The author seeks to track the pink card not just through the bureaucratic machinery of asylum and advocacy practices, but how it emerges in the disparate movements and talk of asylum seekers themselves. Instead of a tool or instrument of governmental power, the pink card emerges rather as a kind of thread through which persons become attached to the category of asylum seeker and its accompanying (but widely varying) set of bureaucratic practices. The pink card is an artifact of bureaucratic and legal processes, and a thread through which persons are tied to legal categories.
However, this document also acquires its power through the divergent meanings that asylum seekers grant it, colored with fears and anxieties of limbo and immobility, desires for status and legitimation, and dreams of prosperity. These many significances emerge not just through the often quotidian bureaucratic practices through which the card takes shape and moves, but just as crucially, through the talk, narratives, and active interpretative work of asylum