Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article proposes to understand the ‘invisible data work’ that asylum seekers must do to put together a ‘credible’ asylum application. While the intersections between asylum and work have typically been analysed in relation to access to employment and labour conditions, we attend to the work of collecting, assembling, and ordering different forms of analogue and digital data inherent to the asylum process. Building on feminist interdisciplinary debates on work and drawing on a selection of asylum appeals from Italy and the UK, we argue that seeking asylum entails extensive and continual invisible work that requires significant resources, effort, skills and time. Attending to these forms of invisible work is crucial to understanding the challenges of seeking asylum beyond the migration journey and the implications of performing ‘invisible data work’ unaided and unequipped. It also counters problematic depictions of asylum seekers as passive subjects who are ‘just waiting’ for a decision to be made. Finally, rendering the collection and assemblage of data as ‘invisible work’ rather than just ‘doings’ has political implications for understanding the resources, responsibilities and resistance to the border politics of making precarious subjects.

Keywords

Borders asylum data invisible work feminism

Introduction

‘We have nothing more than a snapshot of the appellant's Facebook activity in this case. The original bundle shows that he was active on Facebook between June 2018 and July 2019. The supplementary bundle for the FtT [First-tier Tribunal] hearing shows activity between May and September 2019. The additional bundle for the Upper Tribunal (filed on 16 September 2021) mostly shows Facebook activity in 2018 and 2010. There is, in other words, nothing in the Facebook material to show that the appellant has been using the platform to air his views constantly, as might a committed political activist, as opposed to the more sporadic use which might be expected of a person acting in bad faith’ (PA/07142/2019, §38).

‘With regard to the evidence in support of the statement, when invited by the Judge, N. was always able to show the locations of his testimony on Google maps, and also indicated nearby places of interest and displayed confidence despite the different spelling of some locations. In particular, N. located: his three businesses […]; his home address […] and the area where his parents lived […]; the UKPNP party headquarters […]; The police station where he was taken; the Faizabad checkpoint where the police blocked vehicles heading to the demonstration; the GT highway road […] where he was abandoned after being abducted and arbitrarily detained; the address of his friend W., who gave him hospitality the night between 16 and 17 August; Hajira Road […] near an abandoned petrol pump, where N. and other protesters were detained by the police’ (N.R.G. 23684/2017, Court of Turin)

The above excerpts refer to asylum appeal cases that resulted in opposite decisions in the United Kingdom (UK) and Italy, respectively. In the first case, the judge was not persuaded that the political activities of a Bangladeshi citizen who had been active in the student wing (the Chatra Dal) of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) were genuine and considered that his social media activity had been manipulated in ‘bad faith’. Additional excerpts from Bangladeshi newspapers adduced by the applicant were also deemed not genuine and, therefore, not credible. In the second case, the appellant was able to convince the judge of his credibility by identifying 11 different locations pertaining to his testimony on Google Maps. Prior to this, he had also submitted copious documentation corroborating his identity and narrative, including his daughter’s identity card and birth certificate, his party membership card, letters from party members in Pakistan and abroad, photographs concerning his political activity, and documentation concerning his business activities and income. In light of this sheer amount of evidence, the appeal judge found N.’s account to be ‘extremely rich in detail’ and ‘offering numerous elements of external confirmation that fully corroborate his testimony’.

These cases show how digital data, documents and social media come to be used in courts and how they can make the difference between a positive decision and a rejection of an asylum claim. Scholars in migration and refugee studies have drawn attention to the changing role of evidence given increasing ‘cultures of suspicion’ of asylum seekers’ narratives (Bohmer and Shuman, 2017). The extraction of data from migrants at the datafied borders and the increased role of digitisation in asylum systems have been symptomatic of the intersections between suspicion, exclusion, and securitization that govern current asylum policies in the Global North. For instance, scholars have explained how data is extracted from migrants and how migrants and refugees are forced to give data or engage with digital devices in order to access humanitarian resources or to be able to make a claim to protection (Aradau, 2022; Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2022; Madianou, 2019; Tazzioli, 2022). They have shown how datafied borders entail extensive practices of data collection and processing aimed at deterring, confining, or otherwise limiting access to international protection, and have highlighted how migrants and asylum seekers navigate and contest digitised bordering mechanisms (Glouftsios and Casaglia, 2023; Metcalfe, 2022; Scheel, 2018).

Yet, there has been less attention to the work that asylum seekers need to do to turn their lives and bodies into ‘data’ that supports and evidences their claims for protection in the asylum process. In this article, we approach the transformations in asylum seeking through the perspective of work in order to propose a different critical perspective on datafication and its effects on migrants, including asylum seekers. We argue that asylum seekers are increasingly performing ‘invisible data work’ by collecting, assembling and ordering varied forms of digital and analogue data to support their cases. In so doing, we extend analyses of the migration industry, unfree and precarious labour to attend to this invisible work that asylum seekers are forced to do, often for long periods of time, as the processing of asylum cases can take many years. The lenses of exploitation and precarious labour have been key contributions to the analysis of migration governance and border politics as many asylum seekers find themselves in exploitative labour situations or are forbidden from accessing employment, as in the UK, for example. Asylum seekers are subjected to processes of ‘taming the mobility of labor’ through ‘a set of control devices that aim at filtering, disciplining, and often even blocking mobility’ (Altenried et al., 2018: 297). By conceptualizing data work as ‘invisible work’, we recast the process of claiming asylum as one that requires work.

The notion of ‘invisible work’ raises important political questions about the equipment and resources that asylum seekers have at their disposal to undertake this work. Drawing on insights from feminist sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) on invisible work, we show how the concept can recast asylum seeking and open new political questions. The lens of invisible work opens political questions of subjectivity – how work is seen or unseen depending on representations of race and gender, and questions of equipment – how work is done with tools and devices or in their absence, and questions of resources – how precarity is produced in the absence of financial resources and the limits on social reproduction. Our aim is, therefore, to problematize practices of migration and asylum governance through the perspective of invisible work. By attending to data work as a specific form of invisible labour that asylum seekers have to undertake, we show how they are produced as precarious, unaided and unequipped subjects.

To analyse the problem of invisible work for asylum, we use a ‘compositional methodology’. As Celia Lury has formulated it, a compositional methodology focuses ‘on the way in which a problem is put together, how it is formed and transformed, inventively’ (Lury, 2021: 3). The problem of data work became manifest to us through asylum cases where effort, prolonged periods of time and the demands on collecting and presenting data were paramount. We pursued this question through decisions on asylum appeals in Italy and the UK as well as interviews with immigration lawyers, NGOs, asylum seekers and refugees. As a compositional methodology emphasizes the heterogeneity of mixing, we did not combine sources in a linear fashion, but pursued the political questions of invisible work through hierarchies of difference, lack of equipment and protracted temporalities.

Drawing on the two cases of Italy and the UK, we do not suggest that asylum-seeking processes are similar in these two countries, but we use asylum appeals to trace ‘transversal lines’ (Basaran et al., 2017: 2) of how asylum seekers have to undertake invisible data work. The problem of invisible work is thus transversal to the different regulations on employment, asylum and evidence in the two systems. Through a compositional methodology, our aim is not to trace similarities and differences between the two cases, but to understand how asylum increasingly depends on painstaking and drawn-out invisible work, which – we argue – is intensified rather than reduced through digital devices and datafication. While this invisible data work is situated in specific legal and political contexts, it needs to be understood across rather than within national borders.

To develop our argument, we proceed in three steps. We start with the literature that has analysed the relation between asylum and labour and propose to approach asylum as a ‘field of work’ (Shrestha, 2019) characterized not only by lack of work or precarious labour, but also by invisible work. In a second step, we engage with the feminist debates on labour and work to attend to the data work that asylum seekers are summoned to do. Thirdly, we draw on a selection of asylum appeals, interviews with immigration lawyers, and participation in events and training on asylum procedures to show how invisible work is performed by asylum seekers in the context of claims for international protection.

Asylum and labour: Exploitation, destitution, precarity

Asylum seeking and labour have often been perceived as two separate fields. As asylum seekers are differentiated from economic migrants in both legal practice and political discourse, not working is typically seen as an attribute of a ‘genuine’ asylum claim. Indeed, the distinction between ‘bogus’ and ‘genuine’ asylum seekers is often drawn through the intention and need for work. These distinctions place labour at the centre of bordering practices. Scholars in migration and refugee studies have explored the points of intersection between asylum and labour, and especially the conditions of unemployment, unfree labour, precarity and destitution that characterize asylum seekers’ relationship with the job market.

Several studies have highlighted how the insecure legal status and prolonged ‘waiting’ (Jeffrey, 2008) that characterize asylum seekers’ position limit their access to legal employment, often pushing them towards the informal job market. Here, unscrupulous employers routinely subject asylum seekers to coercive and abusive treatment, including forcing them to work long hours, assigning dangerous tasks, and withholding their wages (Dwyer et al., 2016; Jackson and Bauder, 2014; Lewis et al., 2014). These practices are rendered possible by the disproportionate power that employers hold over asylum seekers, which is underpinned by the threat of denunciation to authorities and the possibility of deportation (Dwyer et al., 2016). As Nicholas De Genova (2002) aptly notes, this possibility of deportation or ‘deportability’ creates a revolving door in the labour market, which generates a cheap and easily replaceable workforce for whom exploitative work is often the only available option.

Deportability strips people of choice by turning them into a ‘distinctly disposable commodity’ (De Genova, 2002: 437, 438), thereby blurring the line between voluntary and coerced labour. Scholars have analysed this blurring through the concept of ‘unfree labour’, which challenges the voluntary/coerced binary and approaches free and unfree labour as part of a continuum (Lewis et al., 2014; Waite et al., 2015). In their research with asylum seekers in the UK, Waite et al. (2015) demonstrate that unfree labour permeates each stage of the asylum process, including the ‘post-decision’ stage. Whether they receive a positive or negative decision, asylum seekers may in fact resort to unfree labour to pay legal fees, send remittances to their families, or arrange family reunification. Furthermore, asylum seekers may be subjected to ‘state-sanctioned exploitative, coercive and unfree labour’ while they are being held in immigration detention centres (Bales and Mayblin, 2018; Burnett and Chebe, 2010; Conlon and Hiemstra, 2016). For instance, Conlon and Hiemstra (2016: 124) point out that, in the US, detained migrants are simultaneously ‘captive consumers and coerced labourers’.

In addition to unfree labour, destitution has long been a technique for political exclusion and a second defining feature of asylum regimes across the world. In the UK, it has been an integral part of the ‘hostile environment,’ aimed at disincentivizing asylum seekers from travelling and settling into the country (Crawley et al., 2011; Waite et al., 2015). Yet, destitution also produces value by making asylum seekers dependent on state agencies and non-governmental organizations for their survival, and forcing them to ‘produce value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty’ (Coddington et al., 2020: 1426).

A third analytical category, precarity, has been mobilized to illustrate the lived experiences of asylum seekers. Migration scholars have highlighted how the lack of secure legal status and employment produces intersecting levels of precarity both as a socio-economic condition and an ontological experience. Notably, Hodgkinson and colleagues have coined the phrase ‘hyper-precarity trap’ to describe how ‘aspects of socio-legal status, migration context and gender relations compound to create multidimensional insecurities that contribute to [migrants’] necessity to engage in, and close down exit from, severely exploitative and in some cases, unfree, labour’ (Lewis et al., 2014: 161). Whilst their study focuses on the UK, the concept has been applied to the situation of asylum-seekers in Austria, Finland, and Italy, where asylum-seekers are allowed to access the labour market (Schenner et al., 2019).

The focus on employment, barriers to access the labour market, and the extraction of value from the precarious labour performed by asylum seekers means that there has been less attention to invisible work beyond the realm of markets. A notable exception is anthropologist Tina Shrestha (2019), who has conceptualized asylum seeking as both a field of work (what her respondents called ‘the work of making paper’) and an element of participation in precarious labour. Drawing on ethnographic research with Nepali asylum seekers in the US, Shrestha argues that the multiple activities involved in the asylum documentation and witness preparation process are akin to – and often perceived by asylum seekers as – ‘work’. Attending screening interviews, meeting with lawyers, filing forms, attending doctor appointments, and preparing for courtroom hearings demand significant effort and time from asylum seekers, often encroaching upon their personal and working lives. Hence, these activities intervene in and shape asylum seekers’ precarious labour situation. As Shrestha puts it, ‘people’s participation in precarious labour, while not directly related to asylum-seeking is, however, sustained by the demands of the intangible labour and the indefinite time invested into the process’ (2019: 50). Asylum seeking converts people into precarious claimant workers driven by a future-oriented potential legality, exacerbating their already precarious life and labour conditions.

We propose to expand Shrestha’s focus on ‘the work of making paper’ to understand asylum seeking as the work of data – collecting, assembling and ordering data. ‘Work’ as a suffix has been present in many concepts that render practices such as paperwork or borderwork. Indeed, borderwork has been used in border studies to highlight the everyday practices and multiple actors that enact borders (e.g. Rumford, 2008; Frowd, 2018). Yet, the suffix ‘work’ in borderwork has often been understood as simply indicative of doings, of actions rather than labour or work. Sociologists Tamara Vukov and Mimi Sheller highlight the labour aspects of borderwork when they argue that scholars should attend to ‘the labor of software developers, designers, engineers, infrastructure builders, border guards, systems experts, and many others who produce the “smart border”; but they also depend on the labor of the “data-ready” travellers who produce themselves at the border, as well as the underground hidden labor of those who traffic illegally across such borders’ (Vukov and Sheller, 2013: 226). A distinction emerges here between those whose data work is paid and recognised as part of their employment and the ‘data-ready’ traveller who needs to undertake invisible data work to make themselves legible as data.

‘Invisible work’ or ‘invisible labour’ have been key concepts in feminist scholarship. In the next section, we draw on this interdisciplinary literature to conceptualize invisible work and asylum seeking as invisible data work. We use data work rather than paperwork or digital work given the extensive datafication of border, humanitarian and asylum practices (Broeders and Dijstelbloem, 2016; Weitzberg et al., 2021; Leese et al., 2022). We understand the datafication of borders to render the conversion of life into data – both analogue and digital data (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2019: 10). In asylum processes, data has to be ‘drawn together’ (Perret and Aradau, 2023) and undergo further processing to be deemed credible and be accepted as evidence.

Asylum seeking as invisible work

The notion of invisible work has its roots in feminist writings on the unpaid and unrecognised housework done by women. Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have challenged Marxist conceptions of productive labour and have drawn attention to the centrality of social reproduction to creating surplus value in capitalism (Arruzza et al., 2019; Federici, 2004; Mezzadri, 2022). The distinction between paid or waged labour and unpaid labour is central to their arguments, as they supplement the labour producing commodities with the labour (re)producing workers. While feminist Marxists focus on the relation between productive and reproductive labour, and argue that reproductive labour also produces value, feminist sociologists start from what Dorothy Smith (2003: 62) has called a ‘more generous notion of work’. In their collaborative research, Smith and Alison Griffith distinguish their more expansive use of ‘work’ from the Marxist-feminist approaches which emphasize the relation between labour and surplus value. For them, using the concept of work ‘opens up aspects of what people do that often will otherwise be missed and go unrecognized in the everyday usage of the word’ (Smith and Griffith, 2022: 41).

Inspired by the Wages for Housework movement, the notion of invisible work has been expanded beyond the realm of reproductive labour to understand a multitude of forms of work undertaken within and beyond employment. In her seminal essay ‘Invisible work’, sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels wrote about women’s work in the family and the ‘invisible careers’ of wealthy women volunteers whose work is seen as trivial and remains unacknowledged (Daniels, 1987). In the same period, Arlie Russell Hochschild developed the concept of ‘emotional labour’ (1982) to describe the management of feelings required of women in the workplace. In The Everyday Work as Problematic, Smith centred the generous conception of work for feminist sociology, taking the reconceptualization of housework as a model. She proposed to extend work to ‘what people do that requires some effort, that they mean to do and that involves some acquired competence’ (Smith 1987: 165).

Feminist scholarship in sociology, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) has deployed the concept of ‘invisible work’ to describe a wide array of reproductive and non-reproductive, unpaid and underpaid activities such as emotional labour in care work (Kittay, 1999; Theodosius, 2008), breastfeeding (Stearns, 2009), organizing work by nurses in health care (Allen, 2014), sex work (Kotiswaran, 2011), gestational surrogacy and service work (Vora, 2012). Invisible work has also been used to describe non-feminized activities such as the labour that patients perform in managing health records (Piras and Zanutto, 2010), the work that disabled people do in ‘self-managing’ attendant services (Katzman and Kinsella, 2018), and the invisible work of deaf patients in healthcare encounters (DeVault, 2014). As Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss have pointed out, ‘[w]hat will count as work does not depend a priori on any set of indicators, but rather on the definition of the situation’ (Star and Strauss, 1999).

Invisible work is not opposed to visible or taken-for-granted work, but it emerges in relation to what counts as visible work, what is recognised, valued or simply paid. Star and Strauss (1999) were among the first to draw attention to the ‘ecology of visible and invisible work’ in large-scale networked computing. Accounting for ‘behind-the-scenes’ work, they argued, is crucial to unveiling the hidden skills and expertise of seemingly routine tasks performed by workers. By adopting the notion of invisible work, STS scholars could shed light on the background practices of designing and operating computerized systems (Scroggins and Pasquetto, 2020; Star and Strauss, 1999; Suchman, 1995).

By situating what counts as work within specific situations, they could also attend to the ambiguities of ‘making work visible’ (Suchman, 1995). As STS scholar Lucy Suchman (1995) has pointed out, making work visible can render workers vulnerable to more surveillance, automation, rationalization, and close down debate. The ambiguities of visible/invisible work mean that it is difficult to define invisible work outside a situated analysis of practices. For instance, Erin Hatton has proposed to define invisible work as ‘as labour that is economically devalued through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility’ (Hatton, 2017: 337). Rather than delimiting what counts as invisible work, we draw on Smith, Star and Suchman to understand the boundaries between visible and invisible work.

As we have seen with the literature that has used forced labour, destitution and precarity, feminist migration scholars have also started to address questions of social reproduction and invisible labour as critical intervention to highlight how migrants are ‘barred from the reproductive infrastructures of the state through various legal exclusions’ (Valiavicharska, 2020; see also Tazzioli, 2023). Enrica Rigo (2022) has traced how migrants are marginalized and hindered in the social reproduction of their lives. Yet, a whole range of activities that migrants are required or enjoined to do have been absent from the focus on care work, domestic work and reproductive work. For instance, migrants must undertake extensive work of documenting their claims, which now includes different forms of analogue, digitized and born-digital data.

Building on STS and Smith’s feminist sociology, sociologist Jérôme Denis has investigated the invisible work of data, the activities that need to be undertaken for data to circulate and be processed (Denis, 2018). He has focused on the routine, unseen and often devalued activities that employees need to undertake for data to circulate, and which simultaneously define what constitutes data. The invisible work of data, as conceptualized by Denis, is situated within the workplace and it enables the disclosure and description of unrecognised competences and invisibilized practices (Denis, 2018: 107–110). We could say that invisible data work is about the (in)visibilities of data making at work, be it in a lab, in a government office or in a bank. For Denis, the primary question is ‘what is data?’ and work helps address the variety and multiplicity of what comes to count as data (Denis, 2018: 182). For us, the key question is what counts as work when asylum seekers collect and (re)assemble data so that it can be considered as evidence. Here, we articulate a more generous conception of work as extending beyond workplaces.

By using the lens of data work, we are interested in how this work is conducted in relation to similar data work that lawyers, judges or case workers undertake. The lens of data work also orients us to questions of subjectivity – what does the concept of invisible work entail for how asylum seekers live through the demands of collecting, assembling and ordering data? Asylum seekers need to work with a multitude of digital and non-digital inscriptions, from identity documents and medical certificates to social media data and WhatsApp messages (see also Canzutti and Tazzioli, 2023). By approaching these activities as work, we can trace connections and disconnections that shape how asylum seekers encounter state institutions and forms of power. Smith noted that work is enmeshed in relations, organizations, and forms of power, and it shapes the way people are related to others in invisible ways. For instance, activities such as bagging one’s groceries or assigning postal codes to letters, which shifted from the field of paid work to unpaid work, have imperceptibly reorganized our social world. Work, visible and invisible, makes it possible to ‘discover sequences of action beyond the individual’ (Smith and Griffith, 2022: 48), such as the transformations of work relations in the supermarket example. As asylum seekers are increasingly required to perform data work, this also entails a reorganization of their social world, as they need competences, resources and time to sustain this work over time.

The expansive concept of work we use here does not mean that everything is work. Smith addressed this issue by highlighting that, in addition to retaining certain characteristics of work (‘it’s done in an actual particular place […] under definite conditions and with definite resources, and it takes time’), a more generous notion of work foregrounds individuals’ experiences and subjectivity (Smith, 2003: 62). While we acknowledge that it is important to take seriously the language of work, from paperwork to domestic work, and from border work to data work, this does not mean that the word ‘work’ needs to be used. Indeed, Smith and Griffiths (2022) point out that the word ‘work’ might need to be avoided in interviews given how dominant the connection between work and employment is. ‘Work’ is thus an analytical concept that can recast the relations in which individuals are embedded and make these intelligible both to researchers and those who undertake these activities.

In the next section, we analyse the work that asylum seekers do to put together a ‘credible’ asylum application through a selection of asylum appeals from Italy and the UK. The asylum documents were selected differently in the two countries. In the UK, given that the database of asylum appeals is searchable, we have searched the database using a list of both digital and non-digital data we had compiled based on previous interviews, documentary analysis and fieldwork. In Italy, no such database exists, and the asylum appeals are not publicly available. Therefore, we collected asylum cases that had been recorded by NGOs. Thus, the two selections are quite different, as one has been produced through targeted searches, while the other was more serendipitous. However, through our compositional methodology, we have put together cases that highlight different aspects of invisible data work, thus enabling us to map a problem space of work in asylum seeking.

Assembling credibility in asylum cases: Invisible data work

Collecting data: Hierarchies of difference

In both Italy and the UK, asylum seekers have to provide evidence in support of their applications to prove that they are eligible for international protection. In accordance with Directive 2011/95/EU, Italian and UK law state that asylum seekers must submit all the material factors needed to substantiate their claim, including ‘all documentation at the applicant’s disposal regarding the applicant’s age, background (including that of relevant relatives), identity, nationality(ies), country(ies) and place(s) of previous residence, previous asylum applications, travel routes, identity and travel documents’ (see d.lvo 251/2007, art. 3 [1][2] and UK Immigration rules 339I). Where aspects of an application are not supported by documentary or other evidence, in theory they do not need confirmation if the applicant has made a ‘genuine effort’ to substantiate the claim, if all material factors at their disposal have been submitted, or if a satisfactory explanation has been provided regarding the lack of relevant material. As Bohmer and Shuman (2017:34) note, ‘applicants need to prove that they are who they say they are and that their stories are true. In the absence of documentation, applicants rely on their narratives of what happened as the primary form of evidence’.

Narratives, however, can be perceived as less reliable because they are seen to be ‘personal’, while documents are (wrongly) assumed to be more ‘neutral’ due to their association with bureaucratic institutions (Bohmer and Shuman, 2017). Thus, in the UK it is rare to see a successful asylum application with no supporting evidence or documentation. Documentary evidence is often given more weight than oral evidence in UK courts, and a lack or insufficiency of it leaves asylum seekers liable to be deemed as lacking credibility. Understood as a social accomplishment, credibility brings together economies of credit and credence (Aradau and Huysmans, 2019). Yet, credit and credence are not equally distributed in courts. In the legal economy of credit, documents can appear more credible depending on their provenance, while experts use their credentials (or have them challenged). Narratives hold less credence, and are assembled in relation to other evidence based on a probabilistic standard of proof.

In the following excerpt, an Upper Tribunal (UTIAC) judge reflects on the limits of the evidence provided by an Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker:

I appreciate the claimant has provided some photographs of himself which do show some physical injuries. But there is no independent confirmation as to when they were taken and injuries such as those shown can arise through numerous causes. So, that evidence attracts only limited weight. The claimant’s contentions in this regard are not credible (PA/01766/2019, §12).

Comments on the lack of or limited weight attributed to evidence are frequent in UK cases (see e.g., PA/00771/2016, PA/03052/2017, PA/10235/2017, PA/09645/2019). In Italy, evidence plays a less central role: in the absence of ‘proof’, decision-makers carry out a credibility assessment on the basis of applicants’ efforts to substantiate their claims, their justification for the lack of evidence, and the internal and external consistency of their statements (Asilo in Europa, 2020).¹ Evidence tends to gain prominence when the applicant is found to be ‘not credible’. For example, in the case of N., the Pakistani asylum seeker introduced at the beginning of the article, the Territorial Commission rejected his first application due to perceived inconsistencies in his account. The Commission pointed out that he had been unable to motivate his decision to join the United Kashmir People’s National Party (UKPNP) party at the age of 30 (‘it’s a bit late’) and to detail the activities and organisational structure of the party. They then challenged the lack of evidence concerning N.’s claim that a trial against him was under way in Pakistan, judging it implausible that ‘the applicant’s alleged lawyer came into possession of his arrest warrant […] but did not [have] the court judgment that would have sentenced him to death’. N. filed an appeal with the Court of Turin in 2017, supporting it with extensive documentation: his daughter’s identity card and birth certificate; his party membership card and letters, photographs, letters from party members in Pakistan and Italy; copies of his indictment, arrest warrant, and extracts from the Pakistani penal code; documents relating to his businesses in Pakistan; income tax declarations, and more. This panoply of evidence offers a glimpse into the invisible data work involved in his asylum application.

Immigration lawyers in the UK have compared the process of selecting and assembling data to making a cake. Cake making is an interesting metaphor, as it can speak to both unpaid housework and paid labour. Yet, it also points to the need for financial resources, ingredients, tools, time and skill. In its ambiguity, cake making orients us to the work that is required to assemble, verify and present evidence before courts.² N.’s lawyer raised a similar point in highlighting the substantial time it took to collect evidence for his case (several months), and the extensive resources and contacts he drew from in the process (Interview, 11/08/2021). N.’s ability to collect extensive documentation was indeed facilitated by his strong social and financial standing in Pakistan.

Asylum seekers’ ability to perform ‘invisible data work’ is shaped by hierarchies of difference – nationality, class, gender and level of education. People with lower education and literacy levels may have difficulties in understanding the content of documents and their potential usefulness in asylum claims, while those coming from particularly remote areas may have never been issued documentation from their place of birth or residence. Furthermore, asylum seekers from poorer backgrounds can rarely sustain the costs associated with gathering documents from their country of origin: for example shipping costs, or the hiring of a local lawyer who can access official documentation on their behalf (Interview, 5/05/2021). Their families may be similarly unable to help, as in the case of S., whose ‘uncle, AA, was too poor to afford to send a witness statement for his hearing’ (JR-2021-LON-000053, §148).

In this regard, it is also important to stress that asylum seekers are required to perform data work without adequate financial support or equipment in their country of destination. N., a Sudanese woman who recently obtained refugee status in the UK, recounted the challenges of ‘writing, printing, sending letters’ with no laptop or internet, and of travelling to hearings and appointments while living on £8/week (Interview, 21/03/2022).³ Crucially, as is strikingly evident in the UK tribunal cases, many asylum seekers cannot afford legal representation, having to somehow navigate the asylum system on their own. In the UK, this is also a direct consequence of repeated cuts and changes to legal aid provision which, according to Refugee Action (2018), have led to a 56% drop in the number of providers offering legal aid representation for Immigration and Asylum between 2005 and 2018.

Performing the invisible data work of asylum is entangled with hierarchies of difference which govern access to resources. In the next section, we turn to how assembling data has increasingly come to rely on digital tools and digital platforms. Asylum seekers do not only use digital communication platforms to retrieve documents in ‘digital’ form, but they often must use their own data production on digital platforms as evidence in courts. Digital data and tools are meant to ease the process of gathering and presenting evidence. However, as we show below, they often end up intensifying asylum seekers’ work.

Ordering data: (Un)equipped subjects

Asylum cases increasingly show the use of digital tools to substantiate people’s claims. This is especially true in the UK, where social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and communication apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, or Telegram have become relatively common features of asylum applications. For instance, a search using ‘Facebook’ on the UK UTIAC archive yielded 551 cases, ‘Twitter’ 39 cases, ‘YouTube’ 91 cases and ‘WhatsApp’ 191 cases (until 31/12/2022). While the numbers are overall small, the use of social media in appeals has increased year-on-year. In Italy, several of the cases we analysed and the lawyers we interviewed mentioned the use of Google Maps by both asylum seekers and decision-makers.⁴

Asylum seekers often rely on social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp to collect data about their lives. These digital tools make it easier to preserve and circulate documents, photos and videos, and to provide evidence that can corroborate people’s narratives regarding their political activities or geographical locations at specific points in time. Yet, these forms of digital data are often deemed unreliable and therefore questioned by judges. In several cases in the UK, the use of social media to evidence political activity is simply deemed effaceable or erasable. For example, in rejecting the claim of an Iranian citizen, DK, the UTIAC notes that he could ‘delete any potentially damaging Facebook account before returning the [sic] Iran and that he could truthfully confirm if interrogated on return that he has no interest in separatist politics’ (PA/02474/2020, §7). The result of Facebook deletion would simply turn DK in ‘nothing more that [sic] a Kurdish male with no political profile’. This statement is woefully ignorant of social media and its use of transactional data. While a Facebook account can be deleted, interactions on social media are transactional, so deleting an account does not delete all traces of action. Indeed, in a digital world, it is traces of action rather than speech that have become increasingly important (Cardon, 2015). While DK could delete his account, it remains uncertain whether all the traces of activity would be deleted, as Facebook also acknowledges that some information is preserved if not stored in a user’s account.⁵

When social media is used for evidence of anti-government activity, as in the case of a Kurdish Iranian citizen who recorded rap music critical of the government, the FtT judge similarly sees them as easily effaceable:

However, posts can be taken down and altered, settings can be changed between public and private, and screenshots only show the status shown on a page for the moment of the photograph and may only show a temporary change to a page made for the purpose of the screenshot itself (cited in PA/12093/2019, §15).

The UTIAC challenges this reasoning, given reams of other evidence provided by BR, including medical reports and external evidence about the situation of atheists in Iran. This is one of the few cases we have encountered when an appeal is sustained as the judge deems that it is not ‘reasonable to assume that the anti-Government Facebook posts are not accessible to the Iranian authorities, even if they had been taken down’ (PA/12093/2019, §30).

Generally, the limited value attributed to social media evidence contrasts with the perceived reliability of digital tools used by decision-makers to verify aspects of the asylum application. In Italy, this has enabled asylum officials to carry out real-time online searches to corroborate names and locations mentioned in asylum testimonies. Online maps are a particularly relevant tool through which decision-makers seek to determine whether people are telling the truth about their place of origin – especially in cases where protection hinges on risks associated with specific geographical areas. In these cases, hearings become akin to ‘a tour around villages’ where asylum seekers are expected to locate relevant places, describe routes from one place to another, and name roads and local landmarks to show familiarity with the area (Interview, 28/05/2021). Although seemingly banal, lawyers remark that these activities can require ‘training’ and work:

At times I’ve worked with clients for 15 hours [to collect information and prepare for the hearing], even more. When you have a complex case, ideally you should start prepping a month ahead. There are people who have difficulties expressing themselves, there are all sorts of variables (Interview, 28/05/2021).

This quote highlights the invisible cognitive work that goes into collecting data and preparing for the ‘testing’ of evidence and narratives in court. Such work is particularly arduous given the lengthy time frames of asylum decisions and appeals. In order to obtain refugee status, asylum seekers are, in fact, expected to accurately and consistently relay the same details over time, with inconsistencies being taken as evidence of fabrication (Haas and Shuman, 2019; Herlihy and Turner 2007).

At the same time, digital tools and digital data have been used as ‘shortcuts’ by asylum authorities and courts. A case in the UK shows how an asylum claim by an Iraqi national was rejected based on the inaccurate location of the town of Makhmour on Google Maps as part of the Erbil governate (Case PA/00291/2017). The UTIAC judge underscores the effects of relying on Google Maps:

Had either decision maker looked at an alternative source of information they would have seen that in fact Makhmour is officially, as far as the Iraqi government are concerned, part of the Nineveh governate. Since the Respondent accepts that Nineveh remains 'contested' the decision in this case could have been very different. The starting point would have been that there is an Article 15(c) risk to the Appellant, and the only question would have been internal flight (PA/00291/2017, §7).⁶

In this case, the asylum seeker was unrepresented and unable to contest the taken-for-granted ‘authority’ of Google Maps. In other cases, asylum seekers are expected to have or acquire specific knowledge and skills to navigate online maps that may be incomplete, outdated, or written in a language that they are not entirely familiar with. At times, asylum seekers need to do translation work that requires bridging discrepancies in naming practices – i.e., discrepancies between the local names known by asylum seekers and official names that can be found online (see Spotti 2019). Hence, applicants who lack formal schooling or have limited reading and writing skills in the Latin script can be deemed not credible if they fail to provide the official names of well-known places that officials find on Google Maps and other websites.

In undertaking the work of ordering data through and on digital platforms, asylum seekers need cognitive and material equipment. Yet, despite the need for different types of digital platforms, digital devices and tools to collect and order this data so that it can be presented as evidence, they remain precariously equipped or even unequipped to undertake this invisible work. The lack of equipment and support becomes intensified as invisible data work is extended over protracted and uncertain periods of time, as we will show in the next section.

(Re)assembling data: Precarity and temporalities of invisible work

Data work to support an asylum claim takes time. JAS, an Afghan citizen, arrived in the UK on 6 July 2017, claimed asylum in August 2017, and was rejected in January 2018. His appeal was dismissed by the FtT in November 2018 and then upheld by the UTIAC on 14 January 2021, when it was referred back to the FtT. More than 3 years and a half after his arrival to the UK, JAS was restarting the process of appealing (PA/10872/2019, §3). This is one of the shorter time intervals in which asylum seekers pursue their cases: asylum seekers in fact report waiting times as long as eight and up to 15 years.⁷ The Refugee Council (2021) has confirmed these estimates while also drawing attention to the rise in the backlog of asylum cases in the UK, which has increased almost tenfold since 2010. In Italy, the official average duration of the regular asylum procedure is approximately one year (EMN, 2020). However, reports and immigration lawyers have indicated that it regularly exceeds the stated maximum of 18 months, with similar waiting times for appeal decisions (AIDA, 2016). Between 2015 and 2017, when Italy experienced its highest numbers of arrivals, the entire procedure between manifestation of the will to claim asylum and final decision (and excluding appeals) lasted an average of 2 and a half years (EMN, 2020).

Temporality and waiting have received significant attention within border and migration studies (see e.g., Andersson, 2014; Griffiths, 2017; Khosravi, 2017; Tazzioli, 2018). Throughout their journeys, migrants shift between multiple forms of waiting: to cross state borders, to access the asylum procedure, to obtain refugee status and other forms of regularisation; or in refugee camps, so-called ‘reception centres’, and detention centres (Jacobsen et al., 2021). Waiting is a defining feature of migrants’ experiences both en route and in their country of destination. For many scholars, waiting is aimed at obstructing, slowing down, channelling and hindering ‘unruly mobility’ (see e.g. Tazzioli, 2018). This condition has often been described as an existential limbo (Haas, 2017) or liminal space (Lewis et al., 2014). However, the focus on waiting has also been criticized for the sense of immobility and lack of agency that it implies and which risks portraying migrants as passive subjects who ‘just wait’ for new life opportunities and change (Rotter, 2016; Brun and Fábos, 2015).

Indeed, waiting should not be seen as an ‘empty interlude’ (Rotter, 2016). Rebecca Rotter (2016) points out that asylum seekers’ waiting time has affective, active, and productive dimensions, while Alison Mountz (2011) shows that it can create moments and spaces of political possibility. Khosravi (2014) similarly argues that waiting can be a form of resistance and a strategy of defiance by migrants. As we have seen, asylum seekers do not simply wait for a decision on their case, but are enjoined to engage in a variety of activities. Among these, they gather and assemble different forms of data, gather new evidence if their applications are rejected, recall witnesses, prepare for and participate in hearings. These activities are protracted for several years. Thus, asylum seeking entails sustained invisible data work, which requires not only assembling but also reassembling data again and again, before different authorities. On the one hand, (re)assembling data needs to persist over time, as devices and tools of recording, storing and accessing data can become obsolete; on the other, as asylum seekers transform their lived past and imagined futures into data, they are also relegated to an indefinite present of precarity.

This invisible work is underpinned by non-linear temporalities and it sometimes overlaps and interlaces with forms of unpaid labour. Indeed, seeking international protection entails collecting and assembling data on one’s past, present and, at times, (projected) future: beyond substantiating the claim that they have a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ through a detailed reconstruction of their past, asylum seekers can bring evidence of sur place activities⁸ in their country of destination – for example screenshots of Facebook posts that demonstrate their political opinions or views (e.g. [2022] UKUT 00023 (IAC)). Additionally, if their asylum application is refused, they can hope to obtain subsidiary protection (e.g., humanitarian or other forms of protection), which in some countries requires them to evidence their present ‘integration’.

As Vianelli and colleagues (2022) note, integration-based criteria have increasingly permeated decisions to grant support, exemplifying the conditional inclusion of asylum seekers on the basis of desirable behaviours and specific moral qualities. Volunteering aptly illustrates this point. In Italy, where the ‘level of integration’ has been one of the main criteria for the granting of humanitarian or ‘special’ protection, asylum seekers are advised to volunteer – or, as Pasqualetto (2017) notes, perform unpaid labour– to project the image of a deserving future citizen (see also Martin and Tazzioli, 2023). In the UK, although asylum seekers are not allowed to work while their claim is being considered, they are ‘encouraged to volunteer’ (Home Office, 2022: 5, emphasis added). Thus, asylum seekers are not just expected to wait: they are expected to wait productively – their productivity ‘[being] assessed through the neoliberal imperatives of entrepreneurship, autonomy and self-improvement’ (Vianelli et al., 2022: 1028).

While the work of integration and volunteering is also invisible and unpaid, this section has drawn attention to the aspects of data work that are entwined with these protracted periods of time in which asylum seekers wait for a decision. The invisible work of collecting, assembling and ordering data to evidence their identity, the dangers they face and their potential integration in society also needs to be understood as extending their experience of precarious living in the present. Indeed, Shrestha (2019) has shown how the work of asylum seeking intensifies the asylum seekers’ precarious labour situation. The protracted time in which they have to undertake data work only reinforces their precarity in the absense of financial resources and material equipment.

Approaching asylum seeking through invisible data work entails drawing attention to how asylum seekers have to do work which is not recognised, enabled or remunerated as such. When performed by lawyers, judges and other state officials, similar activities are considered work. However, asylum seekers undertake invisible work without – or with limited – equipment or resources, having to find the tools, skills and time that would make them competent users of data and digital technologies.

Conclusion

This article has argued that seeking asylum entails sustained, difficult and invisible data work. Building on interdisciplinary feminist literature on ‘invisible work’, we have shown that the collection, assemblage, and ordering of data in order to make and substantiate asylum claims is work. This data can be digital or analogue, including social media posts, photographs, identity and other documents, and certificates. Not all this data work will come to count as evidence or be accepted as such. Yet, asylum seekers have to continually engage in data work in case this data might help support their case.

Invisible data work requires significant resources, effort, and time. Firstly, the ability to collect data depends on hierarchies of difference such as asylum seekers’ nationality, economic status, gender and education. Secondly, ordering data and ‘translating’ it into a form that decision-makers can understand requires cognitive work and material equipment. Finally, as seeking asylum stretches over long periods of time, asylum seekers have to continue to assemble data and reassemble it as requested by various authorities. This requires converting their lives into data, but also storing and accessing this data at various moments in time. Some of the appeal cases we have analysed in Italy and the UK lasted as long as ten years. Far from being empty time, waiting entails protracted invisible work which is intertwined with unpaid labour.

By addressing asylum seeking through a more ‘generous notion of work’, we have drawn attention to the aspects of data collection, assembling and ordering, which need to supplement existing critical reflections on asylum and labour. When questions of the digitisation of asylum are raised, the focus is on surveillance by the state – from biometrics to social media and mobile phones – and extractive data practices by commercial and humanitarian actors. The invisible data work that asylum seekers need to perform orients research to questions of resources, effort and time that are required from asylum seekers. Yet, these questions never emerge in courts, where the difficulties of collecting, assembling and ordering certain types of data are simply not seen. Data is not just there: lived experience needs to be made into different forms of data and subsequently translated into evidence, which can be deemed more or less credible in courts. Politically, rendering the collection and assemblage of data as ‘invisible work’ rather than just ‘doings’ is important to challenge the portrayal of asylum seekers as passive subjects who ‘just wait’ for a decision to be made, and understand the intensification of precarity and cruelty that asylum seekers face.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the SECURITY FLOWS team for stimulating conversations that helped shape the paper. Previous versions of this work were presented at the King’s College London 2021 New Voices Seminar series, the 2021 Escapes Conference in Milan, and the 2023 ISA Annual Convention. We thank Amanda Chisholm and Martina Tazzioli for the invitation to present, and we are especially grateful to Martina Tazzioli and Saskia Stachowitsch for their careful reading of the paper and useful comments. Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with our work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SECURITY FLOWS, Grant Agreement No. 819213). The views expressed are, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting agency can be held responsible for them.

ORCID iD

Lucrezia Canzutti

Notes

Lucrezia Canzutti is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research has developed a critical political analysis of security practices. Her latest book, co-authored with Tobias Blanke, is Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (2022). Aradau is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project ‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’ (SECURITY FLOWS).

References

AIDA (2016) The Length of Asylum Procedures in Europe. Brussels: Asylum Information Database. https://www.ecre.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AIDA-Brief-DurationProcedures.pdf (accessed 17 August 2020).

Allen

(2014) The Invisible Work of Nurses: Hospitals, Organisation and Healthcare. London: Routledge.

Altenried

Bojadžijev

Höfler

, et al. (2018) Logistical borderscapes: politics and mediation of mobile labor in Germany after the “summer of migration”. South Atlantic Quarterly 117(2): 291–312.

Asilo in Europa (2020) La protezione internazionale davanti al giudice: uno studio sui decreti del Tribunale di Bologna. https://www.asiloineuropa.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/La-protezione-internazionale-davanti-al-giudice.-Studio-sui-decreti-del-Tribunale-di-Bologna.pdf (accessed 7 December 2022).

Andersson

(2014) Time and the migrant other: European border controls and the temporal economics of illegality. American Anthropologist 116(4): 795–809.

Aradau

(2022) Experimentality, surplus data and the politics of debilitation in borderzones. Geopolitics 27(1): 26–46.

Aradau

Huysmans

(2019) Assembling credibility: knowledge, method and critique in times of ‘post-truth. Security Dialogue 50(1): 40–58.

Arruzza

Bhattacharya

Fraser

(2019) Feminism for the 99%. London: Verso.

Bales

Mayblin

(2018) Unfree labour in immigration detention: exploitation and coercion of a captive immigrant workforce. Economy and Society 47(2): 191–213.

10.

Basaran

BigoGuittet

Walker

RBJ

(2017) Transversal lines: an introduction. In: Basaran

Bigo

Guittet

E-P

, et al. (eds) International Political Sociology: Transversal Lines. London: Routledge, 1–10.

11.

Bohmer

Shuman

(2017) Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

12.

Broeders

Dijstelbloem

(2016) The datafication of mobility and migration management: the Mediating state and its consequences. In: Van der Ploeg

Pridmore

(eds) Digitizing Identities: Doing Identity in a Networked World. London: Routledge, 242–260.

13.

Brun

Fábos

(2015) Making homes in limbo? A conceptual framework. Refuge 31(1): 5–18.

14.

Burnett

Chebe

(2010) Captive labour: asylum seekers, migrants and employment in UK immigration removal centres. Race and Class 51(4): 95–103.

15.

Canzutti

Tazzioli

(2023) Digital–nondigital assemblages: Data, paper trails, and migrants’ scattered subjectivities at the border. International Political Sociology 17(3): olad014.

16.

Cardon

(2015) A quoi rêvent les algorithmes. Nos vies à l'heure: Nos vies à l’heure des big data. Paris: Seuil.

17.

Chouliaraki

Georgiou

(2022) The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power. New York: NYU Press.

18.

Coddington

Conlon

Martin

(2020) Destitution economies: Circuits of value in asylum, refugee, and migration control. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(5): 1425–1444.

19.

Conlon

Hiemstra

(2016) Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

20.

Crawley

Hemmings

Price

(2011) Coping with Destitution: Survival and livelihood strategies of refused asylum seekers living in the UK. Oxfam Research Report, February 1–69.

21.

Daniels

(1987) Invisible work*. Social Problems 34(5): 403–415.

22.

De Genova

(2002) Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–447.

23.

Denis

(2018) Le Travail invisible des données. Éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales. Paris: Presses des Mines.

24.

DeVault

(2014) Mapping invisible work: Conceptual tools for social justice projects. Sociological Forum 29(4): 775–790.

25.

Dwyer

Hodkinson

Lewis

, et al. (2016) Socio-legal status and experiences of forced labour among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 32(3): 182–198.

26.

D’Ignazio

Klein

(2019) Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

27.

EMN (2020) Accurate, Timely, Interoperable? Data Management in the Asylum Procedure. National Report 2020 – EMN Italy. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/publications/accurate-timely-interoperable-data-management-asylum-procedure_en (accessed 7 December 2022).

28.

Federici

(2004) Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.

29.

Frowd

(2018) Developmental borderwork and the International Organization for Migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(10): 1656–1672.

30.

Glouftsios

Casaglia

(2023) Epidermal politics: Control, violence and dissent at the biometric border. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 41(3): 567–582.

31.

Griffiths

(2017) The changing politics of time in the UK’s immigration system. In: Timespace and International Migration. Edward Elgar Publishing, 48–60.

32.

Haas

(2017) Citizens-in-waiting, deportees-in-waiting: Power, temporality, and suffering in the US asylum system. Ethos 45(1): 75–97.

33.

Haas

Shuman

(2019) Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum. Athens: Ohio University Press.

34.

Hatton

(2017) Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. Work, Employment and Society 31(2): 336–351.

35.

Herlihy

Turner

(2007) Asylum claims and memory of trauma: Sharing our knowledge. British Journal of Psychiatry 191(1): 3–4.

36.

Home Office (2022) Permission to work and volunteering for asylum seekers. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1114501/Permission_to_work_and_volunteer.pdf (accessed 7 December 2022).

37.

Jackson

Bauder

(2014) Neither temporary, nor permanent: The precarious employment experiences of refugee claimants in Canada. Journal of Refugee Studies 27(3): 360–381.

38.

Jacobsen

Karlsen

Khosravi

(2021) Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration. London: Routledge.

39.

Jeffrey

(2008) Waiting. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(6): 954–958.

40.

Katzman

Kinsella

(2018) ‘It’s like having another job’: The invisible work of self-managing attendant services. Disability & Society 33(9): 1436–1459.

41.

Khosravi

(2014) Waiting. In: Anderson

Keith

(eds) Migration: The Compas Anthology. Oxford: ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society.

42.

Khosravi

(2017) Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

43.

Kittay

(1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge.

44.

Kotiswaran

(2011) Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex work and the Law in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

45.

Leese

Noori

Scheel

(2022) Data matters: The politics and practices of digital border and migration management. Geopolitics 27(1): 5–25.

46.

Lewis

Dwyer

Hodkinson

, et al. (2014) Precarious Lives: Forced Labour, Exploitation and Asylum. Bristol: The Policy Press.

47.

Lury

(2021) Problem Spaces: Why and How Methodology Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.

48.

Madianou

(2019) Technocolonialism: Digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. Social media + society 5(3): 1–13.

49.

Martin

Tazzioli

(2023) Value extraction through refugee carcerality: Data, labour and financialised accommodation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41(2): 191–209.

50.

Metcalfe

(2022) Autonomy of migration and the radical imagination: Exploring alternative imaginaries within a biometric border. Geopolitics 27(1): 47–69.

51.

Mezzadri

(2022) Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death. Organization 29(3): 379–400.

52.

Mountz

(2011) Where asylum-seekers wait: Feminist counter-topographies of sites between states. Gender, Place & Culture 18(3): 381–399.

53.

Pasqualetto

(2017) Il ‘volontariato’ dei richiedenti asilo in Italia. REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 25: 233–248.

54.

Perret

Aradau

(2023) Drawing data together: Inscriptions, asylum, and scripts of security. Science, Technology, & Human Values Online first. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231200170.

55.

Piras

Zanutto

(2010) Prescriptions, x-rays and grocery lists. Designing a Personal Health Record to support (the invisible work of) health information management in the household. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 19(6): 585–613.

56.

Refugee Action (2018) Tipping the scales: Access to justice in the asylum system. https://www.refugee-action.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Access-to-Justice-July-18-1.pdf (accessed 19 January 2023).

57.

Rigo

(2022) La straniera. Migrazioni, asilo, Sfruttamento in una Prospettiva di Genere. Roma: Carocci editore.

58.

Rotter

(2016) Waiting in the asylum determination process: Just an empty interlude? Time & Society 25(1): 80–101.

59.

Rumford

(2008) Introduction: Citizens and borderwork in Europe. Space and Polity 12(1): 1–12.

60.

Scheel

(2018) Real fake? Appropriating mobility via Schengen visa in the context of biometric border controls. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(16): 2747–2763.

61.

Schenner

Cavanna

Ollus

(2019) Asylum-seekers and the ‘hyper-precarity trap’ in Austria, Finland and Italy. Transfer 25(1): 81–99.

62.

Scroggins

Pasquetto

(2020) Labor out of place: On the varieties and valences of (In)Visible labor in data-intensive science. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 111–132.

63.

Shrestha

(2019) Asylum-seeking work, precariousness, and the making of claimant-workers. XL(1), 47–57.

64.

Smith

(1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northwestern University Press.

65.

Smith

(2003) Making sense of what people do: A sociological perspective. Journal of Occupational Science 10(1): 61–64.

66.

Smith

Griffith

(2022) Simply Institutional Ethnography. Creating a Sociology for People. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

67.

Spotti

(2019) ‘It’s all about naming things right’: The paradox of web truths in the Belgian asylum-seeking procedure. In: Gill

Good

(eds). Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

68.

Star

Strauss

(1999) Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8: 9–30.

69.

Stearns

(2009) The work of breastfeeding. Women's Studies Quarterly 37(3/4): 63–80.

70.

Suchman

(1995) Making work visible. Communications of the ACM 38(9): 56–64.

71.

Tazzioli

(2018) The temporal borders of asylum. Temporality of control in the EU border regime. Political Geography 64: 13–22.

72.

Tazzioli

(2022) Extract, datafy and disrupt: refugees’ subjectivities between data abundance and data disregard. Geopolitics 27(1): 1–19.

73.

Tazzioli

(2023) Border Abolitionism: Migrants’ Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles and Rescue. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

74.

Theodosius

(2008) Emotional Labour in Health Care. London: Routledge.

75.

Valiavicharska

(2020) Social reproduction in the making: Recentering the margins, expanding the directions. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22(2): 2.

76.

Vianelli

Gill

Hoellerer

(2022) Waiting as probation: Selecting self-disciplining asylum seekers. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48(5): 1013–1032.

77.

Vora

(2012) Limits of “labor”: Accounting for affect and the biological in transnational surrogacy and service work. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(4): 681–700.

78.

Vukov

Sheller

(2013) Border work: Surveillant assemblages, virtual fences, and tactical counter-media. Social Semiotics 23(2): 225–241.

79.

Waite

Lewis

Dwyer

, et al. (2015) Precarious lives: Refugees and asylum seekers’ resistance within unfree labouring. Acme 14(2): 479–491.

80.

Weitzberg

Cheesman

Martin

, et al. (2021) Between surveillance and recognition: Rethinking digital identity in aid. Big Data & Society 8(1): 1–7.

Collecting,assembling,ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Asylum and labour: Exploitation, destitution, precarity

Asylum seeking as invisible work

Assembling credibility in asylum cases: Invisible data work

Collecting data: Hierarchies of difference

Ordering data: (Un)equipped subjects

(Re)assembling data: Precarity and temporalities of invisible work

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References