Some Sort of Help for the Poor: Blurred Perspectives on Asylum Juan Thomas Ord o~ nez* ABSTRACT This article explores the distinction between economic and forced migration by following three Guatemalan day labourers in northern California who “discover” the possibility of asylum after coming to the US as undocumented migrants. Vaguely understood as “some sort of help for Guatemalans,” asylum acquires a confusing assortment of meanings for these men as they hear about it from other migrants and local NGOs. They thus face two problems that hinder their application. The first is that their own rendering of their reasons for migration can look both “forced” and “voluntary.” The second is that beyond the validity of their claims, their life in the US is embedded in the marginalization of the cohort of undocumented migrants they join. Whatever the outcome, the men thus continue to follow the logics of fear and mistrust that characterize undocumented day labourers in the United States. This article seeks to problematize the difference between economic migrants and asylum seekers that informs a great many debates in the industrialized countries of the global north. I look at the experiences of three Guatemalan men who, having migrated to the United States following the flows and dispositions of many Latin American undocumented migrants, suddenly find they are eli- gible for asylum, a confounding bureaucratic process they do not clearly understand and, in truth, one that seems not to “understand” them either. My objective is to show that beyond the political and social unrest regarding economic migrants’ abuse of the asylum application – the notion, in other words, that people make false claims – the distinction between economic and forced migra- tion is not necessarily clear-cut from the experiential standpoint of many people who could be deemed legally eligible for asylum. Institutional perspectives on the vagaries inherent in immigration policies and their categorization of highly heterogeneous populations into discrete subsets of migrants have taken state definitions as the cornerstone of analysis and critique (Bloch, 2000; Castles 2007; Zimmerman, 2011.) Both qual- itative and quantitative analyses have shown high degrees of variability in these processes of legal and social inscription, and unsettled assumptions about the fixed nature of such definitions. Further- more, bureaucrats, politicians, judges and interest groups have been shown to affect and even reshape legal determinations or the implementation of immigration policies, including those related to asylum cases (Keith and Holmes, 2009; Ramji-Nogales et al., 2007) and deportation (Ellerman, 2009). I hope to expand these arguments by addressing the vagaries of such categories from the perspectives of migrants themselves. I look at displacement and migration from an ethnographic standpoint that positions itself within the worldview of a particular set of migrants who “discover” they are eligible for asylum after having crossed the US/Mexico border “illegally”. In the asylum application, suffering is scripted onto humanitarian frameworks of understanding that require specific articulations of meaning, such as trauma, victimhood, deprivation and so on * Universidad del Rosario, Escuela de Ciencias Humanas, Bogot  a, Columbia. doi: 10.1111/imig.12175 © 2014 The Author International Migration © 2014 IOM International Migration Vol. 53 (3) 2015 ISSN 0020-7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.