398 Int. J. Migration and Border Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2015

Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Humanitarian confinement: an ethnography of reception centres for asylum seekers at Europe’s southern border

Giuseppe Campesi Dept. of Political Sciences, University of Bari, Italy Email: giuseppe.campesi@uniba.it

Abstract: This article presents the results of an empirical research carried out within Italian reception centres for asylum seekers. The article shows how reception centres can become a trap from which asylum seekers are no longer able to escape as they become victims of a process of social disempowerment making them dependent on the ‘humanitarian government’. This reproduction of dependence enables the reception system to carry out a subtle social control function, achieving the effect of confining asylum seekers within a concentrated place that can easily be controlled by the police. But this form of control is exercised even though the law does not provide any explicitly repressive means for keeping them under surveillance. So-called reception centres exert a centripetal force which is hard to resist, and which in a sense has an ability to trap asylum seekers more than any wall. The Italian reception system amounts to a form of ‘humanitarian confinement’, in that provide hospitality for asylum seekers, while subjecting them to a form of control enacted through humanitarian agents.

Keywords: reception centres; humanitarian government; asylum; confinement; ethnography.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Campesi, G. (2015) ‘Humanitarian confinement: an ethnography of reception centres for asylum seekers at Europe’s southern border’, Int. J. Migration and Border Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp.398–418.

Biographical notes: Giuseppe Campesi is currently a Senior Lecturer and Aggregate Professor (tenured) in Law and Society at the Department of Political Sciences of the ‘Aldo Moro’ University of Bari (Italy), his research cut across different disciplines focusing mainly on contemporary social theory, critical legal studies, critical security studies, border controls and migration policies.

1 Introduction

The use of large-scale facilities for receiving asylum seekers and refugees is justified through arguments stressing the need for bureaucratic efficiency in delivering services and the need that in certain circumstances arises for urgent assistance. Concentrating many people in one place, in structures rigidly organised and autocratically managed by humanitarian agents, seems to be the only solution for providing relief to people in

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distress (Black, 1998; Harrel-Bond, 1998). A similar logic has driven the birth of the Italian network of reception centres for asylum seekers, logic conceived from the outset as one of emergency. Indeed, the first reception centres were created in the framework of the exercise of special powers by the executive under conditions of highly dramatised ‘humanitarian emergencies’, like those that from the 1990s onward would often erupt along the southern coastline. In the following years, the humanitarian-emergency logic proved to be the driving force in framing Italian asylum policies, normalising the use of reception centres where migrants and asylum seekers are housed at the cost of a substantial limitation of their freedoms (Campesi, 2014a).

The penetration of the humanitarian logic in migration control policies has recently been the subject of much research (Pugh, 2004; Campesi, 2011, 2014b; Horsti, 2012; Aas and Gundhus, 2015) as scholars have begun to reflect on the rationale of a policy which aims at «compensating for the social violence embodied in the regime of migration control» [Walters, (2011), p.139]. Humanitarian border control policies can be considered a peculiar institutional articulation of what Fassin has called ‘humanitarian government’, that is, the expression of a governmental rationality in which the administration of human collectivities is carried out in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action [Fassin, (2007) p.151; (2011), pp.1–2]. Humanitarianism is certainly propelled by a universalistic drive. It makes the moral imperative to alleviate suffering and protect human life the main frame of reference for political action. Yet it could also be considered a specific form of biopolitics. Humanitarian government recognises the protection of human beings as the ultimate value that politics should strive for. It is a politics of life, but life must be understood here in the limited sense of being alive [Fassin, (2011), p.251]. Being called to protect lives in danger, this governmental rationality produces spaces of exception within which humanitarian agencies are entitled to exercise an enormous discretional power in view of the most effective crisis management response. The refugee camps are perhaps the main expression of the emergency logic that drives humanitarian government.

According to Agier (2011, p.201), humanitarian government is the entity that constructs, manages and control camps, everywhere that these are needed, in order to keep there populations who are viewed, simultaneously or alternatively, as vulnerable and undesiderable, victims and dangerous. Within these kinds of facilities, assistance and control go hand in hand, as they essentially make it possible to concentrate the assisted population at one point, avoiding the dispersion of people perceived as potentially problematic (Black, 1998; Fassin, 2005; Agier and Vaully, 2007; Szczepanikova, 2012). This ambiguity is particularly evident in the policies adopted in many Western countries, where use of reception facilities is usually tied to the need to keep under police control people whose residence status is still under evaluation. For this reason, national governments prefer to prevent asylum seekers from moving freely across the territory: fearing that these persons may begin to integrate into the host country, national governments choose to set up spaces where they can be held in limbo, in such a way that they can more easily be bent to the bureaucratic needs of the reception system, and thus, in the end, can more easily be deported (Bloch and Schuster, 2005).

All the ambiguities of a reception system that seems less concerned with protecting refugees than with protecting local communities from refugees are evident in the paths taken by Italian policy. The current reception centres for asylum seekers (called Centri di

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accoglienza per richiedenti asilo in Italian, or CARAs, for short) were officially created under Law no. 189/2002 and then came into operation in 2004. Under those provisions, these reception facilities have taken on the character of ‘open centres’ from which asylum seekers could leave in daytime and could also take longer leaves of absence with the formal approval of police authorities. The right to leave in daytime, however, could be exercised only to the extent that it did «not appear incompatible with the ordinary course of the asylum application» and with prior notice being given to the centre’s director. Anyone leaving without authorisation would lose their right to apply for asylum and could be deprived of other forms of international protection. Asylum seekers were thus essentially subjected to a form of control exercised both by the centre’s managing body (usually an NGO responsible for delivering services) and the police (responsible for the order and security within the centre), which could limit at will their freedom of movement. Checking into these kinds of facilities was tantamount to having one’s personal freedom limited.

In its first stage, the Italian reception policy took the form of a ‘compassionate repression’ (Fassin, 2005) policy. The government was at that time ready to put asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their application in detention, but it tried to soften the repressive features of newly created ‘reception’ centres by entrusting their management to humanitarian agencies such as the Italian Red Cross, which was already managing several pre-removal centres in Italy. In 2008, after a change in the ruling coalition, the Italian government tried to redefine the overall features of reception centres for asylum seekers, giving them an explicit humanitarian status. Under Article 20 of the Legislative Decree no. 25/2008, asylum seekers who have applied for protection after being caught in the act of circumventing border checks, or who are otherwise staying on Italian soil unlawfully, or who have no identification documents, must be sent to a reception centre. Article 20.4 of the decree finally sealed the ‘open’ nature of these centres by providing that the managing authorities no longer had the right to discretionarily decide when asylum seekers could exercise their right to leave. Under existing legislation, forced residence within a reception centre should not exceed 35 days, beyond which asylum seekers must receive a residence permit until the their application is processed. They are thus basically free to leave the centre at will, but if they need further assistance or lack a place to go, they are allowed to reside in reception centres for a maximum of six months.

Despite these reforms, those who receive ‘assistance’ in reception centres are still viewed with a certain degree of distrust by Italian law, as they are considered somewhat suspicious applicants ready to abuse the asylum procedure in order to avoid deportation. Unauthorised departure from a centre now carries less severe consequences than before, but those who check into a CARA are still regarded as having a pejorative status by comparison with ‘trustworthy’ asylum seekers, meaning those who report spontaneously to the police and are in possession of all their documents, who receive residence permits as asylum applicants from the beginning of their stay in Italy.1 Reception centres were redesigned in 2008 as places in which to offer ‘assistance’ to asylum seekers, but they continued to play an ambiguous social control function. Italy has essentially shifted from a compassionate repression policy to a form of ‘ambivalent hospitality’ of asylum seekers [Fassin, (2011), 133].

This article sums up the main results of an empirical study aimed at analysing what effect the constitutive ambiguity of reception centres has on their management. I offer an ethnographic perspective on Italian reception policies taking its most problematic institution as the main point of observation. I begin by providing a detailed ethnographic

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account of the main features of reception centres, and then show how these centres have become a kind of trap from which asylum seekers are no longer able to escape. I will describe the ‘social disempowerment’ effect that prolonged residence at reception centres has on asylum seekers and how their dependence on humanitarian government is ceaselessly reproduced. This, as we shall see, not only compromises the humanitarian mission, which is supposed to foster the social integration of asylum seekers while answering their basic needs, but also enables the Italian government to exercise a subtle form of social control over them.

2 Inside/outside: the reception centres’ spatiality

My ethnographic research was carried out over the course of 2013, during which time I had an opportunity to visit all the reception centres currently active in Apulia: Foggia Borgo Mezzanone, Bari Palese, and Brindisi Resinco.2 This region of southern Italy has always found itself at the centre of the geopolitics of Euro-Mediterranean migration and since the 1990s has been a true laboratory for migrant reception and detention policies. In 2013, the region provided 30% of the beds available at the 9 centres for asylum seekers in Italy. The three centres considered in my research hosted more than 35,000 asylum seekers since 2008, becoming one of the main destinations for the thousands of migrants landing on Italy’s southern shores. Table 1 Asylum seekers at Apulia reception centres from 2008 to 2013

Total ASs checking in Women Minors As at 31 december

2008 8,336 398 74 1,504 2009 3,412 226 173 375 2010 3,262 198 360 613 2011 12,524 439 393 1,140 2012 4,009 276 116 1,935 2013 4,380 448 14 2,376

Source: author’s elaboration on police data.

The three reception centres that were the object of my ethnographic research differ from each other in many respects. The most relevant of these probably lays in the different ways the spaces and environments are set up. I am not so much referring here to the internal organisation of space. Each centre is indeed equipped with the same kind of prefabricated housing modules, which are distributed according to a regular and typically ‘martial’ plan. Their internal organisation reflects a depersonalising way of ordering space solely designed to achieve the highest degree of efficiency in the discharge of administrative functions and in controlling the hosted population. Is not any accident that many have already analysed refugee camps by resorting to Goffman (1961) theoretical framework on total institutions (Hitchcox, 1991; Schmidt, 1997; Diken and Laustsen, 2005; Bernardot, 2008). In my opinion, what really distinguishes the three CARAs is their relation to the external space.

Under Italian law, reception centres for asylum seekers need to be managed as self-sufficient communities. Although they are free to leave in daytime, and all the centres

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considered in my research offer a shuttle service connecting to the nearest city centre, strict rules govern access to the facility by persons who are not registered as ‘guests’ (ospiti in Italian) or who do not work at the centre. The closure to the outside world is a typical feature of reception centres for asylum seekers, a trait that reflects the ambiguous function these structures traditionally serve: to gather refugees and asylum seekers into a circumscribed place in which to provide assistance while preventing them from coming into contact with local communities. In spite of that, inside all of the three reception centres considered in my research there are unregistered residents: they are ‘squatters’ (abusivi in Italian), as they are often characterised by the staff, or ‘illegals’, as other asylum seekers call them. Different types of unregistered residents can be identified.

Shall we talk about the various types of ‘squatting’ [abusivismo in Italian] here? First we have those whose right to assistance has expired and do not leave the centre, so they are formally struck from our list but do not go away; second, there are also some people who have never been listed in our directory, so these days I can see them and recognise them, but I do not know who they are, because they have never been in my list and I am not able to identify them; finally, the third type are those who have the documents, have already left the centre, and have come back to renew their residence permit. Where’s the easiest place to come? It’s here! During the renewal procedure they stay here. (Director of CARA Foggia)

The three CARAs can ideally be located along a line of continuity according to the different degrees of porosity that distinguish them.

The Brindisi CARA is a small reception centre located in the open countryside near a large military base.3 It is surrounded by walls three meters high, making it invisible from the outside. The CARA was created within a structure that was previously operating as a pre-removal centre, and this led to the adoption of an architecture inspired by high security standards. Security easily forces control access through a huge main iron gate. It is therefore very difficult to meet ‘squatters’ inside this centre; in general you can only find those cases which can be subsumed under the first type of ‘squatting’, which is tolerated in the reception period because ‘squatters’ lack any clear path to integration into society once they receive residence permits. The Brindisi CARA is a small reception centre not greatly affected by problems of overcrowding: stays beyond the maximum reception period are easily handled.

The Bari CARA is a large complex housed inside an Air Force base located on the northern outskirts of the city.4 The Air Force Base plays the role of a heavily guarded ‘buffer zone’ protecting the ‘inside’ of the centre from the ‘outside’ of the city. The centre’s location thus increases the feeling of isolation, giving the impression of a place suspended in a no man’s land. Access is controlled both at the entrance to the military base and at the gate leading into the CARA. For these reasons, even in this case ‘squatting’ is largely due to stays beyond the reception period. Security forces at the entrance do some screening, though they do not always ask that the centre’s ID badge be shown, and they are not always strict in ascertaining the identity of those who come in, particularly when the incoming shuttle is carrying a full load of passengers. This enables ‘squatters’ to come and go freely from the centre, continuing to reside inside the centre even after their ID badge has been withdrawn. The Bari CARA has another weak point, however. Behind the warehouse, the centre’s boundary coincides with the outer edge of

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the military base bordering with the Adriatic railway line. A number of access gates have been built along the fence over the years, making it possible to reach the centre with some ease. Some manage to sneak into the centre at night, using it as a dormitory.

The Foggia CARA is located in the open countryside, covering a very large area previously occupied by an abandoned Air Force base. The initial project was to create a multi-purpose centre divided between two areas: one made of two building structures originally designed to house migrants in the process of being deported, and a second one made of prefabricated modules sitting on the old military airport runway. The pre-removal section was never put into operation, and brick-and-mortar buildings were eventually dedicated to the reception of asylum seekers. In 2010, a new housing area consisting of prefabricated modules was built, and the old decaying modules placed on the runway of the military airport were abandoned and cut off from the area by the new fence that currently surrounds the CARA perimeter.5 Next to the ‘official’ reception centre, however, there is an informal settlement that has sprung up in recent years at the old, never-dismantled modules sitting on the airport runway, which have been occupied by migrants working in the thriving rural black economy of the Foggia region. This informal settlement, to which local police authorities continue to provide electricity and running water, houses hundreds of migrants whose life revolves around the official centre.

The Foggia CARA is in fact a porous structure in which many can easily sneak in through the several gaps existing along the fence. The centre looks like an island in the middle of countryside, attracting those who work in the rural economy of the surrounding areas and look for shelter at night. The presence of an informal settlement in the old abandoned containers has favoured a complete osmosis between the informal and the official centre. All attempts at isolating the centres ‘inside’ from its ‘outside’ environment proved to be in vain, sparking violent riots.

The managing body has completely lost control of admission and access to the centre’s facilities. In the evening hours, when the shuttle returning from Foggia is very crowded, the gate is often open without any control by security forces, in such a way that even those who need to get to the informal settlement can take a shortcut by walking unimpeded across the CARA facilities instead of taking the long route through the surrounding fields. Any attempt to impose stricter rules, keeping out anyone without the required ID badge had no perceptible effect.

We have now placed a person at the gate, checking to make sure that only ‘regular’ guests access the centre. We had to struggle at the beginning, because they used to come up and say, «No, you have to let me in! » and so on. [...] They slowly realised that we are checking: if you don’t have the ID badge, you’re not allowed in! Now when they come with the shuttle, our few ‘regular’ guests pass through the check at the gate; the others trail away. They know that they can easily go through the back, where there are the holes in the fence. We do all the checks at the entrance, etcetera, and the fence is full of holes. [...] It’s ridiculous! But even if there were no holes. If you find the one who want to get in, or the one who is trying to climb over, or if you find yourself in front of someone who is violent, what can you do? (Director of the Foggia CARA)

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In conclusion, the reception centres’ inside/outside divide is not as rigid as in other types of total institutions. CARAs can be more or less porous, and in fact are generally open to the entrance and exit of migrants, whether registered or unregistered. Paradoxically, however, this porosity is highly selective. Even though the managing bodies have in many cases lost control of the population residing within the centres, they continue to maintain a tight control on access by external visitors. Of course, as we have seen, CARAs are more or less open to the constant come and go of ‘squatters’, who use the centres as dormitories or take advantage of the services offered, but they remain completely sealed from the local community, which is kept at a distance from centres’ everyday life, and anyone in the community wishing to access them needs to go through a complicated accreditation process with local police authorities. CARAs are patrolled by soldiers from the San Marco battalion, an Italian Army elite corps that is sometimes put to civil functions, but they do not seem willing to carry out a very strict surveillance on the movements of migrants and asylum seekers.

3 Negotiating order

Italian law entrusts the police with a duty to define and enforce the internal rules of reception centres, while the managing body is only responsible for delivering services. The rules governing life within CARAs can be grouped into two basic categories: first, those that punish serious misconduct, generally amounting to a crime, which under Article 12 of Legislative Decree no. 140/2005 should lead to an immediate complaint to the police and to a loss of the right to receive aid; second, those rules that deal with ‘civil cohabitation’, whose breach will generally lead to a ‘warning’ issued by the centre’s administration, and if repeated it may trigger a loss of the right to receive aid. As evidence of its mainly humanitarian role, the managing body has no power to punish or discipline anyone residing in the centre. But it does have the power to report the residents’ behaviour to the police or to the asylum commission and these reports can be taken into account when taking disciplinary measures or when deciding whether to grant international protection. Managing bodies thus play a less explicit but pervasive control function that can to some extent alter the humanitarian relationship.

The centres’ internal regulations are typically very detailed when it comes to civil cohabitation: rules in this area are communicated to the residents through brochures translated into several languages or through notices posted near the administration barracks. Article 8 of the Bari CARA internal regulations list a series of «rules to be observed for civil cohabitation»: they are an illuminating exemplification of the internal order that police and managing bodies are called on to enforce.

Inside the centre guests are prohibited from: • climbing over the boundary fence • introducing weapons or blunt instruments that are apt to cause injury • introducing flammable material • gambling • using any type of stove • moving without authorisation to a location other than the assigned housing • giving their own bed to anyone, even temporarily • disturbing other guests during the night • smoking in the rooms and in closed spaces

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• drinking alcohol or using drugs • making structural changes to the rooms assigned to them • wandering about without clothing • making use of physical force in such a way as to injure other people or inciting

physical violence • disregarding a doctor’s orders to remain in isolation once found to be suffering

from infectious diseases

Residents also have an obligation to always be identifiable through their personal ID badge, «both inside and outside the centre». The ID badge also entitles them to access the services provided, especially the canteen service. As is typical of all large compounds for asylum seekers or refugees, it is especially through the distribution of meals or the assignment of beds that censuses are carried out. Counting and sorting the assisted population is a critical control function serving to manage and distribute assistance, raise funds, and deliver services without waste, identifying exactly who is entitled to those services [Harrell-Bond et al., (1992), p.206].

The vision of order emerging from these regulations reflects the bureaucratic regimentation needs typical of large reception facilities, where the managing bodies seek to ensure the most efficient access to the (always scarce) resources for the assisted population. The total control over the lives of asylum seekers and the provision of services is considered a key element in the ‘good government’ of a reception centre, even though the methods for performing the daily administrative practices can be inherently offensive to the personal dignity of asylum seekers, because of those practices are necessarily massifying (Holt, 1981; Black, 1998; Harrel-Bond, 2002). CARAs have many of the structural features of concentration camps, even if they can hardly be associated with the ‘camp’ ideal-type as depicted in Agamben (1995), which has been extremely influential in the contemporary debate on immigration reception and detention centres (Caloz-Tschopp, 2004; Diken and Laustsen, 2005; Minca, 2006; Rahola, 2007; Bernardot, 2008). Fassin rightly asks: does the form give us the content? Can we take away the figures of the camp from its context? [Fassin, (2011), p.151]. The centres we are analysing are open facilities from which foreigners are basically free to come and go under the placid gaze of the security forces; moreover, they are centres where the managing body’s action is framed by the law, which sets out some paths to be followed, albeit inconsistently so, owing to the overlap of the reforms that have been introduced over the years. Even so, exceptionalism seems to govern daily life within CARAs. This is not to say that CARAs are legal black holes where administrative agencies are called on to implement a policy of persecution; as a matter of fact these are places where the protection of human rights should be ensured and humanitarian assistance should be provided. However, in the interests of an efficient delivery of assistance, humanitarian agents are entrusted with an unchecked and unconstrainable power in the centres’ daily management, even though such management is inflected with benevolent and compassionate traits. Every aspect of the asylum seekers’ lives is autocratically handled by the humanitarian government [Agier, (2011), pp.81–83].

The regimentation is a stress factor for asylum seekers, who do not necessarily share the vision of order imposed by the centre’s management, preferring to have greater room for self-organisation. This triggers a negotiation process involving three main actors: the managing body, the police, and the ‘guests’. At all the three reception centres, I noticed a willing attitude to negotiate over internal rules, though the reasons for this attitude and the margins within which managing bodies were willing to tolerate violations were very

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different. At the Bari and Brindisi reception centres the rules prohibiting cooking or engaging in commercial activities are not strictly enforced, and this, after all, seems to be a policy the managing bodies and the police both subscribe to.

They [the managing body and the police] try to be tolerant. For instance, commercial activities inside the centre are absolutely forbidden, but you can see the stalls, internet points where you can surf at one euro and fifty cents an hour; you can buy a chicken or whatever service you need. They tolerate this as a way to ease tensions inside. [...] Every other module has a satellite dish: do you think this is legal? Of course not! There is a margin of tolerance. It’s the same with the food. They should not be allowed to cook inside the housing modules, but it’s pretty much standard practice. They have chosen to have a soft touch. Then, every now and then something happens, they make you dismantle all the stalls for three weeks, but after a while things resume as always. (Legal counsellor, Bari CARA)

Even when deciding on the withdrawal of the right to receive aid for disciplinary reasons, there seems to be plenty of room for tolerance. During the interviews I conducted, reception centre personnel were always stressing that this is an exceptional measure adopted in cases of serious misconduct or only after repeated violations, followed by a series of warnings. When a disciplinary proceeding gets underway, the police have some margin for evaluation and are usually willing to consider any psychological vulnerability the person concerned may have, the amount of time already spent at the centre, and other such factors.

Sometimes they create some problems with the personnel, sometimes even very serious problems. The night they get drunk, we need to call the police. We draw up reports. Maybe the police officer in charge will initially just give a couple of warnings: «Be careful, you’re under observation» [...] Maybe the third or fourth time, the police will ask us to provide an opinion on the withdrawal of the right to receive assistance. If the person is not vulnerable, if they’re not [...]. I mean, only if they’re really people who undermine peace and security on the premises we ask for their removal. (Cultural mediator, Brindisi CARA)

The Foggia CARA instead has much more serious public-order problems because of its extreme porosity. In particular, this situation of absolute ungovernable disorder seems to date back to the period when a management change brought about a substantial power vacuum within the reception centre. This was also the time around which the informal settlement within the abandoned housing modules on the old runway grew. The situation is aggravated by the presence of many ‘squatters’ having nothing to lose or gain and explicitly refusing to recognise the managing body’s authority.

With some of them, say those who arrived more recently, it was easier to get them to understand that there are rules. Those who have been here for a long time have the opposite reaction. They push you back, they yell [...]. They do not accept the rule. In every housing module there are stoves, cookers, knives. This is an absolute violation of centre’s rules. But it is very, very difficult to go in and fix this, because nobody will hand over the stove. If you try to take the stove, they begin to threaten you; really it’s a problem because they start to crowd and riot. So in the end how can you handle a situation like this? Here there are also some truly respectful people, but even if they hand over you the stove and the other 590 do not, how can you be fair? So in the end, the good ones say, «OK, I’m good and I have given up the stove, but those who started yelling and breaking everything is allowed to keep it. So what are the rules

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here? The only rule is that the more you make trouble, the more you are allowed to do what you want». (Director of the Foggia CARA)

The attempt pursued by management to restore discipline does not seem to be properly supported by the police, which believe that ensuring compliance with internal rules is the sole responsibility of the managing body, while the police should be responsible for intervening only in cases of serious offenses or threats to public order. There is a wide range of views between police and the managing body about their respective roles within the CARA.

If I go to collect things, knives [...] the message are that the Red Cross is bad! You’re nobody. So, why are you taking my knife away? Why are you taking my alcohol away? But if we call the police, they will tell us that it’s not part of their duties. They are guarantors of public order. What does public order mean? Only if a riot breaks out? (Director the Foggia CARA)

The police favour a ‘soft touch’, so as to avoid as far as possible getting into a fight with asylum seekers. The police have to work daily with far fewer officers than the people to be managed, and even if critical events break out, the police will limit its intervention for fear of stoking even greater anger. The management body does not share this government philosophy, arguing that it translates to an impossibility of enforcing any rule and to a substantial impairment of its role as a humanitarian agency. More generally, it denounces the tendency to turn the centre into a collector of social marginality and the acquiescence with which an informal settlement was allowed to grow on the edge of the official centre.

Even considering the issue of the informal settlement, in the end what have you [speaking about the police] done? You have not done anything! What you have done is to give them water and electricity, saying, «OK, stay here!» If you give them water and electricity and make them stay there on a permanent basis, you are setting a social bomb waiting to explode. There will always be more people, more and more people. Of course once you’re there… Yeah OK, you have the water, you have a place to stay, but you miss the food, you begin to miss this and that, you’ll always come to this other side to make trouble. So when the Red Cross tells the police that it has this problem, they cannot answer by simply saying: «You have to chase them out». It’s not our job to chase them! We’re not the police; we’re here to welcome those who are entitled to receive our assistance. (Staff member, Foggia CARA)

Asylum seekers take advantage of the tolerant attitude to fashion an alternative order. In the housing modules, they cook more or less freely; informal and illegal markets flourish without the police and the managing bodies being able to do much in the way of prevention, especially at the most porous centres, where illicit goods of various kinds always find a way in. In some cases, however, the tendency to reframe the internal order reaches the point of a veritable appropriation of spaces. This is not only through the personalising of places—which is typical of all reception or detention centres where periods of stay may be long and the inmates feel the need to reshape the identity of places—but also through the attempt to independently manage the assignment of beds. Asylum seekers reject bureaucratic rationality, based on an abstract square-meters-per-person ratio, pretending to reallocate beds on the basis of different criteria, such as family relation, friendship, and other sorts of bonds. From the managing bodies’ point of view this appropriation of spaces entails major problems, as they risk losing sight of the exact number of people residing at the centre. Especially where there are many ‘squatters’, personnel are forced to repeatedly tour the grounds take counts within the housing

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modules so as to get an idea of the exact number of vacancies. This daily exercise is often made necessary by the fact that in periods of large inflows the lack of beds has forced managing bodies to set up emergency shelters for the new arrivals. The issue of the availability of beds, even more than that of access to canteen and other essential services, is the fault line that management tries to exploit in hopes of engendering tension between the ‘regular guests’ and the ‘squatters’. But attempts to break the bonds of solidarity do not seem to have much success.

When we look for empty places saying, «Listen, new asylum seekers have just landed; we need beds; can you please check if there are any empty places? » We always discover that the centre is full and everyone has their own ID badge. When newcomers come into the offices to be registered, people of all nationalities immediately show up to see who has arrived. Many have friends who have contacted them. Inexplicably, many guests say, «No problem, there’s place in my room», taking this person with them. Which is inexplicable, because I went several times in the very same room to ask for a bed [...]. What we fail to make clear is that the internal rules prohibit accepting someone in your own room who is not registered as a guest. Why do they do it? It’s a puzzle! I cannot understand, because they are the very same people who complain about the squatters. Even those who in the beginning were forced to stay in the warehouse, when they finally get a room they support squatters by hosting them. It’s pointless to try to explain to them that it does not work to their benefit. (Director of the Foggia CARA)

The main reasons for conflict do not seem rooted in the bureaucratic discrimination between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular guests’ the managing bodies try to enforce. Those who share a nationality, a language, or a culture support one another. They share meals, putting aside the leftovers, or cooking together; they share rooms by accepting conditions of overcrowding. When conflicts break out, they do so along dividing lines rooted in identity: they are generally unrelated to the issue of who gets to access which resources. As the cultural mediator of the Brindisi CARA has suggested, conflicts rather seem to issue from «an accumulation of negative energy». Stories are punctuated by episodes of violence between national or ethnic-cultural groups triggered by trivial reasons. An example is the fight between Afghans and Pakistanis that in July 2013 led to the death of 26-year-old man at the Bari CARA, a fight that seems to have started during a game of cricket.

4 A ‘camp’: better than nothing?

Asylum seekers at the centres I visited arrived there through fairly standardised procedures. Next to those who arrived escorted by police after they had landed somewhere on southern Italian shores and those who had been deported back to Italy from any of the European countries under the so-called Dublin Regulation, I met many asylum seekers who had finally reached southern Italy after a long pilgrimage in search of a police station ready to receive their asylum application and to ‘welcome’ them at one of the existing reception centres. Asylum seekers in this last group access CARAs as coveted places, reached at the cost of enormous sacrifices and after weeks, even months spending night after night out in the open or in homeless shelters.

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The first time I went to the police for an application, and also the second, they didn’t care about me, even though I had a handicap. I told them about my situation; I told them I’m different from other asylum seekers; they told me no problem, go outside! It was almost 28 days that I’d been outside. After that, they told me, «OK, you can come». [...]. It’s not only me; too many people are now waiting outside to plead their case. (Asylum seeker, Foggia CARA)

Once at midnight I went to the police and said, «Take me, please arrest me! It’s better than staying outside». They said, «No, no, we’re not looking for you! Go away. » I explained that I had arrived in Italy illegally, that I had no papers. And again they said, «No problem! Go away». (Asylum seeker, Brindisi CARA)

The local press is full of news stories about makeshift camps or demonstrations by asylum seekers waiting to be ‘welcomed’ at reception centres, while among humanitarian workers there is a widespread belief that many simulate a landing just to be put into a reception centre, pretending that they are in need of first aid. The wretchedness and fatigue of life without a home leads asylum seekers to prefer to be arrested and thrown into a detention centre than to keep living in the street. The inadequacy of the Italian reception system gives rise to a kind of chronic ‘humanitarian emergency’ no longer related only to landings but also to the presence of people reduced to such a level of need and desperation that they are content to satisfy their basic needs, even at the cost of a drastic restriction of their personal freedoms. Once they have won a place at a reception centre, they will hardly abandon it. Only those who have outside contacts on which they can rely can leave the centre; everyone else remains entangled in the centres’ web of relationships, which at least offers a safety net, becoming the only mediation channel with Italian institutions and the only way to access services that would be very difficult for them to have outside.

Parting with the camp’s daily life, the stagnant and repetitive routines, becomes a risk rather than a stimulating attraction. It is no wonder that whenever an attempt is made to implement a stricter enforcement of the time limit beyond which, under Italian law, asylum seekers can no longer assert a right to receive assistance triggers violent reactions, for they perceive the management’s attitude as a betrayal of its humanitarian mission.

It’s very hard to live here now. My ‘count’ [the right to receive assistance] was cut. I don’t have any document. They said that if you stay six months they cut your ‘count’. Now I’m living by myself, I eat from my brothers, they go and collect food and give it to me. After six months I was staying here they decided to cut my ‘count’. I didn’t leave [...]. By the time I arrived here they told me, «If you leave for three days, that will cut your count», and I never left for a single day! One day they came and called me; they said there’s a new law that if you stay for six months in this camp they’ll cut your ‘count’. I said: «But when I arrived at this camp you didn’t tell me that, why? » [...] I don’t have any food; I don’t have anything. [...] We were explaining that to them, but they wouldn’t pay attention, they didn’t care. The only thing they see is cut your ‘count’ and it’s over, whether or not you have anywhere to go. (Asylum seeker, Foggia CARA)

And yet they show a quite ambivalent attitude to life inside reception centres. All the asylum seekers I met during my fieldwork were ready to say that the centre was being run like a prison. Reception centres, as noted, reflect an organisational model typical of total institutions: the search for bureaucratic efficiency tends to reproduce a depersonalised experience that is sure to affect asylum seekers’ perception of the place. Sequences of

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shabby housing modules, long queues for access to the canteen or for getting a personal kit, the levelling of social differences according to a uniform standard of hospitality: all these factors conspire to aggravate the trauma of the curtailment of the self, a phenomenon that is common when entering any kind of total institution [Goffman, (1961), pp.47–48]. Even the centres’ physical appearance plays a role. The ‘martial’ organisation of space, the pervasive presence of security forces, boundary walls and surveillance tools, inbound and outbound controls and schedules, the requirement to register and show your personal identification, the censuses and counting done when food is distributed–everything clearly points to a concentrationary imaginary:

You can’t overlook the centre’s logistics, which is that of a barracks; unfortunately, there are people who have had bad experiences with the military in their home countries. […] There are people who’ve been in prison and have experienced violence and torture, or people who have been detained or even imprisoned in other countries. Then, when they arrive here at first it’s more or less like being in a military barracks: it recalls their past experiences. Also a problem is the presence of police and security forces. Many of them have told me, «I know these soldiers are different from those in my country; I know these soldiers can’t hurt me as they can in my country, but I can’t control my emotions. Every time I get close to them I feel my heart bursting». (Psychologist, Brindsi CARA)

Reception centres look like traps from which escape is difficult for another reason, too, which has to do with their original matrix as institutions designed to concentrate and keep under police surveillance people that the government prefers not to have scattered across the territory. When centres for asylum seekers were instituted under Law no. 189/2002, they were at first designed very much like institutions for house arrest. Attempts were made in subsequent years to improve the asylum seekers’ reception conditions, but they have only made the centres’ surveillance and control dimension diffuse. Asylum seekers are in effect trapped inside the reception centre because leaving the centre would mean running the risk of compromising their application. This is no longer explicitly stated by law, as we have seen, but in practical terms an unjustified exit may result in a loss of the right to ask for international protection, this either because the Asylum Commission may declare an applicant ineligible on the case record alone or because, even when applicants have been able to regularly report at the hearing for their case, their having left the premises still tends to weigh against them.

If you are an asylum seeker waiting for the Commission to evaluate your application, you cannot leave the centre without notifying the police. It appears that you’re still in here, and the police has to notify the Asylum Commission that you left the centre without due authorisation. If I don’t want to stay here, I say, «OK, I’ve got the money, I found a hotel, a house in which to live; I’m going to stay there». I have to provide the police my address. If you don’t report to the police they will say that you moved away arbitrarily and the data goes to the Asylum Commission. In the end an asylum seeker who has moved away is not even called for a hearing. (Director of the Bari CARA)

Also asylum seekers believe that by leaving the centre they may jeopardise their application, or at least make it much more difficult to follow its complex procedure: «You cannot go to live outside; otherwise, they’ll forget you. [...] Here you follow your case, you go and press them about your case, and maybe they will do something» (Asylum seeker, Foggia CARA). In spite of the reception conditions asylum seekers suffer, they prefer not to stray from police offices or from those who can provide them

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with daily information about their case. They believe that their file will be set aside if they leave the centre.

5 A space of social disempowerment

In a sense, we have already seen how the Italian reception system can reproduce dependence on humanitarian government by trapping asylum seekers within reception centres. But the reproduction of dependence also takes place at a deeper level, fuelling a process that has been defined as one of «psychological confinement» [Cambrézy, (2001), pp.89–90].

A large body of literature has already shown the negative effects of a reception system based on large refugee camps fashioned after an essentially concentrationary model. The totalising, all-encompassing care of individuals’ life, usually justified with arguments concerning the need to ensure efficiency in providing services, amplifies the feeling of dependence (Harrel-Bond, 2002; Agier, 2011; Bernardot, 2008). In a certain respect, asylum seekers are treated as ‘patients’ in a hospital, as people unable to care for themselves. In another respect, asylum seekers are transformed into children, needing to be paternalistically guided in every aspect of their lives. Moreover, asylum seekers find satisfaction of all their basic needs within the centre and are in no way stimulated to go out and to engage with the local community. These masses of people trapped in a prison-like structure are thus perceived as potentially dangerous by that community, which in turn shows a more or less explicit hostility. Everything conspires to hold asylum seekers in what one of the legal information providers we spoke with called the «soap bubble».

It is also the existential temporality in which asylum seekers are precipitated that plays an overbearing social disempowerment effect. Entry into a refugee camp occasions a kind of ‘temporal suspension’ that prevents people from making plans by binding them to an eternal present. Reception at centres should be temporary, but in fact they become places of residence for asylum seekers and refugees for long periods, and this seems to have a decisive impact on their health and psychological condition (Harrel-Bond, 2002; Agier, 2011). The asylum seekers I had an opportunity to talk to repeatedly stressed the attrition by which they are worn down through the long waiting, and some of them said they had to resort to tranquillisers to be able to withstand the situation. Even staff members were well aware of this, as they cited the long waits for a response from the Asylum Commission as the main factor of emotional distress.

The first stage is the arrival, at which point most of them are still disoriented. They need to understand what is happening, get to know the centre, know the people who work there, understand what their rights are, what services are available. At first they are a bit suspicious. Then there is the second stage, which I call the ‘stage of hope’. Once they have understood where they are, once they get used to the place, they start to focus on their application for asylum. Unfortunately, the wait, particularly in the so-called ‘Dublin cases’, is very long and often exasperating. This facilitates the emergence of psychological vulnerabilities. Even those who seemingly appear to be more resilient, who appear more resourceful, are really put to the test by the long waiting. The problem is that it’s as if they felt deprived, deprived of an identity of place that in some way interferes with their perception of themselves. (Psychologist, Brindisi CARA)

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Once they have spent three or four months here they become different. They start to grow weary with the routine: you get up, you eat, you go and get you ‘pocket money’, and then you wait for lunch. In the afternoon, you take the shuttle and take a ride to Foggia, and then you’re back here. Dinner at seven [...] Then you sleep. That’s it! At first this is fine. They need to relax after a long journey. Once they arrive, they need to learn a bit of Italian, understand the situation. In a few months they are ready to go, but they still lack the papers. They must decide: either remain in Italy or go away. But without papers they can’t make a move. It is at this point that they start to become nervous. [...] When the fifth or sixth month comes along, they get together and vent their anger through a public demonstration, a riot, stuff like that. (Cultural mediator, Foggia CARA)

With Harrell-Bond (2002, 2005) we could argue that the problems of asylum seekers are amplified by the reception system into which they end up being trapped. Contrary to a widespread opinion among humanitarian workers–who continue to classify the problems of asylum seekers according to a nosology that only takes past experiences into account –it is primarily the present experience of confinement that amplifies old problems, while engendering new ones. It is not a coincidence that both of the psychologists I have had an opportunity to interview repeatedly referred to post-traumatic stress disorder. Even though they acknowledge the problems connected with a reception system that feeds an iatrogenic dependence on humanitarian government, they insist that the difficulties of the present situation only reactivate problems whose roots lie in the past: they do not see a direct aetiology rooted in the problems affecting asylum seekers during their stay at reception centres. The self-absolution of humanitarian workers is perhaps understandable, but it amplifies the system’s perverse effects, encouraging a tendency to blame asylum seekers for the dependence to which they have fallen victim.

6 Innocent victims?

It is widely known that the reception system also functions on the basis of a process that classifies those who go through it. Asylum seekers are trapped into bureaucratic labels that decide their fate, channelling them into different paths of integration or exclusion (Zetter, 1991). The same category of ‘asylum seeker’ is rather problematic in strict legal terms, though it has been absorbed into the bureaucratic and academic lexicon. Asylum seekers are further divided into subcategories according to the ‘credibility’ of their claim and are consequently channelled into different reception systems: more benevolent ones for those who fit the stereotype of the reliable refugee, more rigid ones in the case of potentially ‘bogus’ asylum seekers (Bloch and Schuster, 2005; Squire, 2009). Italian asylum law reserves CARAs only to refugees considered more or less suspicious, even if control functions are more nuanced than in other countries where asylum seekers may have to wait in detention while their application is being processed.

When we take a look at the dynamics of humanitarian work, we realise that bureaucratic classifications are intertwined with other ‘moral’ distinctions that come into shape over the course of the centres’ daily life. Humanitarian agents have a very precise image of their ‘clients’ and tend to classify them into two main categories: the ‘good’ refugee grateful for the aid offered and the ‘bad’ refugee who is always complaining (Harrel-Bond, 2002; Kobelinsky, 2008).

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According to my experience here, I can say that there are some truly exquisite guests who follow their application in an impeccable way and whose sole purpose is really to obtain the papers needed to leave the centre. There are by contrast others who in spite of everything have no intention to leave. (Director of the Foggia CARA)

The good refugees are proper victims, ‘real’ refugees who show deference and are willing to bend obediently to the bureaucratic needs of the reception system. They understand that everything at the centre is set up for their own good and they appreciate the personnel’s efforts to assist them, patiently accepting any system malfunctions. On the flip side of the good refugee we find the category of refugee who keeps making trouble. Refugees in this latter class are a close relative to the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker, even though their ‘badness’ is primarily a judgment based on life within reception centres, where those who make trouble are labelled as people who do not show the gratitude they owe, or as people who try to bully others to gain a larger share of the resources available in the reception system. Here two elements come together. On the one hand, there is the blame pinned on those who abandon themselves to the care of humanitarian agents, taking an attitude of passivity that leads them to demand more and more services; on the other hand, there is the suspicion that these persons are making a manipulative use of their status as ‘victims’, feigning a state of apathy instrumental to obtaining benefits they are not entitled to.

Many of them have a very ‘welfare dependence’ culture. They always expect something from us. Whatever, they claim, «It’s my right! It’s my right! The shuttle is not leaving: it’s my right to have the shuttle». Always: «It’s my right! ». (Legal information provider, Brindisi CARA)

Many have a distorted view of the psychologist, believing that the psychologist can somehow turn their fate around with a report, leading to some certificate. Since they may also be entitled to receive humanitarian protection, and this kind of residence permit is also granted in the case of disease, you can notice a tendency to submit to psychiatrisation. There is this drift toward the psychiatrisation. They seek our attention in an almost manipulative way, I would say. So we need to be able to understand if the person we have before us is making a ‘collusive’ request, trying to manipulate us. (Psychologist, Bari CARA)

Humanitarian workers therefore look askance at the many requests and complaints they receive. They weigh these requests in light of the person they come from, trying to figure out whether they are looking at someone who may be trying to ‘game the system’. This is at risk of affecting the humanitarian mission, as the constant effort at spotting potential exploiters may make staff members hostile and suspicious, in a way that distorts their role in the eyes of asylum seekers. They will see in the humanitarian worker someone who serves control functions, someone always ready to double-check the legitimacy their requests for help. In this ambiguous relationship the danger arises of leading humanitarian workers to use their power to ensure access to the provision of services as leverage in getting asylum seekers to acquiesce and be compliant. On the other side, this approach to humanitarian work is not without effect on the attitude of asylum seekers, who in turn nurture distrust toward personnel, accusing them of skimping on resources by offering services below the expected standards.

From the humanitarian worker’s perspective, asylum seekers should thus be content to play the role of passive aid-receiving victims: if they should overstep that boundary by

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requesting more services, they become ‘nuisances’, as someone suggested, or they become exploiters if they should try to use the official labelling system to advantage so as to be classified as vulnerable subjects, since that becomes their gateway to otherwise unattainable resources, like a residence permit for humanitarian reasons. It is only the apolitical and suffering body of the asylum seeker who claims no rights but passively accepts the compassion and benevolence of humanitarian government that gets recognition (Fassin, 2005; Ticktin, 2006). In dealing with ‘bad’ refugees, the humanitarian worker is tempted to take a disciplinary stance, reframing aid as something that must be earned.

In my opinion, some things should be mandatory. If you do not attend courses eight hours a week, and so on, you will be kicked out of the centre. It should be as if you were entering into a funnel: anyone can enter; only the best can come out. It’s useless to welcome everyone and let them go about their business. (Cultural mediator, Brindisi CARA)

As a matter of fact, there are no meaningful activities with which to spend the day within CARAs. Except for an Italian course, asylum seekers spend most of their time in line, waiting to receive ‘pocket money’, waiting for the distribution of food, waiting for a meeting with mediators, social workers, doctors. Still, some of the interviewees were ready to express their resentment toward asylum seekers, blaming the state of apathy in which they fall. Not incidentally, at the ideal reception centre described in last interview, those who skirt ‘mandatory’ collective activities would be viewed with suspicion; they would be regarded as people who do not ‘deserve’ aid but should rather be left to fend for themselves in the harsh realities of the world. In this way, an institution the law labels as basically humanitarian is made to assume functions typical of a rehabilitation centre. The language of rehabilitation is after all dangerously close to that of ‘empowerment’, on which the discourse of humanitarian workers largely draws.

7 Closing remarks

I have used the concept of psychological confinement to argue that CARAs exert a centripetal force on asylum seekers, trapping them within facilities that have a concentrationary appearance. The reasoning may be extended to the analysis of the European asylum system as a whole, in which the reception centres I explored are a junction. The system seems explicitly designed to confine asylum seekers on the threshold of Europe, forcing them to orbit around the region in which they received first assistance (Guild, 2006; Klepp, 2010; Squire, 2009). Under the rules governing the so-called Dublin system, anyone who wants to apply for asylum is forced to file his or her application in the country of first arrival, and generally has to wait for the outcome within its ‘reception’ system. In countries such as Greece and Italy, the ones most exposed to the influx of asylum seekers by sea, the waits can last several months and reception conditions are often extremely poor. In addition, because of restrictive asylum policies, most of those who receive international protection obtain a short-term residence permit in the form of subsidiary or humanitarian protection. Refugees seeking to renew their permits are forced to turn back to the same asylum commission that decided their case, and this forces them to return periodically or to constantly orbit around the regions, cities, and centres where they were first ‘hosted’. As we have seen, they wind up

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returning to centres where they again seek shelter when then need to renew their residence permits. This is one of the reasons why the CARAs I analysed take the form of hybrid structures, halfway between a sorting or processing centre housing asylum seekers and an informal settlement crowded with migrants or refugees looking for a place to sleep at night. The European asylum system amplifies the refugees’ dependence on reception centres, with the paradox that the regions in which they are located–generally at Europe’s periphery or along the main migratory routes–are transformed into regions of confinement.

Italian reception centres were redesigned in 2008 in order to take on a clearer humanitarian function. My research indicates that their supposed humanitarian mission is largely frustrated by the contradictions of a reception system in which asylum seekers are made dependent on humanitarian government. This reproduction of dependence allows the reception system to perform a subtle social-control function, achieving the effect of confining asylum seekers into a place that can easily be controlled by the police and is completely isolated from the local community. Such control is nonetheless exercised even though the law does not provide any form of detention for asylum seekers or any other explicitly repressive means for keeping them under surveillance. Reception centres exert a centripetal force which is hard to resist, and which in a sense has the ability to trap asylum seekers more than any wall. It is for these reasons that I put forward the idea of ‘humanitarian confinement’, designating a reception system that offers help and hospitality to asylum seekers, while subjecting them to a subtle form of control enacted through humanitarian agents.

The reception centres I have analysed appear as places of ‘confinement’ because asylum seekers are thrown into a space of social segregation on which their survival entirely depends–a space that they are not able to leave, since they lack the relational and economic resources needed to survive outside, a space that they can leave only at the risk of compromising their asylum application. Such confinement can, however, be officially classified as ‘humanitarian’ because it is not imposed by force on asylum seekers, even though in practice it is the only form of assistance the Italian government offers them pending the outcome of their application. Although CARAs typically have a martial appearance–being staffed by the army and often located inside or next to military zones–the security forces’ attitude toward asylum seekers appears paradoxically more benevolent and tolerant than that of humanitarian workers, having to manage the delivery of services in overcrowded and poorly arranged centres. The traits of the Italian reception systems perfectly exemplify the transition of asylum policy from a regime grounded in rights to a regime in which asylum seekers are given compassionate assistance in exchange for a substantial restriction of their personal freedom. The humanitarian confinement of asylum seekers reflects a governmental logic that combines compassion with suspicion, assistance with control (Fassin, 2005, 2011; Ticktin, 2005; Szczepanikova, 2012).

The degrading treatment asylum seekers suffer does not, however, have the effect of making them completely despondent, reducing them to the role of mere objects of aid. According to the reading offered by Fassin and Ticktin, which here follows Agamben’s theoretical insights on biopolitics (1995), one of the typical effects of humanitarian government is to reduce migrants and asylum seekers to ‘bare life’, that is, to a legally and politically disqualified form of existence [Ticktin, 2005; Fassin, (2011), pp.250–251]. This reading rather underestimates the ability that migrants and refugees

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have to rebuild their own political agencies starting from the refugee camp, turning it into a scenario in which to put up a struggle, advance claims, and engage in conflict. I mentioned that migrants and refugees have the ability to take possession of the spaces within the centres, reorganising these spaces on the basis of alternative logics; informal markets and economic life may flourish within reception centres, and a permanent conflict characterises the asylums seekers’ relations with the managing bodies as concerns the delivery of services. There is room for the refugees to speak out, transforming these places of confinement into stages for engaging in political action and claiming their rights. [Agier, (2011), p.65]. Protests, often violent, are a constant feature of life at Italian reception centres, with the stone-throwing, rioting, and unrest that in recent years have made for a spate of news stories. Tempers are certainly exacerbated by the long waits, and it is clear that the condition of discouragement can also lead people to overreact. This is perhaps the most evident sign that there are no grounds on which to defend a reception model where asylum seekers are confined within large reception centres for long waiting periods; but it also tells us something more. It tells that the only way to put out a message from the spaces of social confinement is to embark on violent and egregious actions aimed at explicitly denying the legitimacy of the autocratic and absolute power entrusted to humanitarian agents.

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Notes 1 Asylum seekers checking into a reception centre have a shorter period to appeal against refusal

decisions; pending their appeal, the execution of the deportation order is suspended only on request; finally, their deportation is executed as a forced repatriation, while ‘trustworthy’ asylum seekers have the right to an order to leave the country.

2 I first visited the CARAs in January 2013, when I obtained an authorization to access their facilities in order to carry out my research. Except for the obligation to plan visits at least two days in advance, I was left free to carry out my research without restrictions and to move freely inside the centres. During the first stage of the research, I collected data relating to migrants’ socio-demographic characteristics, as well as data on management of CARAs and on daily life at these centres. In the subsequent months, I visited the reception centres on several other occasions until July 2013 so as to carry out some semi-structured interviews with CARA staff and guests. An overall 27 interviews were recorded.

3 The centre is composed of 16 housing modules (eight beds each) placed in the middle of a central square surrounded by walls. It can accommodate up to 128 asylum seekers.

4 The centre is composed of 124 housing modules (12 beds each). It can accommodate up to 1,500 asylum seekers.

5 The Foggia reception centre is thus divided into two main areas: the first consisting of two buildings of 17 and 18 rooms (six beds each); the second consisting of 72 housing modules of 12 beds each. It can accommodate up to 1,000 asylum seekers.