‘This Time I Am Going to Cross!’: Fighting Entrapment Processes Through the Provision of Human Smuggling Services on the US–Mexico Border

Abstract

Asylum seekers are immediately recognizable as a population that faces increasing levels of legal, social and economic precariousness, inherited from their home countries and exacerbated by widespread hostility in host or destination countries that feel anxious, if not outright threatened, by the risk asylum seekers are perceived to pose. This book conceptualizes the precarity endured by asylum seekers as entrapment, and seeks to identify the agents and processes that contribute to this cycle and produce the lived experience of immiseration that has been brought to bear on asylum seekers. This chapter introduces the conceptual framework that forms the genesis of this book evaluating the entrapment of asylum seekers. The case is made for a strident analysis of agency so that asylum seekers are not represented as passive victims. And yet this chapter reveals how asylum seeker responses to their environment may further their precarity and criminalization, reinforcing the policies, practices and discourses of the securitization of migration.