Category: Bodies things capital

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.

‘We’ll double your change!’ The materiality and mobility of cash in contemporary Argentina

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Luis Bradley.

In January 2024, the Central Bank of Argentina (BCRA) announced that two new, higher denomination banknotes (ARS10,000 and ARS20,000) would be placed into circulation by the summer. The rift between the value to be printed on these notes and the highest denomination note currently available at the time of writing (ARS2,000) points to the stark inadequacy of the country’s cash in even the most mundane of everyday transactions for items whose prices have been hit by rapid rates of inflation. Consequently, the movement of cash in Argentina is characterised by obstacles arising from the very form of the cash itself. This struck me on the first day of a visit to Buenos Aires in March this year, when I found that what I had considered to be a substantial sum of pesos remaining from my last trip (in 2022) would buy me only two to three items at a local supermarket. To my further chagrin, I did not have my passport with me meaning I was unable, as a foreigner, to pay for my purchases by card. I thus had to return the items one by one until I could pay off the balance, resulting in a long queue behind me and many pointed stares.

Wads of 100 peso notes, bearing the image of Eva Perón, accumulated in change by the author in late 2022. Each note is now worth scarcely one pence (photo: author’s own, March 2024).

The main objective of my trip to Buenos Aires was to witness the everyday mobility of cash under the presidency of Javier Milei, who came to power in December 2023. Milei’s promotion of libertarian economics, currently slashing funding for national cultural bodies such as the national film agency (INCAA), is frequently justified by the argument that there is no money following the excesses of previous administrations, and that a financial ‘chainsaw’ is required to cut expenditure. More generally, however, the status of cash in Argentina has long been linked to notions of instability and inadequacy. As a virtual tour of the national numismatic museum confirms, frequent, recurring inflationary episodes from the 19th century onwards have resulted in the rapid devaluation of banknotes, leading on many occasions to the adoption of a new currency worth a thousand times the previous iteration.

In such conditions, demand for US dollars as a more stable means of investment has been high, often infamously stored under mattresses and outside the national economy. To combat this, the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) administration restricted US dollar purchases from 2011 to 2015, prompting middle- and upper-class protests and encouraging informal, illegal money exchanges, whose agents operate with a more advantageous rate known as the ‘blue dollar’ (Sánchez 2017; Perelman 2021). The Kirchner and the later Alberto Fernández (2019-2023) governments attempted to remedy this by adopting differential dollar rates available to certain individuals at certain times, though this resulted in a plethora of rates (among them the ‘Qatar dollar’ and the ‘Coldplay dollar’) fostering a lingering atmosphere of low confidence in the value of the Argentine peso.  

My interest in money in Argentina stems from what I would describe as a resistant materiality in everyday cash. Given the persisting need to engage with large quantities of banknotes, whether pesos or dollars, many Argentines and foreigners alike are faced with the daily challenges of carrying, handling, counting, storing and hiding what are effectively pieces of paper (an example of these challenges is depicted in Pedro Mairal’s 2016 bestseller The Woman from Uruguay, translated by Jennifer Croft). Once I had settled into my accommodation in Buenos Aires, I set out to collect some pesos I had wired myself. This has been a common route used by foreigners to profit from juicier exchange rates and avoid card and withdrawal fees. Nonetheless, this option does involve several risks, notably the length of queuing times, the potential lack of cash to dispense and the possibility of theft on the journey home. Surprisingly on this occasion, however (and despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary), I did not face a long queue at the branch, perhaps owing to a recent measure offering foreign cardholders a much better exchange rate aligned with the financial market rate, lessening the pull of informal exchange houses for tourists in Argentina.

Once I had confirmed my identity, the agent proceeded to feed a large number of banknotes through a counting machine. Back in 2022, I was caught out by the sheer sum of the notes I would receive, leading to an uncomfortable walk back to the hotel with my jacket stuffed full of cash. This time, while armed with a large bag, I still found the piles of banknotes difficult to calculate, meaning I would always prefer to carry much more than necessary to the shops. Receiving change was also often troublesome: cashiers would often ask me for one note back to reduce the total number of notes returned, but most notes were of so little value that they did nothing but clog up my wallet. At one point, when I was owed 10 pesos in change (less than 1 pence), I was instead offered a voucher redeemable for 20 if I shopped with the supermarket again. While the voucher proclaimed excitedly that my change would be doubled, the scale of that doubling was much less exciting.

Thankfully, my trip also allowed me to think about things other than cash, with highlights including the annual conference of the Argentine Association of Audiovisual and Film Studies, an excellent Borges-themed production at the Teatro San Martín, and a productive discussion with several students of Dr Valeria Llobet at the Universidad de San Martín. However, as stormy weather delayed my return flight by 24 hours, I couldn’t help reflecting on how my daily experiences with money in Argentina challenged the common associations of currency with the purely abstract and symbolic, particularly in those countries, such as the UK, where cash payments are dwindling. Rather than thinking of money solely as a neutral, universal equivalent – the ‘colourless tool’ described by Georg Simmel in his landmark The Philosophy of Money – the case of Argentina prompts me to consider cash as a thoroughly material obstacle to be navigated not just mentally, but physically.

Juan Luis Bradley is a PhD researcher at the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Bristol. His research explores depictions of the everyday materiality of money in Argentine literature and cinema from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on the affective implications of Argentine money in crisis for those who negotiate it.

For other recent MMB blogposts on Argentina read Jo Crow’s post on ‘(Im)mobility in Buenos Aires (1929-2023)‘.

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.

(Im)mobility in Buenos Aires (1929-2023)

Posted on by Emily

By Jo Crow.

I travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in November 2023 to research the First Conference of Latin American Communist Parties, a key transnational meeting that took place in 1929. I also presented my work at the Universidad de San Andrés, thanks to an invitation from the head of its History postgraduate programme Dr Eduardo Zimmermann, and met with Dr Gimena del Rio Riande, President of the Argentine Association of Digital Humanities, who has made critical contributions to global debates in this dynamic and burgeoning field.   

I thought a lot about mobility and movement (or lack of it) on this trip. Immigration at Buenos Aires Ezeiza International Airport was quick and easy for me. The immigration officer politely asked about the purpose of my trip and was intrigued by my interest in Argentine history. We spent longer talking about the latter than we did about where I was staying or how long my stay would be. I wondered if such a swift and friendly border-encounter was enabled by my whiteness, academic title and British passport. I tried to picture what the process was like for the international delegates arriving in Argentina (by land or sea) for the Conference of Latin American Communist Parties nearly a century earlier. They may well have experienced class- and race-based barriers. Their biggest problem, however, was probably party-political affiliation: many delegates represented illegal and persecuted Communist Parties and travelled to Buenos Aires incognito, crossing borders without Argentine and other state authorities knowing.

Statue of Nicolás Avellaneda, President of Argentina (1874-1880), in the main square of Avellaneda (author’s photograph, 2023)

The conference’s main discussion sessions took place in the premises of the Avellaneda district committee of the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) (Jeifets and Jeifets, 2023). When I first started researching this transnational meeting, I imagined Avellaneda as a peripheral space, an industrial suburb on the remote outskirts of Buenos Aires. But, in fact, it is one of the most important municipalities of Buenos Aires Province – just as it was a hundred years ago. In the 1920s, it had not just one, but two major football stadiums. It was also home to the Central Produce Market, Argentina’s largest wholesaler, as well as major textile mills, meat-packing plants and grain-processing centres.

I walked from central Buenos Aires to Avellaneda to find the building of the PCA’s district committee. I also walked around central Buenos Aires, looking for the offices of La Correspondencia Sudamericana, the official mouthpiece of the South American Secretariat (SSA) of the Communist International, which organised the 1929 conference together with the PCA. The SSA was set up in 1925 with its headquarters in Buenos Aires, and the address of its magazine was printed on the front cover: first on Calle Estados Unidos, then, by the time of the conference, on Avenida Independencia (see images below). Both are major thoroughfares traversing this port city. Whilst many delegates at the conference represented Communist Parties (or SSA-affiliated parties) that were banned and operated underground elsewhere on the continent, the PCA and the SSA were functioning relatively openly. Being able to visit the offices where the SSA published its magazine in the 1920s and hearing the clamour of the space and watching people move through it helped me to appreciate how much the Communist Party was beginning to become part of everyday life in Buenos Aires in that period.

La Correspondencia Sudamericana No. 2, April 1926
La Correspondencia Sudamericana No. 16, August 1929

But the Argentina of 1929 was very different to the Argentina of today. In the early twentieth century, it ranked among the ten richest economies in the world (Scobie, 1971; Rock, 1993). In the twenty-first century, Argentina is routinely viewed as part of the ‘developing world’, ‘Third World’, or ‘Global South’ (Beattie, 2009). Its current inflation crisis and expanding recession – one in a succession of economic crises in modern Argentine history – have made headlines around the world. In the early twentieth century, by contrast, millions of people from Europe – especially from Italy and Spain – migrated to Argentina in search of a better life. The country was home to the largest number of immigrants after the United States. Now it is experiencing a wave of emigration to Europe and North America, as it did in in the early 2000s. This option is not available to all, however. More than 50% of the population are living in poverty (Calatrava, 2024) and don’t have the means to travel to the Global North.

The economic crisis is one of the reasons that right-wing libertarian Javier Milei won the presidential elections in November 2023; the election was the day I flew home from Buenos Aires. Since taking power, Milei has introduced ‘shock therapy’ reforms and issued a sweeping (and, according to some Argentine judges, unconstitutional) presidential decree deregulating vast swathes of the economy. This response to economic turmoil – standstill or, indeed, shrinking of the economy – impacts public cultural institutions, research institutes and universities enormously. Some recently appointed staff have been dismissed, many of those with job ‘security’ have seen their salaries suspended, and funding for doctoral scholarships has been slashed (see the recent article in Nature: ‘Despair’: Argentinian researchers protest as president begins dismantling science).

Just before leaving Argentina, I met with Gimena del Rio Riande, Researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at the IIBICRIT (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual). We spoke about the economic crisis and people feeling trapped. We also spoke about the state of the field of Digital Humanities – the huge potential for doing exciting research (for example, having on-line access to medieval texts and being able to read them as a full corpus in new ways) but also the limitations and problems, not least the emphasis on ‘thinking big’, which sometimes risks sidelining the concrete detail, the specifics of our primary source materials, or the focused questions (about people, places or texts) that interest us as individual researchers. Large-scale, multi-partner teams can move things on at a tremendous pace, but individual interventions and viewpoints can get lost, overlooked or stuck within these.

We also discussed the linguistic and social inequalities bound up in a field that continues to be dominated by the Anglophone world and often depends on expensive infrastructures. Dr del Rio Riande has published extensively in both English and Spanish on some of these issues (for example, Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and ¿En qué lengua citamos cuando escribimos sobre Humanidades Digitales?). We hope to welcome her here to the School of Modern Languages and MMB in the summer, to give a talk on Digital Humanities in Latin America and lead a workshop on open research practices.          

Jo Crow is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol and Associate Director (Research Development) of MMB. Her current research investigates the production of knowledge and circulation of ideas about race through four international congresses in twentieth-century Latin America. Her latest book is Itinerant Ideas: Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900-1950) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Read more about it in Jo’s previous MMB blogpost, ‘Roots and routes: debating indigenous rights in twentieth-century Latin America.’

Instead of separating thousands more families – rethink UK family migration policies

Posted on by Emily

By Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray.

Last week, new immigration rules were laid before parliament that will force thousands of British citizens and settled residents to live apart from their partner and even their children. This is because the Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) to bring a non-British partner to the UK is going to rise to £29,000 in April, and to £38,700 in early 2025 (the staggering of the increase was announced only after a public outcry).

The MIR has been a source of anguish since it was introduced in 2012, replacing a simpler test of ‘adequate maintenance’. As it has not risen from the original £18,600, it is easy to see why the government would now consider an increase. However, the MIR has already caused family separation and hardship, and the increase will make things worse.

The MIR is inflexible, being concerned with only one question: the income of the UK partner on application. Changes to the household income after entry, regardless of the incoming spouse’s potential contribution, are irrelevant. As a result, a British parent who cares for children, who works part-time or is still in education or training may be unable to meet the MIR even if the family’s financial position would be transformed once their partner joins them. In addition, meeting the MIR is not just a matter of having the right income, but of having it for at least six months, often longer, before the application. People in casualised work, the self-employed or those returning from abroad often find this challenging if not impossible. Exceptions designed to meet the government’s human rights obligations exist, but they are often difficult to obtain and can require expensive legal advice and an appeal.

(Image: Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr)

The benefits of the MIR are unclear. The government’s twin rationales have been to ensure families have financial resources for integration, and to ensure new entrants do not impose a burden on the welfare system. But those on family visas are already ineligible for public funds, and the costs of the 5-year partner visa process now exceed £11,000 – leaving some families struggling to meet basic needs. Indeed, by refusing so many partners, the MIR creates enforced single parents, so it only increases financial hardship and welfare reliance.

The rationale for the new figure is also unclear. The government has not consulted the Migration Advisory Committee (as it did in 2012), and the new MIR is not tied to the full-time National Living Wage (less than £24,000). The only explanation given is that the government wants to link the MIR to the minimum salary for skilled migrant workers. Leaving aside that even the skilled worker minimum has exceptions, this seems arbitrary.  Family migration policy concerns the minimum conditions for allowing citizens and residents to enjoy family life with a non-UK partner. Why should this depend on meeting a criterion set for an entirely different category: skilled migrants coming to the UK for work?

The MIR is discriminatory. The old minimum of £18,600 cannot be met by 20-25% of the UK’s working population, and has always particularly impacted those tending to earn less: women, young people, some ethnic minorities and those outside London and Southeast England. The increase exacerbates this injustice: 40-60% of the working population do not earn £29,000, and the vast majority will be excluded by the higher threshold of £38,700. The government estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 people will be affected each year, but it could be much higher as UK-EU couples outside the settlement scheme now also come under the immigration rules.

The manner of the introduction of these changes has been cruel. British spouses make major life changes to meet the visa requirements: changing jobs, making difficult choices between caring obligations and working longer hours, or moving back to the UK alone to earn enough to be joined by their family. They make these changes months in advance, enduring prolonged family separation to find work, earn the MIR over six months and then wait for their application to be processed. Increasing the MIR in April, with less than six months’ notice, leaves those who had been assiduously working towards the visa requirements – often at great cost to their family lives – with their plans destroyed.

The UK’s family migration policies are among the most restrictive in the world – a House of Lords Committee found they ‘fail both families and society’. There are many reasons why families need to live together in the UK – which is after all the home of at least one partner – and there is a pile of evidence as to the deep unhappiness, financial stress and loneliness caused by the system, including to children. This will sadly increase once the new MIR applies.

Living in your home with your partner should not be a privilege only for the wealthy. It is time for a total rethink. We have written to the main opposition parties asking them to include a commitment to review the family migration rules in their election manifestos.  

Helena Wray is Professor of Migration Law at the University of Exeter where her research focuses on the regulation of families through immigration law. Her latest monograph, published by Hart in 2023, is Article 8 ECHR, Family Reunification and the UK’s Supreme Court: Family Matters? She is currently working on the ESRC funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on migration, gender and families, with a particular interest in transnational marriages and relationships. She is PI of the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

To learn about the impact of the new Minimum Income Requirement on universities, read Eda Yazici’s recent MMB blogpost, ‘Debordering Higher Education’. And for a previous study on the impact of the UK immigration system on families see Katharine’s blogpost from 2020, ‘Kept apart – couples and families separated by the UK immigration system’.

Invisible: domestic workers’ commutes in Latin America

Posted on by Emily

By Valentina Montoya Robledo and Rachel Randall.

Read the Spanish version here.

Domestic workers make up one in every five working women in Latin America, totalling approximately 13 million individuals. In recent decades, a significant transformation has occurred as many domestic workers have shifted from living in their employers’ homes to commuting daily from their own residences due to rapid urbanization processes. Latin America became the most urbanized region in the world in 2014. By 2020, 83% of domestic workers in Colombia, for example, resided in their own homes. Their precarious earnings and the fact that more than 80% of them are informal workers, however, have forced them to live in city outskirts. Both their homes and the households where they work often lack proper connections to public transport as well as pavements for pedestrians, making their lengthy commutes both time consuming and expensive.

(Image: from Invisible)

This shift has led to extensive commuting times across Latin America, with domestic workers’ journeys reaching up to seven hours per day in Bogotá, six hours in Lima, five hours in São Paulo (Montoya Robledo, forthcoming) and three and a half hours in smaller Colombian cities like Manizales. According to Bogotá’s 2015 Mobility Survey, domestic workers have the longest commutes among all urban occupations in Colombia. In many countries they also allocate a significant portion of their income to cover transport costs: 36% in Lima, for example, and 28% in Medellín. During these prolonged journeys, domestic workers often face racial discrimination, gender-based violence, common crime and road safety concerns.

These hardships not only risk domestic workers’ safety but also hinder their access to a range of opportunities from education to leisure to political participation. And yet, local governments in Latin America frequently overlook their situation. The Invisible Commutes project was set up in 2019 to shed light on this critical issue, starting with a documentary about domestic workers’ concerns, which was expanded into a transmedia project in 2020. Collaborating with musician and cultural manager Andres Gonzalez and filmmaker Daniel Gomez, the project aims to raise awareness not only among scholars but also the general public and mobility experts about domestic workers’ limited Right to the City in Latin America.

Invisible Commutes uses various media to depict domestic workers’ expensive, violent and lengthy commutes in order to advocate for their Right to the City. The project includes short audio segments featuring their testimonials, which focus on their experiences when commuting and their perspectives on mobility infrastructure projects. It includes a section on the maps that domestic workers have drawn of their commutes. The project also produces opinion pieces and journal papers, and engages in academic, civil society and local government discussions. Recognized in 2023 as a ‘Remarkable Feminist Voice in Transport’ by Tumi and Women Mobilize Women, Invisible Commutes is a comprehensive effort to address transportation injustice for millions of women.

Filming for the Invisible Commutes documentary, Invisible, has taken place over an extended period, beginning in 2019 with a focus on Reinalda Chaverra, a domestic worker based in Medellín. In 2022 filming continued in Bogotá with domestic worker Belén García. In 2023, Invisible Commutes was awarded funds by Migration Mobilities Bristol to complete the documentary short and hold a workshop with the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (UTRASD) in Medellín.

The workshop explored how domestic workers themselves want to see their commutes represented on screen and enabled their voices to feed into the form and content of the final documentary. This was crucial for us because, despite a recent upsurge in Latin American films that focus on domestic worker protagonists, almost none depict the workers’ lengthy and challenging commutes. It is widely acknowledged that these films tend to be made by directors whose perspectives are more closely aligned with those of employers, rather than employees. They often dramatize the dynamics of employer-employee relationships within employers’ homes by taking live-in domestic workers as their protagonists, as is the case, for example, of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015). In reality, hourly paid roles are becoming more popular than live-in forms of domestic work, as this report focusing on Brazil also shows. When we talked about the lack of visual representations of domestic workers’ commutes at the workshop, one participant explained that it is not convenient for employers to acknowledge the long, challenging and costly journeys that their employees have to undertake because it raises the question of how these commutes should be compensated.

As a starting point for our discussion, we watched clips from the film Roma, which focuses on domestic worker Cleo. Set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, Cleo’s story is strongly inspired by the real experiences of Liboria Rodríguez who was employed by director Alfonso Cuarón’s family when he was a child. Although Roma risks reinforcing a narrative in which its protagonist is both celebrated as, and relegated to, the status of a surrogate member of her employer family, the way the film dwells on Cleo’s gruelling routine maintaining an extensive house and supporting her employers’ four children sparked strong affective responses among the workshop’s participants. Some addressed the negative implications this kind of workload has for managing to exercise or relax, while others reflected on the impact it has for workers’ relationships to their own loved ones, namely their children.

Many of the insights that fed into Invisible were, nonetheless, provoked by the participants’ reflections on the differences between their experiences commuting and those depicted in one of the only Latin American films that focuses on this topic. Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014) traces the lengthy journeys undertaken by its protagonist Ramona, an hourly-paid cleaner who commutes on public transport from her home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to her employers’ upmarket apartments in its centre. Like Roma, Réimon also dwells on the details of Ramona’s work and routine. One workshop participant praised the grace and elegance that characterises Ramona’s portrayal: she is always nicely dressed and well presented. The importance of this became clear as multiple participants spoke about how the distance that they need to walk across difficult terrain to catch initial transport links means they are forced to arrive at work with unclean clothes, suffer rude comments from other commuters, or take a cloth with them to try and wipe off the dirt. The dignity of Ramona’s depiction resonated with UTRASD members who shared experiences of having been denigrated by others due to their occupation and discriminated against on the basis of their race.

One participant also noted that Ramona does not appear to feel afraid walking through the city in the dark of the early morning, while the participant herself has often feared being attacked. Ohers attested to how common it is to be sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport. Another participant observed that Ramona is shown getting a seat on the train, while the buses they catch are so full at peak times that they must always stand.  

In response to these challenges, Invisible concludes with the changes that UTRASD members themselves would make to improve domestic workers’ experiences commuting to their employers’ homes. These include: building more public bathrooms in stations and across the city; introducing women-only carriages; giving domestic workers preference in queues at peak times; and subsidising public transport for domestic workers or introducing forms of transport specifically for them. The final three proposals would likely require individuals to register formally as domestic workers, which would be a positive given the challenges that widespread informality brings across the sector.

We hope that the documentary encourages policy makers and urban planners to take up their proposals and continue hearing what they have to say.

Invisible (Valentina Montoya Robledo, Daniel Gómez Restrepo and Andres Gonzalez Robledo 2024) will have its UK premiere at the University of Bristol on 31 January 2024.

Valentina Montoya Robledo is a Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford. She directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes on domestic workers’ commuting experiences. Her most recent paper is ‘That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them’: Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City.

Rachel Randall is Reader in Latin American Studies at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Her book, Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture is published this month by the University of Texas Press. It explores the struggles of domestic workers in Latin America through an analysis of films, texts and digital media produced with them or inspired by their experiences. The book is available now with a 30% discount using the code UTXM30 by ordering online in the UK and Europe and in the US and Latin America. 

Further MMB blogposts about domestic workers in Latin America include Rachel’s post on ‘Domestic workers and COVID-19: Brazil’s legacy of slavery lives on,’ and ‘The dangers of staying home: lockdown deepens inequalities in Brazil,’ by Fernanda Mallak, Isabela Vianna Pinho and Thalles Vichiato Breda.

The ethics of mapping migrant violence through Mexico

Posted on by Emily

By Sylvanna Falcón.

From October 2021 through to May 2022 undergraduate students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, Berkeley, participated in a human rights investigation with Human Rights First (HRF) and El Instituto para las Mujeres en la Migración, AC (IMUMI, The Institute for Migration of Women). Under the direct supervision of university staff, we became part of a binational team (US and Mexico) to track incidents of violence in Mexico affecting non-Mexican migrants, many of whom were asylum seekers, that were being captured online, primarily through news reports or social media posts.

Student researchers used open-source investigation techniques to identify incidents of harms committed against migrants in Mexico. These techniques refer to methodologically accessing publicly available information on the internet, including online news articles, non-governmental or other expert reports, and social media content. For research purposes, the team collated and synthesized this information systemically and went through a process of verification on as many incidents as possible during the research period.

Police vehicle parked in front of a migration encampment in Tijuana, Mexico (image: Barbara Zandoval published on June 19, 2021)

With a primary focus on US President Biden’s administration, which began in January 2021, the students identified more than 400 unique incidents of violence targeting migrants since the start of Biden’s presidency, from reported kidnappings, extortion, and death to allegations of widespread corruption of government officials working alongside drug traffickers. Students recorded all incidents in a shared spreadsheet and tried to verify as many of them as possible. In addition to vetting the source of the information itself, verification meant that students would locate additional online material about a specific incident in order to have more confidence that the incident indeed occurred.

But what to do with all the collection of incidents? How to communicate this information to the general public in an ethical way? What do we gain or lose by depicting migrant violence in a data visualization project? For what purpose, what audience, does this form of documentation serve? Each organization in this partnership had a different purpose for participating in the project. For university students, it was a unique learning experience to systemically collect this kind of online information. HRF, based in the United States, was in need of additional research support to document these cases to put pressure on the US government to change its immigration policies to align with human rights standards and for IMUMI, based in Mexico, the plight of migrant women is their primary focus through advocacy and education efforts.

As we all began to think about the most effective method in which to share this information publicly, the desire to go beyond a text-based report seemed important given the university’s access to various data visualization options. As we agreed to create a digital story and digital map of the incidents, students began to reflect on the ethics of this work, asking pointed questions about the purpose, the desired outcome, and whether or not data visualization results in dehumanization of the migrants. As I navigated these thoughtful queries from students, I encouraged them to acknowledge the various sentiments they felt about the research project itself and about these final deliverables. In the digital report titled ‘Perilous Journeys: Migrants Vulnerable to Violence through Mexico’ they wrote, in part,

Many of us are undergraduate researchers from migrant families with ties to Latin American countries. The cases the team reviewed have evoked feelings of both accomplishment and powerlessness. While proud to help to document the migration-related trauma that is familiar to many of our families and loved ones who have faced migrant-related trauma, our constant exposure to the quantity and severity of these instances is felt on an even deeper emotional and personal level.

Acknowledging their relative privilege by being university students in the United States, the students felt it important to include in the report the following line: ‘As researchers, we cannot stress enough the importance of remaining cognizant of the real names, faces, and lives behind the work we present in this report.’ 

The ethics of visualizing the data remained front and centre during the duration of the project. And the questions of ethics were multi-layered: from knowingly exposing students to graphic material on a regular basis, from understanding that the material could be mis-used if not careful about the presentation, to inadvertently exposing the safety areas for migrants to authorities, and, most importantly, unintentionally dehumanizing the plight of migrants through dots on a map.

In the end, a data visualization project that turned into a digital report conveyed an ideal synergy between text-based information and learning about the incidents on a map so that readers could geographically situate where the reported incidents occurred. The students opted to add different color markings on the map to distinguish incidents and, moreover, to aid people’s understanding that the extent of the problem is throughout the country of Mexico. Both HRF and IMUMI felt this presentation of the research aided them in their own efforts to raise awareness of migrant violence and to call for change.   

Sylvanna Falcón is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trained as a sociologist, Professor Falcón is the founder and director of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Santa Cruz. She is a visiting scholar at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB, from October to December 2023.

Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands

Posted on by Emily

The third in our series of blogposts exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port city of Calais.

By Juan Zhang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disablement and resistance in the British immigration system

Posted on by Emily

By Rebecca Yeo.

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

The disabling impact of immigration controls

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

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

Compassion in immigration policy

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

A social model approach

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

The barriers to change

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

Lived experience

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

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

Voluntary sector

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

Public response

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

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

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

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

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