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Asylum and the deportation of third-country nationals have grown into one of Europe’s most politicized topics. Social and protest movements that include concerned citizens take to the streets and raise their voices in favor of solidarity and a liberal stance towards migration on the one hand, or call for greater deterrents and coercive policies on the other. The chapter discusses a range of theoretical approaches to the contentious issue of protest in the field of asylum and deportation. Embedded in concepts of political change, limited state sovereignty, and migration control, it discusses the strength of comparative perspectives across time and national contexts for achieving in-depth insights into the dynamics, actors, forms, and effects of protest activities. In addition, the chapter provides an overview on the contributions to the volume, which include longitudinal studies and case studies on pro- and anti-migrant protest activities in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

With regard to mobilization in the field of migration and refugees, Austria is characterized by a strict migration regime on the one hand, and the performance of a rather moderate protest culture and low civic engagement in politics (besides electoral politics) on the other. Increasingly restrictive asylum policies date back to the 1990s, in conjunction with Austria’s altered understanding of itself as a country of destination instead of only being a country of transit. Although the idea of a merely temporary stay for migrants is deeply inscribed in the Austrian migration system, individual possibilities for gaining the right to stay have emerged for asylum seekers who have already received a negative decision. Simultaneously, the policy fields of migration and asylum have become polarized and politicized with negative overtones, especially by the Austrian Freedom Party–with a majority of the Austrian population supporting stricter immigration policies. All these aspects in the area of asylum and deportation as well as the general political culture in Austria represent institutional and discursive opportunity structures for protest, both for and against asylum seekers. Asylum protests can either occur in support of or in opposition to asylum seekers and concern the deportation, right to stay, and reception of asylum seekers. These three fields–deportation, reception, and stay–are linked to each other in the asylum process but have not been jointly examined to date. This chapter explores this constellation, thereby providing a picture of the contextual framework of protest both for and against asylum seekers in Austria.

During the 1980–1990s, a repressive consensus regarding asylum emerged, resulting in the 1992–1993 reform of Germany’s asylum laws. Since this time, Germany has been characterized by a relatively strict migration and asylum policy. Despite a shift towards liberal migration management in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, restrictive positions remained influential. At the same time, migrant self-organization and pro-migrant mobilization have been a constant feature of “immigration country” Germany. This time has furthermore been marked by an increasing Europeanization of policies on asylum and deportation. As a consequence, Germany’s migration policy is highly ambivalent, oscillating between restrictive asylum regulations and increased opportunities to stay; this in turn creates a complex context for protests, both for and against (rejected) asylum seekers. The aim of this article is to contextualize contentions over asylum and deportation. Besides policy developments in the field, we expand on decision-making authority over asylum, deportation, and stay as specific points of reference for protests. Finally, we sketch the broader protest culture. The article is based on a review of literature as well as (policy) documents, campaign materials, and statistics.

This chapter aims to provide contextual elements to understand pro- and anti-deportation protests in Switzerland. First, it discusses the issue of asylum in the division within Swiss society, between partisans of either closed or open borders. Then, it examines the current Swiss asylum policy which is at the center of debate and criticism for both groups of protesters while providing an historical overview of the revisions and agreements that have shaped it since the 1990s. This section examines the different stages within Swiss asylum policy: the refugee definition, the criteria for inadmissible and unfounded applications, the role of deportations in the asylum system and the issue of return assistance, and ultimately the legal support available to potential deportees either to stay in Switzerland or to return when deportation could not be avoided. To understand who is the focus of action for the protesters, the following section describes the state actors involved in the implementation of deportation policy and the mechanisms of executive federalism. The fourth and last section discusses the overall Swiss protest culture and reveals the advantages and constraints of direct democracy in the case of civil society protests.

To identify long-term patterns of anti-deportation mobilization this chapter uses a social movement-inspired, systematic analysis of news reports of anti-deportation protest events in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (1993–2013). Articles were manually coded, and changes over time and differences across countries were examined using descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis. The chapter examines differences and similarities in the frequency of protest, main actors, protest forms, and claims made. The frequency of protest activities has increased in Austria and Germany, but not so in Switzerland. In the vast majority of events, actors protest in solidarity and on behalf of designated deportees. Grass-root organizations without personal ties to the person affected and social movements that seek social or political change appear most often as main actors. The specific protest events in the three countries are strongly influenced by local and national particularities, but there are similarities in the protests against deportations across countries and over time that suggest a certain kind of transnational protest movement. The chapter identifies anti-deportation protests as solidarity protests that are organized mostly on a local level and focuses on individual, case-specific solutions rather than demands for social or legal change of the deportation regime.

This chapter explores patterns of success and failure of anti-deportation protests. Based on 15 qualitative case studies from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the authors identify four relevant mechanisms that may explain successful protest outcomes: public preferences with regard to the issue of asylum and deportation, political access to decision-making authorities, judicial means, and disruption by protest actors and/or people to be deported. These mechanisms do not exist exogenously, but need to be activated. All of them involve different degrees of risk and unintended consequences. To what degree they can be successfully activated also depends on the context of the case and reflects political opportunity structures. Furthermore, the reconstruction of the cases initially understood as unsuccessful has led the authors to problematize the criterion of success. They therefore propose a chronological perspective for the evaluation of success that goes beyond the specific deportation event and highlights the role of support that is continued in the post-deportation phase and often leads to the person’s return to the country from which he or she has been deported.

This chapter investigates how and why Swiss citizens take sides with undocumented migrants and stand together in anti-deportation protests. It examines case-specific protests aiming to protect an identifiable beneficiary, which can last several months, sometimes even years. The aim is to grasp how deportation decisions – as concrete applications of the law – are challenged. Based on five case studies, we distinguish two types of case-specific protests according to the strategies adopted and the beneficiary’s role in the protest. First, personifying protests involve Swiss citizens with various political orientations exclusively trying to prevent the deportation of a specific person or family seen as ‘deserving’ to stay. Second, exemplifying protests are implemented by groups of left-oriented activists using the case(s) of one or several migrants as examples illustrating the outcomes of a policy they consider unfair and the reform of which they demand. This second type shows that some anti-deportation protests are neither purely case-specific nor change-oriented, but rather a combination of both (case specific in the means and change-oriented in the purpose). Overall, the typology developed in this chapter allows a theoretical generalization of empirical observations that encompasses both the actor structure and the strategies underlying altruistic protests.

In this article, we argue that taking the analytical insights of deportability into account helps to shed light on dimensions of anti-deportation protests that might be overlooked, if we focus too narrowly on efforts to prevent the act of removal. We lay out this argument by drawing on qualitative fieldwork on the anti-deportation protests in the mid-sized German city of Osnabrück, where the Alliance against Deportations prevented 36 Dublin deportations between March 2014 and October 2015. To explore how these collective protests – which brought together a wide range of participants with and without secure residence status – affect and are affected by deportability, we consider different dimensions of deportability: isolation, in/visibility and uncertainty. Our findings suggest that collectivity is, in itself, part of how the participants question deportability. Collective protests undermine the isolating logic of deportability in the moment of an (attempted) deportation, as well as in the daily lives and relations of the people involved. Moreover, they can create (temporary) spaces in which the harmful conditions of public invisibility and private visibility are reversed, lessening the insecurity and uncertainty tied to the state of deportability.

In the last 5 years, self-organized migratory and refugee struggles have achieved unprecedented public visibility in Germany. This “new era of protest” must be understood as part of a complex history of migratory struggles fighting for the right to stay and social inclusion by articulating their own claims. To provide an overview and compare different forms of self-organizing, we focus on three cases of refugee struggles with particular positionalities: Women in Exile, Youth without Borders (Jugendliche ohne Grenzen), and Lampedusa in Hamburg. We argue that specific social and political positionalities, partly shaped by the German-European migration regime and its hierarchy of legal statuses, influence the diverse and sometimes contradicting narratives and strategies of different initiatives. This hierarchical order and its division of migrants’ positionalities is therefore a cause of conflict and rift within the broader movement of migratory and refugee struggles. According to the positionalities of the participants, the framing of initiatives often oscillates between general claims for the rights of all refugees and migrants and particular claims for the rights of their specific social group.

The paper analyzes the Refugee Protest Camp Vienna from different theoretical perspectives. It first asks whether a specific political opportunity structure facilitated the beginning of the movement and, failing to find specific political opportunities, comes to the conclusion that the movement should rather be understood as an “event” in the sense of Alain Badiou. It then analyzes strategies of self-representation, taking as a starting point the assumption that migrants’ interests are “weak” for two reasons: (1) migrants have multiple and diverse interests, and (2) they are a marginalized group. According to Judith Butler, this marginalization can be described as “non-recognition” of the lives of migrants. The Viennese protest movement of asylum seekers defended its weak interests by combining universalist and group claims, as well as individual claims. While this incoherent strategy can be understood as a means of strengthening representation, it obviously also led to contradictions, exclusion, and normatively problematic attitudes. At the same time, the movement was unified by the subjectivization of asylum seekers as citizens. In the third section, the relations between refugees and supporters are described with regard to quantitative and qualitative mobilization, and strong and weak ties, and as a mixture of individual support and collective political action. Finally, the chapter establishes that the results of the movement were generally unfruitful on the political level and ambiguous in individual cases.