The German Duldung: Legal Violence and Struggles Over the Means of Life
By Aino Korvensyrjä
In 2015, as asylum applications increased, German authorities framed the situation as a ‘refugee crisis’. Over the past decade, migration policy toward people from impoverished and crisis-ridden countries of the Global South and the post-socialist East has built on this framing. For decades, (West) Germany has processed such migration through the asylum system, combining humanitarian care with deportation and tightly restricting access to the labour market and social security. This blog post examines how people facing deportation in the asylum system after 2015 contested and negotiated this nexus of legal violence, care, and precarious labour.
The following analysis focuses on conflicts surrounding Duldung—a temporary suspension of deportation issued by immigration authorities when deportation cannot currently be enforced. This ambiguous administrative measure, commonly (mis)understood as a minimal form of humanitarian protection, has been central to (West) German migration governance since 1965 and again crucial to policy responses after 2015. The document resembles a temporary residence permit and, like residence permits, is issued and renewed by the immigration authority (Ausländerbehörde). Yet under Duldung, the deportation order remains in force and can be executed if the obstacle to deportation is removed. The statement ‘This is not a residence permit! The holder is obliged to leave!’ appears on the document, along with a red line crossing one of its six pages to distinguish the Duldung from a residence permit.
Focusing on the West African diaspora, I show how people with Duldung defied legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012) by using this document as a de facto residence permit to claim access to paid work, essential resources, and services. The outcome might seem paradoxical: a better life for some, increased repression for many, and the creation of a racialised, ultra-precarious workforce for Germany’s low-wage labour markets.

Questioning repressive care in the postcolonial nation-state
Anthropologists and migration justice activists have criticised how nation-states entangle humanitarian care with repressive exclusion. Didier Fassin (2005; 2012) and Miriam Ticktin (2011) examined the harshly policed hierarchies of humanitarian deservingness in post-1980s French migration governance. Recent analyses (Pallister-Wilkins 2022) continue to expose the complicity of volunteers and humanitarian organisations in racialised state violence against ‘refugees’ and ‘unauthorised migrants’. As early as the 1990s, West African diaspora activists in France and Germany denounced humanitarian responses to migration coupled with racialised policing and deportation. The Sans-Papiers movement and the VOICE Refugee Forum linked the humanitarian-repressive dynamics of postcolonial immigration law to ongoing dispossession in Western Europe’s former colonies (Igbinoba 2009; Cissé 1998; Korvensyrjä 2024).
Nationwide protests from 2012 to 2014 against the German asylum system articulated these egalitarian demands and anticolonial critiques with unprecedented force. The protesters, many of them holding a Duldung, demanded an end to deportations, the closure of asylum camps, and access to work for all. After these protests were met with repression, the federal government announced a shift in 2015 away from the longstanding strict asylum policy: around a million Syrians were granted protection and work permits, partly in response to employer demand for labour (Altenried et al. 2018). For a brief time, the protesters’ slogan ‘refugees welcome’ appeared everywhere (Omwenyeke 2016; 2017). However, deportations to the Western Balkans—and soon, Dublin deportations to Europe’s frontier states—increased, and the EU invested further in deadly border externalisation. The expansion of tightly monitored, large, semi-open reception centres across Germany, first developed in southern Germany in the early 1980s, reinforced the deportation infrastructure. A new category, ‘prospect to stay’ (Bleibeperspektive), was introduced to sort people according to their perceived deservingness or deportability from the outset of the asylum process. In early 2017, the federal government and the Länder announced a comprehensive programme to increase deportations.
Conflicts over deportation and the means of life
In my dissertation, I examined the new conflicts over deportation in this context. These conflicts manifested in the increased use of Duldung. In late 2013, 94,000 people held this status, rising to 180,000 by the end of 2018 and 248,000 by late 2022 (Korvensyrjä 2024, 1). Successive renewals, when the deportation obstacle persisted, often extended Duldung into years of precarious stay under the threat of deportation. The most common reason for issuing Duldung was the absence of valid identity documents, usually a passport. A passport is required to enforce a deportation order, unless there is a specific readmission agreement with the third country. During this period, identification became a site of intense contestation.
I accompanied people who had migrated to Germany from various West African countries, often with no option to remain but to seek asylum. They described this as being ‘trapped’ or ‘forced into’ the asylum system. Once in the asylum process, rejection was almost certain. North Africans, nationals of post-socialist states, and other nationalities classified as lacking a good ‘prospect to stay’ faced a similar situation. Most people I spoke to were aware that presenting their passports during the asylum procedure would later make them vulnerable to deportation. Without a passport, the rejection of their asylum claim was followed by a Duldung for ‘missing identity documents’, which the immigration authority typically renewed in short intervals of one to three months.
Although renewals often seemed almost automatic, the situation was risky. Immigration authorities used various methods to pressure people into submitting their passports or other proof of identity. They threatened to withdraw work permits and then to reduce cash benefits, and request criminal sanctions from the courts. People with Duldung tried to avoid these sanctions while also avoiding identification and potential deportation. Continuing deportation efforts, immigration authorities organised so-called embassy hearings, inviting embassy officials and delegations from African and Asian countries to identify presumed nationals. Following these hearings, embassies may issue emergency travel certificates, allowing a one-way deportation journey to the country of origin. After 2015, embassy hearings rarely resulted in travel certificates or deportations, but they often created fear and uncertainty among those holding a Duldung.
Economic sanctions had the most severe impact. While most people rely on paid work for a decent standard of living, those in the asylum system also often have extended families depending on remittances. This placed additional pressure on West Africans in the asylum system, most of whom were men under 40. Many eventually left Germany or went underground to seek work and avoid identification and deportation.
A racialised workforce…
The growing number of people with Duldung after 2015 coincided with increasing labour shortages in low-wage sectors of the German economy. In response, authorities made concessions, allowing many Duldung holders into the labour market and selectively issuing residence permits. For individuals, this required patience—waiting seven or eight years for a German residence permit was common among those I interviewed. It also required luck in avoiding deportation, criminalisation, or loss of a work permit during this period, as well as support from fellow migrants, volunteers, organisations, and lawyers.
Obtaining a residence permit is a success on a personal level, albeit a limited one. These policies and conflicts, however, simultaneously created an ultra-precarious, racialised workforce for sectors such as logistics, restaurants, construction, and manufacturing (Maaroufi 2022; Korvensyrjä 2024). The new, upgraded types of Duldung for work or vocational training—a so-called Beschäftigungsduldung or Ausbildungsduldung—protected the holder from deportation as long as they remained employed or in training. As everyone who has held a temporary residence permit knows, its renewal also depends on continuous employment. These documents thus effectively tie the individual to a job and limit their ability to negotiate work conditions.
People aiming for selective regularisation opportunities after 2015 were expected to demonstrate gratitude as part of achieving ‘integration’. This disciplinary narrative normalised their submissiveness as workers while also legitimising the criminalisation and (self-)deportation of others. Authorities and policymakers justified repression by portraying people concealing their passports as deceitful ‘identity refusers’. This framing is grounded in the Residence Act, which imposes ‘obligations to cooperate’ (Mitwirkungspflichten), requiring individuals to submit passports or other proof of identity to the authorities to facilitate deportation. In other words, a moral economy of ‘illegality’ (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012) contributed to the racialisation of people holding Duldung, exposing them to state violence (see Gilmore 2022).
…and an abolitionist standpoint?
Are such outcomes a reason for pessimism about collective struggles against legal violence in the asylum system? In my dissertation, I arrive at a different conclusion, based on how people holding a Duldung resisted the state-centred economy of violence in their everyday lives. They developed a certain indifference to threats of deportation and criminalisation that required both practical skills and a moral and emotional distancing from state violence. Avery Gordon (2018) notes how people who are regularly subjected to intense repression or public abandonment tend to develop, out of necessity, skills to live better in the interstices of unequal societies upheld by violence. She theorises an embodied political consciousness, ‘in-difference’—with a hyphen—to conceptualise this attitude. By ‘being in-difference’ she describes ‘a standpoint and a mindset for living on better terms than what we’re offered’ (Gordon 2018, v)—in this case, living as if not categorised as deportable and disposable surplus people. In a similar vein, Asef Bayat (2010) analyses the ‘quiet encroachment’ by the urban dispossessed in the Middle East and North Africa as they seek to access resources enclosed by wealthy groups and states. This involves everyday practices such as squatting vacant lots or tapping into electricity grids to enhance life chances. I argue that concealing one’s passport to avoid deportation, while striving for a work or a residence permit, exemplifies this kind of defiance and direct redress.
Ignoring deportation orders and living as if entitled to a better life certainly remained a fragile achievement for the people I spoke with, always at risk of being undone. However, following Gordon and Bayat, I emphasise its political moment beyond mere existential necessity. Bayat sees quiet encroachment as part of social ‘non-movements’ in the MENA region. These have the potential for both incremental change and abrupt political transformation, as seen, for instance, during the Arab Spring—or the protests against the German asylum system from 2012 to 2014. For Gordon ‘in-difference’ practiced by the ‘enslaved, imprisoned, indebted, occupied’ is a ‘conceptual measure of abolition’ and a practice of ‘living … as to anticipate, inhabit, make the world you want to live in now, urgently, as if you couldn’t live otherwise’ (2018, 236–7).
Secrecy is often necessary to avoid exposing people to additional legal violence (Korvensyrjä 2024, 47). In other situations, solidarity with those engaged in quiet encroachment requires publicly questioning the legitimations of state violence. A No Borders or border abolitionist politics (Bradley and Noronha 2022) explicitly challenges the moral economy of violence analysed above, in solidarity with ‘people’s strategies to gain access to much-needed life resources’ (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009, 5). As the 1990s Sans-Papiers protests and diaspora organisers in Germany emphasised, these strategies and their illegalisation must be understood in the context of postcolonial capitalist dispossession, which targets the Global South and post-socialist East while benefiting the Global North (Igbinoba 2009; Cissé 1999). This critiques the Global Northern nation-state’s attempts to sort migrants into deserving and non-deserving, or ‘well-integrated’ workers and fraudulent ‘identity refusers.’
The case of Duldung highlights how immigration law serves not only as an instrument of violent state interventions (De Genova 2002), some of which are coupled with humanitarian care (Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2011), but also as a site of transnational struggles over the means of life. In these struggles ‘from below’, we see abolitionist counter-moralities and counter-legalities emerging, and we can participate in amplifying them.
References
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Bayat, Asef. 2010. Life as Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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Citation: Aino Korvensyrjä, The German Duldung: Legal Violence and Struggles Over the Means of Life, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 08.05.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/58984
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Forum Transregionale Studien (May 13, 2025). The German Duldung: Legal Violence and Struggles Over the Means of Life. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13ww2