ABSTRACT
Asylum hearings and other institutional processes constructed to manage transnational migrants pose significant challenges for the national order: they point to the fact that the institutional forms of contemporary nation-states are outmoded by the communicative richness of the present-day world. Nation-states seek to regulate access to state-controlled resources by a wide range of speakers (from natives to aliens) but are generally unable to ensure smooth institutional interactions. Although nation-states try to provide transnational migrants with useful resources (interpreters, access to websites containing information useful to their cases, and the services of lawyers and social workers), state agencies are ill-equipped to handle the complexity of “superdiverse” institutional interactions, mostly because of their political preoccupations and cultural and linguistic assumptions.
By investigating asylum cases in various European contexts, this paper seeks to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the controversial concept of superdiversity. The asylum process—maybe the most “superdiverse” procedure in contemporary society—remains, in particular, a site where multilingual practices come into conflict with national language ideologies. State bureaucrats in particular impose norms and forms (shaped by national concerns and ethnocentric cultural assumptions) on immigrants who are barely able to understand the national language, let alone state officials’ procedures for conducting in-depth interviews, writing reports, and producing the legal record required to grant refugees access to local resources.
