‘External Limbo’ – ‘Internal Limbo’. On the Detention of Immigrants in Polish Guarded Centres for Foreigners

Abstract

For immigrants, a disruption of their migration biography as a result of detention, waiting to be granted the status of a refugee/asylum seeker, is tantamount to being in a state of suspension. Relevant literature often metaphorically refers to this situation as a state of ‘limbo’. In my article, I refer it to the institutional dimension of the total reality of the Guarded Centres for Foreigners (GCFs), calling it an ‘external limbo’ in which the individual is reduced to the rules of the controlling system. This situation evokes a state of alienation in the subject (immigrant in the role of a subordinate), who is strictly dependant on the officers (personnel) supervising their functioning. In effect, such conditions lead to different adaptation attitudes of the people detained in the GCFs, but above all, they do not promote their mental well-being. I call this last dimension of one’s stay at the GCF an ‘internal limbo’. My reflections are concentrated on an analysis of official documents describing events concerning a young Woman detained in one of the six GCFs in Poland. I treat this material as an exploratoryexplanative case study on the topic of the attitude of detention institutions to persons ‘in a mental/ emotional crisis’ and I ask about the ‘external limbo’ as understood in psychiatric anthropology, focusing on sociocultural conditions legitimising institutional use of disciplining practices in relation to the people the personnel of GCFs consider as ‘raising concern’. In my interpretation, I refer to the context of the functioning of the guarded centres as a total institution and the ‘economies of morality’ that are disclosed there. As a result, my goal is to indicate the characteristic manifestations of the ‘external limbo’, which may affect the condition of the ‘internal limbo’, and I progress towards reflection on the sense of detaining persons who pose no threat to their surroundings in the GCF, which is connected with an answer to the question concerning the manner of functioning of the guarded centres (in view of the welfare of all the people who stay there, not only immigrants).