Paper Short Abstract:

How is “the state” staged as a care provider in Germany, even when attempting to deport? The paper interrogates the humanitarian and merit-based integration narratives of the so-called Duldung from the perspective of migrants obliged to cultivate indifference to everyday threats of state violence.

Paper Abstract:

For decades, the German asylum system has been a site of coercive social control coupled with public performances of care. The administrative suspension of deportation (Duldung) has been the main technology to this end, except for the Syrians in 2015 and Ukrainians in 2022, who were issued residence permits. Duldung is not a residence permit, but a form of precarious, unlawful stay after a deportation order, expiring when the obstacle to deportation disappears. Drawing on fieldwork with people in this situation, conducted between 2015 and 2022, the paper discusses the Duldung practice as a site where “the state” is staged as a care provider, even when attempting to deport. The main reason for the growing use of Duldung after 2015 was missing identity documents – that is, immigration authorities could not enforce the deportation but continued trying. Yet many policymakers and practitioners (social workers, lawyers, NGOs, volunteers) discussed Duldung as humanitarian care and a stepping stone to selective, state-facilitated “integration” requiring merits. For the people holding a Duldung, acquiring minimal social benefits, access to the low-wage labour market under deportation threat and, in the best case, conditional regularization, required indifference to the regular threats of violence by the immigration authority and savvy in navigating them. The paper examines the productivity, potentials, and pitfalls of this indifference as an embodied attitude or affect.