By Massimiliano Spotti and Joachim Detailleur

Introduction

The face of migration in Europe has changed quite dramatically after 1991. Prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, migrant groups were rather easy to circumscribe. Such groups often became sedentary recognisable 'ethnic' communities in their own right in the host country. As such, these relatively transparent and definable groups have enabled the emergence of a research tradition that goes under the label of 'migration research'. It primarily dealt with these migrants' acculturation strategies, their (often underachieving) educational trajectories, the language diversity that typified their presence in the host society, their position on the labour market and, last but not least, their civil and political participation in mainstream society (cf. Extra & Yağmur, 2004; Phalet & Swyngedouw, 2002; Hermans, 1995; Verlot & Sierens, 1997).

The aftermath of 1991, instead, has testified the emergence of a new pattern of migration across many European urban conglomerates involving a far more diverse population originating from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Post-1991 migratory patterns differ from the former one for two reasons. First, migration is not supported anymore by fairly liberal labour policies, like those that characterised northern Europe during the 1960s and the early 1970s and southern Europe during the early 1990s. Second, immigrants themselves are well aware that southern Europe is only the beginning of yet another migration trajectory that often brings them to further chances of success in northern Europe (Extra & Gorter, 2008). In the same way, the motives and forms of migration have changed. Immigrants do not enter solely as unskilled labour force. Rather, they enter as refugees, commuting migrants, working migrants, transitory residents, highly educated work force, foreign visiting students and the like. The blending of 'old' and 'new' migration categories gives way to a new, late modern form of diversity in Europe, one for which the term 'super-diversity' has been coined (Vertovec, 2006, 2010). This type of diversity is of a more complex kind in that the ethnic origin of people, their motives for migration, their 'careers' as migrants (sedentary versus short-term and transitory) and their socio-cultural and sociolinguistic biographies cannot be presupposed. Research on the implications of super-diversity for sociolinguistics has started to address these complexities across several institutional arenas (see Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, forthcoming; Jaspers, 2006; Spotti, 2011).

This new migratory wave tops up the original diversity brought by migration before 1991 and it confronts the popular conceptions of 'the immigrant' with new challenges, i.e., the challenge of grasping who an immigrant actually is as well as his/her administrative position. It also raises critical questions about the rationale behind the admission to nation-states in (western) Europe, about the fast changing dynamics of their urban spaces, about the embedded but yet omnipresent supremacy of the majority's perspective within those gate-keeping institutions that regulate migrants' entry and about the capacity of nation-states' bureaucracies to handle them (cf. Extra, Spotti & Van Avermaet, 2009; Leung & Lewkowicz, 2006; Hogan-Brun, Mar-Molinero & Stevenson, 2009; Milani, 2007).

It is against this background that the present paper takes the perspective of the nation-state's machinery and strives to uncover how a high modern understanding of language is used in the Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (henceforth addressed under the acronym of LADO) of asylum-seeking migrants to the Netherlands. More specifically, the paper focuses on the case of an Arabic speaking Sudanese asylum seeker and it demonstrates how the LADO test and the authorities that perform it. This case is therefore analytical and theoretical, yet it has also practical implications for applied linguistics. Authorities work toward pinpointing the identity of an applicant through a sociolinguistic analysis that addresses language as a resource of origin. Rather, we claim that the LADO analysis ought to be driven by an understanding of language as a spatio-temporal resource, linked to macro socio-political events that have characterized the life and the migration history of the applicant.

Keywords: identity construction, migration, language diversity, superdiversity, asylum seekers, LADO. 

How to quote (APA): Spotti, M., & Detailleur, J. (2011). Placing Shibboleths at the Institutional Gate: LADO tests and the construction of asylum seekers’ identities. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 8).

Read the full working paper here: Placing Shibboleths at the Institutional Gate:  LADO tests and the construction of asylum seekers’ identities.