Description
This paper explores the multiple time horizons that shape experiences of resettlement for irregular migrants and asylum seekers. Using illustrations from both Canada and Australia, I interrogate the dominant and linear understanding of the timelines of resettlement schemes and associated, in particular, with procedures. The imaginations of resettlement are of a process that moves from emergency to ‘normality’, and that further locates the asylum seeker and newcomer non-citizen as in the emergency frame, while those who have achieved status (refugee protection, residence, or citizenship) are normalised, disappearing into the general public. Thus, acute interventions and understandings of necessary and urgent support exist within short time horizons. The experience of migration – and particularly of forced migration – does not fit comfortably within these imaginations, and the experience of time as it relates to, for example, trauma, loss, and dislocation, is multiple, circular, and fragmented – not the imagined linear progression of settlement. There is an arrythmia, therefore, that jutters between support provisions and expectation, and the everyday needs of the asylum seeking population.
