During this week’s readings, I kept noticing how much someone’s life was dependent on the label they are assigned. Whether you’re a “vulnerable Afghan,” a deportee with a criminal record, or a Dublin case that belongs to Sweden decides almost everything that happens to you next, and it seemed like those labels were often settled before anyone took a close look at the actual person.
The Reuters numbers made this pretty concrete. Approval rates for Afghan asylum claims dropped from 74 percent in 2024 to 52 percent in early 2025, even though the government says it has no policy of cutting Afghan numbers. Lawyers told Reuters there’s an assumption that Sunni men aren’t really at risk under the Taliban, and a Berlin legal adviser said the outcome was “simply about luck.” That’s a hard thing to hear about a system that is supposed to assess each case individually. Meanwhile Kimia, the artist waiting in Islamabad, had her embassy interview cancelled with no explanation of when it might come back. She said her whole life comes down to that interview, and I believe her.
The Times piece on church asylum in Steglitz surprised me, mostly because of Pastor Martens. I went in expecting a progressive activist, and instead he’s someone with fairly conservative views on migration who has pushed back on the AfD trying to claim his work. Amir’s story also shows how the categories stack on top of each other. He lived in Sweden for ten years and worked as a nurse, then got swept up in a Swedish policy aimed at young Afghan men, and under EU rules Germany could send him right back there. What also stood out to me was how small the numbers are. There were fewer than 3,000 church asylum cases last year against roughly 250,000 applications, and yet it turned into a public fight between the mayors of Hamburg and Berlin. Since we’re going to Berlin, I’d be curious to see how people in that neighborhood actually feel about the church and what it’s doing.
Azmat Khan’s investigation felt like the odd one out at first, but I think it ties the rest together. So many of the deaths she documents came from the military seeing what it expected to see, like a family’s car read as a car bomb or a cotton gin read as an explosives factory. The Band-e-Timor section hit hardest for me, where young men who ran from raids to avoid being held for ransom were killed from the air as suspected Taliban. It made me think about how Germany’s resettlement program only existed because of the West’s twenty years in Afghanistan. I don’t see how that obligation just ends because the politics at home shifted.
Reading these side by side, I also noticed how differently the outlets handled the same policy. The Euronews piece mostly passed along what the Interior Ministry said and gave critics a sentence or two towards the end of the article, whereas Reuters and Politico built their stories around people on the ground like Kimia and Shakerah Baresh. Khan’s story came entirely from checking what the official government—in the case the Pentagon—records say.
