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Tina Shrestha, Surviving the Sanctuary City. Asylum-seeking work in Nepali

Tristan Bruslé
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Tina Shrestha, Surviving the Sanctuary City. Asylum-seeking work in Nepali, New York: University of Washington Press, 2023, 242pp

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1Tina Shrestha's book plunges the reader into the daily suffering of Nepalese and Tibetan migrants seeking refuge in the United States, particularly in New York. Thanks to extended periods of interaction with asylum seekers and her involvement in Adhikaar, an association defending migrants’ rights, the author offers us an empathetic and complex view of a population that is invisible yet essential to New York's service economy.

2The approach adopted by Tina Shrestha, whose fieldwork dates back to the early 2010s, complements studies that have already been conducted within Himalayan communities in New York (Sienna Craig 2020 for example). This book provides insight into the settlement processes of migrants who lack significant cultural capital and often find themselves in precarious situations due to their legal status. It is a fascinating and lively account, featuring numerous excerpts from conversations with the author that allow readers to follow the way migrants' situations evolve. Some characters reappear in the course of the book’s narrative, allowing the reader to become familiar with them and rendering the reading experience particularly vivid. This graphic quality is further enhanced by the author's use of the first person, and in particular when she recounts her interactions with migrants during the English lessons she teaches at Adhikaar. In this regard, it is worth noting that the author clearly explains her own status as someone who is of Nepalese origin but has lived in the United States for a long time: she considers herself ‘a distant insider and simultaneously an informed outsider’ (p7). This lends a certain depth to the study, with the use of Nepali words echoing migrants’ voices.

3The book focuses on the plight of migrants and asylum seekers in New York as they endeavour to obtain a legal status. To this end, the author traces the steps migrants have to take and the obstacles they have to overcome to obtain the precious documents. Shrestha thereby takes a diachronic approach, focusing on the ‘experience of going through the process’ (p6). The backdrop to this is a glimpse at ‘the state's inclusion of people under unequal conditions’ (p12).

4The author follows the migrants, as they apply to asylum offices, law firms and human-rights agencies, to show that suffering (dukkha) is a major factor in the lives of men and women who have left their country in search of better job opportunities or to seek refuge following persecution in Nepal by the Maoists (between 1996 and 2006). Indeed, suffering is considered a valid subject of research for studying processes of acceptance of foreigners by the liberal state. This suffering exists at an individual level both throughout the stages required to regularise foreigners’ situation and in working relationships (particularly with Indian families, for which many Nepalese women work thanks to their good grasp of Hindi), but it also contributes to the creation of a ‘suffering community through collective identification’: dukkha refers to a ‘collective consciousness’ (p46). Shrestha demonstrates in a convincing way how the narration of suffering interconnects with survival strategies. The notion of dukkha lies at the very core of the analysis and of the regularisation process: official documents themselves are even considered ‘suffering documentation’ (p96). Dukkha is a necessary condition for undocumented migrants and is particularly expressed in what migrants call the work of making paper (kagaaz banaune in Nepali) and in the diaspora consciousness. ‘As a site for cultural (re)production as well as a critique of the asylum-seeking process’ (p47), it is also a heuristic and methodological tool used by the author. She shows how the pain felt by migrants is expressed in their interactions during English as Second Language classes, which become ‘a productive space for the emergence of suffering narratives’ (p52).

5Though suffering is certainly a collective experience, asylum seekers also have to individualise their asylum narrative by producing a credible stirring narrative of their journey from Nepal to New York. With the help and the advice of lawyers, claimants have to dramatise their suffering in order to lend it credibility. In a particularly key chapter, the author shows how, behind the scenes of asylum-seeking, testimonies of suffering are co-constructed by claimants and those who support them (p94ff): the aim being to make a ‘credible asylum claim’, with the ‘victimhood frame’ being stressed (p95) to obtain the required official documents. Through her description of all the steps required to obtain these documents Shrestha shows that the actual work of paper-pushing and the precarious nature of labour ‘came to be interpreted on the same continuum as other work that takes up people's time’ (p121) to the extent that ‘the separation between “working to make paper” and “making paper to work” completely disappeared’ (p146). Claimants acknowledge that they have to suffer ‘to get something’ (p128) and, above all, that they have to stage their suffering.

6But this suffering is not easy to express; migrants tend to cover it up. Yet Shrestha shows that, paradoxically, suffering is ‘central to the emergence and survival of the community’ (p149) but that it is hidden even though it is essential for the ‘suffering script’ (p179). Torn between contradictory injunctions and subjected to enormous pressure, the men and women striving to obtain documents are examples of mass workers whose work receives little recognition.

7This book therefore relates the importance of emotions, feelings linked to precarious situations encountered by millions of migrants and asylum seekers around the world. This is why this qualitative study, with a large degree of theorisation, will interest not only those interested in migration and the Nepalese diaspora but also those interested in migration policies of liberal democracies.

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Référence électronique

Tristan Bruslé, « Tina Shrestha, Surviving the Sanctuary City. Asylum-seeking work in Nepali »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 64 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 octobre 2025, consulté le 20 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/3544 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15aux

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Auteur

Tristan Bruslé

Tristan Bruslé is a geographer interested in social and spatial changes, currently co-director at the Centre for South Asian and Himalayan Studie (CNRS-EHESS).

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