Category: Blog

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.

Access to healthcare: human right or civil liberty?

Posted on by Emily

By Ella Barclay.

A right to health is enshrined in many international agreements, indicating the perceived importance of wellness and accessible healthcare for the development and flourishing of individuals (UDHR, Art. 25:1; ICESCR, Art. 12.1; CEDAW, 12:1; CRC, Art. 24:1). Despite this, one of the main sites of immigration control targeted within the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ is the NHS, with the healthcare rights of undocumented migrants being largely compromised following the implementation of the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. Such policies constitute an intentional appeal to the public perception of migration as a strain on the UK’s public services. In framing these individuals as ‘criminals’ or ‘deviants’, it is far easier to justify their restriction of rights. However, the nation-state’s freedom to deny access to such rights for undocumented persons leads us to question whether these supposedly universal rights may actually be mere civil liberties.

The National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations (2015) introduced NHS charges for all those not ‘ordinarily resident’  within the UK, despite the NHS constitution outlining that access to care should be based on clinical need, not an individual’s ability to pay. To be ‘ordinarily resident’ one must reside within the UK voluntarily, legally and with the intention of remaining for a prolonged period (DHSC, 2022). Healthcare providers establish the charging eligibility of patients through a screening process, involving questions about residency and migrant status. If an individual is found to be eligible for NHS charges, this information will be passed onto that NHS trust’s Overseas Visitor Manager (OVM), who will pursue them for payment. Crucially, the actions of the OVM are dependent on the information gathered by healthcare providers, meaning the administrative burden and moral responsibility effectively fall on clinical staff.

(Image: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash)

While primary care, including emergency services, GP registration and vaccinations, is always free of charge and cannot be denied to any individual, all other care is chargeable at a rate of 150%, which must be paid before treatment can be provided. Maternity care constitutes an exception to this policy, defined as ‘immediately necessary’, meaning individuals are not required to pay prior to receiving care but are instead billed after the fact. If an individual is unable to pay for their care after receiving it, their residency status will be shared with the Home Office, thereby alerting immigration officers to the potentially undocumented status of the patient.

Many scholars have argued that this practice of data-sharing conflicts with the NHS’s Caldicott Principles, which emphasise confidentiality and privacy in the interests of both the individual and the institution (Papageorgiou et al., 2020; Reynolds and Mitchell, 2019; Robinson et al., 2018). However, where undocumented migrants in the UK are presented as criminals and their mere existence presented as a threat to state security, this violation of an inherent NHS value is seemingly justified. More specifically, the principles of the Data Protection Act (2018) can be revoked where withholding data is seen to place public interests at risk. Withholding data is therefore seen to hinder effective immigration control: in other words, these individuals are considered not to have a right to privacy (Crépeau and Hastie, 2015; Kulakiewicz et al., 2022; Van Durme, 2017). Once the Home Office has been notified that an individual is residing without the correct authorisation, not only can they choose to deport the individual, they can also keep such ‘deviance’ on record, which will be taken into consideration if the undocumented individual were ever to apply for a visa. This forces undocumented individuals into a ‘rights trap’; they must either incriminate themselves to receive the safe care they are owed under international legislation or go without healthcare they may dearly need (Gentleman, 2018; Hermansson et al., 2020).

Although the impact of such policies on the wellbeing of migrants is well-documented (DOTW, 2017; Hamada et al., 2021; Pellegrino et al., 2021; Westwood et al., 2016), restricting the accessibility of healthcare for a substantial portion of our population has further-reaching consequences. Even where primary services may be free of charge, threats of data-sharing prevent undocumented individuals from exercising their rights to such care, which undermines public health and herd immunity (BMA, 2021; Bulman, 2020; Weller and Aldridge, 2019). Similarly, the deterrent effect of charging policies costs the NHS more than the initial price of providing treatment to all. De Jong et al. (2017), Jones et al. (2019) and WHO (2018) report that undocumented persons are often hospitalised for longer after pregnancy and for otherwise treatable illnesses as a result of their decisions not to seek care due to fears of detection. Preventative care is not only more effective but also more cost-efficient than remedial care, indicating that current policies are not only discriminatory and detrimental to individual and public wellbeing, but also counterproductive for the NHS and the economy (McHale and Speakman, 2020; Norris, 2022).

Charging those not ‘ordinarily resident’ for healthcare also has a serious impact on the NHS. The British Medical Association (2019) reports that a large proportion of healthcare staff find their workload to have increased significantly following the implementation of charging policies. Similarly, NHS staff are working outside of their billed hours to provide informal help to undocumented migrants, as they are not able to support them fully within appointments. This support ranges from signposting and advocacy to financial support and even forging documents (Feldman et al., 2019).

Documenting the far-reaching impacts of this hostile environment policy exposes the irrationality of charging practices, and denying this human right in the name of securitisation sets a dangerous precedent for nation-states’ treatment of vulnerable persons. The UK cannot be said to be upholding their pledges to international legislation when individuals residing within its borders are unable to access basic healthcare. Where international policies can be manipulated and shaped to fit a nation-state’s own agenda we must question who can hold these states accountable, and who will protect the rights of our undocumented populations.

Ella Barclay is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of the West of England. Her research takes an ethnographic approach to understand the experiences of pregnancy, labour and early motherhood for undocumented migrant women within the UK’s hostile environment. Ella completed the MSc in Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Bristol in 2020 and is an MMB Alumni Ambassador.

‘An asylum ban’: why the Illegal Migration Bill must be stopped

Posted on by Emily

By Bridget Anderson.

The Athenian Laws introduced by Draco c. 621 BCE were said to be written not in ink but blood. This government’s Illegal Migration Bill currently going through the UK Parliament, is draconian. It is aimed at people who arrive irregularly – people who the government calls ‘illegal migrants’, but who might better be described as illegalised migrants. There is not some pre-existing category of illegal people who migrate, rather people are illegalised by borders and thereby rendered vulnerable to state and personal power.

The Bill places a duty on the Home Secretary to make arrangements to remove people who do not arrive via state approved routes (backdated to 7th March 2023) and who have not come directly from the country they are fleeing. The Home Secretary also has a duty to rule their asylum and certain human rights claims inadmissible. Because they are ruled inadmissible rather than refused there is no right of appeal. These people will be permanently banned from claiming asylum and from the removal protections of the Modern Slavery Act. They are an ‘ineligible person’ meaning they will never be eligible for any form of legal status or citizenship, or legal entry to the UK and neither will their family members including children yet to be born.

(Image: UnSplash)

People falling under this legislation will likely be detained for 28 days, which can be extended if the Secretary of State believes there is a ‘reasonable prospect’ of removal. There are three options for where they will be removed to. If they are from EEA countries or Albania they will be returned to their country of origin. If they are not from those states, they will not be returned to their country of origin, but, if there is an appropriate returns agreement, to the country which they left before coming to the UK. However, UK geography means this is likely to be France, so this is not currently an option. (In her response to the Bill suggesting the Labour Party’s direction of travel, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made it clear that negotiating a returns agreement with France and other European countries would be a Labour Government priority). Non-EEA/non-Albanian nationals will therefore be sent to other states listed in the schedule of the Bill (note some of those listed are deemed appropriate only for men). The list includes Rwanda. As yet, there are no removal agreements with any of the other countries on that list.

The Bill’s preface acknowledges that its provisions may not be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. It is likely to be not compliant with the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, and the UN Refugee Agency has asserted that it is in breach of the Refugee Convention:

‘The legislation, if passed, would amount to an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be, and with no consideration of their individual circumstances’ (UNHCR, 7 March 2023).

The UK is effectively slamming the country shut to all those fleeing war and persecution, regardless of their circumstances. This is an end to the asylum system as we know it. Asylum seekers do not typically fly to the UK directly from their countries of origin – not least because years of carrier sanctions have closed that possibility. Most apply via the UK’s in-country application process having made long and dangerous journeys through several other countries. Should this Bill become law, the principal means of being granted refugee status will be via specific government-approved routes. The Bill requires that the Home Secretary set an annual cap on the numbers of people entering through these so-called ‘safe and legal routes’. The UK government may have set out ‘legal’ routes, but they are not necessarily ‘safe’. The MoD recently had to apologise for telling applicants to the Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme (ARAP), which relocates MoD approved Afghans at risk of reprisals for working with the UK government in Afghanistan, that their documents needed to be approved by the Taliban to be successful.

There has been a chorus of criticism directed at the Bill. The opposition Labour Party is leading the charge with claims that it is unworkable and will not achieve the objectives of stopping the ‘small boats’. Human rights organisations, charities, religious groups and some lawyers are also challenging the ethics of the Bill – ‘cruelty without purpose’ as the Archbishop of York described it. Sections of the commentariat argue that whether it achieves its aims is a secondary issue (see, for example, The News Agents 2023; Dunt 2023). As Colin Yeo’s helpful analysis of the Bill puts it: ‘It is wishful thinking in legislative form.’

This is performance and the government is looking for a pre-election ‘wedge issue’. The Bill is cunningly drafted in such a way as to make legal challenge both difficult and limited. But challenged it will be, and we can anticipate more attacks on ‘lefty lawyers’ scapegoated for making unworkable legislation well, unworkable. The Explanatory Notes to the Bill set out the number of asylum claims (74,751 in 2022) in clause 9, followed by the ballooning cost of the asylum system (now £3 billion annually) in clause 10. But the cost of the system is not rising simply because of increasing numbers of claims, and there is no reason to think that this legislation will reduce costs.

Meanwhile, it is worth pausing to reflect on the irreparable harm to thousands of people that will be done by this performance piece. Forcible removals of desperate people will require systematic and institutionalised violence. The Home Office has said that ‘Using force on children in family groups may, unfortunately, be necessary if a family is resisting removal.’ There will be a new category of ‘ineligible person’ begging on our streets, permanently shut out of labour protections and services, and this status will be passed on from parents to children. It is estimated that there are over 200,000 undocumented children in the UK, many of whom were born here. This Bill will significantly add to this long-term undocumented population. Should a future government not repeal this Bill large numbers of people will be consigned to illegality, with all the vulnerability and potential for abuse that entails, for their entire lives.

Claims of unworkability sidestep the question of whether workability is desirable. Do we want removal agreements so that people can be efficiently sent to countries with which they have absolutely no connection? Sustained pressure must be put on the Labour Party, should it come to Government, to commit to repealing the entirety of this Bill and to mitigating the harms it will have already done. At a minimum this would mean regularising and expediting the asylum claims of all those caught up by the Bill wherever in the world they may be. This is not only because it is a vicious attack on the rights of people seeking to enter the UK, but it is also an attack on our shared futures. It attacks the rights of future children, and anyone who falls in love with them or wants to work with them or otherwise wishes to spend time with them in the UK. It undermines the global refugee regime. It will create a super exploitable workforce. It will exacerbate divisions in an already divided country. We are already seeing an increase in the criminalisation of those deemed to be assisting undocumented migrants, and more burdensome documentary checking required across employers and the public sector, with all of the racism that stokes. As the undocumented population increases, arguments for ID cards will sound more reasonable. The current government is good at three-word slogans. I have one for them: Stop The Bill.

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

Further resources for understanding the impact and ramifications of the Illegal Migration Bill can be found on our webpage here, and a recording of our online emergency discussion about the Bill on 31st March can be seen here.

The ‘Rwanda Solution’: using Australia’s playbook

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Zhang.

On 19th March, 2023, British Home Secretary Suella Braverman caused yet another controversy during her two-day visit to Kigali, Rwanda, with a photo of her laughing at the building site of future housing intended for asylum seekers to be deported from the UK to Rwanda. This visit drew new criticism from both mainstream and social media, which continued to challenge the Rwanda deportation scheme and the associated Illegal Migration Bill that could potentially violate both the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Publicity for the Australian Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, aimed at stopping all maritime arrivals of asylum seekers, 2013 (image: Wikimedia Foundation)

This controversial deportation scheme, seen as the Conservative government’s ‘vanity project’, faced strong public condemnation and resistance since it was first announced in April 2022. Observers at the time already pointed out the uncanny similarities between the UK-Rwanda deal and the Australian ‘stop the boats’ policy with its infamous offshore processing scheme. It seems that Australia’s past mistakes and systematic failures at ‘stopping the boats’ for at least two decades offer no deterrence to the UK to pick up the same playbook, when the UK Home Office takes Australia’s harsh zero-tolerance approach as an example of achievement instead of a hard lesson to be learned (see Gleeson 2021, Tubakovic, Murray and Matera 2023).

The Australian offshore asylum programme, introduced in 2001 as the ‘Pacific Solution’ to unauthorised immigration by the Howard Coalition government, targeted people entering Australian waters via ocean crossings and arriving by boat. This programme was closed in 2007 by the Labour government (under Kevin Rudd), but revived again in 2012 as ‘Pacific Solution Mark II’ with a hard-line approach to ‘stop the boats’ (see Bakshi 2020 for a full account). The suffering and inhumanity found in Australia’s offshore detention programme caused worldwide concern and criticism on how Australia ‘privileged migration deterrence goals over human rights considerations’, and how it deliberately normalised ‘moral disengagement from the pain and suffering of people in detention’ for populist political gains (see Barnes 2022). It is therefore bewildering to see such a notorious policy, known for being ‘cruel, costly and ineffective’ for 20 years (Gleeson and Yacoub 2021), now being embraced by the UK government as inspiration for how to manage asylum seekers. The Melbourne-based organisation Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) expressed a profound sense of concern to the Australian broadcaster SBS:

‘It’s appalling that, despite a decade of cruelty that has led to severe harm, death, compensation pay-outs by the government, third-country deals, medical transfers, and international notoriety, the Australian model has influenced global policy.’  

There are already extensive reports and analysis that question whether the UK can actually ‘stop the boats’ with its adapted Australian model (for example, Gleeson 2021, Koser 2022). Apart from the legal obstacles the UK has to deal with, different political as well as geographical contexts also suggest that the Rwanda deportation plan is unlikely to proceed smoothly or result in the same kind of outcome as seen in Australia. Moreover, the ‘Rwanda Solution’ – if we can call it that – provokes deeper concerns over legacies of imperialism, colonialism and entrenching patterns of global inequalities. It is effectively outsourcing border control in a way that perpetuates forced displacement, instituting a form of structural violence that holds life in a ‘permanent state of injury outside any realms of protection and political intelligibility’ (Phipps and Yohannes 2022). The Rwanda scheme has already caused toxic social and political divisions both within the UK and beyond before any individual could be sent on a deportation flight. But the government remains determined despite challenges coming from all fronts. Braverman’s Rwanda tour at this moment seems particularly tone deaf to the wider public debate demanding a compassionate and more ethical process with regard to unauthorised Channel crossing.

Whether the UK manages to ‘stop the boats’ when (and if) the Rwanda scheme is in full play remains to be seen. But this much is clear – the number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats has continued to increase in 2022, despite stern messages that the UK will ‘detain and deport you’. These boat arrivals are played up in the current corrosive narratives on the UK’s state of emergency caused by migrant illegality and compromised border security. The Rwanda solution, then, seems very much like a production of ‘xenophobic spectacle’ (Koram 2022) that distracts the public from deeper problems and crises at home. Braverman seems optimistic that, with this visit, the deportation flights between the UK and Rwanda will take off by summer 2023, when legal loopholes and courtroom battles are finally settled. By then, the public is led to believe, all problems with the small boats will magically disappear. But this short-term, single-minded agenda on deportation and offshore processing creates nothing more than a tunnel vision approach that Australia has tried and failed. What gives the UK government the conviction that the Rwanda solution will deliver a better result?   

Juan Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research explores borders and transnational migration with particular interest in Asian borderlands, migrant im/mobilities and transnationalism, cross-border cultural politics and China. She is the co-ordinator of the MMB research challenge, Bodies, Things, Capital.

For more information about the 2023 Illegal Migration Bill see the list of resources on our webpage.

No Recourse to Public Funds: The Big Issue tackles vulnerability to NRPF in Bristol

Posted on by Emily

By Paula Gombos.

The Big Issue is a street magazine founded 30 years ago that tackles homelessness and social exclusion in the UK. It also supports individuals to earn an income by selling the magazine, and there are more than 50 active sellers in Bristol. A significant proportion of these vendors are Romanian Roma, many of who are subject to ‘NRPF’ rules. NRPF stands for ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ meaning they are not eligible for many benefits, including Universal Credit, Social Fund payments, Housing Benefit and social housing and education. It is usually associated with asylum seekers and non-EEA (European Economic Area) citizens. However, European migrants too can be affected, usually while they are waiting for the Home Office decision on their application to the EU Settlement Scheme, or if they have not applied in time for Settled Status or Indefinite Leave to Remain.

In early 2022 the Big Issue was given a small grant from the University of Bristol’s ESRC-funded Everyday Integration project to investigate the consequences of NRPF from the perspective of our essential frontline workers. We also wanted to see how we can take steps locally to ensure better support and inclusion for people who fall under NRPF rules. In December we published our report on the project, ‘How Can Big Issue Sellers With or Vulnerable to NRPF Build a Good Life in Bristol’. Here I introduce its key points.

Big Issue jacket worn by a vendor in Birmingham
(Images: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Flickr)

We were very happy to be supported throughout the process by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and ACH. MMB Director Bridget Anderson first helped us to identify our research question and methods and potential ethical issues. We then held a vendor engagement workshop in our Big Issue Bristol office. Vendors participated in a set of activities and discussed their motivations for moving to the UK, their values and aspirations and the accessibility of services to them. We then devised an interview schedule to explore what participants felt made a ‘good life’, and the barriers that stop them from moving towards this. Together we explored options and used Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Bristol Model to facilitate a dialogue with participants. Finally, we held conversations with other agencies who work with NRPF migrants in Bristol.

The research was small scale, working with ten Big Issue sellers aged between 38 and 60, nine from the Romanian Roma community (three women and six men), and one male Jamaican national. It found that anxieties about housing, personal safety and sustenance had significantly negative effects, and the NRPF condition exacerbated these, making vendors feel disempowered. Their responses showed how it leaves people destitute and unmotivated. Some people end up begging or turning to alcohol and substance misuse, which affects their mental health and general wellbeing. However, together with a range of Bristol based organisations, we came up with ideas that could significantly improve their quality of life.

At a national level, Big Issue argues that the NRPF condition should be scrapped and policies changed so people can secure suitable accommodation, become economically active and be able to access mainstream benefits. We hope that Bristol City Council will play an active role in supporting this demand. However, the project focused mainly on the significant steps that can be taken locally, including funding for services that work with NRPF and support for issues including employability, education, immigration and alternative housing options. More specifically the participants suggested:

  • Improving English skills and learning how to read and write.
  • Accessible employment for people with limited numeracy, literacy, digital skills or for people in poor health.
  • Having a voice and being actively involved in local decision-making processes.
  • Advocacy and legal representation at a local level.
  • Better care and triage system within local provisions.
  • Regular access to interpreters when attending appointments at local services.
  • Less prejudice and less bureaucracy for individuals with very little documentation.
  • Safer, cleaner and more suitable housing provisions.
  • Better protection and safety from Bristol police.
  • ‘City work platform’ – daily jobs for the City Council, such as cleaning, recycling and gardening, distributed amongst rough sleepers to help them contribute to the city and solve anti-social behavior.

These are some of the ways of building local support for individuals with or vulnerable to NRPF, which would positively impact their lives in the city. Housing, in particular, is a priority for safety, wellbeing and civic engagement.

Besides the obvious need for improved local support and changes to national policies, we must remember that our vendors want to be seen and heard, and to have a sense of accomplishment and purpose in their lives. The Big Issue will carry on fighting against social exclusion and poverty and we pledge to continue supporting the most marginalised and vulnerable people in the community. But all of us living in Bristol are responsible for making this city a better place for others.

Paula Gombos is a Sales and Support Worker and Vendor Data Lead for the Big Issue Bristol. She is also a certified Romanian community interpreter and translator for community projects. The full Big Issue report ‘How Can Big Issue Sellers With or Vulnerable to NRPF Build a Good Life in Bristol’ can be read here.

The violence of postcolonial border making

Posted on by Emily

By Maya Goodfellow.

In June 2022 Maya Goodfellow was the discussant for our public lecture ‘Are immigration controls racist? Lessons from history’ by Nandita Sharma. Here we publish her response to Nandita’s lecture.

On the evening of 27th June 2022, they were found on a sideroad in Texas. Fifty-three people in the back of a scorching-hot van. Some of their screams alerted a nearby worker to the abandoned vehicle, which had been left on the side of the road. It was here that they had died – pulled up alongside a railway line and next to Interstate 35, which stretches from a town near the Mexican border right up to the north, close to Canada.

Three days prior, over 5,000 miles away, after ongoing police harassment, 23 people died trying to scale the iron fence that separates Morocco from Spain, many killed in the crush to get over. And 3,000 miles away from here, since the start of the year, 214 people were either dead or had gone missing attempting to cross between Afghanistan and Iran.

Across the world, it is a function of borders that people die trying to cross them. And it is one of their functions that people are killed when they are enforced within countries. 

(Image by Ed Hincliffe on UnSplash)

The response and the counter-reply to such untold death always manage to miss the heart of the problem. In a well-rehearsed sleight of hand, across Europe and the US, politicians loudly and confidently name one foe: people smugglers. Exploitative and violent though this business is, this logic is deeply misleading. A much smaller chorus point out that it ignores the real culprit, which are border policies. Policies celebrated and applied by those same politicians. Few safe routes of travel, pushbacks and restrictive visa regimes. They may not provide as clear an enemy as the ‘smuggler’, but these are the things that produce death and violence.

Discomfort lurks in this counterclaim too. If you look close enough, you can see where it could lead; discussions over how tough the exclusions are, not the reasons why there are exclusions to begin with. Because ultimately, how useful is a country’s border if it doesn’t exclude in some way or another.

Why, too few ask, is bordering obligatory in the first place? People do not die crossing borders just because of border regimes; there is a machinery and process of legitimation that makes bordering possible. That makes it necessary. This is where Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule (2020) takes us. Our attention, she explains, should be on the nation state. Without looking here, we risk reproducing what we seek to dismantle. ‘From the 1950s,’ she writes:

‘the kind of racism resting on pseudoscientific typologies, the kind that normalized atrocities leading up to and including the fascist holocausts of WWII, was made anathema. People did anything to declare they were not racists. However, just as imperial states were replaced by national ones, postcolonialism was also productive of a new, largely normalized, horizontal form of racism. It is best to call this form of racism postcolonial racism, because it depended on ideas of distinct and separate “national cultures,” each with its own territorial claims’ (Sharma, 2020, p. 279).

The nation state ceases to make sense if it is not anchored in the idea that certain territory belongs to a people; the national-natives are distinct from the migrants. How we relate to nation states is organised by these categories. There is a ‘true people’ and this, she argues, is racially encoded.

However much this analysis might apply to Europe and America, this is not where Sharma focuses her attention. Rather, it is to the formerly colonised. Instead of true freedom in decolonisation, there were demands for national sovereignty. And so a system of nation states was born, where the idea of native – thought to have disappeared with colonialism – has persisted. This is one of the ways claims to sovereignty and rights are grounded.  Postcolonialism did not end violent relationships but refashioned them into nationalist subjectivities. Anti-immigration politics is common globally, she shows, including in the so-called ‘poor world’.

This is where the Western left is, arguably, less confident. Used to criticising overtly right-wing, anti-immigrant politics or to challenging liberal nationalism, it shies away from thinking through the ways it supports territorialised, racialised and nationalist politics around the world. This matters because if there is a nation-state there will be an immigration regime, and there will be exclusion.

But there are still questions we must ask: what does the ability of certain migrants, nationalities or racial groups to become ‘part of’ the nation, even if in a precarious way, mean for how we might understand race? Not all groups experience bordering in the same way or continue to experience it in the same way across time, and not all of this maps neatly onto race as a physical identifier.

And perhaps most obviously: what is our way forward?

By spotlighting the nation state, Home Rule gives us an important step to answering this – encouraging us to think about how to create another world altogether.

Maya Goodfellow is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. Her research looks at the relationship between capitalism, racism and immigration. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (2020), available from Verso at a 30% discount.

 

Filmmaking from my father’s memories

Posted on by Emily

By Nariman Massoumi.

I never talked to my father about his experience of arriving in the UK until I made a film about it. Baba 1989 is about his memories of arrival following four years of separation from me, my mother and siblings. We left Iran as refugees in 1985 during the Iran–Iraq war and sought asylum here. My father could not get a visa and had to live in Germany for two years. Without the pretext of making a film, it would have been difficult for either of us to have a conversation on the subject. In the film he describes painful memories of trying to reintegrate into the family, our estrangement from him, the language barriers, lack of work and money, our dire living conditions and his inability to connect to anyone.

Film equipment can often be seen as a barrier to achieving intimacy with a subject. In producing films about one’s parents or family members, the reverse is often the case. When interviewing my father, the presence of the audio recording device introduced a witness, an imagined audience beyond the confines of my parents’ home that allowed him to recall memories of emotionally fraught past events to me for the first time through a performance for others – and for me to vicariously recall my own childhood memories of the same events (as a nine-year-old) through his recollection. He spoke mostly in English and in third person (‘my children’) and only intermittently slipping into second person (‘you’ or ‘your mum’). Perhaps the desire to distance himself from the events resulted in this shifting mode of address.

Still from Baba 1989 (image: author’s own)

My documentary film practice has explored my family’s personal experiences of migration, our resettlement in Britain and its relationship to the history of the Iranian diaspora, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. Documentary filmmaking that engages the participation of a filmmaker’s own family or kin as central subject is what Michael Renov (2004) terms ‘domestic ethnography’. The reciprocity and interplay entailed by a close family tie by this mode of documentary filmmaking plays at the boundaries of self and other, filmmaker and subject in a unique way. A fragile balance exists between ethnographic exploration and an autobiographical pursuit for self-knowledge and cannot be strictly reduced to either. The filmmaker and subject’s intimate connection renders an outsider position difficult (if not impossible), and yet a degree of separation between subject and filmmaker is still retained.

For second generation migrant filmmakers like myself, a parent or grandparent embodies a particular cultural history of migration (Russell 1999) meaning domestic ethnography becomes ‘charged with anxieties about losing access to the parents’ past as a consequence of displacement’ (Berghahn 2013, p. 90). To that end, family photographs, home movies and videos become privileged cultural artefacts due to their role in articulating and mediating memories across generations offering evidence of people and places, kinship and continuity. You can see this in a wide range of films such as Italianamerican (Martin Scorsese, 1974), The Way to My Father’s Village (Richard Fung, 1988), History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, 1991) or I for India (Sandhya Suri, 2005). Family visual archives take on an increased significance for migrants who have experienced involuntary displacement where the continuities of family life and memory have been disrupted by social upheavals or where the range of available sources are scarcer, and susceptible to loss or obliteration. Yet as highly coded and selective forms of visual communication that focus on the ‘high points’ of family life, they are also unreliable records of family history, reasserting the image the family has of itself and its own unity in order to reinforce its own integration (Bourdieu 1990). Domestic ethnography therefore involves ‘memory-work’ (Kuhn 2002), a form of archaeological detective work to investigate the coded or hidden meanings of family photographs or home movies.

Memory-work takes on significance when engaging with visual archives of historical events I did not directly experience that still conjure up emotional ‘memories’. For example, Baba (2011), an earlier film I made about my father, centres on an iconic photograph of him and my uncle on their release from prison as political prisoners under the Shah’s military dictatorship in 1978 during the Iranian Revolution. The poster behind them is a socialist realist painting called Raising the Banner by the Russian painter Geli Korzhev (1925 – 2002), adopted by an Iranian Marxist guerrilla group. While the photograph was taken before my birth, it stirs up deep feelings in me and connects me to the historical moment through my relationship with the men photographed and what Marianne Hirsch (1997) terms ‘postmemory’ – an affiliative form of memory passed on between family generations ‘by means of the stories, images, and behaviours’ and through ‘imaginative investment and creation’ rather than direct experience. The photograph evokes the unrealised hopes and aspirations of a revolutionary generation, a ‘subjunctive nostalgia’ (Malek 2019), an imaginative reflection on what could have been. It is also shaped by knowledge of political defeat and what is not apparent in the photograph: my father’s incarceration, detention, experience of political violence and psychological trauma written on his body in the present.

Photograph of author’s father and uncle in Baba (2011) (image: author’s own)

In what she terms ‘intercultural cinema’ Laura Marks (2000) identifies a ‘haptic visuality’, a way of conveying cultural memory through a tactile and physical sensibility, which she sees as evident in the work of diasporic filmmakers responding to the gaps and silences in recorded history. In that sense, the investigation and disclosure of my family memories through domestic ethnography is not simply driven by a personal investigation or the anxiety of my parents’ histories being lost into oblivion. The privileging of migrant family memories has a wider political intention, as Berghahn argues, responding to ‘inequities of power and visibility’ through an ‘impassioned plea for the inclusion of memories of the marginalised and the pluralisation of the cultural memory of the host nation’ (2013, p. 116).

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 with a specific focus on the British/Iranian context through ethnographic and archive-based documentary film practices.

Working with the Colombian Truth Commission on illegal drug economies

Posted on by Emily

By Mary Ryder.

In June 2022 the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition launched its final report, Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad: Hallazgos y Recomendaciones (There is a Future if There is Truth: Findings and Recommendations). This was the culmination of three and half years of work investigating the causes and consequences of decades of armed conflict in the country, developing a wide-ranging set of recommendations to support the transition to peace.

Colombia’s Truth Commission had a hugely ambitious mandate and introduced a number of innovations, including working with pedagogy as an operational pillar, integrating feminist methodologies, exploring the mobilities of drugs and money in the conflict, and collecting testimonies beyond the borders of the nation. It faced myriad political challenges and ran throughout the global pandemic. The release of its final report and its acceptance by Colombia’s new President, Gustavo Petro, renew prospects for peace in the country and signal the enormous responsibility for Colombian society to widely acknowledge the truths the final report presents and work towards its recommendations.

‘There is a Future if There is Truth’ (image: Colombian Truth Commission)

Colleagues from the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and the School of Education at the University of Bristol have been working with the Colombian Truth Commission since its inception, supporting the innovative work described above. Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Bristol and support from the MEMPAZ and EdJAM projects have enabled the development of gender-sensitive methodologies for collecting testimonies and the collection and transcription of thousands of testimonies from women and LGTBQI+ people affected by conflict. Commissioners Alejandra Miller, who led the Commission’s innovative work on gender, and Carlos Beristain, who led its work collecting testimonies from Colombians in exile, both visited the university in 2019, as did members of the pedagogy and gender working groups (see more here).

Along with another University of Bristol doctoral researcher, Laura Hankin, I have worked closely with the Truth Commission throughout its operation. Here I reflect upon the key role of the drugs working group, to which I contributed, and the importance of understanding the complex relationship between the movement of drugs – and of capital generated by the illegal trade – and the armed conflict in Colombia.

Drugs in the Truth Commission

The Colombian Truth Commission is the first in the world to meaningfully investigate the role of illegal drug economies in an armed conflict, and to dispute the continuation of UN conventions on international drug prohibition by recognising their damaging and counter-productive impact on Colombia’s transition from war to peace.

Drug economies were central to the Commission’s mandate, which explicitly called for an investigation into the relationship between Colombia’s armed conflict and the cultivation of illegal crops, the production and commercialisation of illegal drugs, and the laundering of assets derived from drug trafficking.

The team responsible for this work sought to expand upon existing literature and research that has tended to reduce illegal drugs-trafficking to a means of financing Colombia’s armed conflict, and to contest a longstanding political discourse that blames illegal drugs-trafficking as the source of all problems in Colombia. A deliberate choice was made to focus not just on drugs-trafficking but on understanding the dynamics of regional drug economies – of which trafficking is just one part – and how these interact with the conflict. We also took a broad view of who is involved – from citizens, police, guerrilla and paramilitary groups to politicians and local authorities – who is benefitting from them, and who is suffering because of them.

For more than three years we delved into the Truth Commission’s archives to explore the regulations and controls that different armed groups in Colombia held over drug production, trafficking and consumption in the regions under their control; the conflation of counter-insurgency efforts with counter-drug policy efforts, and the militarisation of state-citizen relations in these regions; the impact of forced eradication and aerial spraying of glyphosate on campesinos, different ethnic groups and on the movement of money in Colombian territories; and campaign financing and the corruption of politics and public institutions through incomes from the illegal drug trade, among other dynamics.

The Commission’s findings reveal a complex web of entangled networks, comprised of political, armed and civilian members involved in the production, supply or use of illegal drugs, which varied widely across the different regions of Colombia and at different moments of the armed conflict. The report describes how the circulation of drugs became a means of accumulating wealth and power for these different actors, which generated violence on Colombian society and caused corruption in many institutions and politics.

Another key conclusion of the final report is that Colombia’s traditional political conflict was exacerbated and degraded by the punitive, prohibitionist ‘war on drugs’. Drug prohibition criminalised anyone involved in the production, supply or use of illegal drugs, which stigmatised their behaviour as ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’ and in turn justified acts of violence against them. For example, systematic human rights violations were exercised against drug users by armed actors as a mechanism to gain acceptance among the wider population, many of whom deemed it a valid and desirable way to deal with people considered ‘disposable’, ‘flawed’ and ‘dangerous’.

The ‘war on drugs’ also resulted in the transformation of the armed forces, whose attention was diverted from citizen protection to destroying coca fields and drug laboratories and pursuing drugs-traffickers, often against the will of many rural communities whose livelihoods depended on illegal crop production. These prohibitionist policies not only failed to shut down these illegal economies, but they played a key role in scaling up the violence.

The Commission’s recommendations for the non-repetition of violence state that Colombian leaders must now recognise how drug economies have penetrated the country’s culture, economy and politics and how the global ‘war on drugs’ is continuing to drive its armed conflict in the present. In particular, it recommends that the new Colombian government leads and promotes an international debate to reform drug policy in cooperation with the United States and to move toward legal regulation. The report is unequivocal that this change is urgent and necessary to eliminate one of the key structural drivers of conflict in the country.

The work discussed above is presented in chapter 6 of the final report Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad and in three case studies which expose, first, the repression and stigmatisation of coca-growing farmers in the armed conflict, second, the militarisation of Colombia’s Macarena region under the logic of the ‘war on drugs’, and third, the victimisation of people using drugs.

Mary Ryder is a PhD student in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. Her research explores how Colombians’ experiences and memories of conflict have been shaped by counter-drug and security policies. She is broadly interested in drug policy reform, transitional justice and memory within the context of conflict and peace.

Looking back to ‘The Postcolonial Age of Migration’: a post-pandemic view

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Ranabir Samaddar.

My book The Postcolonial Age of Migration was published in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic raged in India and elsewhere. Global mobility had screeched to a halt, as had mobility within India. Locked down in my house when I received a copy, I was driven to reflecting on what I had written: did I do justice to our age in describing it as the postcolonial age of migration?

While writing the book I was aware of the importance of historical sensitivity in making sense of our postcolonial age. Time and again the book goes back to colonial histories of war, plunder, changes in land use, peasant dispossession, ecological marginality, primitive accumulation and the continuities of all these themes in our time. With this backdrop the book discussed colonial practices of violence and border-making exercises and how they were being reproduced today on a global scale. It argued that wars, famines and ecological changes accounted in a big way for today’s migrations and forced migration flows and influenced patterns of labour mobility. This was also the context of the emergence of modern humanitarianism with its specific doctrine of protection. In brief, the book analysed the imprints of the colonial roots of modern humanitarianism and protection.

Yet, as I reflected on the book in the midst of the pandemic, it dawned on me that it was silent on one of the most important realities of our time. The overwhelming presence of COVID-19 made me realise that it did not take into account epidemiological disasters as integral to the colonial history of migration and the postcolonial age of migration. The absence of any concern for migrant workers and refugees in the structure of global public health concerns should have been noted. The book discusses camps and speaks of health concerns of the refugees in camps, but the larger perspective of public health was absent.

India’s history of epidemics offers insights into the country’s poor public health infrastructure. The history of the 1897 outbreak of bubonic plague in colonial Bombay is well known and the present situation of COVID-19 has evoked comparisons. Thousands fled the city in the closing years of the 19th century, spreading the disease in the process. Public health infrastructure was zero. Residents locked themselves up in their houses in fear of plague-control officers who could pick anyone up, quarantine them, and separate children from their families.

A refugee Hindu family during the 1897 bubonic plague, Bombay (Image: Wellcome Images)

In the following 20 years about 10 million people died of the disease across India. Plague was accompanied by other infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis and influenza. Malaria killed millions through the years, and an estimated five per cent of the country’s population perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. As one commentator put it, of all these diseases, it was only the bubonic plague that was declared as crisis. ‘Then, as now, only one out of a handful of deadly afflictions, the one that most directly threatened commerce, trade, and the accumulation of capital—was identified as a crisis.’ The plague became the Bombay government’s priority for the next two decades. As capital and labour began fleeing the city in the wake of the disease, the government implemented massive efforts to bring them back in. We are probably witnessing today something similar to what happened in the past.

The countrywide lockdown of 2020 reminded us of these earlier eras as the country witnessed masses of migrants returning home on foot, a growing hunger crisis, stockyards and storages overflowing with millions of tons of surplus food, and arbitrary powers being exercised across the nation. This was a call back to the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897. In the outbreak of the plague the city of Mumbai (then Bombay) came to a halt. Thousands of workers (according to some estimates 300,000) left the city. This only sharpened the crisis further. The Bombay Improvement Trust was formed to restore the city’s ‘reputation’ of cleanliness. Yet in those efforts, the policy focus was on making the city ‘clean’ rather than setting up and improving public health infrastructure. Cleaning the city was a ‘public’ purpose; ensuring health of the people was less of a priority. We still do not know, as we did not know in 1896-98, if draconian measures such as the sudden and total lockdown can stop or control contagion. So far, we have waited and tolerated a ‘minimum number of deaths’ (including collateral deaths such as of migrants on the roads or rail tracks) to allow the pandemic to pass away. Social Darwinism matched perfectly the economic policies that were to follow the pandemic.

Disease does not act alone. It acts in unison with a policy of eroding public health infrastructure. Pushing refugees and migrant workers to the fence and robbing them of access to the public distribution of food, public health provisions and employment in public works became wittingly or unwittingly a part of disease control measure. In many ways independent India followed the colonial approach.  

In this context the migrant is seen, like the virus, to spread disease. The migrant’s body is considered suspect. Like the virus, in country after country, the migrant has been symbolised as the enemy from outside. We are now accustomed to the idea that our civilisation is at war with a new kind of external enemy. Like a parasite it breeds in the most vulnerable areas of human life, waiting for the moment to release a pathological violence upon its otherwise oblivious prey. The colony also represented this threat to the metropolitan world. Colonies brought ‘tropical diseases’ and were the source of mysterious illnesses and dangers. 

Political society has long held the belief that viruses and migrant workers both belong to the outside. The outbreak of the epidemic and the sudden emergence of thousands upon thousands of migrant workers on the roads in India trying to escape the trap of lockdown signalled the end of the mythical safety of a society of settled population groups and of the state that guards this insularity. The range of policy problems and debacles in coping with the pandemic arose from the ignorance of the phenomenon of mobility – of both pathogens and workers. There is no doubt that any account of postcolonial imprints on the current age of migration will be incomplete without an examination of the interrelated notions of public health and refugee and migration flows.

Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group. His research focuses on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His book The Postcolonial Age of Migration was published in 2020 by Routledge and you can watch an interview with him about the book on the MMB Insights and Sounds 2022 series.