ABSTRACT
Playing pool at the Red Cross Culture House for asylum seekers on the island of Bornholm in Denmark, Ali pulled me aside to help him write a letter to the Danish Immigration Service. Having fled Afghanistan, he had come to Denmark a year-and-a-half before on a fake Russian passport that he had bought in Pakistan, along with his passage to Europe. He had been told to dispose of the passport before presenting himself to the officials, but had been picked up so quickly at the border that he had no chance to do so. Consequently the authorities had registered him as a Russian citizen, writing the name they found in his passport on his Aliens' card and giving him an Aliens' number with a Russian prefix. Though this was a subject of great amusement to the other asylum seekers, Ali was rather disturbed by it. Partly, he felt that he was starting out on the wrong foot in the new country, but mainly it was because being registered as a Russian meant his case was processed under fast-track, so-called manifestly unfounded, procedures, rather than progressing, with other Afghanis, under normal procedures with a greater likelihood of being granted refugee status, or ‘getting positive’, as the asylum seekers say. He had written and spoken to the Immigration Service a number of times since his arrival, but they had yet to change his Aliens' card or number, and now he had just been called in for an interview by the Russian name on his fake passport. ‘Maybe they will think I am from Russia, and they will not listen to my case’, he said as we sat drinking coffee.
