Parasitic reading and reading parasites

In a short film by Nick Broomfield and Marc Hoeferlin for Amnesty International, Ashfin, a destitute refused asylum seeker, describes his liminal existence:

Still Human Still Here, made for Amnesty's campaign on behalf of destitute asylum seekers, gives a compelling sense of the deprivations and injustice created by section 4 of the IAA 1999. But it also presents a problem of reception: just as Ashfin's case raises questions of how asylum seekers are welcomed in the UK, the matter of how to receive his testimony is, I think, almost as problematic. Bearing witness is an act of reception; therefore, does the listener, whether to oral or written accounts, play the role of host to the testimony, and, if so, how should that testimony be received? Such considerations begin to bring together an ethics of hospitality with an ethics of reading, which prompts the question, when faced with an account of refused hospitality, what might be the responsibility of the reader as host? This problem is compounded by the terms Ashfin uses to represent his situation: ‘you do not exist anymore as human being’ ‘my life is meaningless because my name is asylum seeker’. Such statements are common in asylum seekers’ narratives and testimonies, to the extent that the problem of reading asylum seeker narratives is one of how to read a vocabulary of bare life.