Paper short abstract:

I trace three Afghan men’s experience of migration to New Delhi, asking how they develop their identity as migrants. The findings indicate complexity not only in reasons for migration but also in notions of belonging, which challenge state-level conceptions of Afghan refugee identity.

Paper long abstract:

Growing interest in migration studies in recent decades demonstrates how current social, economic, and political challenges resulting from human mobility dominate academic and policy concerns. These are reflected in US immigration debates on amnesty rights, UK hesitancy over migrants' rights to healthcare, and EU efforts to distill a common asylum system. Anthropological enquiry has been essential in informing these debates, and recent anthropological studies have highlighted the way immigration regimes create migrants as subjects based on ideas of group membership and national belonging. This paper focuses specifically on the category of the 'Afghan refugee', asking to what extent this label corresponds to actual experience of being and belonging to this group.

In this paper I analyze three Afghan men's stories of migration to New Delhi, their life as migrants in the city, and the process of attaining refugee status in India. I draw on personal interviews and observations of how these men live in the city as three specific examples of different ways migrants create a place for themselves using memory, sensation, and desire. In this way, I complicate the flattened, static definition of 'Afghan refugee' and demonstrate the complexity of these men's emergent and shifting identities as migrants. By moving beyond merely analyzing of the gap between the bureaucratic creation of these migrants as subjects and their own personal perceptions of subjectivity, this paper affords critical insight into the migrant experience and poses further questions for development of migration policy.