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Migrants are often perceived as a group of vulnerable victims, especially within a legal context such as the one in this study: lawyer-client consultations in the field of immigration law. The literature describes how institutional limitations often translate into asymmetric lawyer-client dynamics. The linguistic-ethnographic data gathered for this study shows, however, that the reality is more complex. In operationalizing the concept of agency, this study focuses on the dynamic-relational nature of power differences, which implies a move away from the binary conceptualization of structure and agency. The ethnographic lens helps to unpack agency and reveals a picture of strategic behaviour that is contextually embedded and multi-layered. In this light, the performance of agency and vulnerability is shown to be (1) interactionally achieved, (2) indicative of an awareness of macro-level processes, and (3) reflective of the philosophy behind the authorities' migration management.

Discursive input functions as the core decisive element in answering the legal dilemma of whether someone is eligible for international protection. This pleads in favour of strengthening the narrative-discursive component in migration studies by offering a micro-sociolinguistic analysis of interactional data from diverse legal encounters with applicants for international protection. This article adopts a case study approach, bringing together two different data sets collected in a Belgian context. In focusing on asylum claims based on reasons of sexual orientation and gender identity, the article foregrounds discursive tensions emblematic for the treatment of disclosure in and around the asylum procedure. The first part of our article draws on data from the guidance and counselling side of the asylum procedure in examining legal consultations which took place in the lawyer’s office. The second part of our article turns to the communication that takes place during asylum interviews between applicants and asylum officers. Juxtaposing both analyses, reveals how disclosure is complicated by the different stakeholders that mediate the situated interaction as well as by the legal-administrative categories that govern the asylum procedure. The way in which institutional actors and assumptions are deeply implicated in the creation of asylum narratives, is not only at odds with the government’s evaluation premises about how stories come into being in isolation, it also entails a certain level of vulnerability as mediation holds the potential to obscure the indexical load of the asylum seeker’s testimony.