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Chapter 5 "Use My Name": Noncitizen Identity, Decisions, and Mobilization 1 remember when my lawyer in 1992 wrote an article and she told me she is not going to use my name. 1 said "No.1 want you to use my name." ... And whenever my lawyer tells people, she calls and she says: "1 told them to use your name!" - Therese, refugee claimant, 1995 The importance of ideas and ideology, and their formal and strategic expression by actors attempting to influence the external environment ' cannot be understated. McAdam explains: "Mediating between opportunity and action are the people and the ... meanings they attach to their situations" (1982:48). It is important to understand why actors act in the way they do, and this means not taking for granted their decisions and the intended course of a campaign. In the following, I explore why and how asylum seekers and supporters got involved in campaigning, even when risks were involved, and with what implications for the internal political culture of the campaign network that coalesced. In so doing I seek more specifically to uncover (1) whether asylum seekers were essentially "forced migrants" without options, dependent on the goodwill of the state or desperate to challenge it, or if indeed they sought options and made rational political decisions to act on them; and (2) what roles asylum seekers played in shaping the ideology , aims, and participation of key supporters, and the larger structure and political culture of the campaign network. This emerges through detailed analysis of asylum seekers' and supporters' identity, decision making, and interactions.1 The internal political culture of the campaign network not only shapes its membership and organization, but their core ideology and aims in 136 Chapter 5 relation to the external environment (the public and government). Byexploring why and how actors decided to get involved in public pressure tactics , their belief systems and corresponding aims are illuminated. Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier explain, "public policies/programs incorporate implicit theories about how to achieve their objectives ... and thus can be conceptualized in much the same way as belief systems. They involve value priorities, perceptions of important causal relationships, perceptions of the state of the world (including the magnitude of the problem), perceptions of the efficacy of policy instruments, etc." (1994:180). We can draw out actors "deep core policy values" (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier 1994), which link identity and ideology to underlying policy aims and strategies. The first section below reveals how asylum seekers conceptualized and approached noninstitutional actions-"going public"exploring the personal and political considerations that informed their decisions. These crucial factors mediated between the need for safety as a driving force behind their flight, supporters' influence upon asylum seekers' decisions and opportunities, and asylum seekers' actual willingness to engage in radical tactics to secure asylum. The second section looks at how core supporters ' participation, policy values, and approaches to achieving them were influenced by how they conceptualized the relation between their own belief systems and the asylum seekers they met. It reveals factors predisposing supporters toward participation and how contact with asylum seekers served as a linchpin between their "deep core" ideology and participatory action. Implications of asylum seekers' involvement are discussed in the final section, with a schematic presentation of the campaign network. Asylum Seekers "Going Public": Benefits and Risks To understand asylum seekers' role in shaping the nature and structure of support, we must begin with an inquiry into why asylum seekers went public . First, an obvious point is that, failing institutional means to secure safe asylum, the life and death situations that refugees may face if deported provide a predominant motivating force for noninstitutional action. Second, among a typically resourceless and relatively politically powerless population , actually pursuing noninstitutional action requires opportunities and support. I shall return to these two crucial factors later and begin by questioning both as sufficient in themselves. This is important because over- "Use My Name" 137 reliance on the former may support the idea that real refugees must be primarily "forced" actors to whom receiving countries simply respond or else illegitimate refugees rather than political actors in their own right within receiving countries. Overreliance on the latter may similarly exclude the political role of asylum seekers, instead explaining policy change primarily as result of activism by Canadian residents advocating for asylum seekers, rather than with actors who have various options and participate in decision making. Empirically, problems with both explanations emerge when we consider that generally asylum...

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