In search of a caring state: Migrations of Afghans from Iran to Germany

Introduction

In early 2017, while conducting fieldwork in Berlin, I met with Yousef, a 23-year-old Afghan migrant who had arrived in Germany from Iran. Nearly 3 million Afghans currently live in Iran, ¹ mainly as undocumented migrants. They formed a significant portion of the 158,394 Afghan nationals who sought asylum in Germany in 2015 and 2016. ² Yousef and I met by chance at a non-governmental organization (NGO) offering new arrivals advisory services. We got talking in Farsi, and he shared news of how his asylum application had recently been rejected by Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (the BAMF). Visibly upset, Yousef shared how he had only migrated – leaving his entire family behind – because he thought the German state might be ‘better’ than Iran’s. He explained how the Iranian state mistreats Afghans, denying them employment permits, citizenship or education. He had been impressed by news that the German state was not only admitting migrants, but offering them documentation, accommodation, and a chance to work. He had believed that, unlike Iran’s state, Germany would be a ‘migrant friend’ (mohajir doust). However, following the blow of his rejection, and over a year living in cramped refugee accommodation, he was starting to reconsider this assessment.

This article expands a relatively unexplored perspective within the anthropology of migration: that motivations for migrating may include desires to be governed by states other than one’s own. I draw on 13 months of fieldwork in Berlin, which I spent with Afghan migrants recently arrived from Iran as they sought access to residency and welfare. As is the case for many Afghans from Iran, my interlocutors had spent most or all their lives living in Iran, not Afghanistan. Afghans’ migration to Iran peaked during the Afghan wars of the 1980s, with many second- and third-generation Afghan migrants now living in the country (Abbasi-Shahvazi et al., 2008; HRW, 2013).

Yousef’s invocation of the Iranian and German states as key to his migration decision accords with similar claims I heard during fieldwork. Many of my Afghan interlocutors from Iran also used the term ‘migrant friend’ (mohajir doust) to describe the state they had hoped they were migrating towards. This shared vocabulary is just one example of the discussions of this hoped-for state that circulated amongst them. In this article, I describe the main characteristic of their hoped-for state as ‘caring’. I distinguish this usage from Foucauldian studies of ‘care’ as a technique of power and control, a reading of ‘care’ prevalent in studies of humanitarianism in migration (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; Fassin, 2011; Malkki, 1995; Ticktin, 2011). While important, these works often reveal more of the systems that migrants encounter rather than the significance migrants attach to them. Rather, my use of ‘care’ indexes the positive characteristics my interlocutors attributed to the German state, on account of its apparent willingness to provide support denied to them in Iran. Drawing upon the broader literature on affect and the state (Aretxaga, 2003; Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2018; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Nuijten, 2003), I show how imaginations of the German state as a ‘caring’ entity were borne out of histories of exclusion in Iran, rather than interactions with the institutions of the German state. Taking this approach, the article traces how such desires shape relationality with destination states post-migration, while migrants are confronted with the realities of migration and welfare law.

The ‘anthropology of the social contract’ (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this issue) provides a productive framework to interrogate this phenomenon. Classic social contract theory, and its 20th-century revivalists, viewed exit from the territory of a nation-state as one of the few cases in which withdrawal of consent to a social contract could be made explicit (Locke, 1988: 4–9; Rawls, 1999). Underlying this assumption was a vision of political community in which individual rights are best protected by a sovereign to whose authority citizens had freely consented, to their mutual advantage. Contractarian thought and European asylum law have a shared history anchored in the Western liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. This shared heritage is apparent in the formulation of the Geneva Convention, which defines a refugee as someone outside their nation-state whose state does not protect their individual rights, and which grants asylum based on violations of individual liberties.

While Afghans from Iran became subject to these laws in Germany, in the following pages, I show how their own understandings of state–society relations departed substantially from those often assumed within liberal contractarian models upon which European migration policy is based. My interlocutors arrived in Germany expecting specific benefits they believed the German state could offer, such as residency and employment permits, access to schooling and health care, housing, and other forms of welfare. However, they were wholly unprepared for the limited conditions upon which these rights and benefits are shared with asylum-seekers and refugees in Germany. Their subsequent interpretations of migration outcomes reveal fears and assumptions around state–citizen relations that they carried over from Iran. In this way, this article contributes to a conversation about the impact of the ‘social contract’ as an idea on the everyday lives of migrant populations, showing how contractarian thinking inherent in the Geneva Convention, the morality of welfare distribution in the rentier state of Iran, and Islamic ethics of migration and welcome all produced a complex web of expectations and exclusions.

Iran and divine political legitimacy

Contractarianism offers a particular rationalistic and secular model of state–society relations. Locke’s view that political authority should arise from consensus among men remains axiomatic and underpins the entire concept of ‘consenting’ to the social contract. To the extent that it is possible to speak of Iran’s ‘social contract’, it clearly departs from this liberal ideal. Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 placed clerics at the pinnacle of state power, through a specific interpretation of religious authority, the ‘guardianship of the Islamic Jurist’ (velayat-e faqih). Under most Sharia interpretations, jurists are people learned in Islamic law, or fiq. The Iranian constitution empowers a single jurist (or ‘Supreme Leader’) with religious and political leadership of the entire nation (Articles 5 and 107). The constitution furthermore introduces the Islamic Republic as ‘a system based on faith in the One and only God … and the necessity of submission to His command’ (Article 2(1)). Thus, Iran’s constitution binds the state’s authority to a higher power in the first instance. This introduces a particularly paternalistic state model, where consent is not key to political legitimacy. Indeed, Iran’s Penal Code reserves various punishments for those who defy or otherwise denigrate the state model. ³

Afghans’ treatment in this political system further reveals significant differences between state–society relations in Iran versus those in liberal democracies. When Afghans first began to flee to Iran in large numbers during the Soviet–Mujahedeen wars of the 1980s, United Nations (UN) agencies and the international community readily recognized them as ‘refugees’. Yet while Iran is a signatory to the Geneva Convention, it has not fully incorporated it into national law. Instead of designating Afghans as ‘refugees’, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s (IRI) state law and media recognized Afghans as ‘mohājir’, a term harking back to the Prophet Muhammed’s flight to Medina as he fled his oppressors in Mecca (see Koepke, 2011; Olszewska, 2015: 39–46). Iran’s leadership framed its hospitality as a matter of religious duty towards fellow Muslims, in recognition of Afghans’ refusal of godless Soviet rule. Afghans were granted indefinite residence permits and social benefits on comparable terms to Iranians (Rajaee, 2000).

Iran’s reception of Afghans during the 1980s points to broader divergences between state protection as conceptualized in the Geneva Convention, and Sharia models. Instead of making harm (or ‘persecution’) a central condition of protection, Sharia incorporates broader considerations of the traveller’s ethical constitution, recognizing that the act of migration can itself entail moral agency (Abou El Wafa, 2009). Furthermore, Sharia does not privilege the nation-state as ultimate protector of rights, appealing instead to the religious community. This difference was encapsulated in an axiom repeated by Ayatollah Khomeini and state officials in Iran in the 1980s: ‘Islam has no borders’ (Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2008; Tober, 2007).

The application of Sharia-based principles of protection continues to be debated among Muslim scholars. As Iran’s treatment of Afghans shows, modern-day applications can also come up against the realities of national politics. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980–9 devastated the Iranian economy. Unemployment rocketed, and the IRI became unable to absorb Afghan workers. Meanwhile, the collapse of Afghanistan’s communist government, and formation of the Islamic State in 1992, provided the IRI with ‘moral’ justification for returning Afghans and limiting further immigration. Automatic registration of newly arriving Afghan migrants ceased, meaning most Afghans to arrive in Iran after 1992 did so as undocumented migrants. While Afghans already in the country were largely permitted to remain, they were stripped of their mohajir title, and the following decade saw successive erosions of their rights. Today, these Afghans are prohibited from public sector employment and may work in only a handful of lower-paying industries, subject to onerous approval processes (HRW, 2013; Nadi et al., 2017). In the early 2000s, a series of national decrees empowered Iranian provinces to completely ban Afghan residents. ⁴ Documented Afghans effectively became undocumented migrants overnight in multiple provinces, and unable to take up legal residency elsewhere.

One could compare Afghans’ treatment to numerous examples elsewhere. Over the past forty years, European and North American countries have adopted increasingly inhospitable policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees, sometimes even reversing ‘refugee’ status. Yet in Iran, this decline occurred against a specific promise of state–citizen relations ordered on religious ethics, by a state that claims moral authority over implementation of those ethics. Understanding this difference is critical to understanding why Afghans’ ultimate exclusion in Iran signified such a gross moral violation to them, and how Afghans’ migration aspirations were subsequently attached to the idea of the German state.

Imagining a different state

Afghans from Iran are intensely aware of their exclusion from the Islamic Republic’s promise to its citizens. As Fariba Adelkhah and Zuzanna Olszewska (2007: 154) note, they ‘readily invoke Imam Khomeini’s declaration that “Islam has no borders”’ when speaking of their now marginalized status. I found such narratives prevalent in Berlin too, as my interlocutors emphasized that they migrated in hopes of a better state. They said as much repeatedly during our conversations, and – as discussed in the next sections – I also heard them repeat this claim among each other. ‘Compassionate’ (dil suz, literally ‘heart-burning’), ‘humanitarian’ (ensān dust, ‘human friend’) and a ‘migrant friend’ (mohajer doust) were just some of the terms they deployed to describe what they hoped the German state would be.

I heard these narratives in Germany, however I contend that the centrality of the ‘state’ in such narratives cannot simply be explained as a net result of experiences in Germany, but should rather be examined considering my interlocutors’ experiences in Iran. I demonstrate this through the case of two Afghans who migrated from Afghanistan to Iran: Omideh and Moujeeb.

Omideh was born and raised in a seaside town in Iran, where she attended school, and then met and married Hamid, whose parents had also arrived from Afghanistan. Hamid and Omideh had two children and set up a watch-making business together. Then in 2007, the city they lived in banned all Afghan residents. Omideh’s children were automatically removed from school, leaving her daughter with only primary education and her son three years shy of completing high school. Having lost all rights to formal employment, her son took up day-labouring while her daughter helped around the house. This situation, said Omideh, ‘shaved away’ at her ‘heart’. Omideh had left school early to get married and had always hoped her daughter would complete high school. Now, her daughter had left school even earlier than she had.

Omideh and her husband continued their watch-making business clandestinely, relying on their customers’ and suppliers’ discretion, and on Iranians to stand in as proxies in matters where ID cards had to be presented, such as renewing their apartment lease or purchasing telephone SIM cards. Omideh found these dependencies exhausting. Iranians could be racist, she said. They could easily renege on promises without consequence and, worse, threaten to report her family to the authorities.

Like many of my interlocutors, Omideh told me that she had never seen Europe as a possibility until she heard Germany had ‘opened its borders’ in 2015. She was struck by news that Germany was extending help to migrants to ‘stand on their feet’ post-arrival, providing language courses, accommodation, and a weekly ‘stipend’ to cover living costs. Omideh and her husband thought things through carefully. None of her family could swim, and they were afraid of the Mediterranean crossing. She also knew she would miss Iran. Like many Afghans living in Iran, Omideh had never visited Afghanistan. But, she said, what was she to do? Iran was ‘good, but the state was bad’, and she had researched enough to convince herself that the German state was truly a ‘migrant friend’.

Many young solo male Afghans also migrated from Iran to Germany. This was the case for Yousef and numerous other men in his refugee accommodation. I consider here the case of one of his roommates, Moujeeb, aged 19, who was born to Afghan parents in the suburbs of Tehran in the 1990s. As Iran’s welcoming policies to Afghans had all but ceased, he was born undocumented with no rights to education or employment. Moujeeb and his family researched Germany’s policies through word-of-mouth, social media and conversations with smugglers. Like Omideh, Moujeeb was struck by the idea of a state that would not only give him residency rights but a home on arrival and possibilities of workplace assistance. He was confident about the German state’s more ‘compassionate’ (‘heart-burning’) nature.

Anthropology has interrogated how people come to imagine ‘the state’ as a bounded entity, notwithstanding its intangible nature. Many anthropologists borrowed Abrams’ (1988) ‘state-system’/‘state-idea’ distinction, and used Michel Foucault's theories of governmentality to examine how state-ideas develop out of unequal power relations (Gupta, 1995; Mitchell, 1991; Nugent, 1994). A major contribution of these works was demonstrating how ideas about the state are reproduced through everyday practices and interactions with representations of state power. Building on these insights, I enquire why people so disillusioned with one state actively desire governance by another. Perhaps where ‘state-ideas’ already exist, belief in the reality of other states easily follow. Yet to the extent this is the case, such imaginings are not as easily explained by direct interactions with materialities of power linked to other states. Or, to put it another way, it seems a stretch to conclude that Afghans’ imaginings of the German state, in Iran, is a result of the ‘mundane processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance …’ (Mitchell, 1991: 95) aimed at upholding belief in the German ‘state’.

Yet if not through these interactions, then what does inform imaginaries of other, apparently more favourable states? Works on affect and the state prove helpful to unpack this question. Navaro-Yashin (2002), for example, draws on Slavoj Žižek’s engagements with Jacques Lacan to argue that belief in the state serves an emotional function; that somewhere, some entity is actually in control. Others have also shown how belief in the state can intensify among those in marginalized positions, with hopes for positive state action surviving against all odds (Aretxaga, 2003, 2005; Das and Poole, 2004; Nuijten, 2003). In all these cases, hopes attached to the state are directly informed by histories of disappointment and exclusion by the state.

Similarly, my interlocutors’ emotionally charged narratives of the German state – as ‘migrant friendly’, ‘compassionate’ or, as I summarize, more caring – were not merely triggered by knowledge of benefits in Germany. They were also produced by painful histories of declining rights and exclusion under the IRI. My interlocutors were not under any illusion that the German state would extend an explicitly Islamic model of protection, of the type that Iran had once extended. It was the German state’s apparent willingness to extend support to them, in ways that the IRI had denied, that played so powerfully in its favour. Thus, Omideh and Moujeeb’s imaginations of the German state were, at least initially, borne out of disappointments with the Iranian state, rather than interactions with governance systems in Germany itself. This is critical to note since, as we shall see, experiences under the IRI continued to shape their understandings of the German state post-migration. Indeed, Omideh and Moujeeb were quite unprepared for the different state–society relations in Germany, and how they would impact their prospects for inclusion.

Germany’s uneven welcome

In summer 2015, as asylum applications rose dramatically across Europe, Germany stood out in its welcoming policy towards asylum-seekers. Yet as political pressures mounted, Germany rapidly reduced its granting of refugee status and limited refugees’ rights. By this point, the political damage to Merkel was under way. Her party suffered heavy losses to the right-wing populist party, Alternatives for Germany (AfD), in the September 2017 parliamentary elections. The AfD entered parliament with 13% of the vote and a manifesto promising to protect Germans’ welfare benefits against migrants while declaring: ‘Islam does not belong in Germany’.

The types of public anxieties and backlashes present in 2015 are not new to anthropologists studying migration in Europe. Islam is often construed as external to European identity, and as a moral and security threat (Asad, 2002; Özyürek, 2009). Asylum-seekers and refugees are also frequently subject to charges that they will misappropriate welfare benefits (Bloch and Schuster, 2002). Beyond anthropology, academics have analysed migration as a normative question; namely, of whether liberal democracies have special obligations to include those denied rights in their origin countries, and how states ought to balance migration against their existing social contract with citizens (Gibney, 2015; Long, 2012). Similar questions guided Germany’s political response to migration in 2015, but with different outcomes for Iranian and Afghan nationals. In a development that proved emotionally devastating for Afghans, Iranians were twice as successful in securing asylum as Afghans and were granted accelerated access to welfare benefits before the BAMF issued decisions on their asylum claims.

I attribute this striking outcome to three factors in particular. The first is the problematization of Afghan migration in German public discourses, in which hierarchies of suffering came into play. As media coverage of the Syrian war intensified, public opinion was more willing to recognize Syrians as deserving of refugee status than others (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016). Afghans, by contrast, who comprised the second-largest group of asylum-seekers after Syrians, were singled out as having weaker claims and subjected to a host of restrictive policies. On 2 October 2016, the European Union (EU) and Afghanistan signed the ‘Joint Way Forward’ agreement, in which Afghanistan agreed to assist directly in repatriating Afghan returnees. Germany and Afghanistan signed the ‘Joint Declaration of Intent on Cooperation in the Field of Migration’ the same day, establishing bilateral commitments to streamline returns. Meanwhile, Germany’s Ministry of the Interior issued guidance determining that parts of Afghanistan were safe for return, putting the onus on Afghans to justify why they had not moved to these ‘safe’ areas instead of coming to Germany. The result was a substantial diminishing of Afghan nationals’ chances of securing refugee status, or the lesser right of ‘subsidiary protection’. ⁵ Roughly 30% of Afghans were successful in their claims for refugee status or subsidiary protection in 2015 and 2016, compared to 95% of Syrians.

Due to the formulation of German asylum law, Afghans from Iran were also subject to these exclusionary policies. The German Asylum Act incorporates the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol (‘Geneva Convention’), meaning it grants refugee status based on ‘persecution’ in one’s ‘country of origin’. Hence, Afghans from Iran were unable to rely on persecution in Iran to support asylum claims. They needed to evidence persecution in Afghanistan.

Iranians were not subject to such targeted policies, and they had more obvious pathways to refugee status at their disposal. This brings us to the second differentiating factor between Iranians and Afghans: how German asylum laws interpret Iranian and Afghan state laws. As mentioned above, Iran’s theocratic state model diverges significantly from the liberal-democratic model. Iran’s Penal Code also imposes capital punishment based on religion and political opinion, aligning with the Geneva Convention’s definition of ‘persecution’. By contrast, the Afghan constitution, at the time, explicitly protected individual liberties, including political expression and association. ⁶ These laws are attributable to foreign intervention in Afghanistan’s laws and constitution since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. ⁷ An immigration lawyer in Berlin summarized the situation to me this way: ‘it’s easier for Iranians than Afghans because of their state’. In 2015 and 2016, most Iranians secured asylum by submitting that they had converted to Christianity from Islam, a crime punishable by death in Iran.

The third reason for Afghans’ and Iranians’ differential treatment stems from overlaps between refugee law and the economic conditionalities that regulate migrants’ welfare access. Germany’s Migration Act of 2005 follows the position that the earlier refugees learn German and access the labour market, the higher their chances of long-term economic productivity and welfare independence. As such, persons with refugee status are entitled to benefits designed to incentivize quick workplace integration, such as a language training, jobseekers’ allowance and work-placement.

By 2015, however, a first-time asylum application could take over a year. To mitigate delayed workplace integration, Germany passed the Asylum Package I of 2015, which grants the above benefits to asylum-seekers for whom ‘a lawful and permanent residency is to be expected’. The Ministry of the Interior defines such asylum-seekers as those from countries with an asylum success rate of 50% or higher in the previous six months. As Iranian asylum-seekers were securing refugee status at a rate of nearly 50%, they, together with those from Eritrea, Iraq, Somalia and Syria, secured the designation of ‘good remain prospects’ between 2015 and 2018. Afghan nationals, by contrast, have yet to make the list.

The above shows how Germany’s basis of ‘protection’ departs radically from the IRI’s. So too does its ordering of welfare for asylum-seekers and citizens at large; the Migration Act arguably reflects a liberal European ideal of citizenship, wherein reciprocity of taxation and welfare cement state–citizen relations (Guano, 2010; Makovicky and Smith, 2020; Vicol, 2020) or, in other words, consolidate the social contract. It is not obvious how the logics of these policies could have been legible to newly arrived Afghan migrants from Iran. What was apparent to them, however, was a replication of Iranians’ preferential treatment all over again in Germany. In their attempts to reconcile their expectations with their experience, their imaginations of the German state were reconfigured post-migration.

Reconciling the Iranian/Afghan distinction

At the time I arrived in Berlin in autumn 2016, most Afghans who had arrived in the previous year were still awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims and were living in refugee accommodation. As Berlin struggled to house over 60,000 newly arrived asylum-seekers, refugee accommodation was established haphazardly across the city, in gymnasiums, cleared-out schools, and abandoned office blocks. Omideh lived in an insulated marquee in a field, with about 300 other asylum-seekers, primarily from Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. The marquee was partitioned with office dividers, each encasing three bunkbeds, often housing multiple families. Residents shared toilets and lived off meals provided by an NGO. Omideh told me that never in her wildest dreams had she imagined Germany would house her in this way.

Omideh and I first met at an information evening on Germany’s schooling system. I had come to meet Sima, a 23-year-old Iranian man who had arrived a year earlier. Sima had studied at a private university in Iran. With the German state’s assistance, he believed he had better chances of ‘making something’ of himself and perhaps returning to Iran one day to marry. After consulting a lawyer, he submitted an asylum claim based on Christian conversion. Now he was awaiting the outcome and attending state-funded German classes to which he was entitled as an Iranian asylum-seeker.

Hearing us speaking Farsi, Omideh came and sat next to us. After some introductions, she told us she had come to verify a rumour she had heard through her refugee accommodation: unlike Syrians and Iranians, Afghans aged over 16 were not entitled to free secondary schooling in Germany. Omideh was worried that her children would never get an education. She added that they were not even allowed to attend the state-provided German classes to which Iranians were entitled. How were they ever going to get by in Germany if they were not allowed to learn German? Her agitation grew, and she began speaking with increasing speed, at several points clearly on the verge of tears. Then she shared another rumour: that the German state planned to deport most Afghans before the end of the year. Iranians and Syrians would be allowed to stay. Her family was still waiting on the outcome of their asylum claims, and she was worried they would all be rejected. She did not understand why the state was being ‘bad’ with Afghans, they were ‘good people’. Then she added, ‘I thought Germany would be better than Iran, not the same.’

The evening’s presentation did little to allay Omideh’s fears, except to assure her that her children could complete high-school credits if they secured refugee status. Afterwards, once Omideh was out of earshot, Sima muttered to me, ‘that poor woman’. It was only natural that a mother’s heart would ‘burn’ for her children, he said. Nevertheless, I should ‘see the problem from the German state’s perspective’. According to Sima, Germany had probably seen the ‘criminality’ of Afghan migrants in Iran and were right to be wary of them. On the other hand, it was evident that Iranians would keep their heads down – they had ‘just come to work’. That was why, in his opinion, Iranians and Syrians were being granted free German classes: the state wanted them to stay.

Sima’s interpretation illustrates discriminatory attitudes often mobilized by Iranians against Afghans in Iran (Olszewska, 2015). While it is noteworthy that these attitudes travelled over to Germany, it is even more striking that Sima viewed them as underpinning the German state’s distribution of welfare and asylum rights. Meanwhile, Omideh’s insistence that Afghans were ‘good people’ reflects her worry that a misreading of Afghans’ character was occurring. Thus, Omideh and Sima were each advancing a specific understanding of the state’s basis of decision-making: namely, on its favour and disfavour of their respective nationalities. The prevalence of this view became apparent to me in 2016, following the rape and murder of a 19-year-old student in Freiburg, Maria Ladenburger, by an Afghan refugee. My Afghan interlocutors were worried that Germany would now be ‘even less’ likely to grant them refugee status, while Iranians used the incident further to justify the German state’s treatment of Afghans.

These interpretations cannot be attributed to a lack of knowledge of asylum law. While many asylum-seekers went into hearings without legal preparation, this was not the case for either Omideh or Sima. Both hired Farsi-speaking lawyers, understood that they needed to evidence ‘persecution’, and tailored their asylum claims accordingly.

So why did they nevertheless believe that the state’s favour had such an important role to play in the granting of asylum? I attribute these interpretations to the specific histories of state–society relations to which Afghans and Iranians had become accustomed in Iran, which triggered their hopes and fears in Germany. I next examine these two points in relation to welfare and residency rights.

The economics of citizenship

The intrinsic value of ‘good remain prospect’ benefits varied from the perspective of my interlocutors. Some, like Sima, approached free German classes with great enthusiasm. Others were less interested in learning German, especially those who had travelled with adult children and planned to rely on them financially. Yet, in the lead-up to being granted refugee status, these interlocutors still worried intensely over why they, as opposed to Iranians, were being denied access to these language courses. Thus, access to these ‘benefits’ had tremendous significance for them, but for reasons that seemingly diverged from the policy rationale of their provision: encouraging future tax contributions.

To understand their interpretation, it is important to recognize how entirely novel Germany’s welfare model would have been to migrants from Iran. Iran is what is often called a ‘rentier’ state, meaning a state whose public sector is funded not via taxation but through sales of natural resources abroad (in Iran’s case, oil). Income tax is low and only selectively applied, mainly to certain businesses and public sector employees (Harris, 2017). Following Islamic jurisprudence, Iran’s leadership does not unilaterally incorporate tax into its models of distributive justice. It instead focuses on the just distribution of public wealth. Relatedly, welfare distributions are at the relative discretion of the state.

Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, I heard income tax being discussed with curiosity among my interlocutors. The notion that the state might take such a hefty portion of a person’s earnings was, in their minds, a peculiarity of the country they found themselves in – causing them to give Germany the ascription of being ‘a taxer’ (maliat-i). Omideh’s husband, Hamid, once quizzed me extensively on where all this income tax goes. When I explained that they go to the public budget, he immediately seemed uncomfortable. He shyly asked if his monthly stipend, as an asylum-seeker, came from income taxes. He then asked me outright if I paid income tax. To his noticeable relief, I assured him that I was not required to pay taxes in Germany. ‘That’s very good,’ he said, satisfied. But then he pressed me even more. Did I believe that all of the state’s money, and all of the welfare payments, came from income tax? Perhaps, he mused, the state made money from businesses it owned.

Hamid’s disbelief might have given him comfort that he was not claiming other citizens’ taxed income. Yet it also resonated with how welfare distributions work in Iran. Significantly, Iran’s system generates avenues through which to hold the state morally culpable for such distributions. The rentier model has been called a ‘resource curse’ by historians and political theorists. The argument runs that citizen of such states view government assistance as ‘handouts’ rather than a right generated by the taxation of their labour, and are thus disincentivized from working or from making political claims on their state (Elbadawi and Selim, 2016; Schwarz, 2008). Yet as events such as the Arab Spring show, where welfare distributions fall clearly within the state’s discretion, citizens may nevertheless judge the state by the justness of its distributions (Loewe et al., 2021). Similarly, in Iran, dissatisfactions with the IRI’s economic policies have led to periodic mass popular uprisings, and mass economic reforms (Bayat, 2013; Harris, 2017). Not all segments of Iranian society have the political capital needed to trigger such reforms, including Afghans. Yet this did not extinguish Afghans’ beliefs that the Iranian state was acting unjustly towards them.

As my interlocutors assumed the German state to be rich, they struggled to understand how Iranians’ favourable treatment could be anything other than an act of state discretion. Omideh and Hamid’s, and indeed Sima’s, interpretations of why the German state was distributing benefits in this way displayed, in essence, two very different kinds of ‘social contract’ beliefs at play. Asylum-seekers’ access to residency and welfare was clearly shaped by liberal notions of citizenship prevalent in Germany, rooted in European Enlightenment ideals. However, my interlocutors were, at least in part, interpreting this access through the lens of how state–society relations work in Iran. For Afghans, this resulted in deeper concerns over the character of the German state itself. I now examine how the asylum process itself reinforced these perceptions.

Protection without recognition

Unlike Omideh, Moujeeb had not engaged a lawyer before his asylum hearing, thinking he did not need one. In his hearing, he submitted that he left Iran because it mistreated Afghans, and he wanted to set up a better life in Germany. When asked, Moujeeb claimed he was afraid to return to Afghanistan because it was at war, and he had no family there.

Sometime later, Moujeeb texted me to share the news of his rejection. As is standard, Moujeeb had received his rejection letter in German and in a Farsi translation. By his assessment, the letter accurately relayed his testimony. It was the part that explained his rejection that upset him. Moujeeb’s friends at his accommodation, Yousef included, had helped him make sense of it by explaining that the German state ‘didn’t care’ about how the Iranian state treated Afghans. Moujeeb had engaged a lawyer and wanted to ask the lawyer if this was true. He asked if I could act as his translator in their first meeting.

At the appointment, the lawyer started by asking Moujeeb why he had come to Germany. Despite having read the letter, which quite clearly set out why his experiences in Iran did not count as grounds for refugee status, Moujeeb immediately launched into the cruelties he had experienced in Iran. He had only been able to attend school in Iran because his mother bribed the school principal; he had been stopped and searched by police multiple times and had to bribe them too to avoid deportation; he had experienced near-daily racism from Iranians; and finally, due to discrimination against Afghans, he could never secure a good job. He explained that all he wanted was to set up a good life and work hard to support his family. He kept pausing for me to translate, checking to see if the lawyer had understood. It was as if he believed that the gravity of the situation had not been appropriately registered during his asylum hearing.

The lawyer frowned but let Moujeeb finish. He leant back in his chair and declared that Moujeeb’s migration from Iran ‘made things more difficult’. He then fired a series of questions about Moujeeb’s relationship with Afghanistan. Was he born there? Did he have family there? Had he ever visited Afghanistan? These questions were geared at strengthening Moujeeb’s asylum claim, but they made him increasingly nervous. Eventually, Moujeeb turned to me exasperated, pleading with me in Farsi, ‘Please tell him that I do not have anyone in Afghanistan!’

Once all questions were answered, the lawyer lit a cigarette and offered his prognosis. He could lodge an appeal, but it was important for Moujeeb to be realistic: the chances of him being offered refugee status or subsidiary protection were slim. His advice to Moujeeb was to learn German independently and try to secure an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship might result in an employment-based residency visa once his training came to an end. The lawyer then recited a list of professions Moujeeb could consider, such as factory maintenance or electrical engineering. Did any of these careers sound attractive to him? Moujeeb said they did, but he wanted asylum. We left the lawyers office with Moujeeb clearly dejected. He told me he did not understand why Germany cared so little about Afghans. An Iranian man in his accommodation was currently appealing a rejection, but he was still receiving free German classes.

Pursuing a labour-based residence permit without free German classes would be challenging for Moujeeb. Yet this was not the only reason why he found this alternative pathway to residency unsettling. He was also distressed by the privileges Iranians received, and the German state’s refusal to recognize the Iranian state’s moral infractions against him. His fear that the German state did not ‘care’ about the Iranian state’s mistreatment of Afghans had thus surely been confirmed. The implications of this realization came out clearly in Omideh’s worry that Germany might be ‘the same’ as Iran.

Conclusion

This article has examined how imaginations about host states and expectations about state–society relations motivate migration. For Afghans who had spent most or all of their lives in Iran, these perceptions were directly shaped by experiences in the state they left behind – the IRI. In Germany, Afghans became subject to welfare and residency laws which differed starkly from Iran’s. Liberal ideals of state protection and citizenship permeate modern refugee law, including in Germany. They narrowly define ‘persecution’ as liberal-rights violations and uphold the state as the ultimate protector of citizens’ rights. Further, ideals regarding individual transactions with the state, via the taxation of labour and so on, shape migrants’ and asylum-seekers’ welfare and residency rights. Collectively, these ideals shape public understandings of the state’s obligations towards asylum-seekers, and imaginaries of ‘social contracts’. They contributed to the substantial exclusion of Afghan asylum-seekers from Iran in Germany. Afghans from Iran were required to evidence ‘persecution’ in Afghanistan, not Iran, and saw their chances of refugee status and welfare diminished.

However, while Afghans were subject to Euro-centric notions of state protection, they did not adopt these notions themselves. Their devastation over being denied refugee status revealed assumptions that state protection was being extended for reasons beyond suffering of harm, namely the attributes that made them good candidates for inclusion. Their substantial anxiety around why welfare rights were being granted to Iranian asylum-seekers, but not to them, revealed assumptions that such distributions were distributed as a form of moral desert in recognition of their characters.

Thus, Afghan migrants’ readings of rights distributions point to a view of state–society relations not generally advanced in liberal, including contractarian, thought. However, they do resonate substantially with how these distributions have historically occurred in Iran, under Iran’s very different ‘social contract’. It was precisely Afghans’ exclusion in Iran which fuelled their desires for a more caring state. As they were denied the rights they had hoped for in Germany, Afghans from Iran made sense of their experience through the lens of the state they had left behind – the IRI. They thus reassessed the German state’s capacity for care entirely, leading to their growing ambivalence over its motives and intentions.