Author: Emily

Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Juan Zhang.

At the Dover border crossing I sat in the backseat in silence waiting for questions from the immigration officer inspecting the four passports we handed over together as a group. While neighbouring lanes saw vehicles swiftly passing through with only a small pause, our officer meticulously examined my Chinese passport among three British ones. ‘He’s looking for my Schengen visa,’ I murmured to myself. I hoped he’d find it soon. On that passport, there were four expired Schengen visa stickers mixed with several other entry visas I had to obtain as a Chinese national. Determining the validity dates on these stickers required sharp eyes and patience. Finally, the officer raised his gaze from the documents and directed his attention to us – what work do you do, and what’s the purpose of your visit?

Waiting at the Dover border checkpoint (photo by Juan Zhang, 3 July 2023)

Border delays and extended examinations at checkpoints were no strangers to me, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my colleagues might have crossed faster without me. This interruption reminded me how borders could stretch or compress space-time unequally and regularise a particular kind of asynchronicity to justify delay and waiting, and smooth border-crossing should not be taken for granted (see Anderson 2020 on this point). My Chinese passport added an extra ten minutes to the journey – a minor inconvenience after all. But what if I did not possess a valid visa, or if I were not accompanied by my British colleagues who answered immigration queries, or in a more extreme scenario, without a passport or any form of identification? What could a non-EU, non-UK citizen expect at this crossing in that case?

During the week of our two-day visit to Calais, more than 1,300 migrants crossed the English Channel in small boats, setting a new record of unauthorised crossings in recent years and fuelling intense public debate on the UK and French governments’ failure to ‘stop the boats’. Most of the migrants lacked any documents or legal papers and had likely endured weeks or months of waiting in Calais before their risky attempts (Sandri 2018). If the border added a 10-minute delay for me, for migrants and many others on the move, the border could feel altogether impenetrable as no ‘safe passage’ was possible due to tightening British immigration control and bureaucratic red tape (King 2016). People on the move had been stopped and forced to camp out in Calais, where thousands were stuck in limbo in the so-called Jungle – makeshift campsites of deteriorating conditions outside the city of Calais between 2015 and 2016 – until they were forcibly evicted by the French authorities (Van Isacker 2022).

The Jungle may now be abandoned and appear empty, but this does not mean people have stopped coming or are no longer trapped. Calais-based activists explained to us how the French border police and CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, a reserve force of the French National Police in charge of riot control) enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people from establishing any permanence or stable connection with volunteers, services and local residents. Evictions routinely take place every 48 hours when enforcers harass and push people around, destroying tents and seizing their belongings. In underpasses and public spaces, people make temporary sleeping arrangements in makeshift shelters. Unable to move forward safely or legally, and faced with harassment and eviction while remaining stuck, migrants in Calais are exposed not only to the harsh policing environment but also to the brutalities of abandonment and the structural violence inherent in the politics of bordering.

A temporary shelter amidst the boulders in an underpass (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

When we left Calais on a ‘big boat’ – a popular cross-Channel ferry with on-board duty free shopping to ‘keep everyone entertained as you sail’ – I wondered how many were planning or had already embarked on treacherous Channel crossings on small boats during our stay in Calais. Our return journey was rather uneventful, when going through immigration was simply a well-practiced sequence of queuing, passport checking, stamping and onward travel. For us, the border seemed to disappear into the larger urban infrastructure that made things ‘flow.’ Interruptions were seen as anomalies, and even boredom during the crossing was to be avoided for an overall pleasant experience. However, for thousands attempting to cross the same waters each year, the border extended out and hardened offshore, inflicting violence and insecurity on those without proper identification or considered undesirable to the UK government.

Calais border crossing (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

Calais’ borderlands serve as a constant reminder that distinct temporalities and subject-specific immobility are maintained for the purpose of producing illegality (Andersson 2014) and normalising politics of rejection. The overlapping processes of identification, surveillance, interrogation and waiting at the border are not therefore just ‘a by-product of state institutions and bureaucracies,’ as Roos Pijpers (2011) reminds us, but possibly tactics of management and integral parts of state control, where irregular bodies are systematically stopped and checked, captured or evicted.

Juan Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on transnational cultural politics in and out of China, and Chinese mobilities across different cultural and social spheres. She is the co-ordinator for the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’

See our other posts in this series on Calais’ borderlands: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and the video blogpost ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘ by Nariman Massoumi.

Notes from a visit to Calais

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Nariman Massoumi.

Nariman Massoumi is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures. His filmmaking practice and research centres on histories of colonialism and migration.

Previous blogpost in our series on border regimes in Calais: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson.

‘I’ll see you on the other side’: migrant journeys and the (re)formation of diasporic identities

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By Leah Simmons Wood.

The poetry of Warsan Shire – a Kenya born, UK raised and US based second generation migrant of Somali origin – addresses the topic of journeys. She often deliberately fails to clarify the point of departure and of arrival. In this way, she centres journeys at the heart of the migration experience and removes the focus from nation states, whilst also using a local, singular perspective to draw attention to global movements of people.

Between departure and destination

‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Shire’s work highlights the instrumental role played by journeys in the formation of ‘hybrid’ identities – the condition of ‘double consciousness’ that develops in the liminal space between departure and destination. Journeys appear as formative, contrasting the common perspective in policy, media and academia that focuses on the causes and outcomes of migration and construct journeys as linear and as an in-between phase. Focusing on journeys thus gives voice and agency to migrants and legitimises their experiences of mobility and lives in exile.

(Image by yucar studios on Unsplash)

In ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, her most famous poem, Shire recounts the reasons for leaving, the journey itself and the discrimination and state of precarity encountered within the host nation, supporting the notion of internal borders. These include the structural and racist complications migrants encounter once they reach their ‘final’ destination, aligning with ideas of migrants as non-belonging and undeserving. Changing laws and regulations mean the threat of deportation is constant, and migrants remain stuck in both/either mobility and/or immobility: this is the condition of exile. The impact on the speaker’s identity is found in her rhetorical question – ‘Can’t you see it on my body?’

Theoretical context and symbolism

Oceanic imagery and the female body are used as symbols in the poem to explore themes of journeys and identity (re)formation, and the connection between them. The sea appears as simultaneously deathly and generative, hopeful. This recalls previous academic work by Paul Gilroy and his concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993). It explains the emergence of transnational and intercultural voices through experiences of the diaspora and documents the cultural dialogue that occurred between Africa, North America and the UK. I apply this concept beyond the realms of the Atlantic to a different seascape: today, the Mediterranean hosts a liquid graveyard of migrants attempting to reach Europe – echoing the horrors of the Middle Passage. Despite this, Shire states that the journey and borders encountered are:

‘better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Here, the female body imagery situates the speaker’s identity within the context of the journey. It illustrates how a person’s sense of self, gender and relationships are renegotiated and transformed by the process of migration. This is also clear in the language and long sentences, which reflect the linguistic work of the 1970’s French feminists’ in ‘l’ecriture feminine’. They argued that the ‘female imaginary’ exists as plurality, non-linearity and fluidity of identity, as reflected in art, poetry and language and symbols such as the ocean. The sea appears as a female space, offering an opportunity for analysing female creativity and resistance in language, where women can challenge their identities and the gendered roles assigned and defined by Western imperialism and patriarchal norms.

Poetry: lens of analysis

Poetry constitutes an especially useful lens of analysis in this regard. It serves as a vehicle for self-expression, the reclaiming of personal and political agency, community building and solidarity. It is specifically relevant to Shire as sound and listening are integral to Islamic culture, and more specifically as Somalia is known as a ‘nation of poets‘. Combining the predominantly pastoralist nomadic existence of Somalis with the fact that their written orthography was only realised in 1972, oral poetry acts as a signature of Somali culture and as a mode of communication across distances. By writing poetry, Shire reclaims her Somali heritage and identity whilst living in a Western world.

Voice, sound and listening

Internationally, migrants and stateless/racialised people are largely excluded by a focus on nation states and their citizens, where overlapping layers of oppression render them voiceless – without access to platforms for expressing their experiences and concerns. Sound has the potential to cross and dismantle borders through space and time, where the mobility of people is increasingly blocked by security controls and xenophobic policies. It emerges as a form of resistance with the ability to restore voice to those who feel like they have lost it. Indeed, Somalis use technological mediums, including social media, YouTube and cassette tapes, to disseminate their poetry and communicate across the diaspora. These mediums capture the emotions, accents, repetitions and hesitations that are often lost in other means of research, but that are given value in poetry and music. Whilst sound appears as something constructed and orderly, noise – embodied by these accents, repetitions and hesitations – holds negative connotations of being disruptive and pointless. In this way, sounds and noises reveal important information on migrant identities and are central to narratives of inclusion and exclusion.

The movement of the ocean

‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ Shire concludes – reflecting on the circular nature of migration. The title of the poem, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, suggests that at this point, she is being sent back to where she came from, back to where she started – mirroring the movement of the ocean. Placing journeys in this way at the core of attempts to understand migration would legitimise migrant experiences and give a more complete view of the formation of transnational identities and diasporas. The implications of this lie with the contestation and destabilisation of notions of nationalism, race and ethnicity that currently depict a static conception of nations and of societies. Such work would promote and legitimise migrant voices and acknowledge their experiences, with the objective of developing more inclusive politics and policies.

Leah Simmons Wood studied the MA in Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Bristol and is an MMB Alumni Ambassador. She currently works as the Fundraising and Communications Officer for the Kenyan NGO Sponsored Arts for Education and for the UK Community Interest Company The Launchpad Collective.

This post was originally published by EURAC research in June 2022.

Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Bridget Anderson.

As we walked around Calais, one of the group remarked ‘It’s just like The City & the City!’ She was spot on. In his novel The City & the City (2009), China Miéville describes a murder investigation that takes place in what, from the outside, looks like one city, but is for its residents two, Besźel/Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space. From childhood, citizens of one are taught to ‘unsee’ the residents, buildings and events of the other. Ignoring or accidentally forgetting this separation is called ‘breaching’, a crime worse than murder. Calais is a manifestation of this hallucinatory dystopia. It is both seaside town and bidonville, both tourist trap and migrant hub. The seaside town markets itself with a certain irony (maybe particularly appreciated by a British sensibility) as ‘Calaisfornia’. In the shopping mall that borders Calais’ Channel Tunnel terminal there is an escape room called the Prison Island adventure game. The escape room backs onto the border police station and an immigration detention centre. To comfortably inhabit Calais(fornia) it is necessary to see past exclusion and violence, and to accept brutal immigration enforcement as a minor inconvenience.

The escape room, Prison Island adventure game, backing onto the border police station by the Eurotunnel (image: Emma Newcombe)

In July 2023, the MMB team, Challenge leads and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Victoria Hattam, of the New School for Social Research, visited Calais. We were guided by a long-term activist and researcher who has been working in the town for over ten years. It was his knowledge and experience that enabled us to commit a ‘breaching’ and see the gaps between the cities. Calais(fornia) is crosshatched (Miéville fans will catch the analogy) with fences and barbed wire. For Calais(fornia) visitors, they enclose random spaces: running along both sides of a long, thin strip of disused yard; closing off a space under a bridge; enclosing a small piece of land in front of some residential flats. Indeed, the randomness helps invisibilise the practice: there is nothing of note here, nothing exciting or dangerous that is guarded by these fences, just concrete and grass. But breaching enabled us to see these spaces were once hubs where people on the move gathered, hosting community kitchens, they were meeting and distribution points, places where people could sleep. In January 2015, when people were forcibly evicted from the centre of Calais and pushed to the outskirts of the city, the spaces they vacated were enclosed to ensure that they could not be used again. The fences can be read as maps of struggles against deportation and eviction.

An area where migrants once camped is now fenced in for ‘wilding’ and conservation with all access prohibited (image: Nariman Massoumi)

These evictions were the origin of the so-called Jungle* as people were pushed to a piece of land that had been a neglected dump for city rubbish, toxic waste and dredgings from the port expansion (Van Isacker 2022). This became the gathering point for people attempting to cross from France to the UK and was a constant source of dispute for the two governments. In October 2016, the French Government destroyed the encampment completely and declared the area subject to ‘ecological restoration’ and ‘landscape reconquest’. It was converted into a nature reserve, with the UK Home Office a key investment partner. The topography was changed to make it attractive to waterfowl but impossible for humans to camp on, and anti-intrusion features made it difficult for humans to traverse. ‘Fort Vert’ was transformed into a reserve where the citizens of Calais could ‘reconnect’ with nature and where the endangered native species Liparis Loeselii fen orchid could flourish. This would mean the space could achieve designated status in France’s ‘National Restoration Plan’. The then UK Immigration Minister was delighted, describing the project as facilitating a ‘return to nature’ and as preventing the return of migrants to the area (Rullman 2020). This eerily silent space is a different form of enclosure. But it is haunted by its recent past: the police access road, the fences around the motorway, the graffiti under the bypass declaring ‘No Border No Nation’ and, in a nod to Calais(fornia), ‘Maybe this whole situation will just sort itself out…’. People on the move today are banished largely to the inhospitable territory of the outskirts, with no easy access to basic necessities like water, food or shops.

Graffiti under the bypass (image: Emma Newcombe)

Calais(fornia) is curiously manicured and carefully landscaped. Flowers and grasses abound, but bushes have been uprooted as they provide shelter. We roamed freely around Calais(fornia), and about halfway through our walk we arrived at the town hall, a striking red brick and stone building constructed in the early twentieth century and surrounded by well-tended flower beds and grass. One of the group took a photograph of us as we sat down and opened our map to decide next steps. To sit freely should not be taken for granted. After the eviction of 2016 the authorities announced a policy of ‘zero point de fixation’, moving people on within hours to ensure that there is no possibility of informal settlements, destroying tents and goods in processes known as ‘cleaning’. As part of this policy green spaces which could be potential resting spaces are littered with boulders to prevent people from lying down or gathering. As we walked past one such space, I wondered what purposes future archaeologists might attribute to these out-of-place rocks that must have taken such efforts to move and that make public spaces so horribly ugly and unusable. A form of worship? A collective project that builds community? Will such cruelty and racism be imaginable?

Boulders by the canal prevent groups from resting on the grass there (image: Nariman Massoumi)

We, the breachers, both sat and moved freely. The thousands of people on the move who attempt to breach the national border that separates Britain and France enjoy no such possibility. To be able to inhabit Calais(fornia) and to see Calais is indeed a privileged position. But I left feeling the importance of not being paralysed or silenced by that acknowledgment of privilege. Rather, having seen, we now have a responsibility to speak.

* There are in fact many ‘jungles’ around Calais, but this site is the one most strongly associated with the word.

Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Other MMB blogs and projects connected to this post include the (de)Bordering plot, a space for exploring the politics of immigration and the environment through planting, which contains a Hearth modelled on shelters in the Calais ‘Jungle’. See also Travis Van Isacker’s post on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais’ analysing how the French and UK governments have created a hostile environment for migrants trying to cross the Channel from Calais.

Imperial denaturalisation: towards an end to empire

Posted on by Emily

By Colin Yeo.

As the British empire gradually remodelled itself into a British nation state over the course of the twentieth century, it was inevitable that problems would arise. There was no masterplan or strategy on how to achieve change and successive governments tended to react rather than plan. Nowhere was this more evident than in the process of redefinition of membership of the emerging nation state.

Until as late as 1 January 1983, all citizens of all Commonwealth countries were, according to British law, British subjects. This had been the legal regime at common law, before British subjecthood was put on a partially statutory basis by the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. It remained the legal regime when the British Nationality Act 1948 became law.

(Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

What the 1948 legislation did change was the constitutional nature of British subjecthood. Until then, British subject status derived from a person’s place of birth and a direct relationship of allegiance to the crown. In future the question of who was or was not a British subject would effectively be decided by the legislatures of independent Commonwealth countries. In the United Kingdom and its colonies, the legislature was the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the local citizenship within the Commonwealth was citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies.

Both before and after the 1948 legislation, a British subject was free to enter and reside in Britain. At least, that was the legal position. In practice, informal barriers to entry and residence were used to try to interfere with the rights of some racialised subjects. In the case of Bhagwan [1972] AC 60, about alleged illegal entry by British subjects, Lord Diplock held in the House of Lords that a British subject ‘had the right at common law to enter the United Kingdom without let or hindrance when and where he pleased and to remain here as long as he liked.’

This is arguably not quite correct as it was more of a freedom than a right, given that aliens (meaning everyone not a British subject) had historically also been free to enter and live in the United Kingdom. As the legislation of the twentieth century was to show, it was a freedom that could be curtailed for aliens and subjects alike.

The right to enter and reside in a country is one of the fundamental rights of membership of that country, whether labelled subjecthood or citizenship. But the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 removed that right from a wide range of British subjects. The separation of rights of entry and residence from nationality law status was further cemented by legislation in 1968, 1969 and 1971. British subject status was then formally terminated by the British Nationality Act 1981 with effect from 1 January 1983.

This process is not traditionally classed as ‘denaturalisation’, a term usually reserved in modern usage for involuntary loss of formal nationality status on an individualised basis by means of administrative action. On this traditional understanding, denaturalisation is seen as exceptional, albeit to have undergone something of a revival in recent years. Withdrawal of rights of entry and residence from colonial peoples should nevertheless be considered denaturalisation by the central imperial power. With significant caveats, the process was comparable to massive scale denaturalisation by legislative means by certain states in the early to mid-twentieth century.

It might be said that the whole point of independence is to achieve a new citizenship of a new state, which might necessarily involve shrugging off the yoke of the old subjecthood. Such ‘denaturalisation’ might be considered not just consensual but actively sought, rather than imposed involuntarily. But there are two major flaws with asserting that this process was benevolent.

First, the British had hitherto felt free to enter and reside in many countries around the world and in the process repatriated much of the wealth of those countries to Britain and gained a considerable leg up in international trade, in industrial, economic and social infrastructure and more, as Nadine El-Enany argues in (B)ordering Britain. Unilateral withdrawal of access to this bounty quite understandably seemed rather unreasonable to many colonial subjects, who were attracted to live and work in the part of the empire that had overwhelmingly benefited from the imperial project.

For others, the loss of the right of entry to and residence in Britain was far more than an abstract and as-yet unrealised benefit. Those colonial subjects who had already moved from their original colony of residence to another were routinely denied the right to re-enter or reside — or at least reside with dignity and rights of citizenship — in their new country of residence. The East African Asians are one such group, for example. They were denied the right to live as full and active citizens in their country of residence: some were also denied formal citizenship and some were forcibly expelled.

Many of those British subjects who moved from colonies to the United Kingdom, later dubbed ‘the Windrush generation’, form another such group. It is thought that a very considerable (but unknowable) number were later denied re-entry to the United Kingdom following temporary absences abroad, for example. Others were later excluded from formal British citizenship status by complex and paid-for registration requirements when nationality law was later reformed. Later, some were denied effective citizenship rights by the suite of hostile environment laws brought into force since the late 1980s.

For those affected by these laws this felt a lot like denaturalisation, and with good reason. ‘I don’t feel British. I am British. I’ve been raised here, all I know is Britain,’ Paulette Wilson told journalist Amelia Gentleman in 2017. ‘What the hell can I call myself except British? I’m still angry that I have to prove it. I feel angry that I have to go through this.’ Wilson was not in fact a British citizen according to law, although she was able very belatedly to obtain leave to remain as a foreign national before she died in 2020. This was not before she had been rendered homeless, denied welfare benefits and health care and even detained for deportation at the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Her situation and her feelings of betrayal and estrangement were very far from unique.

Denaturalisation is not a novel or new phenomenon in British law. The involuntary loss of rights occurring as imperial citizenship was withdrawn first de facto then eventually de jure was a prolonged and, for some, ongoing episode of denaturalisation.

Colin Yeo is a barrister, writer, campaigner and consultant specialising in immigration law. He founded and edits the Free Movement immigration law blog and is an Honorary Researcher at the University of Bristol with MMB. His latest books are Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System (2020) and Refugee Law (2022). We will be posting a second blogpost by Colin on denaturalisation in the autumn.

Previous MMB blogposts by Colin include ‘The hostile environment confuses unlawful with undocumented, with disastrous consequences.‘ You can also hear Colin discussing the UK Nationality and Borders Bill in an MMB webinar in 2021 here.

If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in Nandita Sharma’s posts, ‘A tale of two worlds: national borders versus a common planet‘, and ‘National sovereignty and postcolonial racism.’

The other side of Partition: tracing Bengal and Bangladesh’s (post-)Partition legacy

Posted on by Emily

By Nazia Hussein and Anushka Chaudhuri.

Since its June 2022 release the Disney Plus series Ms Marvel has brought the conversation around the creation of Independent India and Pakistan – commonly dubbed as ‘Partition’ – to the mainstream. The series has been applauded for introducing the first Muslim superheroine and narratives of the Partition – one of the bloodiest episodes in South Asian history – onto global screens, with recognition of the British colonial administration’s active role in its formal withdrawal from, and cleaving of, British India. However, in line with much academic research and popular culture, Ms Marvel presents a partial Partition narrative via the Two Nation Theory. This theory positions Islam (Pakistan) and Hinduism (India) against each other and disregards the violent and multiple partitions of Bengal, which created West Bengal in eastern India and East Bengal in East Pakistan, the latter gaining liberation as Bangladesh in 1971. This positioning is aligned with most popular representations of South Asia and, as a result, erases past and present lived experiences of Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis.

Created primarily for young and Western audiences, Ms Marvel erases the brutal realities of Partition. The Partition subplot demystifies the story of Aisha, the protagonist Kamaala’s maternal great-grandmother, who secured her family’s safety by ensuring they boarded ‘the last train to Pakistan’ from Punjab, India, to Punjab, Pakistan. The series’ representation of Partition as a time of tension, fear and existential insecurity, but otherwise a relatively organised migration process, amounts to misinformation for global audiences. What ensued after the announcement of the new borders – severing Punjab and Bengal – to create West Pakistan (now Pakistan), India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on 14th and 15th August 1947 was overwhelming disarray and disorder. Hindus and Sikhs were to migrate from West and East Pakistan into India, and Muslims were to migrate from India into one of Pakistan’s domains. Violence was widespread. Hence, the minor reference to boarding ‘the last train to Pakistan’ risks erasing the harsh truth that, due to widespread violence, train travel was often inaccessible. The limited number of trains that did run often arrived blood-stained or filled with dead bodies and became known as ‘blood’ or ‘ghost’ trains. Therefore, most individuals migrated on foot or by cattle, with many seeking refuge in camps, being killed or dying from disease.

Partition of India 1947 (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Many of the academic and popular representations of Partition are heavily Punjab-centric. Ms Marvel follows the same pattern. Its representation not only neglects Bengal’s Partition story but also latently equates the Punjab province with all of Pakistan by symbolically and linguistically portraying, but not directly naming, Punjabi language, culture and lands when representing Pakistani national identity and diasporas. That Bengal was partitioned twice – first in 1905, which, prompted by protests, was annulled in 1911, and then again in 1947 – is disregarded. Such erasures are dangerous, excluding voices from the ‘other half of Partition’ with its differing socio-political histories and ambivalent religious demographics. It also positions a Punjabi Partition narrative in popular culture as representative of this period, when there are other equally complex and alternative histories. For example, upper caste Bengali Hindus (including Zamindars or landowners) dominated political, arts and agrarian labour systems, subordinating Bengali Muslims and other lower caste workers and prohibiting their access to wealth and land. Coupled with Bengal’s Muslims being the marginal majority, this created a more complex task for the British and Indian political elite when drafting religionised borders.

While the shift of nationalism to communalism in Bengal is blamed for Partition, such narratives erase the agency of contemporary Bangladeshis’ and then-East Pakistani populations’ (denied) choice in their fate. This is observed in the political elite District Congress Committee in Sylhet’s pledge to Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement – a Hindu contextualised Indian anti-colonialism movement which emphasised non-violence – despite the Committee’s lack of commitment to this type of struggle. Furthermore, after Hindu Zamindars learned of Sylhet’s lucrative tea estates and the international demand for tea, Muslim-majority Sylhet was fragmented during its 1947 referendum, with some regions being succeeded to greater Assam in India, despite voting patterns revealing an intention for Sylhet to join then-East Pakistan. The agency of East Bengal as a region and a people during Partition in seeking to choose their own destiny – despite being disallowed – is rarely addressed in either academia or popular culture, with Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India continuing to be presented as violent, communalistic and unpatriotic in curricular textbooks and films such as The Viceroy’s House and Earth. The creation of West and East Pakistan itself drew another line between the two regions and populations. This new ‘border’ induced linguistic, cultural and economic oppression, including genocide and weaponised rape, on the Bengalis of East Pakistan. This led to the Liberation War of 1971 when East Bengal again separated from Pakistan, gaining independence as Bangladesh.

The downplaying of the historical struggles of Bengal and contemporary Bangladesh undermines the legacy of discrimination and deprivation experienced by Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis in the hands of the British colonists, Hindu nationalism and dominance in India, and West Pakistani state and military. This same deprivation is visible in the UK today. British Bangladeshis show the highest rates of poverty and face the largest ethnic pay gap with, on average, 20% less earnings than their white British counterparts. Indians are just 2.42%, Pakistanis 2.58% but Bangladeshis 3.56% more likely to be economically inactive than white ethnic groups in the UK. Further, the death rate involving COVID-19 was highest for Bangladeshis – respectively 5.0 and 4.5 times greater than white British male and female groups in 2020–2021.

In Britain’s classed and racialised surveillance state, Bangladeshis will continue to be labelled and penalised as ‘bad minorities’, likely to experience the worst of the Conservative’s austerity measures, particularly during the worsening cost of living crisis. Such lived experiences of British Bangladeshis reflect a long history of violence, starting with British and European colonialism.

Nazia Hussein is a Senior Lecturer in Race at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research, teaching and activism focuses on gender, race and religion with a particular focus on Asian Muslim women in South Asia and Britain. Her most recent book is Muslim New Womanhood in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2022).

Anushka Chaudhuri is a Sociology PhD student at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work explores nationalism, migration, ethnicity and racism, and focuses on South Asian histories, politics and diasporas.

What fosters a sense of belonging? Refugee voices in Germany

Posted on by Emily

By Emily LeRoux-Rutledge.

My children are new in Germany like those two flowers. I want my children to be allowed to stay in Germany…. We build something up. We are like LEGO, block by block.

‘A new life’ (image by Liam)
‘Building a life in Germany with our family’ (image by Liam)

These photographs and words belong to Liam* — a young man who made his way to Germany in the midst of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015. They convey his determination to begin anew. Yet voices like Liam’s were scarcely heard during the crisis, subsumed by the voices of those already living in European host societies and their concerns about ‘integration’, which culminated in the 2016 German Integration Act.

In 2017, cognisant of this imbalance, Carmen Lienen and I undertook a photovoice project with refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, who had entered the country since the start of the crisis. We wanted to understand how they felt about the country (in contrast to how the country felt about them) and what would help to foster a sense of belonging. Our results were recently published in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

Much of what we learned aligns with the prevailing literature on immigrant identity, which suggests that newcomers undergo a complex process of identity negotiation as they endeavour to balance their pre-existing identities with those that align with their host societies. Often they do this aware of negative social representations about them, from which they seek to distance themselves. Additionally, they do this in the context of temporal uncertainty brought about by government policies, which require them to wait for approval to remain, to work and to reside permanently.

There was one thing that surprised us, however. Imagine, for a moment, you were to speak with two different groups of people: one made up of refugees with permission to remain in Germany, and the other made up of asylum seekers with no permission to remain. Which group do you think would feel a greater sense of belonging? You might think the former — indeed, previous scholarship has highlighted the importance of secure legal status for integration (which we don’t dispute) — but that’s not what we found.

In our small, qualitative study of the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in two German towns, we found that those in town N, where the majority did not have permission to remain, felt a much greater sense of belonging than those in town E, where the majority did. 

‘I think… I’ve become a citizen of Germany. I feel good,’ said Sabir, a young man in town N who did not have a residence permit. 

‘Germany has many job opportunities, future… but it’s not our country,’ said Amer, a young man in town E, who did have a residence permit.

How to account for this? The answer, according to our data, appears to be in the reception of the townspeople:

‘I know almost five to six [local] families where I always go to eat, or who help me with things,’ said Zeynep from town N.

‘Yesterday, I sit at train station and a man asks, “Why do you look at me?”’ [imitates an angry voice], said Rayhan from town E.

The inclusive and open way in which research participants were welcomed in town N seemed to provide them with social scaffolding, underpinned by positive social representations of refugees held by the townspeople of N. This appeared to foster a sense of belonging in our research participants, and, consequently, some of them were able to identify with German culture and claim a German identity.

In contrast, participants residing in town E appeared to lack such social scaffolding and such identification. Their narratives indicated a greater sense of alienation from locals and German society. Few participants reported having personal relationships with locals, which they attributed to Germans being ‘generally private’.

This may, on one level, seem obvious — the way in which people are received impacts their sense of belonging. Yet, under Germany’s 2016 Integration Act — which contains punitive measures against refugees and asylum seekers who have not demonstrably tried to ‘integrate’ — residents of Germany have ‘keinen zusätzlichen Erfüllungsaufwand,’ or ‘no further obligations’.

The German government itself has defined integration as ‘feeling part of a community and developing a common understanding of how to live together in society.’ By explicitly stating in the law, however, that German residents have ‘no obligations’ towards achieving integration, is the government not absolving German residents of the very thing that could foster, in newcomers, the sense of belonging it seeks?

The on-going development of the National Action Plan for Integration may be a step in the right direction. The plan considers how Germany’s institutions and citizens can contribute to sustainable integration — but it remains to be seen how far this goes towards fundamentally shifting people’s understandings of what integration is: a reciprocal process undertaken by both receiving society members and newcomers.

*All names are pseudonyms. The origin countries of participants have been withheld to protect their identities.

Emily LeRoux-Rutledge is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of the West of England. She currently studies the psychology of migration, looking at the identities and representations of refugees, asylum seekers and other diaspora groups. Her most recent paper, ‘Refugee Identity and Integration in Germany during the European “Migration Crisis”: Why Local Community Support Matters, and Why Policy Gets It Wrong,’ was published with Carmen Lienen in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. 

Disablement and resistance in the British immigration system

Posted on by Emily

By Rebecca Yeo.

The distinction between deserving and undeserving individuals has always been core to immigration policy in the UK. However, the hostility and restrictions directed at those framed as ‘undeserving’ has steadily increased. The recently introduced Illegal Migration Bill takes these restrictions to a new level to include detaining and preventing new arrivals from even claiming asylum. The need to build effective opposition has never been more urgent. With this goal, it is important to consider the inequities of the current system, possible alternative approaches to resistance and the barriers that must be addressed.

The disabling impact of immigration controls

In 2012, then-Home Secretary Theresa May stated her aim to create a hostile environment. Subsequent legislation (Immigration Act, 2014; Immigration Act, 2016) was explicitly designed to restrict access to such necessities as housing, financial support and sense of safety. These policies prevent people from meeting their human needs. As one Disabled woman subject to asylum restrictions said to me: ‘If they are torturing someone they can’t expect that person to be okay.’ The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) acknowledges that ‘immigration control measures which deny access to services, can increase vulnerability.’ The result is to disable people with existing impairments, as well as to create new impairments. Immigration policy is actively and deliberately disabling.

Mural created with Disabled people subject to immigration controls, led by artist Andrew Bolton, see disabilitymurals.org.uk (Photograph: Mark Simmons)

Compassion in immigration policy

The hostility of immigration policy has always been combined with expressions of compassion. In her speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2015, while setting out measures to create a hostile environment, Theresa May also proclaimed: ‘Let Britain stand up for the displaced, the persecuted and the oppressed. For the people who need our help and protection the most.’ Similarly, current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserts that he is ‘balancing’ his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ with assertions that ‘the UK remains a safe haven for the most vulnerable.’ Even the UK-Rwanda partnership includes a clause to allow for resettlement of some of ‘the most vulnerable’ refugees from Rwanda to the UK. This may be considered a welcome alternative to hostility. However, as the ICIBI asserts, Home Office efforts to identify ‘vulnerable individuals is a test not just of its competence but also of its capacity for compassion.’ Expressions of compassion towards ‘vulnerable’ individuals are not used to contest, but to reinforce, the legitimacy of hostility towards others.

A social model approach

Insights from the Disabled people’s movement could help focus resistance against the disabling impact of immigration policy. In 1976, the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation argued it is ‘society which disables.’ This principle was developed by disabled sociologist Michael Oliver, among others, to replace the individual approach of the charity model with what became known as the social model of disability. This approach calls for collective responsibility to address the disabling impact of inequities faced by people with impairments. A similar approach could focus on resisting the disabling restrictions imposed on people subject to immigration controls. Without negating the emotional and physical pain inherent in many forms of impairment, or in being forced to flee one’s home, effective resistance must challenge the socially constructed, and therefore changeable, injustices. A social model of immigration could bring together the Disabled people’s movement, people subject to immigration controls and allies of both, to build solidarity and collective resistance to the restrictions and inequalities of assumed human value, which underpin current injustices.

The barriers to change

It is meaningless to assert the need for a social model of immigration without acknowledging the barriers. Restricted access to services and support is a central tool of immigration policy. Barriers to change are not, however, exclusively at the level of the state.

Lived experience

Manjeet Kaur paints part of the mural that represents her experience: ‘The wheelchair is chained… I feel restricted by the UK Border Agency, I am not free to do anything.’
(Photograph: Andrew Bolton.)

The social model of disability was developed by Disabled people rather than charitable organisations. However, when people are struggling for immediate survival, there is little capacity to lead resistance. As activist Manjeet Kaur explained to me just months before she died, in the face of immediate struggles as a Disabled asylum seeker, ‘I don’t have the energy… I myself am in a floating boat, I can anytime fall down.’ The capacity for solidarity from the wider Disabled people’s movement is reduced by lack of information and individual struggles in the context of an ever more punitive welfare state. The mantra of the Disabled people’s movement ‘nothing about us, without us’ is as valid as ever, however, the solidarity of allies has never been so important.

Voluntary sector

The asylum voluntary sector may be the obvious source of solidarity. However, rather than seeking advice and collaboration from the Disabled people’s movement, all too often asylum voluntary sector organisations have endorsed Home Office and local authority initiatives towards individuals considered ‘vulnerable’ as if this approach is better than nothing. Of course, some compassion is better than none, but these initiatives adopt a regressive individualistic approach to disability. Like most progressive ideas, the social model of disability and associated concepts have been widely co-opted and distorted to remove demands for systemic change. This risks undermining key struggles of the Disabled people’s movement, including demands for the services and support necessary for independent living as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. A broad-based movement of solidarity is needed to focus on addressing causal injustices.

Public response

Collective resistance is further hampered by lack of public concern. Response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposes how publicly acceptable it is to treat some lives as disposable. The majority of people who have died from COVID are Disabled. Yet public response to this knowledge is not to take collective responsibility to reduce the risk, but instead to remove precautions and leave the responsibility with individuals. The result is to exclude anyone concerned about infection from public space, with at least #Forgotten500k facing the fourth year of lockdown.

Widespread disregard for the value of certain lives may increase the barriers to effective action but if current inequalities are socially constructed the issue is not whether change is possible but how it can be achieved. Systemic change may appear unrealistic, but as author and disability activist Ellen Clifford writes: ‘We have no choice. The stakes have become too high’.

Rebecca Yeo is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bristol on refining and promoting a ‘social model of asylum’ as a tool to transform responses to disability and forced migration in the UK. Her work draws on her involvement in the Disabled people’s movement and what she has learned from disabled people seeking asylum.

A recording of Rebecca’s webinar, ‘A social model of asylum: disablement and resistance in the British asylum system,’ is available here. This was part of a webinar series co-hosted by MMB and GRAMNet on ‘The Health of Migrants and the Right to Health.’ A recording of MMB’s emergency discussion on the 2023 Illegal Migration Bill can be watched here.

Previous post by Rebecca Yeo: ‘The power of collaborative art in research for social change,’ 8th March 2022.

Many Turkish people in Europe are worse off than those who stayed at home

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Şebnem Eroğlu.

Many people migrate to another country to earn a decent income and to attain a better standard of living. But my recent research shows that across all destinations and generations studied, many migrants from Turkey to European countries are financially worse off than those who stayed at home.

Even if there are some non-monetary benefits of staying in the destination country, such as living in a more orderly environment, this raises fundamental questions. Primarily, why are 79% of the first-generation men who contributed to the growth of Europe by taking on some of the dirtiest, riskiest manual jobs – like working in asbestos processing and sewage canals – still living in income poverty? There is a strong indication that the European labour markets and welfare states are failing migrants and their descendants.

A Turkish barbers’ shop in Scotland (image: byronv2/Flickr)

In my recent book, Poverty and International Migration (2022), I examined the poverty status of three generations of migrants from Turkey to multiple European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. I compared them with the ‘returnees’ who moved back to Turkey and the ‘stayers’ who have never left the country.

The study covers the period from the early 1960s to the time of their interview (2010-2012), and draws on a sample of 5,980 adults within 1,992 families. The sample was composed of living male ancestors (those who went first were typically men), their children and grandchildren.

For my research, the poverty line was set at 60% of the median disposable household income (adjusted for household size) for every country studied. Those who fall below the country threshold are defined as the income poor.

Data for this research is drawn from the 2000 Families Survey, which I conducted with academics based in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The survey generated what is believed to be the world’s largest database on labour migration to Europe through locating the male ancestors who moved to Europe from five high migration regions in Turkey during the guest-worker years of 1960-1974 and their counterparts who did not migrate at the time.

It charts the family members who were living in various European countries up to the fourth generation, and those that stayed behind in Turkey. The period corresponds to a time when labourers from Turkey were invited through bi-lateral agreements between states to contribute to the building of western and northern Europe.

The results presented in my book show that four-fifths (79%) of the first-generation men who came to Europe as guest-workers and ended up settling there lived below an income poverty line, compared with a third (33%) of those that had stayed in the home country. By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind.

Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.

For example, across all three generations of migrants settled in Sweden, 60% were in income poverty despite an employment rate of 61%. This was the highest level of employment observed for migrants in all the countries studied. Migrants in Sweden were also, on average, more educated than those living in other European destinations.

My findings also reveal that while more than a third (37%) of ‘stayers’ from the third generation went on to complete higher education. This applied to less than a quarter (23%) of the third generation migrants spread across European countries.

Returnees did well

Having a university education turned out not to improve the latter’s chances of escaping poverty as much as it did for the family members who had not left home. The ‘returnees’ to Turkey were, on the other hand, found to fare much better than those living in Europe and on a par with, if not better than, the ‘stayers’.

Less than a quarter of first- and third-generation returnees (23% and 24% respectively) experienced income poverty and 43% from the third generation attained a higher education qualification. The money they earned abroad along with their educational qualifications seemed to buy them more economic advantage in Turkey than in the destination country.

The results of the research should not be taken to mean that international migration is economically a bad decision as we still do not know how impoverished these people were prior to migration. First-generation migrants are anecdotally known to be poorer at the time of migration than those who decided not to migrate during guest-worker years, and are likely to have made some economic gains from their move. The returnees’ improved situation does lend support to this.

Nor should the findings lead to the suggestion that if migrants do not earn enough in their new home country, they should go back. Early findings from another piece of research I am currently undertaking suggests that while income poverty considerably reduces migrants’ life satisfaction, there are added non-monetary benefits of migration to a new destination. The exact nature of these benefits remains unknown but it is likely to do, for example, with living in a better organised environment that makes everyday life easier.

However, we still left with the question of why migrants are being left in such poverty. Coupled with the findings from another recent study demonstrating that more than half of Europeans do not welcome non-EU migrants from economically poorer countries, evidence starts to suggest an undercurrent of systemic racism may be acting as a cause.

If migrants were welcome, one would expect destination countries with far more developed welfare states than Turkey to put in place measures to protect guest workers against the risk of poverty in old age, or prevent their children and grandchildren from falling so far behind their counterparts in Turkey in accessing higher education.

They would not let them settle for lower returns on their educational qualifications in more regulated labour markets. It’s also unlikely we would have observed some of the highest poverty rates in countries with generous welfare states such as Sweden – top ranked for its anti-discrimination legislation, based on equality of opportunity.

Overall, the picture for ‘unwanted’ migrants appears to be rather bleak. Unless major systemic changes are made, substantial improvement to their prospects are unlikely.

Şebnem Eroğlu is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on poverty and household livelihoods, and on the economic behaviour, success and integration of migrants. Her recent book, Poverty and International Migration: A Multi-Site and Intergenerational Perspective (2022) is published by Policy Press.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Asylum and extraction in the Republic of Nauru

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Julia Morris.

My book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (2023), looks at the impacts of outsourcing asylum to the world’s smallest island nation. The Pacific Island of Nauru was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the asylum industry by importing Australia’s maritime asylum-seeking populations. On an on-then-off-again basis, following 2001 and 2012 agreements with Australia, anyone who makes their way by boat and claims to be a refugee in Australian territorial (now excised) waters is offshored to Nauru for refugee processing and resettlement.

I wrote this book at a time when governments worldwide were hunkering down with populist policies of externalised border enforcement. For decades, the EU has toyed with funding countries across Eastern Europe, North and East Africa, and Central Asia. The US has experimented with several extra-territorial asylum schemes, including processing Haitian asylum seekers in Guantanamo in the 1990s. Many Asian countries, including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, have implemented restrictive detention and temporary visa practices for African migrants, in particular. Now, these arrangements have been given immense visibility with the UK government’s much debated Rwanda deal. Like Nauru, migrants – largely from Albania, the Middle East and South Asia – could be sent 4,000 miles south-east of where they lodged their asylum applications.

My book takes a different approach to tackling the global trend of outsourced asylum. It moves beyond arguments that centre on the erosion of asylum and international law. Rather than a benevolent system under threat, I argue that asylum is extractive. I make this argument by weaving between discussions of Nauru’s mineral and migrant extractive industries. My fieldwork in Nauru starkly revealed just how deeply asylum is an extractive industry. Nauru operated as a company town around phosphate and refugees, where an entire industrial assemblage of labourers and expertise, technologies and representation, worked to bring both sectors into being. By detailing the expansiveness of the phosphate and asylum industries, my work demystifies commodities that have immense fetishistic power. It shifts critical attention toward the international NGOs, state agencies, lawyers, activists and migrants that allow boom town sites to ‘pop into visibility’ in modular fashion, as Hannah Appel puts it when discussing the offshore oil and gas industry.

But, of course, this engineering is place specific and embedded in localised political economies (from Nauru to the Mediterranean), even if the wider asylum industry assemblage is in some ways standardised. Nauru’s boom story around refugees owes itself to the phosphate industry pathways that preceded it. The island’s colonial foundations around global extractive industries shaped its industrial fabric in the present. These structural relations were made evident to me almost daily. Not long after relocating to Nauru, Georgia, a Nauruan friend and phosphate worker, took me to ‘refugee royalties day.’ Similar to ‘phosphate royalties day,’ held down the road, landowners would collect monthly rental payments from the Australian government for leasing their land for buildings connected to the asylum industry. The nineteenth century system of land holdings from the era of colonial extraction structured these contemporary industry land negotiations. Scholars such as Tarcisius Kabutaulaka have found a similar relationship between extraction and land tenure in other colonial industry sectors. The process of resource exploitation produces a culture characterised by rapid monetisation, where land and humans are inscribed as economic commodities for generating financial income.

But while the asylum industry has been immensely profitable for some local islanders, it also – like phosphate mining – has harrowing consequences. The reality of cohorts of migrants from far different regions of the world, none interested in being there, and many with very particular psychological needs, are just some of the repercussions of this economic sector. For asylum seekers and refugees, most with devastating pasts and equally hazy futures, tragic instances of self-harm and suicide were commonplace. Australian psychiatrists and clinicians were on fly-in-fly-out cycles locally: many of them have since spoken out about the policy’s damaging effects.

Many islanders left jobs in Nauru’s schools and public service sectors to work at the regional processing centres. This option was more financially lucrative, but led to a ‘brain drain,’ as one local called it. Residents also described to me the corruption and greed that overtook the government. During my fieldwork, protests against local politicians were commonplace. Opposition MPs would form always-shifting alliances, using Australian media interest in refugees to encourage international and local support. Like the extractive industry communities that anthropologists and other scholars describe, torn apart by internal or intercommunity conflicts, fluctuating prosperity and contentious repercussions, Nauru became tied into the repeating destructions of a resource-cursed state.

In my work I describe the uneven placements of where containment industries are located, and the racialised populations that are governed, as a form of environmental racism. Toxicologists and scholars of extractive industries use this concept to describe the process whereby hazardous waste facilities are overwhelmingly sited in communities of color. In my view, the disproportionate exposures of hypercriminalisation, violence and precarity that largely Black and Brown migrants are subject to is also a form of environmental racism that is enacted on migrants’ bodies, as is the siting of carceral sectors in minority and low-income communities. Much like the toxicological ‘body burden,’ these harms can accumulate in people’s bodies over time. The conversations I had with migrants undergoing the asylum process and with local islanders battling the effects of phosphate extraction form part of the elongated exposures to violence experienced by certain populations and geographies. Both phosphate and asylum extraction centre around unnatural metallurgical processes with untold social and ecological costs. In the phosphate industry, dust and toxins are released into the atmosphere with tremendous pollutant effects. In the asylum industry, people are compelled to present themselves through legal narratives of trauma in order to move elsewhere. Linking the asylum industry boom to previous extractive practices in the landscape shows asylum to be part of the ‘hyper-extractive assemblage’ that scholars of resource extraction, such as Macarena Gómez-Barris and Michael Watts describe, premised on continued racial subordination.

A major difficulty in making these arguments is that many critics and publics have uncomfortable, mixed feelings in approaching people – and especially refugees – as commodities. Periodically, global media campaigns give visibility to the Nauru arrangement but often through a victim-villain binary. Since agreeing to the Australia deal, Nauruans have been targeted through global media and liberal advocacy campaigns as ‘refugee beaters’ … ‘cruel in the extreme’ … a heart of darkness, where refugees are ‘hacked with machetes’ by the local population. Such representations are not unique to Nauru. Based on western colonial stereotypes of the Indigenous, Black and Brown as savage, and the refugee as racialised suffering Other, this construct is mobilised by refugee solidarity advocates on a global scale to leverage against outsourcing asylum. The sorts of racist colonial tropes that Nauruans contend with are already in use by critics who claim that Rwanda is an ‘authoritarian state with extreme levels of surveillance’ and that it ‘tortures and murders those it considers to be its opponents.’

These Western mis/representations have troubling effects. In Nauru, the suffering-savage slot instigated fractious relations. As an advocacy strategy, it did little to endear locals to the plight of asylum seekers. In fact, it obscured powerful solidarities between locals and refugees that could have given added momentum against outsourcing asylum. And ultimately, I argue in my research, this imaginary has a fundamentally extractive character. It provides more political economic and moral value to the global asylum industry, which cyclically carries out operations in places like Nauru.

My book gives hope that we can disrupt these models of perennial extraction. By seeing the international refugee regime as an extractive process, we might better imagine alternative systems of free movement that go beyond adjudicating human worth and solidifying hierarchies of suffering. We can move towards using a more egalitarian language of solidarity, coalitions and commonality, rather than one of suffering, salvation and #RefugeesWelcome valuation. The logic of ‘mobility commons,’ put forward by Anna Nikolaeva and Mimi Sheller, is a theoretical framework that I am exploring using the creative arts and design. Together with the Berlin-based Organisms Democracy, I have been working on participatory projects in wild garden spaces with students and publics around cohabitation. Alongside this, I design experiential walking practices that encourage more expansive understandings about borders seen and unseen. These projects are inspired by powerful calls to ‘de-exceptionalise’ and ‘methodologically de-nationalise’ migration to broad publics. Outsourced asylum regimes continue to advance, as do political narratives surrounding migrant deterrence from global south to north. It becomes ever more urgent to explore the relationship between privileged and stigmatised (im)mobility, and commonalities of experiences.

Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research focuses on migration governance through the framework of resource extraction, from ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva and Fiji to research projects in Guatemala, Jordan and Lebanon. Her book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, is recently published with Cornell University Press, with a 30% discount available here.

Julia will be giving an open air, interactive talk on ‘Territory and Citizens: Reimagining Cohabitation in the City‘ at MMB’s (de)Bordering plot on 3rd May.