Category: Justice/Race

Refugee women’s struggles for rights and stability: insights from an intersectional lens 

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff. 

As a researcher exploring the experiences of refugee women in small German towns, I have come to understand the critical importance of applying a postcolonial and intersectional lens to capture the complexity of these women’s lives, particularly in relation to accessing rights and entitlements. My research has underscored the need for a broader understanding of the multiple, intersecting factors that shape refugee women’s experiences, moving beyond a narrow focus on predetermined categories of identity. 

Ayla’s* story is a powerful illustration of this. As a young, recently divorced single mother, Ayla encountered significant obstacles due to her initial dependence on her husband and limited access to language classes, childcare and mental health support. Her struggle to navigate the complex legal systems in Germany, from immigration rights to divorce and family rights, was further compounded by language barriers and a learning disability, undiagnosed until recently: 

I had been going through post-partum depression when we separated. Everything happened so fast, I had to look for housing and learn the language to get a job as soon as possible. I had no money, all friends I had through my husband. Only later I found out that there would have been financial help for us, help with my daughter and so on […] It took me a long time to get my life together. [Ayla]

(Image by Ayush Kumar on Unsplash)

Ayla’s experience highlights common challenges faced by refugee women who come to Germany through family reunification but who are facing separation or divorce. Many of these women face barriers in accessing crucial support services and information about their rights and entitlements. Additionally, several women in my research reported feeling at a disadvantage in legal proceedings, particularly in cases involving divorce and child custody, where they felt that their husbands had more power due to their longer residence in Germany, better language skills and greater understanding of the legal system. 

In the case of Miran, a refugee woman who experienced domestic violence, these challenges were further exacerbated by a lack of support from authorities and social services. Miran described feeling disempowered and unsupported in her interactions with the court and social services: 

I don’t really trust authorities and I didn’t know where to go […] I only found out many years later that there is specific support for families like ours from charities. The youth welfare office and the council, and another organisation I visited […] everyone said we don’t help with this kind of thing. I wanted someone maybe to go to the youth council with me or to my children’s schools or the immigration office. The biggest stress for me was with the youth welfare office. […] I was always worried they would take my kids away, the youth welfare office. But I never felt they wanted to help me or us as a family. No. [Miran] 

Miran‘s story underscores how refugee women’s lack of knowledge about their rights and the legal system, combined with a lack of cultural sensitivity and support from authorities, can create significant barriers to accessing justice and support.  

For hijab-wearing women like Hiba, the challenges in accessing these entitlements are further compounded by experiences of prejudice based on their religious identity: 

I worried a lot before. It was hard to think about anything else, you know. I thought maybe for me, for Muslim women, it‘s more difficult to be accepted here, to get the right to remain […] When I walk into the job centre, for example, I see how they look at me, how they talk to me. They look down on me.

Hiba‘s story highlights how the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status can create additional barriers to accessing support. The way she felt seen and treated in society overall as a Muslim refugee woman, such as at the job centre, increased her anxiety about how this discrimination might affect her asylum claim. Her experience elucidates the heavy toll that a prolonged state of instability, closely tied to not receiving her rights and entitlements, has on refugee women’s mental health and well-being. Research has shown that women have poorer physical and mental health stemming from gender-specific challenges and traumas before, during and after flight (Cheung and Phillimore, 2017; Hollander et al., 2017; Keygnaert et al., 2014). The constant fear of return, dealing with complex bureaucratic systems, and often-times concern for their children’s wellbeing, all contribute to heightened levels of stress and anxiety (Vromans et al., 2021). 

The women’s experiences underscore the importance of considering a wide range of rights relevant to refugee women in Germany beyond citizenship and immigration policies, such as divorce rights, family law, reproductive rights and maternal care. While rights related to the public sphere such as language attainment and labour market integration are more commonly at the forefront of available migration studies (for example, Mihalcioiu, 2016; Verwiebe et al., 2019; Vogtenhuber et al., 2018), rights related to the private sphere were of high relevance to the women I interviewed. 

The stories of Ayla, Miran, Hiba and others illustrate how the interplay of various factors, such as gender, religion, family status and experiences of violence and discrimination, creates unique challenges for refugee women in accessing support. These diverse experiences underscore the limitations of existing research on refugee women’s lives, which, while increasingly recognising the significance of intersectionality, often focuses on a narrow set of predetermined identity categories, in particular gender and religion.

Embracing the broadness of the concept of intersectionality serves as a powerful tool to capture the complex reality of refugee women’s lives and the diverse range of factors that shape their access to rights and entitlements. By recognizing the multiple, intersecting barriers these women face, we may work towards developing more inclusive and responsive support systems that adequately address their unique needs and challenges. 

* Participants’ names have been changed for anonymity.

Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff is an ESRC-funded Doctoral Researcher at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research aims to better understand how refugee support organisations work with refugee women in small towns in Germany. She is also Head of Impact, Evaluation and Monitoring at Bristol Refugee Rights, a Bristol charity. 

The problem of promoting legal identities for all in anti-trafficking work

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Natalie Brinham.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in how a lack of legal identities, or state-issued documents, is connected to the risks of trafficking and modern slavery. As someone who has worked in human rights organisations on the statelessness of Rohingyas and others, I have been approached multiple times over the past year by NGOs and researchers looking to provide analysis and recommendations to donors and policy makers relating to this nexus.

Having advocated for the issue of statelessness to be better incorporated into other human rights agendas, I welcomed such interventions. Yet, in approaching these conversations I also felt a nagging sense of trepidation. It has been difficult to locate the source of my concern. After all, it is true that if the stateless people I have worked with had travel documents and/or citizenship they would not suffer the same forms of exploitation. So, if the anti-trafficking sector promotes legal identities as part of their strategies, that is a good thing, isn’t it?

A Rohingya passport from 1955 kept by a Rohingya refugee family in India (photo: Natalie Brinham)

Being identified and documented by a state is most often associated with rights and freedoms – we all have a ‘right’ to a legal identity, so we are told. The push for ‘legal identities for all’ is a core component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which strive to ‘Leave No One Behind’ in delivering inclusive and just development globally. Those who lack a legal identity are sometimes stateless – meaning they are not recognised as citizens in any state. The rationale behind the global campaign is two-fold: legal identities will deliver both rights and development to people who are undocumented or unregistered by any state.

From an international development perspective, people without a legal identity are not accounted for within national and international development plans and are therefore left out as beneficiaries. From a rights perspective, people who have no proof of residence or citizenship are often, in practice, unable to access a whole range of basic rights and services including education and healthcare. They are often unable to work in the formal economy, access judicial procedures or travel using ‘legal’ routes. Within these paradigms, the logical way to ensure access to rights and services is to provide unregistered and undocumented people with a legal identity, freeing them from their state of invisibility and irregularity. The lack of a legal identity can compound the risks of being exploited in the workplace or while crossing internal checkpoints and international borders. As such, work from within the anti-trafficking sector explores this key nexus between trafficking and legal identities/statelessness.

The situation for Rohingyas is often used as an example of the worst consequences of being deprived of a legal identity and being trafficked. Stripped of citizenship in their home country, Myanmar, they have been contained in the conditions of apartheid and subjected to genocidal violence and deportations. Those who have left the country live across Asia and beyond in situations of protracted displacement, inter-generational statelessness and labour exploitation, struggling to access safety, security and basic services. Images abound in the media of Rohingya stranded at sea in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea, prevented from landing by hostile state authorities, or beaten, raped, extorted and exploited by smugglers, state actors and members of ethnic armed groups. According to the ‘legal identities for all’ paradigm, trafficked and stateless Rohingya need states to provide registration and documents. From there state protections and rights can follow. 

But an important body of research reveals how anti-trafficking legislation and action plans can sometimes do more harm than good. For example, some approaches can criminalise people working in unregulated sectors of the economy, or they can shift the focus of initiatives from state policies and practices to criminal individuals and networks. Anti-trafficking discourses can be drawn on to legitimise hard borders and draconian immigration policies. What is perhaps given less attention is that the promotion of legal identities as a core component of international development policy can also do harm as well as good.

The ‘legal identities for all’ agenda has been accompanied by global growth in ID’ing technologies, which along with other border tech has consolidated the symbiotic relationships between state authorities and private tech companies that are largely unaccountable to anyone – both citizen and noncitizen. Development funding is increasingly premised and contingent on modernising ID systems. There is no evidence to suggest that these schemes reduce statelessness. Meanwhile, digitised and centralised ID systems have profoundly changed experiences of statelessness and other forms of noncitizenship. They can ‘lock in’ an irregular status. They can become a single access point for all services including health, education, banking, internet and mobile phones, and work licenses. As such, people without IDs become locked out the economic, social and political spheres.

With increasing requirements for documentation in all spheres, strategies for coping through informal economies are reduced. Further when used in conjunction with other border tech, ID systems can be misused against stateless or other groups as part of violent systems of surveillance, securitisation and apartheid. Digital ID systems, then, consolidate the power of states to both include and exclude. They can help states to move bordering practices from the physical infrastructure at border crossings to the everyday, less visible spaces. 

So, there is a source for my trepidation in these conversations about the nexus between legal identities and trafficking. Both anti-trafficking and legal identity discourses and agendas can be coopted to harden borders, illegalise economic activity and legitimise authoritarian state practices that exclude and segregate. But locating the source throws up many broader questions and dilemmas. With digitisation and centralisation of national and international ID and bordering schemes, states are not the only powerful actors governing through citizenship regimes. Instead, oligopolies – states in conjunction with tech companies and international financial institutions – control both movement and identification practices. How, then, in advocating for rights and social justice, do we move beyond supporting more individuals to access documents and anti-trafficking services, to holding these oligopolies of identity providers to account for exclusions and bureaucratic violence?

Natalie Brinham is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2024-2027) at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol where she is working on her research project ‘Countering citizenship stripping in times of war: IDs and autonomy’. Her new book, Genocide and Citizenship Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance (Routledge 2024), is available via open access here.

Natalie has written previously about statelessness on the MMB blog in her post ‘Looking for the “state” in statelessness research’. Other MMB posts on Rohingyas include ‘Myanmar’s discriminatory citizenship law: are Rohingyas the only victims? – Migration Mobilities Bristol’ by Ali Johar.

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‘Slaves’, migrants and museums: the struggle for places of African memory in Brazil

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Julio D’Angelo Davies.

Brazil is built on slavery. It was the Americas’ largest importer of enslaved Africans, with Rio de Janeiro serving as the country’s main port of entry. Despite receiving nearly half of these five million enslaved people, Brazil’s former capital (1763-1960) did not have a single museum nor permanent exhibition on this key aspect of its transnational history until December 2021, when the Museum of History and Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUHCAB) was inaugurated in Rio’s Little Africa neighbourhood. The black presence that is a legacy of slavery has historically been neglected or erased in ideological storytelling about the nation (Lopes de Santos, 2023). Brazil’s widespread investment in museums and simultaneous negligence of places of Afro-Brazilian memory is indicative of how it still struggles to overcome centuries of racism and inequality. The federal government’s 2023 announcement of another African heritage museum near MUHCAB suggests that the city’s lack of memorialisation of the history of slavery is gradually being rectified.

Remnants of Valongo Wharf Heritage Site in Rio de Janeiro, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Until the 1770s slave traders’ human cargo was off-loaded at Praia do Peixe docklands then sold at Rua Direita, the main street in colonial Rio de Janeiro. But in 1774, it was determined that the Peixe docks were not the ‘appropriate’ site to receive ‘Africans arriving full of diseases and wandering naked on Rua Direita’ (Ribeiro, 2020). With a view to ‘protecting Brazilians’ Cais do Valongo was established as an alternative port of entry for the enslaved Africans, receiving around 900,000 of them in total.

Trafficked people arriving in Valongo were transferred to a quarantine hospital built by slave traders known as Lazaretto. The survivors were ‘fattened’ before being sold in commercial houses near Valongo. Those who did not survive were taken to the Cemetery of New Blacks. It is estimated that here, between 1772 and 1830, some 20,000 to 30,000 corpses were disposed of without proper burial or funeral, thrown one on top of the other and eventually incinerated. After the closure of Valongo in 1831, Brazilian businessmen continued to openly import trafficked Africans until the 1850s in remote coastal places despite the international prohibition of the slave trade.

Commercial slavery houses near Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Today, the Institute of Research and Memory New Blacks (Instituto de Pesquisa e Memória Pretos Novos, IPN) stands above the site of the cemetery. It is one of only two places memorialising slavery in Rio and was founded in 2005 after an accidental discovery. As explained on a plaque at the museum entrance, IPN director Merced Guimarães originally bought an old house on the plot to renovate as a home for her family. On the first day of rebuilding the foundations, however, a large quantity of human remains was discovered and it was eventually concluded that this was a burial site for enslaved Africans. Dislodged from their residence, Merced’s family moved to the warehouse where their small business operated. They camped out here for four years waiting for support from municipal and federal governments to fully excavate the site and create a memorial. Tired of waiting, they returned to their plot of land. With the support of activists, researchers and friends, Merced’s family worked to create a memorial to the enslaved. Since its opening, IPN has survived with little state support and investment.

The second site of memory also derives from an accidental discovery (Andrade Lima, 2020). In the preparations to host the 2016 Olympics, the downtown streets of Rio de Janeiro were dug up to build a tram system and in 2011 construction workers uncovered the remnants of Cais do Valongo. This was designated by UNESCO in 2017 as a World Heritage Site in recognition of it being the remains of the most significant landing point of human trafficking in the Americas.

The excavations of this site, led by Brazilian archaeologist Tania Andrade Lima, found many personal objects such as charms, ornaments, small children’s rings and sacred objects from Congo, Angola and Mozambique: ‘These urban slaves did not have many belongings and everything of theirs was perishable, made of straw, of cloth. We found some elements of personal use and some objects related to children,’ Andrade Lima said in an interview to O Globo in 2014. However, these important and powerful finds still wait for a home in a permanent museum where they can be displayed to the public.

The two sites that now memorialise the lives and deaths of enslaved people arriving at Valongo are a powerful testimony to civil society and Black struggles for recognition as well as to official neglect. The fact that at the same moment as Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings were in the public eye Rio’s mayor funded the USD 100 million Museum of Tomorrow, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, suggests that this has been a matter of prioritisation rather than lack of funds (Freelon, 2017). The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill are testaments to the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been obscured by private and public actors.

Celebrating Brazil’s ethnic and racial diversity, São Paulo and Rio inaugurated immigration museums in 1993 and 2010, respectively. Both spaces were formerly quarantine hostels for European, Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants, inaugurated in 1883 in Rio and 1887 in São Paulo. But migration has been racialised as white in Brazil. Unlike ‘slaves’, migrants are typically imagined as European bearers of the culture at the centre of the country’s ‘melting pot’. In 2004 the Afro-Brazil Museum was founded in São Paulo thanks to the efforts of Emanoel Araújo, who explains: ‘this story could not be told from the official viewpoint, which insists on minimizing the African heritage as the matrix that forms a national identity, ignoring a saga of more than five centuries of history’ (Araújo, nd). Meanwhile, Salvador, the capital of Bahia, Brazil’s blackest state, only had its Museum of Afro-Brazilian National Culture inaugurated in 2009.

Future museum overlooking Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

In March 2023, Brazil’s federal government finally announced a USD 3 million project to convert the warehouse facing Valongo into a museum, expected to be inaugurated in November 2026. The building was constructed in 1871 by Brazilian black engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças, who forbade the use of an enslaved labour force in the construction 17 years before the official Abolition of Slavery (1888). Activists and civil society refused to name it the Slavery Museum to avoid further stigmatising and dehumanising of the victims. The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill all highlight the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been sidelined by private and public actors in the epicentre of the Transatlantic slave trade. Thanks to civil society, activists and academics, the memorialisation of African heritage is gaining increasing attention in the 21st century.

Julio D’Angelo Davies is an anthropologist focussing on migrations, diasporas, gender and processes of nation-formation and racialisation. In 2022 he completed his PhD in Anthropology at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil). Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, his thesis discusses the formation of Lebanese diasporas in Montreal (Canada). He worked as Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2022-2024) on the project Modern Marronage?: the Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World led by Professor Julia O’Connell Davidson. 

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Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.

Transnational borders: from containment to freedom

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 Miriam Ticktin.

Borders as infrastructure

As I looked out the car window in Calais at the enormous white mesh razor-wire lined fences, the surveillance towers and the starkness of the militarized landscape, I felt an eerie sense that I had been there before. I looked back at my photos from my trip to the border zone at Ceuta, between Morocco and Spain: the same mesh border fence structure, barbed wire and militarized landscape, and people and cars being funnelled towards guard booths. I had the same sense of foreboding, the same disorientation. The space felt at once uninhabited, and yet it seemed that eyes were everywhere. The local birds nesting in the Calais barbed wire were the main differentiating feature.

This visit to Calais with MMB last April made it very clear to me that national borders are transnational creations. Even though border walls purport to be the materialization of national sovereignty – deriving from and protecting an essential, inner national identity – they are created by transnational, border-crossing technologies, designs and networks. They are recognizable transnational types; indeed, there is very little that is nationally unique. Calais and Ceuta felt similar because they are constituted by the same designs and infrastructures, possibly even built by the same companies. Such border walls and zones could not exist without the transnational circulation of commodities and architectures.

Figure 1. Calais border zone, 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 2. Border crossing from Morocco into Ceuta, Spain, 2016 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)

To aid in this process, there are annual global Border Security Expo’s, which draw tech companies and government officials from around the world in the name of fighting transnational organized crime and terrorism. I attended one of these in 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, with the Multiple Mobilities Collective. Israeli companies lead the way, profiting from the fact that Gaza ‘is a great laboratory’ (Miller and Schivone 2015), creating what some have dubbed the laboratory of ‘the Palestine-Mexico border’ (Miller 2019) where technologies are tried out and data is shared.

Humanitarian infrastructures are also part of this transnational border complex; various types of migrant and refugee camps can be found alongside border walls to simultaneously rescue, contain and incarcerate people on the move. I saw these in Ceuta and on the Moroccan side of the border crossing. In Calais, the container camp that eventually replaced the so-called Jungle – photos of which were displayed at the Fort Vert bird blind, overlooking the now destroyed and remade area of the Jungle – was one such infrastructure (Figures 3 and 4). While the Jungle had complex beginnings, including a mix of organized state abandonment and autonomous organizing (Van Isacker 2020), it ended up being run by humanitarians, who replaced the informal housing and living spaces with shipping containers they could control and surveil (Ticktin 2016). Humanitarian structures such as refugee camps have their own architectures, meant to demonstrate temporariness while anchored in hard, material realities. They are at once ephemeral and carceral (Siddiqui 2024).

Figure 3. Official representation of the history of the ‘Jungle,’ Fort Vert, April 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 4. The ‘Jungle’ beside the replacement humanitarian container camp (photo: Léopold Lampert)

These various transnational technologies and designs circulate in the name of national closure. As they travel, they produce and reproduce a political imagination of what a border looks like, what it means to be a secure nation-state, and even what it means to rescue people without compromising borders. Such transnational technologies and infrastructures both produce and justify exclusion and carcerality, rendering racism legitimate.

Borders as people

The transnational nature of borders is also created, marked and made by the people who travel to counter them, to unmake them; that is, by the activists, organizers and academics (like myself!) who work to document, undo, undermine or subvert borders. In other words, many of the movements that challenge borders are also, unsurprisingly, transnational. They are predictably found at many border zones, part of the infrastructure even as they work to undo them. I want to focus on the people-part of the infrastructure (Simone 2004), and the making of the border by way of complexly layered forms of antagonism and cooperation.

No-borders activists, for instance, share knowledge about how to enact sea rescues; they track migrant boats to help when they land; they support people on the move in preparation for their journeys, from providing ziplock bags to keep cell phones dry, to giving informal legal advice. Some call this a version of the ‘underground railroad’, referring to the network of safehouses for those who were enslaved in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, to escape into free states and Canada. Yet while visiting Dover and Calais, it became clear that not only do the knowledge and strategies travel, there is a transnational circuit of people who embody this knowledge, and who circulate too. There were people who had cut their teeth on organizing around the Mediterranean, from Lesbos to Lampedusa, and by fighting border regimes like Frontex. Calais was another stop on this circuit, where people came to help with small boat crossings from Calais to Dover.

The same groups also regularly work with people on the move to occupy abandoned buildings and set up collective living spaces or squats. Informed by scholarship on the topic, they are artists, anarchists, academics and lawyers. I became keenly aware that I, too, am part of these circuits: I have traveled to many border zones, to research and act against them. We embody knowledge to challenge border regimes, attempting to enact unpartitioned visions of the world. Perhaps paradoxically, this layering of political movements and the movement of people working for and against borders helps to create the transnational border and render it recognizable across national contexts.

Borders for whom?

If national borders are created by transnational movement and movements, how about the people they are designed to catch, stop, protect or enable? Even as there is a commensurability between the infrastructures of borders and no-borders, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is harder to name those that we are there to either work with or against; they are the least recognizable as transnational ‘types.’ To be sure, there are social and political movements that have created migrant collective subjects. As I wrote in my first book (Ticktin 2011), the ‘sans papiers’ movement both created and was created by a different collective political subject, the sans papiers themselves, who worked against criminalization by changing their name. Yet, those who move across borders today are perhaps not as easily named or recognized. In part, this is because of the transnational nature of the border: these are not just national struggles, but transnational ones. People move for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of ways.

‘People on the move’ is a name that migrants and no-borders activists have used to get away from legal categories like refugee or economic migrant, which are built on hierarchy and exclusion. And yet, there was no consensus when talking to activists in Calais about what term to use in French: each had a lack. While the term ‘sans papiers’ was still used, it was not ideal, because not all people on the move are without papers; some have temporary papers, some have the wrong papers. They suggested that some use the phrase, ‘personnes exilées’ (people in exile, or exiled people); and yet it is not clear that all people on the move feel to be in exile, not least because there is not always a consistent place from which to be exiled. They mentioned ‘personnes bloquées à la frontière’ or those stopped at the border, but some are stopped in national interiors, and some stop for other reasons. There was the concept of ‘personnes en transit’ – people in transit or transitory people – but the activists pointed out that this has been appropriated by the right, to suggest that people should NOT stay, that France and other places should be transit zones and not permanent residences.

New scholarship is starting to explore the different concepts used to name people on the move, each of which have their own political histories and ontologies: from ‘harraga’, or those who burn borders, in the Tunisian context (M’Charek 2020) to ‘touduke’, or those who steal across borders, from the Chinese context (Chen 2023).

Even as many of us try to create alternative political imaginations of the world to enable everyone to move, to stay and to flourish – politics is, after all, a battle over imagination (Dunne and Raby 2018; Ticktin 2022), where the imagination can help us maintain pre-existing realities or denaturalize the ‘real’ – the inability to ‘capture’, name or fully know those who move suggests that they will remain elusive, their desires and reasons opaque. While borders have an increasingly material, transnational presence, this unknowable Otherness continues to exist, and rather than trying to overcome it, we should respect it as a basic source of freedom.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP). She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press (2025).

Listen to Miriam’s Insights and Sounds interview with MMB Director Bridget Anderson on ‘Invasive Others: Plants? People? Pathogens?’.

The racist politics of ‘mindless thuggery’

Posted on by Emily

By Dan Godshaw, Ann Singleton and Bridget Anderson.

We pay respect to the memory of the children killed and to those injured in Southport as well as their families.

In early August 2024 the UK experienced a wave of fascist violence and organised hate of the kind not witnessed since the 1980s. Far right activists ignited unrest throughout the country (largely England and Northern Ireland). Bricks, bats, boots and fists rained down on Black and brown people. Asylum hotels were attacked, set on fire and daubed with racist graffiti. Mosques, advice centres and immigration lawyers were threatened. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described this hateful violence as the ‘mindless’ actions of ‘thugs’, but this wilfully ignores the politics of these events, stripping them of their economic and political meaning and potential remedy. The violence is racist violence, an assertion of white supremacy. A criminal justice crackdown is not enough. Counter demonstrations and chants – ‘we are many, you are few’ and ‘migrants are welcome here’ – show the strength of solidarity and opposition to racism, but they too are not enough. These are responses to symptoms, not to the underlying problems.

Anti-racist protestors in Manchester, UK, August 2024 (image: Mylo Kaye on Unsplash)

Analysing the symptoms is critical to understanding what led to this violence. The original pretext for the unrest was the false claim that the young man (at 17 years old, legally a child) arrested for the murder of three children in Southport had arrived in the UK on a small boat as an asylum seeker. He was, in fact, born and brought up in Cardiff and Lancashire but he was later unnecessarily identified as a ‘child of immigrants’. Those targeted for attack have been ‘non-whites’, asylum seekers and Muslims: ‘Get them out’, ‘Stop the boats’, ‘We want our country back’, ‘England,’ the rioters shouted. Resistance by allies of those targeted has been met with chants of ‘You’re not British anymore’. White Britishness is being used to rally ‘pro-British’ mobs. This mix of hostility to migration, racism and Britishness matters. Because while racism is not acceptable in polite society, hostility to migrants is too often represented and made respectable by the framing of ‘legitimate grievances’. In a statement later denounced by other Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) one of the country’s most senior police officers, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight PCC and chair of the Association of PCCs, put it like this:

The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values? This is the biggest challenge facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Hostility to immigration and asylum has been drip-fed into political consciousness for more than a century, emerging from a long history of colonial racism. But in recent years the demonisation of asylum seekers has held a central place in British institutional politics. ‘Stop the boats’ is a slogan made ‘respectable’ by both former Conservative and current Labour ministers. Migrant numbers have been represented as an external, existential threat by successive Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries. Asylum was effectively outlawed by the Conservative’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act, but it was under the 1997 New Labour Government that the term ‘asylum seeker’ moved from a description of a legal status to a form of abuse. Their term saw policies become fixated on reducing asylum numbers, the withdrawal of asylum seekers’ permission to work and the dramatic expansion of the privately run immigration detention estate. This has for decades inflicted foreseeable and preventable harm on people held in what Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor recently described as ‘truly shocking’ conditions, purely because of their immigration status.

The same New Labour Government introduced dispersal policies that housed asylum seekers away from support networks into cheap housing run by unaccountable private providers, often in areas where long-term residents were experiencing severe economic hardship and lack of investment. All these policies contributed to further division and toxifying of asylum politics, ‘othering’ asylum seekers and migrants. Racism is roundly decried, and rightly so, but migration ‘concerns’ are actively legitimised and cited as justification for more restrictive policies.

Across the world, human mobility is increasingly presented as a threat to citizens, with border deterrents a way to manage populations defined as surplus to the needs of capital. By framing migration as an invasion and drawing sharp lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, wealthy nation states  pursue a war on migration. Supported by a growing border industry, in which profits are made by corporations subcontracted to prevent, detect and deter unauthorised movement, states enact what activists and scholars have termed ‘border violence’, resulting in death and injury. Violent borders such as razor-wire topped fences maim and trap people in ‘death zones’ between states; these borders are internalised within bureaucracies, universities, hospital and schools; they exceed territoriality through boat and land pushbacks and offshore detention sites. The failure of national and European policies has fatal consequences. But rather than facing and responding to these failures, politicians blame the illegal and extortionate markets they themselves have created for human smuggling, claiming these are the sole cause of untold numbers of deaths during migration.

According to the narrative pushed by Starmer and others about the rioters, it is ‘thugs’ who get confused between migrants and the mosque-attending ‘multi-cultural’ public, or between asylum seekers and the social care worker going about her business. Yet the Windrush scandal demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that creating a ‘really hostile environment for illegal migration’ also means creating a really hostile environment for Black and brown people whatever their citizenship. As the poorly trained general population is increasingly drawn into immigration enforcement, often anxious to err on the side of the law they rely on race and/or ethnicity as a marker of national difference, thereby exposing how ideas of Britishness are in practice bound up with whiteness. As A. Sivanandan, former director of the Institute of Race Relations, observed many years ago ‘We all carry our passports on our faces’.

The phrase ‘mindless thuggery’ mobilises a slur used in the UK and the US against economically marginalised people who are also racialised. Austerity-driven economic policies have produced social and economic conditions that have pitched impoverished communities racialised as white against those racialised as Black and ‘other’. Migration policies focused on reducing people to the essentialised identity of ‘migrant’ have created legitimacy for these attacks. What is needed, alongside incisive placards, demonstrations and counter chants, is a political ground shift. Migration, as a fundamental dimension of human life, must be normalised and accounted for across all areas of public policy. The hostile environment must be dismantled. Politicians must stop scapegoating ‘migrants’ for the social harms of neoliberalism. Instead, they must address elite power and inequality, and invest in housing and public services. We have had enough of decades of state and corporate-driven violence at the border and elsewhere. With anything less than a fundamental shift in political discourse, racist violence on the street, whether random or organised, will not go away.

Dan Godshaw is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He specialises in migration, with a particular focus on state violence, immigration detention and the intersectional dimensions of border harms.

Ann Singleton is Reader in Migration Policy in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, and MMB Policy Strategic Lead. She is a leading expert in the production and use of international migration data in policy development.

Bridget Anderson is Director of MMB and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. She is currently co-PI on the research project Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe (PRIME).

Across the waters: Caribbean mobilities, itineraries, histories

Posted on by Emily

By Orlando Deavila Pertuz and Bethan Fisk.

What stories are told about the Caribbean? What do these narratives exclude? How can we broaden the story? And how can we teach a wider vision of the Caribbean to students of all ages and wider publics?

Orlando Deavila Pertuz from the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia, joined us at the University of Bristol in November 2023 to share his work on internal migration in Caribbean Colombia and take part in a workshop centred on how we tell stories about the Caribbean. Orlando’s perspective demonstrates the importance of including Latin American and mainland Caribbean mobilities, histories and cultural production to how we think about the region.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz shared his research on rural to urban migration from the former maroon community of Palenque, in Caribbean Colombia, to the city of Cartagena. Palenqueros, who speak their own creole language, experienced a profound racialisation with lack of access to employment and housing, and created enclaves and endogamous communities apart from the mainstream society, leading to the creation of what Deavila Pertuz calls the ‘first racial-based movements in Cartagena during the 1980s’. His work details the place of race in the production of urban space and how race guided the life experience of the rural migrants that flocked the city’s peripheries during the twentieth century.

Old city walls, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia (image: Justin Sovich on flickr)

Bridging the gap: stories from the Greater Caribbean

The Colombian Caribbean shares a common history with the islands and continental territories of the Caribbean basin. This is a history marked, mostly, by processes including colonialism, transatlantic slavery, the presence of imperial powers, the permanent flow and exchange of people, cultures, capital and goods, and, more recently, the contradictory effects of tourism development. Cartagena (or Cartagena de Indias) is a key site for understanding African diasporic and Caribbean history. The city was the centre of the Spanish American slave trade for two centuries, the colony’s most important port, home to the Inquisition with jurisdiction over the whole region, and a major place of afrodescendiente political mobilisation in Colombia’s nineteenth-century revolutionaries wars, independence and beyond. Black mobilities during and after slavery have long connected the long northern coast of South America to the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. Indeed, the Caribbean was fundamental to Colombia’s independence. When Spanish royalists defeated Simon Bolívar during the early years of the war of independence, he found asylum in the British colony of Jamaica and later in Haiti. The Republic offered ships and weapons to Bolívar so he might resume the struggle for independence. However, by the twentieth century, Colombian elites had turned their back on the Caribbean.

While nineteenth-century architects of the nation sought to de-Caribbeanise the newly named ‘Atlantic’ coast, it continued to be shaped by movements and cultural flows from and between the islands throughout the twentieth century, through labour migration—most notably West Indian workers for the United Fruit Company including Marcus Garvey—to the popularity of baseball and boxing. Deavila Pertuz asks, how do we make a history of Colombia as part of the Greater Caribbean? How do we bridge the gap that Colombian elites created since the nineteenth century?

Caribbean stories across borders

The Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe, founded in 1993, has been at the forefront of the academic endeavour of reintegrating the northern coast of South America into conceptions of and studies of the Caribbean. One of the key reasons for meeting was a workshop to collectively think through how we can have broader stories about the Caribbean across borders, whether those be boundaries of empire, language or discipline, and within academia, educational institutions and beyond.

With an eye to thinking about how we can broaden understandings of the Caribbean in diverse educational settings, Deavila Pertuz traced the pioneering work of the Instituto in the creation of teaching materials. Materials included school primers entitled ‘Afrodescendants in Cartagena: A Story To Be Told’ (2011) matched with archival documents from the Centro de Documentación para la Historia y la Cultura de los Afrodescendientes en el Caribe Colombiano (CEDACC) (the Centre for Documentation of the History and Culture of the Afrodescendants in the Colombian Caribbean). Its purpose is to facilitate access for local researchers, teachers and students to archival sources held in the General Archive of the Nation in Bogotá and the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. Once established, CEDACC facilitated the creation of new knowledge, not only about the city’s history but also about these historical processes, such as the slavery, independence and colonialism that the northern coast of Colombia shared with the Greater Caribbean. In order to make this content accessible to a wider audience, the Instituto produced a CD collection with key sources of transcribed archival documents. In 2013, it also launched a short documentary series called ‘Cartagena: piel de cimarrones’, exploring histories of slavery, independence, cultural production and the experiences of Afro-Colombian women.

Towards broader Caribbean stories

The workshop in Bristol was concluded with an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion from colleagues in Anthropology, Education, English and HiPLA (Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies), along with local teachers and some brilliant year nine students. Some crucial collaborations emerged which form the basis of a future project that will bring together community groups, schools and teachers to co-produce resources for teaching a multilingual, multi-imperial and multi-ethnic history of the early modern Caribbean.

Bethan Fisk is Lecturer in Colonial Latin American History in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on slavery, cultural geographies and the production of knowledge by people of African and indigenous descent in Colombia and the African diaspora.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz is Assistant Professor at the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia. As a social and urban historian his work focuses on the history of the development of tourism, the informal city and the construction of race and ethnicity in modern-day Colombia.

Bodies, things, capital – intersections in our research themes

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Zhang.

As co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital’ I have been reading our recent blogs under this theme and am struck by the range and depth of the projects. They cross many contexts, disciplines and research fields, and engage with critical debates around (in)justice, vulnerability, borders and the politics of (im)mobility. From Jo Crow’s personal reflections on the broader implications of economic and social immobility in Argentina through a historical lens to Julia Morris’ poetic account on the damaging politics of ‘value extraction’ through offshore asylum processing in the Republic of Nauru; from Rebecca Yeo’s critiques on the disabling impact of the UK’s immigration control measures to Şebnem Eroğlu’s observation of the long-lasting generational poverty among Turkish migrants in Europe, these blogs provoke thoughtful discussions and raise fundamental questions about the politics of movements through bodies, things and capital. These accounts challenge us to think more critically about the multiple intersections of personal experiences, structural inequalities, infrastructural barriers, historical legacies, and geopolitical shifts on both local and global scales. These reflections and scholarly engagements are central to our research at Migration Mobilities Bristol.

(Image: Eddie Aguirre, UnSplash)

Bodies

Bodies are intimate sites of encounter – with borders, checkpoints, institutions, infrastructures, policies, biases and discriminatory politics. It is pertinent to recognise the ways in which migrant bodies are intersectionally positioned within and across systems, and this positioning is influenced by various factors including gender, class and race, as well as immigration status (legal or illegal), moral claims (deserving or underserving), and capacities (shaped by disability or other forms of vulnerability). The blogs also prompt us to consider the colonial and contemporary contexts that influence how bodies are perceived and treated.

Julia Morris’ ethnographic work on asylum and extraction, for example, compares the extractive logic in both Nauru’s mineral and asylum processing industries. The colonial legacy of phosphate mining in this island nation finds an uncanny reiteration of a ‘hyper-extractive assemblage’ in modern-day outsourced asylum processing centres, lending particular ‘political, economic and moral values to the global asylum industry’. In this context, the bodies of asylum-seekers become a kind of resource, exploited and commodified in a way not that different from processing phosphate. At the same time, Nauruans themselves are depicted by global media campaigns and refugee activists as ‘savages’ of cruelty, a racialised and stigmatised image rooted in colonial-era stereotypes.

In other blogs under my Research Challenge theme, critical discussions also extend to how migrant bodies are judged based on an (often) arbitrary assessment of ability and the perceived deservability, which influence decisions on vital matters such as access to social services and support, and family reunification in the UK. When bodies encounter policies and perceptions in these intertwined realms, it provides an impetus for urgent scholarly interventions in popular politics, especially at a moment when ‘one in five Britons say that immigration is one of the top issues facing the country’, and the UK’s Rwanda plan continues to stir controversy and deepen socio-political divisions.    

Things

Things offer another analytical engagement with materialities, spatialities and temporalities in migration, through which social relations and identities are shaped and evolved. Things can be objects (for example, passports, visas, maps and tickets) and systems (for example, policies, rules, processing facilities, services), as well as larger transnational bodies (for example, activist groups and NGOs) and infrastructures (for example, media, national services, and cross-national agreements). Things can be physical and metaphorical, and they highlight how movements intersect with broader contexts of trade, exchange and securitisation. Borders are a good example of things – they can be barriers or productive pathways, depending on who (and what) is crossing them. Offshore processing centres in Nauru become de facto maritime borders for Australia, where immigration control is outsourced and externalised. The Jungle in Calais demonstrates another case in point of externalised bordering, where no safe passage is provided by design, in order to deter migrant crossing into the UK. Things such as tents, makeshift dwellings, and temporary shelters are targeted by the French border police to enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people on the move from establishing a sense of stable connection to the city and forcing them to move on or go into hiding.

Apart from borders, urban transport infrastructure offers another interesting take on things, where domestic workers in Latin America, predominantly women, struggle with long commuting hours and concerns for discrimination and crime. While public transport allows workers to travel to their employers’ homes, it is woefully inadequate in terms of providing efficient and reliable services or a safe space for female workers to be comfortable with their daily commute. Essential infrastructures such as public transport are things inherently gendered and classed, as they mediate movements and mobilities in highly embodied and differentiated ways.

Capital      

Capital emerges as another compelling common thread that brings together reflections on value, differentiation and the infrastructuralisation of ‘extractive politics’ through the control and channelling of local and global flows of humans, resources, knowledge and policy frameworks. It is curious to see how the example of offshore asylum processing in Nauru gains instant ‘political capital’ in the UK, when top decision makers use it as a success model to justify sending asylum seekers to Rwanda as a winning solution. The income-tested immigration rule in the UK also effectively monetises the right to family reunification, turning a universal right into a kind of money game, where the right to bring family to the UK comes with a hefty price tag of £29,000, an income the majority of the working population do not earn. This approach reflects a transactional view on migration, where people are either regarded as assets or liabilities to the capital system, rather than human beings with intrinsic social and familial rights. Even for those who have successfully migrated, like the Turkish migrants in Europe described by Şebnem Eroğlu, structural inequalities and systemic racism create barriers for them to transfer social and cultural capital in meaningful ways, thereby limiting their opportunities to capitalise on these resources for a better life. These cases demonstrate how migration policies and individual lives are impacted by a profound ‘capital logic’, where extractive politics are normalised to maximise accumulation and sideline fundamental ethical considerations.

Multimodal methodologies

In addition to tracing conceptual connections around bodies, things and capital in these blogs, I have also noted the development of multimodal methodologies, particularly creative and art-based methods focusing on participatory designs and artistic interventions. These approaches have effectively bridged the gap between academic research, public engagement and activism. Other innovative methods, including data visualisation and participant mapping techniques, open up possibilities for experimenting with data collection and analysis. Sylvanna Falcon and her team, for example, use data visualisation techniques to map violence against migrants in Mexico while cautioning against the dehumanisation of migrants who disappear into ‘datasets’. Robledo and Randall’s Invisible Commutes project utilises short audio segments to document experiences of daily commutes by domestic workers, as well as their perspectives on critical mobility infrastructure in the city. The incorporation of migrant voices lends a significant feminist perspective to issues of transport justice.

This Research Challenge has brought diverse researchers and their perspectives and methods together, a kind of assembling of bodies, things and capital in its own right. There is clear potential for developing collaborations and innovating strategies of research practice and intervention in the future, as this Research Challenge brings forward MMB’s commitment to informing academic and public dialogues on migration and mobilities across disciplines and borders.

Juan Zhang is 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 of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’

Why do we use the term ‘irregular migration’ and can it be translated?

Posted on by Emily

By Edanur Yazici and Bridget Anderson.

The term ‘illegal immigration’ is often used in discussions about immigration but is widely agreed to be pejorative, misleading, and stigmatising by scholars, refugee and migrant groups, and across the third sector. Instead, ‘irregular migration’ has become the preferred term, especially in Europe. However, this term can be confusing and unclear – especially when translated into different languages, as we are doing in our work with the PRIME Project to understand employers’ use of migrant labour.

As one employer told us: ‘I can’t give an answer to this, I don’t know. I just don’t know the difference between regular and irregular.’

This post looks into how we define irregular migration in different contexts and examines the challenges and insights gained from translating the term into five languages in a survey of employers.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Surveying employers: defining irregularity

Choosing and defining a term is political, and what is chosen might not always be clear to everyone. There is increasing recognition that ‘who counts as a migrant’ is very uncertain: is a ‘migrant’ defined by their citizenship, how long they’ve stayed in a place, or their intentions to remain? In addition, in migration studies, there’s an increasing recognition of the critical role race plays in how we understand migration. This perspective considers how border policies and practices contribute to the construction of racial identities. Additionally, it emphasises that the term ‘migrant’ itself acts as a form of racialisation.

This uncertainty around the term migration, as well as its association with race, is compounded by the term ‘irregularity’ and other frequently used descriptors such as ‘illegal’, ‘undocumented’ and ‘sans papiers’. These descriptors, including ‘irregularity’ (the term we adopt in PRIME) do not describe a fixed category. They are instead ambiguous, contested, and exist on a spectrum. Types and degrees of irregularity are continuously shaped and reshaped by various stakeholders, including policymakers, migrants, and employers.

The PRIME Project is working to explore how national and sector-specific institutions shape employers’ engagement with migrant labour. As a part of this we are conducting a survey of employers to find our about their labour needs. Before launching the survey, we ran a three-stage pilot. We used the pilot to understand how employers think about migration and what terms make the most sense to them. All pilot respondents employ migrant workers and most of them have contributed to national-level policy debates on migration. Piloting the survey highlighted key issues with terminology and translation. Below, we describe what the pilot asked employers about and how employers understood the terms chosen.

How do employers understand the term ‘irregular migration’?

To start with, we need to understand what employers think about when they describe ‘irregular migration’ and how they understand irregularity.

Our pilot survey asked respondents to tell us who they thought would be categorised as ‘irregular’ and gave them a list of descriptions such as ‘a worker who entered the country illegally’ and ‘a worker who is an asylum seeker.’ Of the pilot respondents, all but one said that they didn’t know.  

We revised the question to ask who they would ‘describe as an illegal migrant’ (with the caveat that ‘defining who is an “illegal migrant” can be complicated’), and this was considered much more accessible.  While more readily understood, the decision to use terminology that has been rejected as stigmatising poses its own set of ethical and definitional challenges. In particular, it raises the question of how migration scholars communicate their ethical and political standpoints to audiences who may not always share their preferred terminology when conducting research.

Who is a citizen?

To analyse factors shaping how and why employers recruit (irregular) migrant workers, we also need to understand how and why they employ non-migrant workers. To do this, we need to understand how employers think about different categories of citizenship and belonging. Different national assumptions about this became evident in the translation.

UK

In the UK English language version of the survey we piloted, we asked: ‘Do you find it difficult to recruit workers with British citizenship?’. All pilot respondents reacted negatively to this phrasing, variously suggesting that we use ‘domestic workers’, ‘workers within the UK’, or ‘national workers’ instead. One respondent suggested PRIME might distinguish between ‘native British citizens’ and ‘British citizens who are foreigners’.

We reformulated the question to ask: ‘Do you find it difficult to recruit British workers?’. This particular wording reveals the different ways that migration status and race intersect. Who, for example, are respondents likely to imagine when asked about ‘British workers’ and what alternative assumptions would have been made if we had decided to use ‘national worker’ or ‘domestic worker’ – each with their own particular nativist underpinnings?

Sweden

The term ‘Swedish workers’ (Svenska arbetstagare) presented a problem for the survey in Sweden. One pilot respondent suggested re-phrasing the question to ask about ‘workers born in Sweden who speak Swedish as their mother tongue’. This suggested re-phrasing carries assumptions about place of birth and linguistic ability as intrinsically related to ‘Swedishness’. Swedish official categories add another layer of complexity, particularly for comparative international research. Official terms used by state actors in Sweden are: ‘foreign background’ (a person born outside of Sweden or born in Sweden with two foreign-born parents) and ‘Swedish background’ (a person born in Sweden with one or two parents also born in Sweden). Foreignness, birth, and background each point to how the state and official agencies relate to race, migration, and citizenship, each with distinct implications for how irregularity is conceptualised across different national and sectoral contexts. 

The terms Austrian/Italian/Polish workers were not problematic, but the term ‘migrant worker’ raised queries.

Who is a ‘migrant’ worker?

Poland

In Polish, ‘migrant worker’ was translated into ‘foreign worker’ rather than ‘migrating’ or ‘migrant’ worker. In Polish ‘foreign worker’ (pracownicy cudzoziemscy) is more readily understood and the alternative ‘migrant worker’ risks being confused with ‘migrants’, which some interpret as non-citizens and others interpret as Polish citizens who have returned to Poland having been migrant workers in other countries.

Italy

As in Polish, in Italian, ‘migrant worker’ was translated to ‘foreign workers’ (stranieri/e). This was preferred because it is the term used by the Italian Statistical Institute. As in the Swedish context, the adoption of state-sanctioned terminology has implications for conceptualising ‘migrantness’ and ‘foreignness’. These differing conceptualisations are exposed by translation. In this way, the process of translation itself becomes a site of data collection.

Austria

Decisions made about translation and what they communicate about national and institutional contexts are also evident in word choice. In the Austrian context, three variations of the German for ‘migrant workers’ were piloted before settling on a term (migrantische Arbeitskräfte – which roughly translates to migrant worker) that respondents would feel relatively comfortable with.

Looking forward and implications for research

Translation highlights how we attempt to strike a balance between familiarity for respondents and accuracy and ethics for researchers. It opens up questions about the constraints and limitations of methodological nationalism, current academic orthodoxy, and the way the vernacular shapes how we think and know.  

Designing, translating, and piloting the PRIME Employer survey has helped us think through some of these challenges. As we move forward with data collection and analysis and later use survey findings to begin qualitative data collection, we will no doubt encounter barriers and opportunities when conceptualising (ir)regularisation and researching the intersection of race and migration status.

As the study progresses, we will continue to reflect on what our linguistic and methodological choices mean for how we understand and ask for irregularity. We will interrogate what has informed our choices and question how respondents have reacted to them.

Can you help us connect to employers?

The PRIME Employer survey is open until July for employers and labour providers in Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, or the UK working in any of the following sectors:

  • agriculture and food processing;
  • older adult care;
  • restaurants; and
  • waste management and recycling sectors.

If you know an employer in the categories above who would be willing to share their experience, please ask them to complete the survey here:

In English | In German | In Italian | In Polish  | In Swedish

Edanur Yazici is a Research Associate on the PRIME Project based in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, co-PI of the PRIME Project and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol.

Hysteria and disinterest: accommodating asylum seekers

Posted on by Emily

By Melanie Griffiths.

The UK’s asylum system is in crisis. Despite the government’s rhetoric, this is largely a crisis of the Home Office’s own making. Years of painfully slow decision-making has created a massive backlog of tens of thousands of people. The recent political hysteria around small boats crossing the Channel and the cruel, fear-mongering policies to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, are attempts to distract from these failings. This includes the inhumane – but entirely predictable – crisis of asylum housing, produced as the need for accommodation has outstripped supply. At a time of fervent emotionality around asylum, this blogpost uses one person’s story to focus in on the disastrous impact of the asylum backlog on the UK’s fragmenting portfolio of asylum accommodation. 

Missing in the system

A friend rang me recently in a panic. A worried family in his country of origin was trying to track down a family member missing in the UK. Their son – I’ll call him Daniyal – had disappeared a fortnight previously, hours after arriving looking for safety.

Daniyal had called his family to reassure them he had survived the dangerous Channel crossing and approached the authorities for protection. But immediately afterwards, he had become uncontactable.

Until recently, asylum seekers were generally housed in the community while their claims were decided. Although notoriously inadequate, such housing allowed a degree of ‘normality’ and social connection. But as the asylum backlog has outstripped Home Office accommodation, the picture has altered significantly.

I suspected Daniyal was lost somewhere in the monstrously convoluted and rapidly diversifying asylum housing system. Armed with just his name and GPS coordinates from his last phone call, I started by contacting detention NGOs.

Indefinite detention

For decades, the UK incarcerated people in immigration detention centres principally to remove them from the country. But since 2021, these ‘removal’ centres have been used for initial processing of newly arrived people.

Last year, the UK detained over 16,000 people in immigration detention, costing the taxpayer about £100 million. These prison-like centres detain people with no time limit and are notoriously harmful, with decades of reports documenting traumatisation, ill-health, violence and abuse. Using such sites to isolate and incarcerate people seeking safety reflects systemic mistrust and distaste towards them.

Yarls Wood Detention Centre, Bedford, 2015 (image: EYE DJ on flickr)

Diversified detention

After failing to find Daniyal in the detention estate, I turned to the newly established ‘quasi-detention’ spaces. These include disused military barracks, which have housed new arrivals for ‘processing’ since 2000 and have repeatedly been found to be inadequate and unsafe. Manston Barracks were described as ‘really dangerous’ by the independent inspector of borders, who found severe overcrowding and outbreaks of rare, contagious diseases. Moreover, in 2021, the High Court found the Home Office guilty of employing unlawful practices in holding asylum seekers at Napier Barracks.

Worryingly, such sites are categorised as outside of mainstream immigration detention and thus excluded from the scrutiny of official detention statistics. Holding asylum seekers in manifestly unsafe spaces, outside of the community and exempt from proper accountability, reflects underlying notions of contagion and disgust.

Fragmentation

But if Danyial had already been ‘processed’, he could be housed anywhere in a bewildering web of sites. Since 2020, this includes hotels, at a cost of £8 million a day. Thousands of asylum seekers have been housed in these ill-equipped places, with the international aid budget plundered in the process. Hotel residents suffer isolation, poor food and hygiene, worsening mental health and even deaths. They have become a magnet for xenophobic hatred and violent Far Right demonstrations, which the government has been accused of stoking.

Or Daniyal could be in one of the Home Office’s new mass asylum accommodation sites. This includes Wethersfield, which was opened in 2023 on a former airfield in a remote part of Essex. The last chief inspector of borders described an ‘overwhelming feeling of hopelessness’ there, warning of immediate risk of criminality, arson and violence.

Similarly, the controversial barge the Bibby Stockholm has housed asylum seekers since 2023. It has been plagued with problems since opening, including legionella bacteria in the water system. Residents describe it as overcrowded, claustrophobic, retraumatising and prison-like; remote, inaccessible and heavily securitised. Just weeks after it opened, a man tragically died onboard.

The sites differ, but they are united in forcing people into substandard, segregated living, subjecting them to dehumanising levels of danger, despair, punishment and abandonment.

Criminalisation

Or was Daniyal in prison? I launched a search with the ‘locate a prisoner’ service and rang individual prisons. But without a prisoner number, and with the Roman-alphabet spelling of Daniyal’s name uncertain, I got nowhere.

I then contacted Captain Support, an NGO that supports imprisoned foreign nationals at the prison nearest Daniyal’s last known location. They sent out information requests amongst their contacts. Eventually a prisoner reported seeing someone who might be Daniyal. Through a complex web of care and connection spanning international and domestic scales, we found him.

Daniyal was in prison, but why? With more digging we found that he had been charged with ‘illegal migration’ offences, even though article 31 of the Refugee Convention stipulates that people seeking refuge must not be punished for irregular entry. Increasingly, the government seeks to criminalise people for seeking safety, despite not offering legal alternative routes. Earlier this year, Ibrahima Bah – barely out of his teens – was sentenced to a decade of imprisonment for manslaughter, after the dinghy he was travelling on sank.

Across Europe, refugees rather than governments are being held accountable for increasingly deadly borders (see also the case of the El-Hiblu 3 in Malta). In the UK, the new Illegal Migration Act 2023 not only prosecutes and punishes those entering ‘illegally’ but allows the government to refuse to consider their refugee claims. Daniyal, Ibrahima, the El-Hiblu 3 and countless others are re-categorised from rights-bearing refugees into one of the most emotionally labile folk devils of our times: the deeply hated and feared, and highly racialised, figure of the ‘foreign criminal’.

Indifference

And yet, the UK’s response to Daniyal was also one of apathy and cruel disinterest. After several months imprisonment, Daniyal was given a release day but not told what would happen to him nor where in the housing labyrinth he would be sent. He spent weeks waiting in fearful uncertainty.

When the day came, Daniyal was just released from prison, with nowhere to go. Neither the Home Office nor Probation provided him with any support. The Home Office had a statutory duty to provide Daniyal with accommodation but they simply, and without explanation, did not house him. As an asylum seeker, he was forbidden from working and had no recourse to public funds, including night shelters. So, in the middle of winter and unable to speak English, Daniyal was abandoned into the horrors of indefinite street destitution.

‘A proud history of protecting refugees’?

An enormous human backlog has been created in the UK’s asylum system. The political response has been to punish and isolate those affected, including through crimes of refuge-seeking, a diversifying portfolio of quasi-penal, segregated and unsafe housing and through political spectacles such as deporting people to Rwanda. The government is attempting to distract us with fearmongering and inflammatory diatribe fuelling hate, disgust and mistrust.

And yet, the almost-garish emotionality of the immigration debate exists alongside a dehumanising disinterest. As I argued in a recent article, it is precisely this mix of splenetic emotionality and callous lack of emotion that not only characterises the immigration system but produces it, and paints certain people as degradable, deportable and disposable. How hopeful then, that as the government’s Safety of Rwanda Act is passed and asylum seekers violently bundled into detention centres for removal, we are witnessing a tide of public outrage and resistance, with hundreds of people coming together in emotional acts of empathy and solidarity.

Melanie Griffiths is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham. She works on mobility and immigration enforcement in the UK. This post relates to Melanie’s article in the recent Special Issue of Identities on ‘Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe’, discussed on the MMB blog by Ioana Vrăbiescu and Bridget Anderson. Previous MMB blogposts by Melanie include ‘The freedom to love: mixed-immigration status couples and the UK immigration system’, written with Candice Morgan-Glendinning.

More information about the Captain Support Network can be found here. Donations to a fundraiser for the network can be made here.