Life Entrapment or Trampoline? Understanding life experiences of rejected asylum seekers in Copenhagen’s open drug scene

While Europe faces a growth in forced migration and refugee flow, Denmark has moved towards a closing-doors approach that includes increased rejections, deportation camps, and restricted access to health care and other services. Migrants often suffer from poor mental health and reinforced substance use to cope with trauma, physical health problems, and loss. However, studies on how Danish migration policies affect everyday life and health of migrants with precarious social rights are lacking. 
Based on the literature on time, space, and mental health in which the rejected asylum seekers are stuck, this study examines how the existing realities both in the Danish asylum system and the drug scene shape the irregular lives of Iranian rejected asylum seekers in central Copenhagen, Vesterbro, where the open drug scene influences their existential life experiences.
The empirical data is a result of three months of field work in 2019 and 2020 gathered through participant observation as well as semi-structured qualitative interviews with undocumented Iranian migrants who use drugs and the professionals in health/social care centers who work for substance users. 
In exploring the patterns of these experiences, I focus on the role of drugs and the drug scene on one hand as a means of rescue from temporal and spatial stuckness with which the rejected migrants are confronted (risk-environment factors), and on the other hand as a means of empowerment providing chances of social recognition, cultural integration and economic involvement (enabling-environment factors). Beyond an open drug market, Vesterbro is a social meeting space where ‘life’ is happening actively compared to the trapped life in the Danish deportation centers, where passive waiting for an unknown future never ends. 
It is demonstrated throughout this study how aspirations for life possibilities outweigh the risks of entrapment and how the risk- and/or enabling factors mobilize Iranian rejected asylum seekers to Copenhagen’s open drug scene; entering a grey zone that potentially puts their basic human rights into question and create challenges in their access to resources.  The contextualized findings of this study point at the importance of recognizing the needs and protecting the rights of vulnerable undocumented migrants, as well as the necessity of finding a durable solution for their lives in limbo.