COVID-19, gender and migration in Central Asia: reinforcing precarity

By Jenna Holliday.

As we pass the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence and International Migrants Day this blog post considers the intersection of gender-based violence and migration against the backdrop of COVID-19 in two of the world’s most remittance reliant countries – Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Amongst the COVID-related migration research that I have undertaken since the pandemic hit, I have found one line of enquiry particularly compelling: the gendered impacts of COVID-19 on migrant women and women of migrant families. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan share several similarities that make them particularly interesting to research in this context. The lack of livelihood options – exacerbated by climate change – has given rise to increased seasonal and permanent migration (internal and international) to the extent that Tajikistan and the Kyrgyzstan are both in the top five states reliant on migrant remittances (remittances account for around 30 per cent of the GDP of both states).

Both countries also score relatively low in the Global Gender Gap Index 2020 rankings (with Tajikistan at 137 and Kyrgyzstan 93 of 153 states ranked). This reflects conservative traditional gender norms that have a significant influence over the lives of women who are seen as wives, mothers and homemakers. Although globalisation and international progress of women’s rights have led to incremental change in these states, it is often these more conservative norms and values that exert power and violence over women in times of crisis – such as these times of COVID-19.

In the context of Tajikistan and migration, women figure predominantly as the ‘left behind’. Most of Tajikistan’s international migrants are men – largely migrating to Russia – and while much of this migration starts off as seasonal, many migrants end up living permanently in other countries. This has resulted in Tajikistan’s labour migration being characterised by the prolonged absence of men and high divorce rates. In 2015, one in ten divorces in Tajikistan involved a migrant partner

Wives of migrant workers left behind in their village of Kapali, Tajikistan (Image: Manizha Kurbanova, Journalist of the Partnership for Innovations Program in Tajikistan via USAID Central Asia)

Women left behind in Tajikistan often have to care for children, with no money being sent home by their migrant partners. As a consequence, Tajik women have increasingly become heads of households, solely responsible for generating the family income. In rural areas they have been compelled to fill a demand for seasonal agricultural labour during the summer months. And older women (who find that younger women are securing traditional female jobs such as care work and cleaning) have increasingly found work informally as handywomen, which may include mowing grass, building garden beds and general labouring.

The COVID-19 pandemic effectively froze the migration corridor between Tajikistan and Russia. The lockdown in Russia resulted in widespread job losses while restrictions on movement meant that many Tajik migrants trying to return home were faced with grounded planes and closed borders. Even though there was a loss of remittances flowing back to Tajikistan, many families found money to send to the migrant relatives in Russia to tide them over. The pandemic also interrupted outmigration, with hundreds of thousands of Tajiks unable to travel to Russia for seasonal work. The compounding factors of lost remittances, returning workers and lack of seasonal migration added pressure to the economic situation and increased tension in migrant families and households in Tajikistan. 

We know that the pandemic, the lockdowns and the resultant economic downturns have exacerbated gender inequalities globally, intensifying discriminatory and harmful norms and creating greater physical and economic insecurity for women. Based on research from across Central Asia, we can reasonably assume that in Tajikistan women’s responsibilities for domestic and care work have increased further. Data indicates that domestic violence has also increased: in part this can be attributed to the lack of seasonal migration, which typically reduces intimate partner violence. But what is not yet clear is the impact on the women who had become heads of household in their husbands’ absence. Did their (ex)husbands return and require support? Are the women still the breadwinners?

In Kyrgyzstan, by contrast, men and women have commonly migrated into the cities together in family units. But a rapid assessment undertaken by UN Women since the lockdown shows that 80 per cent of women now devote more time to unpaid domestic chores and care work – even though men and women suffered proportionate job loss. Women also reported that their work was moved to being homebased (for example, sewing work). For internal migrant women – many of whom are not registered as residing in the city – their home-based activities (both paid and unpaid) intensified while their limited access to transport, healthcare and other social services resulted in increased isolation.

The rise in violence against women during the pandemic has widely been attributed to heightened stress, economic insecurity, disruption of protective networks and controls on movement. In Kyrgyzstan cases of domestic violence increased by 65 per cent during lockdown. Service shutdown, risk of infection and the overriding social stigma attached to women who report domestic violence prevented women from accessing services or from leaving their abuser.

The impact of COVID-19 on migrant women and on women in migrant families in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan has illustrated how the pandemic has enhanced existing gender norms – to the detriment of women. It is vital that this is highlighted in post-COVID development policy and that women’s organisations are included in that discourse. There are already some positive signs of this. In Kyrgyzstan, a new Gender Council has been established under the Supreme Council (parliament), which will support national legislative and policy efforts in the field of gender equality, women’s empowerment and the mechanisms for preventing and responding to sexual and gender-based violence. The Gender Council will comprise representatives from government and non-government bodies including NGOs focused on women’s rights. In Tajikistan, the United Nations has responded to COVID-19 with a Socioeconomic Response Plan. This aims to empower women by ensuring they are involved in the dialogue around and implementation of the programmes within this plan. Continued research is needed, however, to make sure that ongoing initiatives such as these continue to respond effectively to the situations experienced by women.

Jenna Holliday is an independent gender and migration specialist. She consults for the United Nations and international development agencies, providing expert support on integrating gender and labour perspectives into migration policy. She can be reached at jennakholliday@gmail.com.

Learning online with MMB

By Bridget Anderson and Emma Newcombe.

Everyone is talking about migration. You hear about it on the media, from news and documentaries to dramas and soaps. People talk about it in pubs and in taxis. There is no shortage of opinion, assertations and information about migration. And inevitably there are a lot of assumptions about the subject too. For example, when we think of migration why is it that we tend to focus on the movement of people from low to high income countries, particularly Europe and North America? Why aren’t young British people working as au pairs in Australia not imagined as ‘migrants’?

At Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) we think it is interesting to step back and look at the many different definitions and understandings of ‘migrant’, and the kinds of questions and methods that characterise different disciplines’ engagement with the field. We are very excited to say we have launched a free online course on Future Learn – ‘Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship’ – that will be part of the Bristol Futures portfolio. We are also opening registration for ‘The MMB Online Academy 2021’, which will run May to July next year.

We are particularly pleased to showcase some of the fantastic research on migration and mobilities that takes place at the University of Bristol, linking to research in the Schools of Anthropology, English, Film Studies, Law, Philosophy, Social Policy and Sociology.

Thinking or rethinking assumptions

‘Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship’ is aimed at a broad audience, but we think it will also be of interest to practitioners in the field and others working on related social justice issues. We hope it offers a chance to take a step back and think about the assumptions that we all bring to conversations about any subject that is deemed a ‘social problem’.

The course aims, not to tell you what to think, but to give you tools to critically examine your own ideas and be able to engage in respectful debate with others. It is short – approximately six hours – but we hope that some students will be encouraged to follow up on the references and projects to take a deeper dive into migration and mobility at Bristol.

For those interested in more…

The MMB Online Academy 2021 will be synchronous and online, giving participants access to a range of senior scholars and cutting edge scholarship on topics as diverse as migration and COVID-19, race, racism and migration, and mobility and the socio-digital, as well as foundational knowledge on asylum, labour migration, trafficking and family migration.

At MMB we believe that learning about migration is not only learning about people who move but also better understanding the societies in which we live. We hope that both these courses convey something of our commitment and passion for this subject, and the brilliant work that is being done at Bristol.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and Director of MMB. Emma Newcombe is Manager of MMB.

Visualising MMB’s AGM 2020

We were delighted to bring our MMB members together for our online AGM on 3rd November. After such a long time without an informal group event it was a pleasure to see so many of you!

We started with MMB Director Bridget Anderson presenting our Annual Report and then divided into break-out rooms to discuss three questions:

  • What’s the best thing you have read/seen in the past year relevant to MMB?
  • Can you find a common research area/topic/question in the field of migration and mobility that you think should be prioritised?
  • What recommendation(s) would you give to MMB to help sustain our MMB community during COVID?

Members uploaded many of their answers to Padlets – a great visual way to document the discussion. You can see the results below.

In particular, there are lots of interesting and very varied suggestions for books and articles to read and films and exhibitions to see. We will be using some of these ideas again for our Christmas online gathering on 11th December, so hope you feel inspired by these to take part then!

Made with Padlet

Made with Padlet

Made with Padlet

Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?

By Lydia Medland.

In the recent launch of the new migration research project MigResHub, agricultural labour economist Professor Philip Martin stated that he saw the future of farming in the USA as reliant on ‘machines and migrants, buffered by imports’. This is indeed the direction in which commercial agriculture is going. However, we don’t need to accept this trajectory. It means relegating agricultural work to the bottom of the pile for good and accepting as a given that people don’t want to pick fruit (when they have other options). This is not necessarily true, at least in the UK.

My new project on risk and resilience looks at work in horticulture, where much seasonal labour is required, so I want to focus particularly on the ‘migrants’ part of Martin’s triple prognosis for the future of the food system. Yet, the dominance of both machines and imports in the food security debate makes them important to comment on too.

Lang reasons that, due to Britain’s imperial past, we are used to assuming that other countries will feed us, but he argues that we should be wary of doing so for security as well as sustainability reasons. As I found in my last project, Moroccan workers producing food for Europe’s imports experience pressures such as low wages, a lack of respect and intense time pressures. Put simply, they face the same patterns of pressures as farmworkers within the UK. A reliance on imports therefore displaces social and environmental challenges to other places.

A mechanical engineer with an agricultural robot (image: This is Engineering on Flickr)

Machines have always reduced labour in agriculture, which makes food cheaper but not always better. This direction of travel, spearheaded most recently by proponents of AI and robotics, is at least partially self-propelled by those involved in producing ever bigger and more sophisticated machinery. Huge increases in research funding for automatisation contribute to an industry that has established a narrative of erasure of the majority of workers from agriculture in food systems. (Searching in the UK Research and Innovation Gateway for projects involving the terms ‘robot, agriculture, food and labour’ brings up 1,169 relevant research projects funded in 2019, compared with fewer than five a year between 2000 and 2005.)

The public debate over agriculture and migration has intensified in recent years. While farmers call for large numbers of temporary seasonal workers, nationalist sentiment keeps up pressure for tight restrictions on migration across the board. In addition, discomfort regarding working conditions plays on the conscience of consumers. This mix of concerns appears related to the haste towards robotisation. Government and industry specialists are now charmed by ‘agricultural modernisation’ (robotics and AI) and characterise temporary worker migration as a short-term fix before the mechanical hands are ready to pick. In 2018, Michael Gove re-introduced the UK’s temporary migration programme by saying that ‘… automated harvesting solutions are not universally available and so in the short term, this pilot will support farmers during peak production periods.’ Migration as a short-term fix is a convenient discourse, but insufficient. Not every task is easily mechanised, and while machines work best on large flat lands, the UK has many smaller hilly fields.

Temporary worker permits in agriculture are not new. We could say that the seasonal agricultural workers, who came to Britain at the end of the Second World War, took over from the Women’s Land Army. There is also a longer continuity of drawing on those at the periphery of the workforce for seasonal labour. In earlier times, Irish workers and Travellers were among those who met labour demands at peak times. What is common to all these temporary workers is their position in the labour market, which is low.

The seasonal agricultural workers scheme (SAWS) is the UK’s temporary migration programme; it began as a volunteer scheme after the war and became SAWS in 1990. Access to the EU labour market led to its closure in 2014 as policy makers argued that freedom of movement made SAWS unnecessary. However, this ending turned out to be temporary. Following the Brexit vote in 2016, farmers feared, and began to experience, a lack of access to willing workers. A ‘pilot’ SAWS was launched again in 2018, initially with quotas of just 2,500 workers, which has been increased to 10,000 workers from 2020 onwards. The continuity of demand is clear.

Migrant workers harvest leeks in Lincolnshire, UK (image: John M on Geograph)

Rather than just focusing on SAWS or migrant workers we also need to consider agricultural work itself. The prognosis of machines, migrants and imports takes as a given that workers, given full access to a diverse labour market, will not choose to work in agriculture. Yet, could this be more about the agricultural model than any naturalised preference of workers? Intensive production systems are indeed unattractive to many as a career choice, especially if you don’t own the land.

Nevertheless, many people are interested in producing food. In the UK, demand for allotments has quadrupled in recent years, and growing at home boomed under lockdown. This year, record numbers of non-migrants signed up to pick fruit during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while many didn’t end up on the farm, or didn’t last long, this shows an interest in the work. Perhaps for those that dropped out it isn’t them who should be blamed, but rather the system. Some large UK farms are now described as ‘plantations’, with monocultures that require absolute obedience from both nature and worker. Rejecting this kind of workplace regime – which only became dominant after a squeeze on farms from retailers in the 1990s – doesn’t mean people don’t want to grow food at all.

The growing Land Workers Alliance, representing sustainable growers and farmers, is testament to the increasing interest among young people. So too is the LION (Land In Our Names) movement of black people and people of colour gathering to access land for sustainable projects in the UK. These movements are challenging assumptions about who can be a grower, and a farmer. If opportunities are provided for this to become decent and sufficiently paid work, an able, diverse and motivated workforce may just be available.

Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers? I think it’s more important that we don’t naturalise the assumption that only migrants do farm work. The ‘Pick for Britain’ campaign set up early in the pandemic had the benefit of reconnecting British people with the idea (and for some the reality) that we too can pick fruit. As people rallied to feed the nation, it’s just possible that the public became more aware of the essential nature of this work. Alongside machines and imports, it’s possible to aspire to a future in which migrants and non-migrants choose jobs that bring in the harvest – and that they are supported to do so.

Lydia Medland is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She currently has a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to study risk and resilience in the UK’s changing food system. She writes regularly on her blog, Eating Research.

Related MMB blogs include ‘Disposable workers, essential work: migrant farmworkers during the COVID pandemic’ by Manoj Dias-Abey.

Tony Bunyan retires as Director of Statewatch after 30 years

September 2024 – Tony Bunyan, Statewatch’s founder, Director (1991-2020) and Director Emeritus (2020-24), passed away on Monday 9 September. He was a trailblazing figure in the defence of civil liberties and human rights across Europe, whose commitment to exposing the abuse of civil liberties ran throughout the entirety of his life. In recent years Tony created the Tony Bunyan Foundation: The Shape of Things to Come.  This collection includes a section on theatre and literature as well as special collections, pamphlets and rare books. Read more about his amazing legacy – Statewatch – ‘Tony Bunyan, 1941-2024‘, The Shape – ‘Tony Bunyan 1941 – 2024‘ – and The Guardian, ‘Tony Bunyan Obituary’.

Statewatch is a unique resource for migration researchers across Europe. It has an unprecedented collection of official documents, analysis and reports by investigative journalists, which serves to monitor state and civil liberties. Over the past 30 years, many academics, students, government officials, journalists and civil liberties groups have come to rely on it.

The organisation has strong connections with Bristol. Many academics at the University of Bristol (UoB) and at the University of the West of England (UWE) use Statewatch reports and official materials that would otherwise be unavailable, particularly those on the development of the European Union’s migration policies and their impacts on society. The Statewatch website and online news service enables us all to stay up to date with the very latest developments in UK and EU migration policy and law. The Board of Trustees of Statewatch includes MMB colleagues Ann Singleton and Vicky Canning, and thanks to Statewatch funding (in addition to ESRC and UoB grants) Yasha Maccanico completed his PhD in the School for Policy Studies in 2019. The organisation is led by Chris Jones, Executive Director, an alumnus of UWE.

In September 2020, after 30 years, Tony Bunyan retired as Statewatch Director to become Director Emeritus – a lifetime position. This blog summarises his thoughts on Statewatch past and future. One of his passions is the preservation of historical books, pamphlets and ephemera so that the past can inform the present and the future. You can learn more from the Statewatch Library & Archive, collected over 40 years of political activity, and Tony’s personal collection, collected over 60 years, ‘The Shape of Things To Come’.

A personal message from Tony Bunyan.

I am immensely proud of Statewatch. Rarely has so much been produced by so few for so little pay. Its origins lie in State Research, which I worked for from 1977 to 1981. After that I was head of local government police monitoring units until, in the autumn of 1990, I was invited by Claudia Roth MEP, then leader of the Green Group, to a meeting in the European Parliament office in Strasbourg. Ann Singleton (now Co-Chair of Statewatch and MMB’s policy strategic lead) and I drove the 500 miles from London to discuss EU developments, including the Maastricht Treaty, with MEPs on the then new LIBE (Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament). When we came back, we called a meeting of old friends from State Research. Now we had a project: our aim was to monitor civil liberties and the emerging European state. We had an office in Stoke Newington Public Library, shared with the Libertarian Research and Education Trust and I went on the dole and registered as a ‘volunteer’ with Statewatch.

Little were we to know what lay ahead. In March 1991 we launched a hard copy Bulletin published six times a year and at that time we pretty much had the field to ourselves. I travelled all over the EU to speak at meetings and found many new comrades. Between 1992 and 2004 I made a point of attending every meeting of the new Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council in Brussels and Luxembourg including the Tampere Council in Finland in 1999. In those days this was the only way of getting access to documents. In the early 1990s I went to see an old friend, the late Lord Geoff Tordoff, then Chair of the main House of Lords Committee on the EU, and it emerged that the Home Office were not sending him JHA documents – not even the meeting agendas! A battle ensued for the Lords Committee to automatically be informed.

Key activities

Central to our work has been the creation of ‘Observatories’, online collections of original sources, commentary and campaign materials. Topics include:

This work was supported by a regular news service launched in 1999 and long-term investigations. ‘Neoconopticon: the EU security-industrial complex’ by Ben Hayes has been downloaded more than a million times. This was followed by Chris Jones in ‘Market Forces’, published in 2017. We also sought to identify wider issues such as the growth of authoritarianism and institutionalised racism, including the role of AI and digitalisation, which you can read more about in ‘The Shape of Things to Come’.

We should be proud of what we have achieved, and it has been recognised by others. For example, in 2011 Liberty awarded Statewatch the human rights ‘Long Walk’ award, jointly with Private Eye. The European Voice newspaper selected me as one of the 50 most influential people in the EU twice – in 2001 for Statewatch’s work on access to documents, and in 2004 for Statewatch’s work on civil liberties and the ‘war on terror’. But this could not have been done without the volunteers and the contributors’ group and the Trustees who have given their time for free over the years. Thanks too to all the NGOs who continue to help us so much.

The struggle continues to defend and extend civil liberties and freedoms, democratic rights and accountability and to oppose authoritarianism, racism and anti-democratic forces. Though I’m stepping down as Director I’m looking forward to working with the Statewatch team as Director Emeritus in the years to come.

The full text of Tony’s personal message was published here on the Statewatch website on 24th September 2020.

MMB Annual Report 2019-20

A message from the MMB team.

The past year has been a busy and productive time for MMB – though not in the way we imagined! Last week we published our Annual Report, which outlines our approach to migration and mobilities research as well as our activities over the past year, our ongoing objectives and a taste of the wide range of subjects in which MMB members are currently engaged. Do take a look at the report here.

The focus we set ourselves for 2019-20 was to build our international networks – and we developed some fantastic plans. We joined the IMISCOE network of European migration scholars. Our Trans-Oceanic Mobilities network was to be launched in May with a visit from US scholars on the theme of Mobility and the Biome. We successfully applied for a Benjamin Meaker Fellowship for Professor Nandita Sharma from University of Hawaii. We won funding for visits to Latin America to develop projects with institutions in the region. Then, of course, came COVID.

It took a month or so to adjust. We moved most of our events online and revised our objectives so we could not just bounce back but bounce forward. We developed a space on our website to host University publications, research and events on migration and COVID-related matters. We launched two new blog series: ‘Letter from Afar’, which collates research and experiences of colleagues responding to COVID-19 in very different contexts, and ‘MMB Latin America’, which is the first output from the MMB Latin America working group. The University of Bristol hosts a wide range of activity and research related to Latin America that spans multiple schools and faculties. Interests include political violence and post-conflict reconstruction, labour and mobility, and the circulation of ideas and transnational exchanges. We have started to showcase work with and from the region and to work to develop common research agendas. Keep an eye out for our Dialogue events next year and check out our Latin America website.

The Black Lives Matter protests also marked an important opportunity and challenge for MMB’s work. Pulling down Colston’s statue put Bristol on the map. Anti-racism is entangled with migrant rights and vice versa – until Black Lives Matter irrespective of immigration and citizenship status, Black Lives will continue to be disposable. We believe MMB has an important role to play in making these connections and will be highlighting research and analysis on this in the coming year.

Another key activity keeping us busy since the spring has been the development of online courses that draw on the wealth of research and expertise from across the University of Bristol. The first of these will be a free taster course introducing ‘Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship’, which will launch in December – so that will give you something to do over the Christmas period! At the same time, we will open registration for a longer online, interactive, synchronous course that will run for six weeks from May 2021.

We also recently started a quarterly MMB Newsletter for all our members, in Bristol and beyond, with information about our recent and upcoming events, our blogs, member publications and other announcements. Our first, from the summer, is available here and another will be sent out shortly. If you would like to receive this Newsletter do contact us or fill in the online subscription form.

Finally, we would like to thank our fantastic Research Challenge Co-ordinators and Management Group for all their ongoing hard work and support. A special thank you to our Strategic Leads from the past year: Ann Singleton (Policy), Diego Acosta (International), Katharine Charsley (Postgraduate) and Julia O’Connell Davidson (Anti-Racism). Thanks too to Josie Gill who is stepping down as Director of the Centre for Black Humanities and so from her position on the Management Group, and to Chris Bertram, an original co-director of Bristol Institute for Migration and Mobility Studies. We would also like to welcome our two new Alumni Ambassadors, Ella Barclay and Ignacio Odriozola, who will be spreading the word about MMB and the MSc in Migration and Mobility Studies as they forge new paths in their work and studies.

Bridget Anderson, Emma Newcombe and Emily Walmsley

Domestic workers and COVID-19: Brazil’s legacy of slavery lives on

By Rachel Randall.

On 19 March it was confirmed that Rio de Janeiro’s first coronavirus-related death was that of Cleonice Gonçalves, a 63-year-old domestic worker who suffered from co-morbidities. When Gonçalves fell ill on 16 March, she was working at her boss’ apartment in the affluent neighbourhood of Leblon, in the city of Rio. Her boss had just returned from a trip to Italy where COVID-19 had been rapidly spreading. She had not advised her employee that she was feeling sick. Gonçalves’ family called a taxi to bring her from the state capital to her home-town 100km away. It took her two hours to arrive. She entered hospital the same evening and died the next day. Her story exemplifies the fact that it was Brazil’s ‘jet set elite’ who first brought COVID-19 into the country, as Maite Conde points out, but it is the poorest who are now at greatest risk of dying from the disease as it ravages urban peripheries. Unlike her employee, Gonçalves’ boss, who tested positive for COVID-19, later recovered.   

Gonçalves’ case is not an isolated one, as Luciana Brito explains. Domestic workers are among those most vulnerable to the pandemic. While many employers have remained at home, 39% of monthly-paid domestic workers (mensalistas) and 23% of hourly-paid cleaners (diaristas) continued their labours in spite of the lockdown, frequently out of economic necessity – often residing with their bosses or travelling substantial distances by public transport to reach them. Of the country’s six million domestic employees, over 90% are women and the majority are black (Cornwall et al. 2013). As Angelo Martins Junior has argued, it is the descendants of enslaved Brazilians who occupy the jobs that put them at greatest risk and who are being encouraged to return to their precarious, low-paid work in order to continue feeding themselves and their families.

In Brazil, domestic workers have featured at the centre of debates about the country’s high levels of socio-economic inequality, its legacy of slavery and the relationship between the private and public spheres for some time, including in its cultural production (as I have discussed in an article about contemporary Brazilian documentary). In the wake of COVID-19, these workers have become a powerful symbol in the media for the ways that the virus is exacerbating existing inequalities in the country in terms of mobility, income security and housing. The artist Cristiano Suarez has published a pair of illustrations that explore these dynamics on his Facebook page. They serve as parodies of Instagram posts made by young, white influencers in upmarket apartments who remind their followers to prioritise their well-being and relinquish negative energies during quarantine, while their domestic employees can be glimpsed in the background maintaining their glamorous lifestyles. Sadly, some social media content shared by real employers to ‘celebrate’ their domestic workers’ return to work has been actively degrading, including a video posted by vlogger Luan Tavares who recorded his employee cleaning his bathroom as he joked about reducing her wages due to the crisis; the video was spotlighted on an episode of Greg News (the Brazilian version of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) dedicated to domestic workers.  

natypatriota Pluto in retrograde has come into full force. This pandemic has not occurred by chance, it is an instrument of human redemption preparing us for a better world! COVID-yourself, love yourself, take care of your own and free yourself from useless suffering! Big love to our Brazill! Resilience, gratitude and peace!’ (Image: Cristiano Suarez.)

The debate about how employers should treat domestic workers during the pandemic has been heated. 39% of bosses have dismissed their employees, leaving them without a salary, a situation that worst affects hourly-paid cleaners who do not have a formal contract and are not eligible to benefit from the government’s emergency financial package. Meanwhile, in several states domestic employees were classified as essential workers, thereby obliging them to continue working in spite of the risks. This decision draws attention to the ways that paid domestic work has historically been treated as ‘exceptional’. The Constitutional Amendment on Domestic Work (‘A PEC das domésticas’) implemented in 2015 by the Workers’ Party government represented an important attempt to redress this by aligning domestic employees’ rights with those of other workers. It has been called ‘the second abolition of slavery’.

Ultimately, pressure from domestic workers organisations led the Brazilian Ministry of Labour to state in April that domestic employees should not be made to come to work and should be guaranteed pay while their employers are self-isolating. Despite this, Sérgio Hacker – the mayor of Tamandaré municipality in Pernambuco – and his wife Sari Corte Real, continued to treat the services of their domestic employees’ as ‘indispensable’. The couple, who are white, were both infected with COVID-19, as was their Afro-Brazilian employee Mirtes Renata Santana de Souza, who went to work at their apartment in the state capital Recife on 2 June, taking her five-year-old son Miguel with her as no creches were open.

While Real was having a manicure, Souza took her bosses’ dog out to the street, leaving Miguel with Real. Miguel, who wanted his mother, entered a lift in the apartment block. CCTV shows Real speaking to Miguel in the lift and pressing a button for another floor. Miguel got out on the ninth floor and fell to his death. Real is under investigation for manslaughter. The event – which coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd – horrified many Brazilians who took to the streets demanding justice for Miguel.

Brito has explained how Real’s disregard for Miguel’s life epitomises the white supremacy still so prevalent in Brazilian society. As the country’s economy begins to re-open, despite having the second highest death toll in the world, there seems little hope that the lives of domestic workers and their families will be better safeguarded. After all, President Jair Bolsonaro was the only elected deputy to vote against the Constitutional Amendment on Domestic Work when he sat in the National Congress in 2012.

Rachel Randall is Lecturer in Hispanic Media and Digital Communications (School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol). Her current research explores cultural representations of paid domestic workers in Latin American film, documentary, digital culture and literary testimonies (testimonios).

This blog post was first published on the MMB Latin America blog on 6th August 2020. Related MMB blogs: ‘To stay home or go out to work? Brazil’s unequal modes of COVID-19 survival‘ by Aline Pires, Felipe Rangel and Jacob Lima, and, ‘A violent disregard for life: COVID-19 in Brazil‘ by Angelo Martins Junior.

From imperial sugar to golden passports: the Citizenship Industry

By Sarah Kunz.

In a surprising turn of events, September 2020 saw the end of Malta’s citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programme and its conversion into a residence-by-investment (RBI) scheme. CBI schemes allow the acquisition of citizenship regardless of regular naturalisation criteria, such as residence or language skills, in return for a payment to a government fund or a real estate purchase. Similarly, RBI programmes – or ‘golden visas’ – offer residence permits for money. So-called ‘investment migration’ is among the most significant innovations in recent migration policy and in my research I argue that residence and citizenship-by-investment (RCBI) schemes, and the highly privileged migrations they produce, need to become more central to discussions about migration. Research also needs to overcome nation-state centric frameworks to recognise RCBI as the product of a booming transnational industry: the Citizenship Industry.

The decision to wind down Malta’s CBI programme came after years of controversy on the island. The programme was criticised not only by the opposition Nationalist Party but also by Malta’s most famous journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose assassination in 2017 sent shockwaves across Europe and eventually caused Prime Minister Joseph Muscat – who launched Malta’s CBI scheme in 2013 and was its staunchest defender – to step down. The decision to phase out Malta’s CBI scheme also – for now – decided the country’s on-going skirmish with the EU, which has opposed CBI schemes for years due to concerns over foreign security, money-laundering, tax evasion and corruption.

Valletta, Malta. In September the country’s citizenship-by-investment programme was converted into a residence-by-investment scheme (image: Needpix.com)

While Cyprus, Malta and Bulgaria are the only EU-members to run CBI programmes, RBI is much more widespread and similarly prone to political controversy. This might be best exemplified by the UK’s Tier 1 ‘Investor Visa’. In 2011, while also rolling out its ‘hostile environment’, Theresa May’s Home office redesigned Britain’s RBI programme to introduce a fast track for the richest among the super-rich and relax residency requirements. Four years later, Transparency International discovered a loophole which meant that between 2008 and 2015 3,000 applicants – the majority from high corruption risk jurisdictions like Russia and China – were granted visas without checks on the source of their wealth or funds.

While European RCBI schemes have been getting more media and scholarly attention, the story of CBI actually began in the Caribbean. Saint Kitts and Nevis has been credited with devising the first CBI programme in 1984 upon gaining independence from Britain in 1983. Yet, as a small and poor island state economically dependent on sugar exports – a relic from its days as the British Empire’s prime sugar plantation – few applicants made use of the provision. This changed in 2006. Its ailing sugar industry had just received a deadly blow from the EU slashing its import price for sugar when the country started working with Henley & Partners, an offshore immigration advisory firm, to develop a new commodity: citizenship. The country’s revamped CBI programme offered ‘citizenship customers’ limited disclosure of financial information, no taxes on income or capital gains, and, from 2009, visa-free travel to the Schengen area. It became a great success.

Crucially, the story of RCBI involves a cast of corporate actors who design, run and promote RCBI schemes – what I call the Citizenship Industry. After working with St. Kitts and Nevis, Henley & Partners helped other Caribbean governments to develop CBI programmes, making the Eastern Caribbean as famous for its citizenship as the Western Caribbean is for offshore financial services. The firm then advised Cyprus and helped design Malta’s CBI legislation, effectively bringing the Caribbean CBI model to Europe. In many ways, the Caribbean has been a laboratory for new models of political belonging that are fast having a global impact. Corporations have been key to this development: effectively creating, skilfully expanding and arguably dominating the global citizenship market. Since its relatively recent origins, investment migration has developed into a USD 3 billion global industry and thousands of service providers now stretch in a ‘golden visa belt’ from East Asia across the Middle East to Europe. Yet, the emergence, shape and role of the Citizenship Industry remains poorly understood and under-theorised.

The rise of RCBI programmes has not only been marked by political controversy. It has also raised some fundamental questions about the fairness of selling citizenship and its broader socio-economic and political impact. Advocates of RCBI argue that it brings much-needed economic activity, human capital gains, and substantial government revenue to small economies. RCBI is said to have enabled countries to diversify their economies and better respond to catastrophes, including global financial crises, hurricanes, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics, like Shachar (2018), raise troubling questions about how RCBI advances the encroachment of market forces into the political arena and warn that the commodification of citizenship will impact the institution of citizenship as such. This is an especially pertinent point as the sale of citizenship seems to also hasten the institutionalisation of citizenship revocation, as exemplified by Cyprus’s 2020 laws.

There is also on-going debate about the impact of RCBI on social inequality. Here, Shachar (2018:4) finds ‘the hollowing out of the “status, rights, and identity” components of citizenship’ and Džankic (2014:402), notes that investor programmes ‘infringe upon the liberal ideas of democracy’ and allow wealth and social class to disrupt equality of membership. Kochenov (2014:27-29) – who co-published a ‘Quality of Nationality Index’ with Henley’s chairman and acted as founding chairman of the citizenship industry’s main trade association and lobbying body, the Investment Migration Council (IMC 2014), for several years – defends RCBI, arguing that it allows individuals to overcome the inherent unfairness of international border regimes that limit the movement and life chances of many based solely on the randomness of their birth country. Citizenship, then, not only works to enact equality within states but is also, as Shachar (2009) and Boatcă (2016:15) argue, ‘a core mechanism for the maintenance of global inequalities’ and, moreover, ‘the basis on which the reproduction of these inequalities is being enacted in the postcolonial present’.

Whatever our assessment of investment migration, the phenomenon seems here to stay for now. While Malta’s liaison with CBI might have ended, RBI has become a standard feature of many states’ visa offerings and countries as diverse as Jordan, Moldova, Montenegro, Slovenia, Turkey and Vanuatu have either implemented CBI or plan to do so. There is an urgent need to better understand this trend and to explore the growing role corporate actors play in shaping the organisation and meaning of investment migration. Additionally, we need to make sense of this arguably exceptional ‘liberalisation’ of citizenship in the context of the broader ‘restrictive turn’ (Shachar 2018) in migration policy and its associated proliferation of borders, the preventable deaths of thousands at those borders, and the surge of right-wing populism all over the world.

Dr Sarah Kunz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Her research focuses on privileged migration, the politics of migration categories, and the relationship between mobility, coloniality and racism. In her current project, she looks at investment migration with a focus on the Citizenship Industry.

This post was updated on 09/10/23.

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Supporting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers through the UK asylum courts

By Tannith Perry

I am a volunteer with Pride Without Borders (PWB), a support group for LGBTQ+ refugees and people seeking asylum run by Bristol Refugee Rights (BRR). Part of my role is to attend asylum court with our members, both as a witness and to provide emotional support.

The route to gaining asylum in the UK is long and exhausting. It begins with an initial screening interview, where the person’s details, fingerprints, photograph and other physical information are collected. This is followed weeks or months later by the substantive interview, which lasts hours or, occasionally, days. During this interview the person seeking asylum is expected to justify their right to claim asylum and to provide evidence that they meet the qualifications set out by the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.

This process, difficult for most, is harder for LGBTQ+ applicants since they have spent their whole lives hiding their identity both in their home country and their local community. Asylum claims based on sexuality have a lower acceptance rate (29% in 2018) than claims based on other protected categories (33%), almost certainly due to the difficulty of providing evidence. If the claim is rejected by the Home Office, the case can be appealed to the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber). 

Going to court is incredibly stressful. Home Office barristers are often aggressive and behave in an intimidating manner. I’ve witnessed a Home Office barrister refuse to use the correct pronoun when referring to a transgender man from Uganda and multiple barristers speak to both those seeking asylum and witnesses with condescension and rudeness. Our Bristol Pride Without Borders (PWB) members often report rude and disrespectful attitudes from Home Office staff. During court proceedings questions run from the inane (‘Are you lying?’) to the invasive (‘Why did you have sex if you knew you could get in trouble?’).

Home Office lawyers claim that joining groups such as ours can be explained away as an attempt to work the system. But, simultaneously, they use a lack of joining such groups as evidence of not actually being LGBTQ+. They often grasp at tiny unimportant details. For example, one witness described a group of LGBTQ+ people getting together as a ‘meeting’, while another described it as a ‘hang out’. The Home Officer lawyer jumped on this wording despite both witnesses not being native English speakers and even mentioned it in his summing up of the case as evidence of our member ‘not being credible’.

This kind of focus on minutiae (which is not uncommon) gives the impression that the Home Office is not interested in the truth, but rather in finding any reason possible to deny protection to the person seeking asylum. The fact that 38% of appeals relating to rejected LGBTQ+ asylum applications are accepted after going before a judge gives further evidence of the idea that the Home Office is often incorrect and overzealous in their initial high rate of rejections.

The process is extremely stressful and long, and there are only a handful of groups like PWB in the whole of the UK providing this kind of assistance specifically to LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum. In the past three years 27 people we have supported have been successful in their asylum claim. For 17 of these applications we have had to present evidence in court. So far, every time we have provided evidence in court we have been successful, which indicates how many of the refused applications should have had positive outcomes in the first place.

For the majority of our members, this process takes between a year and three years (though sometimes longer) and has significant impacts on their mental health. Most of our members suffer from depression, anxiety and/or insomnia as they wait, their whole life on hold, unable to work or attend school, to find out whether or not they will be allowed to remain in the UK – allowed to stay safe. But joining our group has for many made a dramatic difference. As one of our members from Pakistan said, ‘Any LGBTQ+ person seeking asylum who needs help should come to this group. PWB helps you mentally, socially, medically and with accommodation. The PWB environment is like a family in which all members are equally important.’

Bristol Refugee Rights is currently running a crowdfunder for Pride Without Borders. To support the campaign please visit this webpage.

Tannith Perry is a writer, dance teacher at Easton Social Dancing and volunteer with Pride Without Borders in Bristol.

Somatic shifts: the politics of movement in the time of COVID

Letter from Afar – the blog series about life and research in the time of COVID-19.

By Victoria Hattam.

Dispatch from Brooklyn, NY.
September 2020

COVID-19 has returned questions of migration and mobility to the centre of politics by upending the distribution of mobility privileges. Who is allowed – or required – to move is changing; many are trying to assess the consequences of such reorderings. I want to extend discussions of the virus by turning our eye from migration and mobility to movement of another kind. Under COVID-19, mobility for many has become less about getting from here to there; less about journeys of one kind or another; less about the movement of things: trade, finance capital, and cross-border production. As Shannon Mattern and others have shown, the virus is pushing the boundaries of mobility by demanding that smaller, differently located shifts be included in any assessment of virus significance. If we remain alert to the possibilities, perhaps the virus can open migration and mobility studies to somatic shifts and in so doing expand the political stakes of the present moment.

The virus has ricocheted through the somatic: distance, stance, breath, fluids, air flows, droplets, spittle have taken on new importance. There is a new awareness of the bodily everyday. What is especially interesting is the malleability of bodily actions; within weeks of hearing that the virus had arrived, and without any visual evidence that it was here, how one walked, talked, moved and stood changed. Space is now of the essence. Give a wide birth. I have been surprised at how quickly quotidian ways of being have shifted. What once seemed entrenched social forms have altered in relatively short order. If bodily actions can change so quickly, maybe habitus is not so fixed after all. Political possibilities open up as well.

Lining up for the Food Co-op, Park Slope, Brooklyn (image: Victoria Hattam, August 2020)

The somatic shifts underway have reminded me of Alan Kaprow’s experimental projects from the 60’s and 70’s. Fluids (1967) and Echo-ology (1975) come to mind. When I was co-teaching the ‘Political Sensorium’ with the late Ann Snitow, New York artist/researcher Robert Sember came to class and enacted one of Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’. It was a simple yet amazingly powerful action – deeply political in ways that resonate for me with the virus now.

The protocols went as follows: Everyone stands in a circle. One person has a teaspoon filled with water. The teaspoon is passed from one person to the next moving around the circle. Once the spoon has been passed all the way around, it changes direction and the spoon is passed back to the beginning. Once completed, the person left holding the spoon swallows the water. The whole action takes no more then 5-10 minutes – depending on the size of the group.

When Sember drank the water, a gasp filled the room. I understood expropriation in a way that I had not before. The visceral political. Disbelief, injustice, outrage followed. What amazed me in the Kaprow action, and what echoes now, was the speed with which I and other participants invested in the care of the water and collectively were outraged by its demise. Within the few minutes that it took to complete the action, we had identified collectively with the spoon’s contents – the careful passing of the spoon from one person to another had created a sense of affective investment in the water. The testament to the identifications generated was revealed by the shock that accompanied the arbitrary consumption of our newly created charge. A cycle of identification and resistance occurred within minutes not years.

Spoon filled with water (image: Victoria Hattam, Brooklyn, New York, August 2020)

Living in the time of COVID-19 has shifted somatic presumptions in powerful ways, changing the terrain of the bodily political.

Kaprow was certainly not the only one to push the envelope with such experimental work: John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Daniel Goode, Fluxus, The Motherfuckers, the Cockettes and many others drew attention to the somatic dimensions of the political through a variety of wide ranging projects.

Many experimental works carry with them a playfulness, a sense of pleasure and lightness of being that is captivating. But often, especially with Kaprow’s Happenings, there is a multi-vocality in which matters of power, futility and loss hover in the works as well. This more somber dimension to the Happenings adds to their salience now. Cage’s playfulness and infectious smile are complicated in Kaprow’s work. Constructing the ice ‘tomb’ that is left to melt, carrying buckets of water up stream in order to tip the water back into the river cast shadows over these collective endeavours. Perhaps a sense of mourning pervades Kaprow’s water actions as they were created not long after his two-year old daughter was killed by a car near their home in Glen Head, Long Island. (But one need not resort to such individualized motives; the power of Kaprow’s events often lay in their capacity to hold possibility and difficulty together.

This other register within Kaprow’s work, the more somber, futile, shadowy elements, echo in the time of COVID-19 when the virus reveals again the deep seated racial violence that constitutes the ground of US politics: infections, deaths and unemployment numbers all are structured by zip codes. The virus has ravaged unequally, exploiting longstanding economic and racial disparities in new ways. Pope L’s street crawls come to mind. In 1991, Pope L lay prone on the street, pot plant placed on the road in front of him, pushing it along the road inch by inch for hours. The Tompkins Square Crawl, as the action is known, was one of several such crawls that enact a powerful sense endurance and struggle.

Alternatively, we might follow Jill Richards into what she calls ‘The Fury Archives’ where movement is key, but takes less teleological forms. First wave feminism was powerful in Richards’ telling not for its end point, not for the retrospective ordering provided by the securing of women’s suffrage decades later. Any such ordering foreshortens the politics as it is happening. It is the long slog of action itself, the ‘long middle’ of small scale conflict without clear end, that Richards foregrounds. That unsettled, shuttling motion resonates now. Where the somatic shifts are taking us is by no means certain.

Under COVID-19 movement has neither ended nor disappeared. It has changed. Movement has moved to the everyday somatic. The political ramifications of somatic shifts are neither natural nor inevitable. They are in good measure ours to shape.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School in New York City. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster and of the Transoceanic Mobilities Network. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. For a recent writing see ‘Race Walls,’ in The Funambulist 31 (September–October 2020).

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