Drawing on elite interviews with UK asylum policymakers, this article entails a detailed elaboration of how policy programmes are produced by particular ways of imagining asylum seeking in an effort to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon and thus devise policy responses to it. The article explores how such processes can lead to the curtailment of the economic rights of asylum seekers with specific reference the UK policy of severely restricting labour market access for asylum seekers. The policy imaginary—the story which is utilized in reducing the complexity of irregular migration in this context—is the idea of the ‘economic pull factor’. That is that disingenuous asylum seekers (economic migrants in disguise) are ‘pulled’ to particular countries by economic opportunities. This construal of what drives irregular migration for asylum is not natural or inevitable, it is the outcome of institutionally embedded ways of viewing the world and Britain’s place within it. This discussion brings insights from critical policy studies to bear on asylum policy making, offering new ways of understanding the practices and processes of policy making in this field.

中文翻译：

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想象庇护，管理寻求庇护者：英国内政部的复杂性降低和政策制定

本文利用对英国庇护政策制定者的精英访谈，详细阐述了政策计划如何通过想象寻求庇护的特定方式产生，以努力降低这一现象的复杂性，从而制定应对政策。本文具体参考英国严格限制寻求庇护者进入劳动力市场的政策，探讨了此类过程如何导致寻求庇护者的经济权利受到限制。政策想象——在这种情况下用于减少非正常移民复杂性的故事——是“经济拉动因素”的概念。也就是说，不诚实的寻求庇护者（伪装的经济移民）被经济机会“拉”到特定国家。这种对寻求庇护的非正常移民的解释不是自然的或不可避免的，它是制度化的看待世界和英国在其中的地位的方式的结果。本次讨论将批判性政策研究的见解用于庇护政策制定，提供了理解该领域政策制定实践和过程的新方法。