between the bureaucracy and the interviewee. In the new spirit of openness, an ethos of bureaucratic accountability holds sway, which itself serves to shroud police plenary power.
Later, another interviewee—a woman from Georgia—references the violence outside Allodhapon.4 She explains that a few months ago, she went to renew her pink card, but that she was not able to make an appointment; the police officers in charge kept saying ela avrio, ela avrio [έλα αύριο, έλα αύριο] (“come tomorrow, come tomorrow”). But she was afraid, particularly when she saw another woman stripped naked by the crowd after coming out of the building. The young officer shakes his head in disbelief and comments: “last year the situation was not controlled easily,” and the interviewee interjects, explaining that now it is “fine.” When I ask the officer later about the violence outside, he comments that he has heard and seen things, and particularly that the situation was very bad before he came. Yet overall, it strikes me that from his position inside, in the interview room, he does not involve himself in the enforcement measures outside.
These two accounts from Allodhapon point to very different formations of state regulatory power surrounding the pink card. Though the violence I witnessed earlier outside the building contrasts with the relatively warm atmosphere currently unfolding inside, it is not entirely erased. Discussions of the document as an instrument of both protection and enforcement give spectral testament to arbitrary forms of regulatory control and police violence, which persist in and through the reform process. The newer process emphasizes openness, oversight, and bureaucratic accountability, particularly through additions and shifts in personnel, including both UNHCR representatives and a number of newly trained police officers. For the young officer, who is in many ways a product of this new environment, documentary practices and decision making emerge as part of a bureaucratic process and procedure, while enforcement measures remain outside the purview of the asylum division, curtailed both spatially and temporally (outside, and in the past). The old-timers remain, however, attesting to the persistence of another culture of documentation and decision making that is more personalized, arbitrary, yet also flexible. The pink card can be used as a bargaining chip, which dilutes the image of bureaucratic distance and accountability that the young officer cultivates, indicating, for some of the UNHCR representatives, ongoing forms of corruption that undermine the reform process. But for asylum seekers, such as the young Egyptian man, such flexibilities may also enable more immediate goals. In the end, whether the asylum seeker is greeted with a depersonalized but accountable bureaucracy or a highly personalized (and seemingly arbitrary) ad hoc approach depends very much on which officer he or she encounters (see Ramji-Nogales et al.).
In her analysis of the limbo of indefinite detention, Judith Butler (2004) draws on Foucault’s assertion that “governmentality” serves to vitalize the state, replacing traditional forms of sovereignty with diffuse formations of power that grant the state a powerful everyday life. When “petty sovereigns” (57) (in this case, police officers and bureaucrats) enact Greek and European territorial sovereignties through documentary practices, asylum seekers encounter a diffuse disciplinary power, which ultimately remains unpredictable even through emerging forms of bureaucratic accountability. Yet the pink card does not simply reinforce the power of the state; it reflects both police and asylum seekers’ attempts to make this document and limbo meaningful. The very practices that vitalize state power also imbue the pink card with meanings and functions that reshape or even undermine state regulatory activities.
Narrating Limbo
In addition to the powerful physical-spatial dimensions of limbo enacted through policing practices at both Greek and EU scales of governance, limbo is implied in the juridical formulation of asylum seeking itself. Asylum applicants occupy positions precariously between undocumented, paperless illegality and “refugee” status. While recognition as a refugee conveys the right to protection in a host country, the category “asylum seeker” connotes a temporary relationship to a nation-state in which the right to stay is itself highly transitory (Coutin 2005). In seeking asylum, one has asked to be granted the status of refugee, but one has not been “recognized” as such. Asylum seekers thus occupy a neither fully legal nor illegal position of non-belonging, suspended in limbo between multiple bureaucratic stages conveying possible acceptance, rejection, or appeal. If an asylum claim is approved, one is “recognized” as a refugee, but if the claim is rejected, temporary permission to stay is revoked and one is rendered, de facto, an “undocumented” migrant; in Greece, one must leave voluntarily, attempt to employ other methods of regularization, or risk arrest or deportation.
Amid the many ambiguities and instabilities of limbo, the pink card acquired vitality in the intimacies and informalities of daily life, as persons invoked the document through narrative attempts to make sense of their encounters with the asylum procedure. At times, these moments of discursive engagement highlighted the document’s power to immobilize, imprison, or make one vulnerable. Yet individuals also infused the pink card with hopes for belonging, recognition, freedom, access to rights, and economic survival, thus reinterpreting both the pink card and the condition of limbo that it consigned.
In March 2003, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Greek Ministry of Public Order effectively “froze” asylum applications from Iraqis, implicitly anticipating that the situation in Iraq might improve. Between 2003 and 2008, few Iraqi claims were approved or rejected, meaning that many Iraqi asylum seekers could renew their pink cards repeatedly but that their cases rarely progressed to a decision or even a second-instance interview. The extreme difficulty of obtaining an asylum decision made this limbo, for many Iraqis, particularly protracted, lasting months and even years.5 Take, for example, the case of Kamir, an Iraqi Kurd. In an informal interview over coffee in January 2007, he explained that he had been in Greece since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq but that his asylum claim had been “frozen.” He had initially “started out with a pink card,” but after a few years of waiting while working and making a life in Greece, he quit the asylum process and initiated a new process of legalization as an economic migrant, successfully applying for the Greek equivalent of a “green card.” Thanks to his excellent Greek, good education, and an employer who had hired him, this different legalization pathway was ultimately more convenient, and much faster, than the asylum process.6 However, he explained that he was disappointed because he was a refugee and should have been recognized as such.
Kamir’s commentary evoked an ambivalent relationship between the limbo to which he was consigned through the pink card and his own self-identification as a refugee. He suggested that refugee status would have signified the recognition of crucial elements of his experience, while the failure of his asylum claim implied a delegitimization of that history. He discursively associated the green card with this failure, as a document related to economic migration, which labeled him a migrant, not a refugee. A few months after our conversation, however, Kamir traveled back to Iraq to see his family, a trip that would not have been possible had he been an asylum seeker or even a recognized refugee, since the travel document issued to refugees expressly prohibits travel to the holder’s country of origin. Thus, while the green card came to signify a lack of recognition, this document also provided a way out of limbo, with significant forms of mobility.
In addition to the overwhelming frustrations and delegitimizing effects of limbo, many asylum seekers characterized the card as a powerful indicator of physical immobility. Through a series of interviews in spring 2008, Asad, a young man from Somalia, told me how he had attempted a number of entries and undergone multiple expulsions in crossing the border into Greece. After being expelled twice from Greece, in Turkey he arranged for a false passport, and traveled directly from Istanbul to Britain, where his aunt lived. He applied for asylum there, and for a year lived in Manchester while he awaited a decision. The British authorities, however, discovered Asad’s fingerprints registered in Eurodac (the EU biometric data system), revealing that he had first entered the EU via Greece, so they deported him to Athens under the auspices of Dublin II. When he asked for asylum upon arrival at the Athens airport, he was issued a pink card, and finally officially became an asylum seeker in Greece.