (Mountz 2010). Documentary circulations are among governmental practices that produce an impression that the state is separate from society and has authority over it (Mitchell 2006). Mundane social relations and material practices contribute to the state's symbolic presence in society and everyday life, so-called “state effects” (Painter 2006). State effects include experiences of stateness (Mitchell 2006) and effects that make state practices recognizable in non-state sites (Trouillot 2003). Papered experiences of the state; the state's papered presence in everyday life as a marker of governmental authority; and the papered production of atomized individuals, collective identities, legible classifications, and spatial jurisdictions (Trouillot 2003), all are “state effects” that explained asylum-seekers’ conducts in the Finnish protest.

The focus on practices and everyday experiences directs attention to social and material production of governmental power and to the meanings the governed give to state documents, as materiality, circulations, social relations, uses, and symbolizations affect the outcomes documents produce (Hull 2008). Refugee studies recognize that documents are material and social and that documents are circulated with other migrants (Vasta 2011; Griffiths 2012; Reeves 2013), sympathizers (Darling 2014; Murray 2016) and authorities (Chauvin 2009; Cabot 2012; Reddy 2015). As material artifacts, documents have heterogeneous significance and functions (Cabot 2012; Reddy 2015). They simultaneously materialize the state, produce subjectivities, trigger personal desires and anxieties among asylum-seekers (Yngvesson and Bibler Coutin 2006; Darling 2014; Horton and Heyman 2020), mobilize civil society to serve governmentality (Murray 2016), and facilitate control and resistance (Vasta 2011). Meanings and effects the asylum-seekers and authorities assign to material documents modify state regulation (Cabot 2012). Documentary practices shape how migrants imagine immigration bureaucracies and are imagined by them (Thomson 2012; Whyte 2016). Similar effects were evident in the Right to Live protest where materiality amplified papers’ governmentalizing effect by facilitating circulability, co-readership, and social co-production and by engendering emotions and everyday experiences.

Methodology

Our understanding of asylum-seekers’ relations with papers was formed in the Right to Live protest in Helsinki, Finland, where the first author conducted participant observation from February to August 2017. The Right to Live protest was a site where asylum-seekers and supporters convened for 24 hours a day and where contacts between asylum-seekers, activists, journalists, artists, and even some officials took place. Papers were circulated there around and with the authors. The protest was a site for press interviews, documentary shootings, support concerts, theater performances, and other events, which the authors observed.

Participant observation was the method to study social effects and circulations of papers. The first author, who was present in the protest for more than one-hundred days, spoke with dozens of asylum-seekers she met only briefly and had frequent informal conversations with about 50 regularly participating asylum-seekers and three dozen Finnish supporters. As a support person, she joined asylum-seekers who visited lawyers, police stations, and Migri and visited activist organizations helping with papers. Unless specified otherwise, the cases and reactions analyzed in this article come from discussions the first author personally heard and papers she read around the Right to Live protest. Empirical evidence collected from observations and informal conversations was verified by similar messages accumulated from multiple independent sources, including other protesters’ papers and comments, or Finnish activists’, lawyers’, and media outlets’ mentions of similar cases.

The first author observed the social lives of papers as communicative and material objects that had social effects and uses. She read asylum-seekers’ papers and listened to asylum-seekers speaking about papers. She observed social circulations of papers and the production of new papers. She was interested in meaning-making processes, attitudes, strategies, and social relationships inspired by papers. To highlight conducts and identities the papers produced, she also recorded subjective perceptions, motivations, and identifications that inspired and modified asylum-seekers’ conducts.

The second author, an asylum-seeker participating the Right to Live demonstration, checked the text to ascertain that the interpretations of asylum-seekers’ responses were accurate and not insensitive. To guarantee confidentiality, cases and migrants’ personal experiences are discussed in a generalizing manner, focusing on common expressions, experiences, and moods. A high level of abstraction is a method to anonymize cases that are confidential and sometimes still ongoing. For ethical considerations, the focus is not on persons, but on papers and observable papered interactions.

The focus on protesters’ interpretations and discontents that incited counter-conducts leaves the bureaucratic circulation of papers misrepresented. To understand Migri's side, we recommend literature about assessment methods typical to immigration bureaucracies (Fuglerud 2004; Thomson 2012; Dahlvik 2018; Gill and Good 2019; Oliver 2020), as our anthropological reading reveals that Migri communicates its decisions as if it used similar methods. Anthropologists read texts, as they use other empirical methods, to observe social processes, practices, structures, and power relations, instead of analyzing, for example, discourses or legal arguments. Inside the government, the authors only investigated the production of governmentality, state effects, and illegibilities, using an anthropological reading of the state documents the first author came across during the protest and consultancy. Similar asylum decisions are publicly available (Bodström 2020, https://migrileaks.wordpress.com).

The Circulation of Papers in Finnish Bureaucracy

The primary circulation of papers within bureaucracy started with filing an asylum application at a police station. In asylum-seekers’ slang, it was called “giving fingerprints,” as this act, rather than any paper, characterized the start of the process. Asylum-seekers had no access to the police file, which was based on oral testimony. Only if a lawyer prepared a written reapplication was a subsequent asylum application included among asylum-seekers’ papers.

The next encounter with the bureaucracy was the asylum interview(s) at Migri. The interview transcript was the most central document in the making of asylum decisions (Bodström 2020). Applicants received a copy after the interview was complete. Papers started to pile up if the Migri's decision was negative. By law, negative decisions introduced the appeal process. Asylum-seekers had a right to a public defender, who prepared appeals to the administrative court and later to the supreme administrative court. These appeals and court decisions were included in a document file. The protesting Iraqis and Afghans had sought asylum in Fall 2015, received a negative decision from Migri, and challenged that decision in the administrative court before the 2017 protest.

Asylum-seekers had an active role in the production of papers during the interview, appeals, and evidence-gathering. The home country produced documentary evidence, such as hospital reports, death certificates, and clan agreements. Legal appeals were asylum-seekers’ primary method to question the asylum policy, while the protest was one effort to accelerate the asylum process. Assisted by lawyers, NGOs, supporters, friends, and host families, asylum-seekers inserted papered evidence, appeals, reapplications, injunctions, and complaints into the paper trail to request other authorities to intervene or compel Migri to reconsider cases.

Other paper trails for acquiring a residence permit coexisted with the asylum process. For work permit applications, asylum-seekers produced a work contract and the forms filled by the applicant and the employer, who supplied documents about paid taxes, pensions and social service contributions, and clarification about employment practices in the company. Studying pending or failed work permit cases, supporters could read decisions, work contracts, tax reports, pay slips, and requests for the employer to provide additional information.

Residence permits and identity cards were not the only papers that guaranteed some rights. In 2017, with certain limitations, asylum applications and court appeals gave asylum-seekers rights to wait, receive immigration services, and work in Finland. Negative decisions that took away rights were personally delivered and translated to asylum-seekers and, therefore, always in their document file. A negative decision by an administrative court, a so-called second negative, made an asylum-seeker legally deportable, but only the third negative decision by the supreme administrative court ended asylum-seekers’ right to work in Finland. Together, this research will show, papers in the bureaucratic circulation constituted micro-power that constrained conducts and imaginations by making migration appear as a bureaucratic process.

Social Circulations of Papers Around Asylum-Seekers

Asylum-seekers who had a stake in the primary bureaucratic circulation of papers initiated secondary social circulations by sharing papers with lawyers, peers, Finnish activists, host families, and reporters for legal appeal, protest mobilization, mutual learning, political influencing, and public awareness. The key documents in the paper trail were the same for Migri, the courts, asylum-seekers, and the lawyers and activists helping them. Asylum-seekers showed supporters, such as the first author, a file of papers that included Migri's decisions, legal appeals and judgments, and interview transcripts. Other relevant papers, such as proofs of persecution, were seldom in a file, because the originals were given to Migri, but reappeared when supporters helped with a new asylum application. Some asylum-seekers kept everything, even standard instructions and invitation letters, in case they proved useful.

The protest brought people together to share information about asylum-seekers’ cases. Papered activism generated new networks between supporters and asylum-seekers and among asylum-seekers learning from their peers. Some NGOs, church-led projects, and weekly Coffee without Borders events held by the Free Movement Network specialized in assisting asylum-seekers with paperwork. Some Finnish activist networks systematically collected and analyzed cases. Outside the protest, Finnish host families and other supporters shared diffuse information about papers online. The Facebook group, Refugee Hospitality Club, for example, was a site for people helping or housing asylum-seekers to crowdsource information about various subjects, including the papered bureaucratic process.

Documents that evidenced injustice were used to mobilize support and attract media publicity. They were also tools for truth-telling that served asylum-seekers’ demands to be governed otherwise. Supporters used papers to invite the media (Haavisto 2020) to spotlight the dysfunctional paper process and consequent deportations of well-integrated asylum-seekers (Valkama 2017). Grievances that even Finnish supporters first found hard to believe became publicly known, thanks to the Right to Live protest. The Internet homepage, Migrileaks, ¹ was set up to publicize problematic asylum decisions. The National Theatre solicited asylum-seekers’ experiences with bureaucracy for the play, Other Home. In the We See You Migri campaign in March 2017, two dozen theaters and some churches read aloud absurd asylum decisions. In these decisions, Migri denied asylum even when it accepted that future violence was possible or that the case fulfilled all grounds for humanitarian protection (Heikkinen 2017).

The Category of Asylum-Seeker in Finnish Policymaking

The protesting asylum-seekers had arrived in Finland in 2015, when the country received 32,476 asylum-seekers, a nine-fold increase from the previous year (Ministry of the Interior 2017). Of them, 25,698 were from Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of the cases decided in 2016, asylum-seekers from Iraq had around a 20-percent chance of receiving asylum, while less than 40 percent of Afghans received it. ² In the European Union, 61 percent of Iraqi and 37 percent of Afghan asylum-seekers received asylum in 2016 (European Asylum Support Office 2016).

Along with the overloaded bureaucratic process, political pressures explain why even asylum-seekers who had been subjected to violence in their home country were denied asylum in Finland. The coalition government of three parties — the Centre Party, the National Coalition Party, and the anti-immigration party the True Finns — made the asylum process stricter to curtail costs and to make Finland an unappealing destination for asylum-seekers (Finnish Government 2015). The Conservative Minister of Interior even announced a quantitative target to grant asylum only to one-third of applicants (Tolkki 2015), when before 2015, four-fifths of Iraqi asylum-seekers had received asylum (Euroopan muuttoliikenneverkosto 2016).

The Finnish government initiated legislative restrictions to the asylum process, some of which the United Nations Human Rights Council (2017) and the Finnish Chancellor of Justice (Oikeuskansleri 2017) censured for weakening humanitarian protection and the rule of law. The main method to reduce the number of asylums granted in Finland was the removal of past experiences of violence as a category that predicted future persecution (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018). Consequently, individual French courts even prohibited sending asylum-seekers back to Finland, where the high deportation rate subjected them to a risk of being sent to death in their home countries (Cour administrative d’appel de Lyon 2018).

The Finnish Government's (2015) objective to keep the costs down while fulfilling Finland's international obligations shows that asylum-seekers were central, not marginal, for governmental rationalizations to match national resources with the welfare of the population, which is an essential problematization in governmentality (Foucault et al. 1991). Governmentality identifies a target group, problematizes its conduct, and designs programs to reform its conduct (Dean 2010). In this case, asylum-seekers were the target population. The objective was to dissuade potential applicants from choosing Finland. An unwelcoming asylum process with a low acceptance rate was the method. The government appealed to governable subjects as responsible and autonomous individuals (Rose 1999) to reduce refugees’ will to migrate.

This governmental rationality failed to curb asylum migration because it did not address refugees’ considerations. The Finnish asylum procedure was not a relevant factor for their choice to come to Finland (Koikkalainen, Kyle and Nykänen 2020). Some said they did not know before entering Finland that they would be processed as asylum-seekers. The governmental category of asylum-seeker was translated to refugees through papered governmental technologies to assign asylum-seekers into target populations.

Bureaucratic Assignment to Governmental Categories

Governmentality employs regulatory apparatuses, laws, expert knowledge, and mundane mechanisms, such as assessment and calculation, to produce statistically knowable populations and to regulate populations according to authoritative criteria, which conceal mechanisms of discipline (Rose and Miller 1992). Accordingly, Migri was assigned to determine individually whom to include in the population and in what terms. To maintain an orderly system and the nation's integrity (Fuglerud 2004; Hoag 2010), it demonstrated serious bureaucratic commitment to place each asylum-seeker in an appropriate administrative category, often several times.

Read through an anthropological lens, Migri's asylum decisions display technologies of distance and standardization. We identified techniques to distance the bureaucrat from the applicant in interviews, such as mediation through translators (Puumala 2018), typing the ongoing interview, and even a glass partition to minimize direct contacts with the asylum-seeker in the same room. Paper was another technique for distancing the bureaucracy from the applicant. Papers allowed Migri to examine details, instead of narratives about persecution. Many negative decisions the first author read focused on few details to establish that inconsistency was a sign of lying. Papers abstracted away humanitarian needs and relevant background conditions to reduce Finnish responsibility over asylum-seekers, as when Migri treated individual victims of past violence as generic members of an ethnic group in which “not everyone … is in danger of persecution,” as one standard clause to reject an asylum application stated.

Distancing positioned Migri in authority over asylum-seekers and diluted Finland's responsibility over their safety. Migri presented its decisions as objective knowledge and asylum-seekers’ narratives as subjective feelings, as when negative decisions used standard phrases to state that the applicant's “fear” of unsafe return was “not objectively justified,” although in several cases, its predictions proved mistaken (Näre 2020). In a language of objectivity, Migri presented its judgment as the truth about the future in the applicant's home country, their tormentors’ future intentions, and the applicant's personal beliefs or intimate family life. Migri determined a part of the home country safe for the applicant (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018), ignoring bureaucratic and ethnic restrictions to movement. It assumed curious authority over fake marriages, false conversions, and faked sexual identities, without recognizing that “in Finland”, according to a lawyer the first author consulted, “individuals choose their own sexual and religious identities.” Although Migri claimed professionalism, the first author heard trauma therapists, lawyers, and priests complain that it dismissed their expert knowledge.

Bureaucrats treated personal biographies as cases to which a correct bureaucratic status needed to be established. As each person's case was processed individually, one brother participating the protest could receive asylum, while the other's application was rejected, although their cases were identical. Asylum bureaucracy reduces complex individual situations to simplified categories (Tazzioli 2014; Puumala 2018). Refugees fled personal experiences of violence, hopelessness, and conflicts with influential groups that did not automatically fall under the general categories of persecution. Persecution, a consequence of ungovernability, is difficult to make bureaucratically governable.

Standardization into cases and categories can make the human invisible but does not help bureaucracies overcome uncertainty (Dahlvik 2018). Anthropological reading of Migri's decisions teased out mutual illegibility. Migri suspected asylum-seekers’ testimonies because they appeared frustratingly complex to be fitted in categories. To cope with asylum-seekers’ illegibility through generalized categories, Migri sought to make applicants legible by assessing their credibility. The focus on individual credibility marginalizes the conflict from which the refugees flee (Thomson 2012). Not belonging to a correct category was a reason for Migri to reject an application, even when Migri stated that it believed the applicant was a victim of violence (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018).

Migri regarded asylum-seekers as one-dimensional persons, whose marriages and jobs were strategies for acquiring residence, and treated residence applications in multiple categories as rule violations. What Migri considered as cheating, when it suspected that marriages, and even children, with a Finnish national after a rejected asylum application were fake, demonstrated integration to asylum-seekers, one of whom noted: “Only after you have been in the country for some time you start to know people and meet the right person.” As Migri assessed whether to grant the right to enter to people who had spent years in Finland, it deported people who had assimilated, held jobs, and had children in Finnish schools (Valkama 2017).

Despite all scrutiny, protesting asylum-seekers complained that only liars received asylum. This understanding may have resulted from frustration, as many honest applicants did not receive asylum. Liars may be smooth storytellers, even shedding some tears, both factors that asylum-seekers believed Migri to reward. Migri's scrutiny may have rewarded liars who fit their stories into established asylum categories, while persons fleeing violence were challenging to categorize. However, asylum-seekers’ beliefs in the efficacy of lying must be separated from actual success. Against some stereotypes circulating among asylum-seekers, Finnish supporters recognized that gaining asylum was difficult, even for religious and sexual minorities that were among Migri's categories.

Migri evaluated individual cases of people it identified as “asylum-seekers” to classify whom to give asylum and which state was responsible for them. Thereby, its decisions served governmentalization by constructing atomized individuals, collective identitifications, legible classifications, and spatial jurisdictions, which, as state effects, are called the isolation effect, identification effect, legibility effect, and spatialization effect (Trouillot 2003). Populations that are being managed are also created in bureaucratic processes, but not without friction in the translation between governmentalizing population categories and self-subjectificating individuals. Migri's technologies of distance engendered inconsistencies between cases and persons, bureaucratic decisions and personal narratives, and standardized categories and personal experiences, which, among asylum-seekers, generated both subjectification and discontents that provoked counter-conducts and protest.

Counter-Readings for Counter-Conducts

Technologies of distance and standardization did not produce Weber's (1964) rational-legal image of an impartial and professional rule because of “stereo-typos” (Reddy 2015) and other underperformances with paperwork. Migri expedited the overstretched asylum process with standard clauses that seemed unrelated or even absurd. One decision, an Iraqi asylum-seeker witnessed, even stated that a Somali asylum-seeker could safely return to Baghdad. Migri's internal inquiry ascertained that around 20 percent of sampled asylum decisions had problems the Right to Live movement brought to light (Maahanmuuttovirasto 2018).

As papers are multivocal, asylum-seekers and Migri could read the same events and papers differently. Bodström (2020) identifies counter-narratives that Migri used to reinterpret and dismiss asylum-seekers’ experiences. On protesters’ counter-reading, bureaucratic standards did not make Migri's evaluations appear objective and judicious because they bracketed off relevant experiences. For protesters, gaps between personal histories of violence and their papered simplifications seemed to overlook ethical considerations and human dignity. Hence, asylum-seekers blamed Migri for violence by other means (Näre 2020). Some stated that it was more honorable to return to Iraq to die than to be treated as Finland treats them. Many supporters developed suspicions toward Migri's objectivity after learning that it refused to protect people who had escaped violence. One supporter, for example, joined the protest when she read a decision that accused a torture victim of causing his own wounds.

Unpredictability undermined protesters’ trust in the rationality, neutrality, and fairness of the process. Nobody, not even lawyers, knew what could work when sensible reasons for granting asylum, such as politically powerful persecutors or family members’ torture to death, were commonly rejected by Migri. Protesters suspected that subjective emotions and values, including racism and anti-Muslim stereotypes, accounted for the rejections. Because the rules were unpredictable, asylum-seekers, who did not know what to disclose to make themselves legible, started to add details they expected Migri wanted to know. What was not explainable became explained with expectations and imaginations, some of which were helpful but others misguided. Opaque and unpredictable bureaucratic processes can make governmental power seem even more formidable (Horton and Heyman 2020) but are costly for images of bureaucratic legitimacy, impartiality, and rationality.

Asylum-seekers whom the first author met opined that the Finnish bureaucracy worked against both genuine, well-behaving asylum-seekers and Finnish national interest. In contrast to Finnish supporters who prioritized human rights, many asylum-seekers emphasized decent and productive behavior in Finland as legitimate selection criteria. They thought that Migri rewarded the wrong kinds of asylum-seekers and lamented that honest and hard-working people were deported while “bad people,” such as liars, drug dealers, and rapists, received asylum. When honesty did not pay off with Migri, asylum-seekers asked if they should “become bad” to receive asylum.

Migri's paperwork generated both intended and unintended translations, including mistranslations, of governmental intentions among asylum-seekers, all of which generated conducts and some of which made asylum-seekers question governmental practice. Protesters’ interpretations of Migri's paperwork engendered perceptions of being governed in an unjust manner and demands to be governed in another way that prioritized protection, humanity, and human rights. The resulting counter-conduct, the Right to Live protest, became another site to involve asylum-seekers in governmental rationalities.

Resisting With Papers

Bureaucratic paperwork exposed that grievances were collective, provided a common target for the protest, and corroborated asylum-seekers’ claims of injustice. Bureaucratic paperwork assigned personal cases to individuals to atomize them, but collectively, bureaucratic documents proved that injustices were systematic, not random mistakes (Näre 2020). Collective protest was viable because governing was structured, institutionalized, and communicated through standardized categories that classified refugees into a group called “asylum-seekers.” In the Right to Live protest, “asylum-seekers,” a bureaucratic category, became a real social group that mobilized around a collective identity and shared injustices.

According to an asylum-seeker, they started the Right to Live demonstration when so many deportation orders revealed that something was wrong with paperwork. Similar experiences with the standardized bureaucratic process, similar phases in the papered process, and similar aspirations for a Finnish residence permit connected protesting asylum-seekers, who otherwise were separated by language, culture, and social background. Standardized bureaucratic paperwork directed discontent against the institutions that produced problematic decisions.

Migri's documents focused protesters’ attention on the problems in the documentary process and on the papered forms of resistance. The Right to Live protest that started with collective demands became increasingly a site for papered activism to rectify individual cases (Näre 2020). To challenge negative asylum decisions, protesters generated new paperwork and disseminated contestable decisions in public. Using standardized documentation for information sharing and mutual learning, they circulated papers to acquire collective knowledge that was validated when negative decisions were overturned in courts or imminent deportations were stopped (Näre 2020). Finnish supporters who assisted with paperwork in the protest, including the first author, helped translate asylum-seekers’ individual experiences into the language of asylum criteria and introduce new strategies to cope with the papered process. Asylum-seekers, who became well-versed with paperwork during the protest, internalized governmental rationalities. Rather than being coopted, they became knowledgeable and, eventually, mostly successful in legitimizing their stays, as the article will show.

Paperwork empowered both the government and the protesters but upheld power hierarchies and information asymmetries between them, as papered resistance responded to the government, not with an independent voice, but with appeals, reapplications, and evidence. Thereby, papered resistance remained reactive and largely constrained to the bureaucratic rules of the game. In contrast to the centralized production of papers in bureaucracies, protesters’ uncoordinated readings of individual asylum cases by various NGOs, lawyers, researchers, and well-meaning people decentralized knowledge production. Asymmetrical knowledge contributed to successes mainly with individual cases, but individual legal appeals had unintended systemic effects when asylum-seekers clogged Migri and the courts with appeals and reapplications (Rautio 2017).

Counter-conducts, social contacts, and critical expert knowledge around the protest kept asylum-seekers entangled with papered governmentality. Paperwork made governmental power tangible and legitimate even when it was resisted. Like asylum interviews (Conlon 2013), Migri's papered decisions and legal appeals nurtured asylum subjectivity. Social circulations surrounded asylum-seekers with asylum papers and with expertise, known to promote normalizing conducts that governmentalize (Rose 1999). Active co-participation in the production of papers taught asylum-seekers to display particular kinds of selves.

Desires to Become Governable

Governmentality works because asylum-seekers cannot escape bureaucratic standards, even in their minds and everyday lives. Papers generate procedural and everyday entitlements and constraints that remind asylum-seekers of governmental power and promote governable conducts. Papered governmentality becomes lived practice when governmental rationalities become internalized, embodied, and practiced. Because official paperwork constructs subjects and forms of sociability (Hull 2008) and is invested with values and emotions (Cabot 2012; Darling 2014), it naturalizes governmental rationalities and categorizations that seep into asylum-seekers’ attitudes, behaviors, self-understandings, and preferences.

People have a stake in making themselves governable because governmental power is not only oppressive but also productive. As material objects, identity papers structure the micro-power of social opportunity and discipline as their holders gain inclusion, opportunities, and recognition. They grant a tangible status that enables certain forms of self-determination (Caplan and Torpey 2001). Asylum-seekers, whose passports the Finnish police kept, lacked access to those social and marketplace opportunities that require identification through state-issued documents, including banks, discos, and some construction sites. Everyday exclusions reinforced asylum-seekers’ investment in proper identity papers that facilitate entry to normal life. Minimizing governmental intrusion was undesirable, as life without identity papers was uncertain, draining, and undignified.

Papers made governmental power not only implemented but also felt. Paperwork held asylum-seekers in a state of in-betweenness that left them out of normal progress in life. Many said they found no energy to invest in integration when they stayed mentally in limbo between countries. They predicted that gaining Finnish identity documents would bring a sense of purpose, belonging, and respect. Asylum-seekers oriented themselves toward the future. “When I get the papers” was the time to learn Finnish, visit the family, start a business, and do many other things. Asylum-seekers imagined that receiving identity papers was a cut-off point after which normal life would start. Waiting for papers aroused feelings of disappointment, frustration, and dishonor.

Bureaucratic paperwork had human costs that treating people as cases hide. The lengthy and uncertain papered process that separated asylum-seekers from their desires created psychological stress and anger. Sometimes, waiting was filled with non-productive activities. One asylum-seeker described his life as “partying every night for trying to feel good” and forget. Asylum-seekers complained that the asylum process turned many good people into “bad people,” as asylum decisions did not seem to reward those who stayed good. Eventually, many lost hope for the future, causing depression, self-harm, and even suicides. Importantly, waiting fueled discontent and was a main resource for the Right to Live protest.

Technologies of the Self

Governmentality relies on technologies of the self to manage autonomous subjects’ conducts and identities from a distance (Rose 1999). A papered technique to produce individual selves was the treatment of asylum claims as individual cases. When particular kinds of individuals qualified for desired categories, asylum-seekers read bureaucratic decisions for cues about how to conduct and represent themselves to become acceptable. The gaps between governmental identification and individual identity (Caplan and Torpey 2001) inspired asylum-seekers to invest in conducts and identities that accorded better with bureaucratic expectations. Both strategically and through identity formation, active asylum-seekers were in the process of becoming someone.

Discrepancies between asylum-seekers and their bureaucratic papers made some ask the first author's help to correct even unimportant details. Others concluded that the process rewarded strategic self-representation. The transcripts of their first interview with Migri revealed that asylum-seekers sometimes had misunderstood what to disclose of themselves to gain asylum. Migri expected them to reveal things, such as rape, which they would not tell to authorities or to translators from their own country. In later stages of the process, self-representations became more strategic. Asylum-seekers learned to insert useful evidence, such as psychiatric reports and new threats. Strategic introductions of new claims and evidence prolonged decision-making and, thereby, asylum-seekers’ legal stay in Finland. In 2019, for example, 46 percent of asylum applications in Finland were reapplications, with Iraqis filing more than half of these applications (Euroopan muuttoliikenneverkosto 2020).

Trusting experience more than written rules, asylum-seekers circulated information about successful cases within their own community to collect information from fellow asylum-seekers about the arguments successful claimants had used. Learning from their peers, they sought for logic that could provide a key to beat the illegible system. Asylum-seekers used bureaucratic decisions as cues, not to whether they should leave Finland, but to what a successful papered process required.

Asylum-seekers actively remake themselves to demonstrate they deserve residence permits (Menjívar and Lakhani 2016). Many sought to build a path to a Finnish residence permit by acquiring the kind of work, schooling, marital relationship, and language skills that showed integration. The bureaucratic criteria affected the choice of employment and the timing to register a marriage, as when highly educated asylum-seekers sought low-paying jobs that qualified for a work permit, some of which the first author helped to apply. People who wanted safety, thus, became productive subjects and invited governmental scrutiny into their intimate relationships. Self-making was also paper-making, generating new applications and evidences. Through another lens, these resourceful people refused to wait for Migri's permission to start a new life in Finland. Asylum-seekers who worked and married while waiting for residence permits attempted to build normal lives secured with formal documentation. Many emphasized to the first author that they wanted to be self-reliant and to contribute to their new country.

Adopting the majority religion, Christianity, was another method to acquire a Finnish identity that the converts hoped would prove their integration. As one asylum-seeker convert expressed it, finding Christianity was like finding home. For believers in Christianity, conversion indicated a break with the home country's religious norms that were directly linked to the conflicts and oppression the asylum-seekers had fled. Conversion was a serious matter, often leading to threats and a break with the family in the home country, but the church provided converts a new Finnish community to join.

The papered process made asylum-seekers in the Right to Live protest governable. Being monitored by papers, many avoided standing out and making demands out of fear of being punished by Migri, even when Finnish supporters recommended them to file a formal complaint. Most lost imagination outside the papered process and either continued applying for asylum anew or agreed to return to their home country when their application was rejected. Others put their hopes on a legal status somewhere else. Rumors circulated about applicants who received protection in another European Union country, despite the Dublin Regulation mandating that asylum applications be processed in the country where the applicant first registered. Imaginations of asylum elsewhere were visible in two Iraqi demonstrations in September 2017. One stopped at the Canadian embassy with a banner demanding Canada to “Take Us.” In another, asylum-seekers crossed the border to Sweden to claim asylum there (Pihkala 2017). The alternative to paperwork in Finland was paperwork elsewhere.

The government's plans to make the majority of asylum-seekers leave failed, as the papered process guided asylum-seekers to try anew, rather than leave. If 20,484 Iraqis sought asylum in Finland in 2015, between August 2015 and December 2020, Iraqis acquired only 6863 asylums but filed 77,080 applications for residence permit on all grounds, of which 18,112 were granted, and received 27,156 rulings that made them removable from Finland. ³ On average, each asylum-seeker filed three to four applications to stay in Finland, showing how successfully they were governmentalized to attempt to settle through the bureaucratic process.

Bureaucratic rationales did not meet technologies of the self without friction. Against Migri's effort to fix identities into singular and stable bureaucratic categories, asylum-seekers revealed the plurality of identities and utilized them to gain a residence permit. Applying for residence in the category of “worker” reclaimed one's identity as a self-supporting individual who became “visible as something/one else … than a mere object of care” (Vries 2016, 893). By refusing to stay within the category of asylum-seeker, many navigated between various uncoordinated, even contradictory, governmental rationalities of migration control. By claiming a more desirable migration category based on work or marriage, applicants resisted the governmental rationalization of them as welfare costs associated with asylum-seekers. Moving outside the asylum procedure disrupted the governmental policy to make most asylum-seekers leave. Asylum-seekers who switched the process to other governmental problematizations, such as labor shortage or the rights of the child, chose to be governmentalized otherwise. Asylum-seekers resisted by subjecting themselves to more governmental knowledge production, but with identities they chose.

Some asylum-seekers said they became acquainted with the category “asylum-seeker” only at the Finnish border when a policeman directed them to the line to submit their asylum applications. The adoption of asylum seeking as their own identity and strategy demonstrates that governmentality had modified their conducts. Even after the path to the Finnish citizenship was open, some former protesters with resident permits in Finland still, in 2021, invested in their asylum process, showing how permanent the identity of asylum-seeker that many acquired only in Finland had become.

Conclusions and Discussion

Governmentality tames refugees into a manageable target population of asylum-seekers. This article demonstrated that the bureaucratic-legal status of “asylum-seeker” does not precede asylum process but requires translation before it is internalized by the target population, not once but in numerous instances. Paperwork and other governmental technologies made refugees, who in 2015 could have chosen any European country, governable in Finnish terms. This article demonstrated how complex experiences with bureaucratic paperwork in a rejected asylum-seekers’ protest in Finland in Spring and Summer 2017 reinforced and undermined governmental rationalities and constructed power that, for asylum-seekers, was both external and internalized and productive of both counter-conducts and self-subjectification. It showed that, of the Finnish government's various uses of the target population of “asylum-seekers,” asylum-seekers internalized governmental authority to grant residence, but not the 2015 governmental rationality to use rejected asylum applications to dissuade them from staying in Finland. Instead, as we demonstrated, asylum-seekers used papered bureaucratic methods they had internalized to undo papered rejections. Nevertheless, governmentality was successful in making even those who defied governmental orders internalize governmental authority and remain, as long as possible, under its radar.

Our empirical observations illustrated that asylum papers worked as a governmentalizing technology because they linked governmental ambitions with self-subjectification by positioning the government and the subject on the same paper trail and because, as state effects, they permeated asylum-seekers’ social and everyday life. We evidenced how papers bolstered governmentality by structuring thoughts, practices, and social relations because they generated opportunities, meaning-making processes, experiences, aspirations, demands, and cooperative efforts. Co-participation in the papered process constrained asylum-seekers’ imaginations and made them see migration like the government as a regulated bureaucratic-legal process. Asylum-seekers were not outsiders to governmentality but had a stake in the production of power and of papers that let them stay in Finland. Without becoming submissive, they learned to accept the governmentality of categorizations, deservingness, and bureaucratic selection and to strategize accordingly.

Throughout the empirical chapters, we saw how translation around asylum-seekers in the Right to Live protest was an active and open-ended process, in which asylum-seekers’ own circulations, uses, and meanings for papers curtailed the government's dominance over the translation of its rationalities into asylum-seekers’ conducts. We identified multiple sources of translation of governmental rationalizations and categorizations, including the asylum bureaucracy, fellow protesters, and everyday experiences. We found that bureaucratic documents have their own standards, processes, and mechanisms to translate governmental ambitions. As paper is a technology that governments cannot monopolize and that neither domination nor freedom can exhaust, papered governmentality mitigated against some other governmental technologies and policies, outliving policy changes in 2015 and enabling some forms of papered counter-conducts. Furthermore, papered standards extended governmental technologies of freedom to asylum-seekers. We showed how asylum-seekers in the Right to Live protest utilized their unquestioned rights to appeal, protest, publicity, and private life, all of which normalized governmental categories of residence and standards of responsible individuals among asylum-seekers.

The empirical chapters demonstrated that governmental power becomes enmeshed with individual identities and governmental technologies in ways that blurs the distinction between domination and resistance. Governmental power that produced seductive promises of inclusion worth an investment in Finnish governmentality explained papers’ empowering effects as the tools and goals of the Right to Live protest, while papers’ disciplining power impelled asylum-seekers to protest against the threat of deportation. The protest we studied succeeded in achieving some of its aims not by making governmentality weaker but by strengthening identifications as “asylum-seeker” and by acquiring more knowledge about governmental rationalities. The line between compliant conducts and counter-conducts was fluid as both were conducts produced and productive of how people were governed. For example, in reapplying asylum or acquiring whatever bureaucratic category, instead of displaying stable identities that Migri measured, asylum-seekers used governmental technologies against governmental ambitions to make them leave Finland.

As our research illustrated, the translation of governmental rationalities employs productive aspects of power, which produced desires and acts toward securing residence in Finland. Moreover, as the governmentality of immigration designs target populations that use governmental categories to immigrate (Lippert 1999; Vries 2016), refugees’ will to settle and the government's will to record produced “asylum-seekers” and the paperwork around them. Asylum-seekers’ seemingly individual conducts with bureaucracies produced new governmental rules and practices in Finland. We observed the bureaucratic technology to compartmentalize migrations into individual cases, which makes deviations with asylum interviews, appeals, and reapplications appear to be individual conducts, but the Finnish government responded to them as if they were collective counter-conducts to be regulated through technologies of doubt, standard responses to commonly used narratives and evidences, and disincentives to reapplications. Actually, we explicated that many individual counter-conducts were collective, as social circulations of knowledge, including the Right to Live protest, taught asylum-seekers to strategize collectively with paperwork.

This article demonstrated that not only exceptions (Bigo 2008) but also standard governmental technologies characterize the governmentality of migration. Although policies and rights differ between citizens and non-citizens as separate target populations (Oliver 2020), this article found no separate technique of papered governmentality for asylum-seekers. Finnish asylum decisions followed the same format as other bureaucratic decisions communicated to individual applicants, and the lack of identity papers had same effects on asylum-seekers and others. In contrast to the literature that focuses on disciplinary techniques of governmentality (Hiemstra 2010; Mountz 2010; Fassin 2011; Geiger and Pécoud 2013), our research showed that technologies of freedom likewise have a governmentalizing effect on asylum-seekers.

This study covered a Finnish case. Governmentalizing powers of bureaucratic papers are unlikely to be essentially different anywhere where governments have instituted a case-based bureaucratic asylum-application process. However, as institutions, regulations, and governmental traditions vary, more research is warranted on the effects of technologies of freedom in countries where traditional liberal forms of governmentality are not as strong as in Finland. Technologies of freedom as governmentalizing techniques may be less pronounced with asylum procedures that either emphasize neoliberal surveillance over individual autonomy, leave more spaces for informality outside governmentalizing power, or process resettlement refugees’ asylum applications outside the country. Further research is required to explore why governmentalizing forces work differently on refugees who continue their asylum-seeking journeys to other countries, unlike the protesters in this study who internalized not only the process but also identified with the country.

International migration control relies on the national governments’ use of governmental technologies, including bureaucratic-legal papers, designed to apply technologies of freedom to governmentalize people inside national territories. This article demonstrated that even restrictive asylum processes can governmentalize asylum-seekers to want to stay and that technologies of freedom inherent in legal-bureaucratic paperwork provide opportunities for asylum-seekers to become governmentalized differently than the government intended. Papered technologies of government tie asylum-seekers to the country where paperwork is processed, not only as subjects of territorial governmental processes but also because the papered process manages asylum-seekers through an identity in the country where they are being processed.

For policy makers, this implies that the political strategy to discourage humanitarian migration by adopting restrictive asylum policies does not deter migration because, for refugees, the population category of “asylum-seeker” does not precede migration but is internalized during the asylum process. In the country where the asylum application is processed, restrictive policies even prolong bureaucratic processing because they produce asylum-seekers’ desires and efforts to belong to governmental categories. The unrealistic image of “asylum-seekers” who shop for a country with the most welcoming asylum policy is produced in the minds of policy makers who manage migrations by identifying a target population, problematizing its conduct, and designing programs to reform its conduct. Policies based on more realistic asylum aspirations would be less costly for the asylum-seekers and for taxpayers in the countries where asylum applications are processed.