Asylum policy: how to create a permanent crisis

There may soon no longer be enough accommodation for asylum seekers, according to the federal government. However, this has little to do with the actual number of applications. There has been a home-made emergency in the asylum sector for decades.

By Judith Saladin and Lukas Tobler

[This article posted on 10/5/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2340/asylpolitik/wie-man-eine-permanente-krise-bastelt/!GQ5YJG47G53M.]



Asylum seekers climb a staircase into a bunker, 1987

Once considered unacceptable, then normal accommodation: Asylum seekers in a bunker, 1987 Photo: Gertrud Vogler, Social Archives Zurich

Container village or civil defense facility? Beds in the gym or military barracks? Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider fears that the federal government could run out of space for newly arriving asylum seekers by the end of the year and has therefore been looking for new accommodation options for some time.

Originally, these were to be several new container villages - temporary ones, of course. The cantonal governments thought this was a good idea. However, the conservative-dominated Council of States, which represents the cantons in Bern, did not. It scuttled the Federal Council's proposal. Now there is the threat of another "emergency situation" in the asylum sector: water on the mill of the right-wing election campaign.

In view of these predictions, the SVP literally hyperventilated at the extraordinary session on asylum and migration issues last week and diagnosed an "asylum rush". "We can't always discuss in which gym we can put how many more beds," said SVP member Gregor Rutz.

Invention of "renitence"

To understand why the asylum regime is once again reaching its limits, it helps to take a look at history. It turns out that the decisive factor is not the number of asylum applications actually submitted.* A crisis is always linked to the authority of those who declare it. Where does it begin? Where does normality end? It is a matter of discretion. The asylum authorities in Switzerland have been talking about crises for decades. They are not referring to civil wars or poverty in the wider world: they have always scandalized the shortage of beds in gymnasiums. The crisis is almost as old as the asylum law itself.

Until then, asylum-related issues had been regulated by the general Aliens Act. It stipulated that foreigners who were at risk for political or other reasons could apply for "permanent asylum". For decades in the post-war period, the political debate was dominated by the idea of anti-communist exile.

The first version of the new asylum law was comparatively liberal. However, this was to change soon after it came into force. At the beginning of the 1980s, the number of asylum applications increased by leaps and bounds. This also applied to the number of countries from which the applicants came: For the first time, asylum seekers from non-European countries - such as Sri Lanka - were applying for asylum in Switzerland on a large scale. Against the backdrop of global networking and European integration, the meaning of "asylum" is changing fundamentally at this time - becoming a permanent phenomenon and an expression of structural global inequalities.

In response to the significant increase in the number of refugees at the time, the Asylum Act undergoes its first tightening revision. A process that would become a constant over the next two decades: The Asylum Act was amended a total of thirteen times until it was replaced by a new one in 1999. Each revision resulted in stricter regulations. In the second revision in 1988, for example, "temporary admission" and detention pending deportation were introduced into asylum law. The acceleration of the asylum procedure is invoked as a solution to the crisis. Acceleration always means that the time during which asylum seekers have to be accommodated by the state is shortened. This justification is used to legitimize increasingly precarious, improvised and inhospitable accommodation.

The final departure from the anti-communist political asylum discourse of the post-war period came with an urgent federal decree in June 1990, which included a ban on working and sanctions against "unruly" asylum seekers. This federal decree marked the beginning of a policy of rejection of asylum seekers.

At this point, the asylum system had already been in crisis for ten years. The number of applications was increasing. However, instead of adapting to this situation and opening up access to the job or housing market, for example, talk of crisis-ridden, overcrowded accommodation facilities became the cornerstone of the authorities' arguments for tightening the law: a permanent pretext.

From then on, the authorities put more and more centrally managed collective accommodation and emergency sleeping facilities into operation: after accommodation in civil defense bunkers was still considered unreasonable in 1988, the authorities designated converted industrial facilities, barracks and containers as suitable infrastructure for asylum seekers as early as 1991 - for fear of resistance in the communities to which asylum seekers could be assigned. The cantonal authorities prematurely argued that such accommodation could prevent resistance.

Temporary emergency accommodation was thus normalized at the beginning of the 1990s. Since then at the latest, the asylum crisis has also been an accommodation crisis. The political climate in which these tightening measures in the area of asylum are implemented is historically entangled with the culturalist discourse of "foreign infiltration", which was used in the 1960s to stir up xenophobic polemics in the public eye. At that time, the isolationist splinter party "Nationale Aktion gegen Überfremdung von Volk und Heimat" (NA) set the tone for the radical right. In the following decade, however, it lost media significance due to its thematic one-dimensionality. In the 1980s, it managed to make a comeback by discursively occupying asylum policy with the old hobbyhorse of the "foreign infiltration problem" and declaring asylum seekers the subject of scandalization.

Attacks from the right

The effects of this new agitation are devastating. In the shadow of the NA represented in parliament, radical right-wing thugs and neo-Nazis are appearing and sometimes carrying out serious attacks against refugees, but also against punks and homosexuals. They advertised their actions in amateurish hate publications - and received a great deal of media coverage.

From the late 1980s onwards, racist attacks were increasingly directed against asylum shelters. There were numerous arson attacks, armed assaults and hunts against people waiting for their asylum decision in officially assigned collective hostels. The NA itself changes its name to the Swiss Democrats (SD) in 1990. It finally lost its significance towards the end of the century. Its ideas and positions were absorbed into the growing SVP.

In 1991, when the first bloody conflicts in Croatia heralded the start of the Yugoslav Wars, which would trigger the largest mass exodus in post-war Europe to date, the authorities reacted by tightening up procedures once again. Procedures were to be accelerated once again and the number of temporary accommodation places increased. Not only to actually create more places, but also to strategically "reduce the attractiveness" of the Swiss asylum system.

The new old crisis in the asylum sector continues to legitimize the rapid pace at which the tightening of asylum laws is being implemented. This development reached its climax with the implementation of the "coercive measures in immigration law", which came into force in 1995 despite a referendum. These measures extended detention pending deportation, made it possible to ban people from certain areas and assign them to certain areas, and legalized searches of accommodation and private belongings.

The principle of repression instead of adapting the asylum system to changing circumstances had long been established by this time. The discourse is being whipped up from the right. In its dispatch, the Federal Council justifies its repressive package of measures with the dissatisfied mood among the population towards "delinquent asylum seekers", which it attributes to initiatives by the SD and SVP.

The strategy of the right-wing populists is successful. In 2003, one of them, Christoph Blocher, was elected to the Federal Council. As head of the Department of Police and Justice, he pushed through further tightening of the law with the support of the electorate, in particular the ban on social welfare for rejected asylum seekers. And Blocher, the hardliner, boasts about his alleged successes: While around 22,000 asylum applications were submitted in Switzerland in 2003, in 2006 the figure was just 11,000.

At that time, however, the figures were falling throughout Europe. Above all, however, it had long since become clear that the number of applications is volatile and can increase rapidly. Blocher doesn't care. He is bluffing with his "consistently applied asylum policy" and the apparent savings potential associated with it. "In recent years, the federal and cantonal infrastructure was geared towards 20,000 asylum applications per year," according to a Federal Council press release from 2006, one year before the elections. The number of beds was therefore halved. Although not a single year since 1987 has seen fewer than 10,000 asylum applications, until today.

Six new centers already in operation

And how many are there this year, in which Gregor Rutz and his colleagues are conjuring up an "asylum rush"? At the end of August, there were only 17,000, plus refugees from Ukraine. However, they are being accepted outside of the regular asylum system. Upon arrival, they are immediately assigned to a canton.

As a reminder, the last fundamental revision of the Asylum Act only came into force in 2019, four years after the "refugee summer" of 2015. Today, six new temporary centers are already in operation. The army has to make its infrastructure available for this. Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider is looking for new temporary reserve accommodation - in the middle of the election campaign. And the fact that beds now have to be set up in gymnasiums again is more than convenient for Rutz.