Bureaucratic Entrapment: Refugee Experiences of the European Union (EU) Migration Regime

Abstract This article advances sociological scholarship on how supranational migration governance shapes the lived experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. It focuses on the European Union (EU)‘s Dublin Regulation (1990, 2002, 2013), which requires asylum seekers to apply for protection in the EU country where they are first fingerprinted—typically the country of entry. For individuals arriving via the Mediterranean route, this is most often Italy. Drawing on over 170 hours of participant observations and 42 in-depth interviews conducted at a refugee center in Rome, I examine the trajectories of asylum seekers transferred back to Italy following unsuccessful claims elsewhere in the EU. I argue that rather than streamlining pathways to protection, the Dublin system produces a process of “bureaucratic entrapment,” whereby overlapping national and regional bureaucracies amplify the well-documented administrative harms of national asylum governance. These intersecting systems prolong legal uncertainty, constrain mobility, and render the EU’s role invisible in producing these conditions. This article shifts the analytical focus beyond the nation-state and demonstrates how supranational migration regimes intensify asylum seekers’ precarity while obscuring the source of this harm. As regional migration frameworks proliferate globally, these findings offer insights into the lived consequences of asylum governance under increasingly complex legal frameworks.