ABSTRACT
The Asylum Seeker is a stateless person seeking asylum but not yet accepted by another nation-state as a ‘refugee’. This is an in-between position that makes meaningful such bizarre designations as a person having no status in excised offshore places. By comparison, The Refugee is a displaced person who is outside their original state of citizenry, is a forced migrant and is recognized as such. She or he is a person who now has a legally recognized place in a new state, or at least a right to have such a status. In legal terms they have a new place to reside, however constrained or appalling that place might be, while in colloquial terms they are people at a distance for whom we should feel sympathy. Of those many faces of globalization – and here we are talking of embodied faces rather than the disembodied faces of Facebook and the mass media – it is then the irregular migrant and the asylum seeker who are the most contentious, and of central concern to this essay.
