Bordering through recalibration: Exploring the temporality of the German “Ausbildungsduldung”

Abstract

The past decades of inquiry into the “what, where, and who” of borders have more recently been followed by an interest in borders’ temporal dimensions. In this article, I contribute to this research by analyzing how border temporalities operate on the scale of the lived experiences of rejected asylum seekers in Germany. My point of departure is the so-called Ausbildungsduldung, which since 2016 has permitted the suspension of deportation for rejected asylum seekers who start vocational training. After three years of training glimmers a promised residency permit. I approach the Ausbildungsduldung as a biopolitical technique of bordering and focus on its temporal aspects. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how young Afghan asylum seekers negotiate the Ausbildungsduldung and how they can make its promised future their own. I show how the state deploys techniques of “future giving,” suspension, and deportability to produce skilled workers, and argue that the Ausbildungsduldung works as a bordering technique by producing affective attachments to a particular future trajectory, and by elevating certain ways of dealing with suspension and deportability in support of this trajectory. Showing how migrants are compelled to “wait well” while confined to a condition of deportability, the paper highlights how migrants’ experiences and practices of time become central to processes of bordering.