Tweet an international peer-reviewed journal ISSN 2041-3254 Journeys of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugees from Syria Confronting Fortress Europe by Rafeef Ziadah 16 May 2016 • Comment (1) • Print Posted: Reflections on Dispossession: Critical Feminisms [14] | Article Introduction According to the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of registered Syrian refugees was 4,086,760 as of late 2015, with 6000 people continuing to leave each day. [1] As early as 2013 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees declared that “we have not seen a refugee outflow escalate at such a frightening rate since the Rwandan genocide almost 20 years ago.” [2] While the picture of the drowned child, Alan Kurdi, made headlines and came to symbolise the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, the much longer history of the European Union’s exclusionary immigration policies, extending the role of surveillance, enforcement, externalisation and securitisation of its borders, was swept aside. The pronounced rise in the electoral fortunes and popular support for racist and xenophobic parties across Europe, exacerbated by economic austerity politics in border states like Greece and Spain, [3] as well as the political situation in the Mediterranean region, including both the uprisings in the Arab world and the large- scale dispossession caused by the conflict in Syria, have brought the debate about the EU’s migration system to the fore; but researchers and campaigners have been pointing to the defects and violence of EU immigration policies for some time. This chapter aims to trace the lived reality of dispossession associated with crossing European borders, looking at the specific case of Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria. The more than half a million Palestinian refugees living in Syria are no exception to the mass flight out of Syria, with an estimated 63% of the community displaced by early February 2014. [4] Palestinians, however, because of their particular status as almost ‘permanent’ refugees, have faced much greater difficulties entering other Arab countries compared to Syrian citizens. Jordanian authorities have largely refused asylum to Palestinians coming from Syria, and overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon lack the necessary infrastructure to host them. In this context, Palestinians escaping Syria have had few options but to attempt the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, or by land from Turkey, to seek safety in Europe. Once they arrive in Europe, however, they encounter an array of state-backed policies that criminalise asylum seekers. More specifically, the chapter analyses the ways in which Palestinian refugee women fleeing Syria are experiencing the twinning of securitised borders and exclusionary racism that does not permit them the much coveted legal status of asylum seeker in Europe. European institutions have in the past decades blatantly moved to restrict the right to claim. asylum that is supposedly enshrined in the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees [5] As noted by Davina Bhandar in her paper in this volume: “Official legal status has been used to define and legislate the very nature of personhood in society. Status determines membership, belonging and may also define the rights and entitlements that a political subject or actor can demand of the state.” Exclusion from status in the EU, including the status of asylum seeker, is a key mechanism through which migrant lives are regulated. Beginning with a discussion of the historical evolution of EU border policies, the chapter moves on to outline of the characteristics of the Palestinian community in Syria and the situation following the 2011 uprising. I argue that Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria are suffering a double burden as stateless people; their continued exclusion from asylum procedures and the fact that surrounding borders are closed to them is leaving them in a dire situation. This discussion draws upon semi-structured interviews with Palestinian