Suspended Lives

Book excerpt: "Suspended Lives vividly explores the everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the United States. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among a diverse group of asylum seekers, Bridget M. Haas traces the emotional, psychological, and social effects of being embedded in the US asylum regime. Appealing to the United States for protection, asylum seekers are cast into a complex and protracted bureaucratic system that increasingly sees them as threatening or suspicious. Haas takes readers into the intimate spaces of asylum seekers' homes and communities, as well as into legal and bureaucratic settings that are often inaccessible to the public. Poignantly foregrounding the lived experiences and voices of asylum seekers, Suspended Lives exposes the asylum system as a site of multiple, yet often hidden and normalized, forms of violence. In doing so, Haas also illuminates how asylum seekers respond to these harms to actively endure the asylum process"--