Tschalaer, ‘Waiting for LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers in Germany’, 2020

Mengia Tschalaer, ‘Waiting for LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers in Germany: A Form of State Control and Resistance’, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, 15 September 2020

Abstract

Since 2016, the European Union has made efforts to streamline and simplify the administrative procedure for international refugee protection. Despite such efforts, people seeking asylum in Europe generally wait one to four years (or even longer) between lodging their asylum claim and when a final decision is reached (European Commission). Indeed, four years after the peak of the “refugee crisis,” European courts still experience a huge backlog, and waiting several years for a decision on an asylum claim is now the norm. As in other parts of Europe, in Germany, the length of time a person seeking asylum spends waiting for the asylum decision has significantly increased over the past four years. As a judge at the Administrative Court in Berlin told me, today they handle about 20 times more asylum cases than before 2015—with the same personnel. In public and political discourse, “waiting” in the asylum context is constituted by imageries of either the lazy male migrant or the weak and protection-worthy mother/family (Khosravi 2014; Griffiths, Rogers and Anderson 2013). For LGBTQI+ people seeking asylum, this “wait time” often means isolation, homo- and/or transphobia, racism, violence, resettlements, dependence, and an unknown future (Griffiths 2014, Hage 2009).