Category: Bodies things capital

Disablement and resistance in the British immigration system

Posted on by Emily

By Rebecca Yeo.

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

The disabling impact of immigration controls

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

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

Compassion in immigration policy

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

A social model approach

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

The barriers to change

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

Lived experience

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

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

Voluntary sector

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

Public response

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Şebnem Eroğlu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returnees did well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asylum and extraction in the Republic of Nauru

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Julia Morris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Researching Western privilege in Dubai: a conversation with Saba A. Le Renard

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

This is an edited version of an interview with Saba A. Le Renard in Jadaliyya* about their recent book Western Privilege. Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write the book?

Saba A. Le Renard (SLR): When I was doing my PhD fieldwork about the transforming femininities of young Saudi women fifteen years ago, I was shocked by the stereotypical discourses many French residents I met there held on Saudi people. After finishing my PhD, I started working on the statuses, self-identifications, and practices of Western passport holders, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Dubai. During the courses I had followed in Middle East studies, the statuses of Western passport holders had never been a topic, despite many of this group occupying dominant positions in firms and various administrations of the region. My research started with a willingness to question this status, to make ‘Westerner’ the object rather than the implicit subject of knowledge.

In Dubai, as in many places of the world, having or not having a Western passport produces a clear split. Having one facilitates passage across national borders and represents an important differentiator and ranking criterion within the globalised job market, though how and how much one benefits from it differ, notably, depending on one’s position in gender, class and race hierarchies. The book explores how men and women, white and non-white Western passport holders inhabit the privileged status of ‘Westerner.’ It shows how they perceive Dubai’s social order differently depending on their trajectories, and how they nevertheless participate in reproducing it, for instance by implementing salary differentiation when recruiting, or by routinely racialising other inhabitants, described as ‘locals,’ ‘Arabs,’ Filipinos’ or ‘Indian.’ 

J: What particular topics, issues and literatures does the book address? 

SLR: First, the book contributes to what could be called a postcolonial turn in studies of the Arabian Peninsula, breaking with the longstanding tendency to ignore the imperial history of the region. In this book, I study Westerners not only as privileged migrants but also as local elites, playing a role in the perpetuation of nationality, race, class and gender hierarchies. I deconstruct the discourse presenting Westerners in the Arabian Peninsula as outsiders, having no role in the perpetuation of inequality; this belief is central, I argue, to the construction of their privileged subjectivities. For instance, some parents I interviewed told me that Dubai was great with young kids as it is very practical to have a live-in nanny, but that they planned to leave when their kids would become teenagers, because they did not want the latter to ‘see’ such blatant social injustice. I analysed this need to distance themselves from Dubai’s social order while benefitting from it as a salient element of distinctive Western subjectivities. 

Second, the book aims to contribute to race and migration studies. In the last decade, several authors have criticised the lack of attention for privileged migrants in migration studies. Postcolonial approaches of expatriation, which have shown how whiteness is transformed through migrations, have been very useful to understanding the distinctive subjectivities of Western residents in Dubai. The originality of my approach lies in my choice to compare the trajectories, practices and discourses of white and non-white Western passport holders. It enabled me to identify the specificity of whiteness as a privileged status among Western passport holders (because whiteness, in practice, does remain a privileged position among them), and to make visible the trajectories of non-white Western passport holders that benefit, to a lesser extent, from Western privilege, while also facing forms of stigmatisation and marginalisation. Beyond this, the similarities and contrasts between the two groups reveal how Dubai’s neoliberal discourse on multiculturalism, combined with the use of whiteness in the city’s branding, impact racial categories and produce conditional and limited inclusions. Such reflection echoes works on neoliberalism, multiculturalism and selective inclusions in other contexts, especially the United States and some European countries.

Third, the book is grounded on gender and sexuality studies; it documents how the formation of Westerners as a social group interlocks race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. Postcolonial feminism as well as intersectionality are important inspirations for such approach. I argue that beside professional aspects, Western distinction lies on specific forms of heteronormativity. On the one hand, Western, white, upper-class couples, in spite of a clear labour division among spouses, identify with gender equality and women’s emancipation in contrast with ‘others’ represented as oppressed or sexist, or as frustrated sexual predators. On the other hand, single Westerners often long for serious, authentic relations, which they present as impossible in Dubai. Many associate authentic love with the West and Westerners, in contrast to Dubai’s so-called materialism and superficiality. By analysing specific models of heteronormativity among Western residents and how they participate in making boundaries between them and ‘others,’ I hope this book brings a contribution to Middle East feminist studies, which have been developing postcolonial and queer approaches in the last decades. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

SLR: I hope people interested in the Middle East, in race and migration studies, and in gender and feminist studies will read the book. I think it could help question how Western researchers position themselves while in the field, and also nourish the wider discussion that is currently developing about racialisation in the region.

Since the book is also inspired by race and migration studies and gender and sexuality studies focused on other contexts, I hope it will interest people working in these fields beyond the Middle East. While Dubai has an awful reputation among many intellectual bourgeoisies, some Western passport holders experience it as less racist than their home societies (for instance, France or the United States) and many women consider its streets as more secure than their home cities. As these two elements suggest, Dubai is an interesting society to better understand transnational racial formations, structural racism, gender regimes and the policing of public spaces—impacting gender, race, class, sexuality and nationality hierarchies.

Saba A. Le Renard is a Researcher in Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. They are currently researching the place of ‘Westerners’ in the multinational professional worlds of Riyadh and Dubai. You can see them interviewed about their book Western Privilege in the MMB Insights and Sounds 2022 series.

* This interview has been edited and republished here with kind permission of Jadaliyya, the independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute. The original, longer version, published in November 2021 and including an excerpt from Western Privilege, can be found here. Please note that Saba’s book was published under a first name that they no longer use.

Engaging with visions of mobilities within the landscape of risk

Posted on by Emily

Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment.

By Thomas O’Shea.

When describing the commercial port land of Felixstowe (fig. 1) as a ‘nerve ganglion of capitalism’, a proto-nostalgic horizon ‘blighted by cargo ships’, Mark Fisher (2006) was describing a vision of the natural’s collision course with the monetary in words that ooze forth from the ascetic expanse he walked us through, right up to the journey’s reposeful end point, the burial ground at Sutton Hoo (fig. 2). Here in this space, the increasingly unseen in today’s world is seen so lucidly that upon listening closer Beowulf’s verses may come rushing forth upon the Deben mists to play amongst the ancient mounds and time-worn grasses.

Figure 1. Felixstowe container port is the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom, a point of arrival and nerve ganglion of capitalism responsible for the distribution of material commodities across the land along established networks of commerce (image: Institution of Civil Engineers).

Figure 2. By contrast, the ‘sunlit planetary quality of serenity’ offered at Sutton Hoo engages with a vision of departure (image: thesuffolkcoast.co.uk). Two different points within a geography that speaks to themes of migration, mobility and the conflict of boundary in space and time.

In a space as innately human as this, the purpose of the city, the urban, and what it means to exist in it becomes overwritten in the victorious verse and rhythm of nature and the environment, yet there is an eeriness inherent in this vision. A sense of disconnection and immobility that is increasingly disassociated with the ever-expanding urban centres across the world. This is a sense that many might argue is, itself, becoming increasingly overwritten through development and, possibly more directly, through proliferating networks of digital visualisation and communication.

More of us are living in urban settings and more of us are moving to them. What drives this flight to the city? The deeper motivations can only be described as, much like the conditions of the British weather, myriad. What this mobilisation and migration looks like is relatively more straight forward to describe: a need for access to resources through labour, coupled with a space in which to live and be at home, to rest. Mirrored perfectly in Fisher’s visions from Felixstowe to Sutton Hoo, a seamless cross section of the Anthropocene. Capturing the stillness afforded by a space so radically different to the city, where the scale of achievement, to simply occupy a space with as much concrete matter as is condensed into the wondrous square miles of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, amongst many others, by comparison to that which does not occupy the vastness of Suffolk is astonishing. Historically, progress for those who have settled in these cityscapes has, in many senses, been assured, simply through an increased likelihood of encountering streams of revenue and capital, or so goes the utopian visions of the upwardly mobile Mondeo Men and Worcester Women.

Loosely this might be described as the enabling of capital progress, however these connections, patterns and trends underpinning, however loosely, such stereotypical visions of city living have become much more distant for most within the current global climate. A crude utilisation of Tobler’s first law of geography would, when coupled with Mark Fisher’s nerve ganglion metaphor, lead us to deduce that those closest to capital, to the contemporary capital markets of the city, are not as readily likely to benefit from this proximity as they might once have. This sense of capital mobility associated with the city is now fundamentally more precarious and is visually very different from that seen in the past, offering the first glimpse of the landscape of risk.

Of course, this form of mobility is not completely linear as the city has long also been associated with a flux of capital mobility represented by a great, and growing, disparity between those operating at the top of the metropolitan hierarchy, in gleaming beglassed monoliths, and those looking up at them from the mosaic of avenues and streets below. This structural and spatial inequality of the cityscape is as symbolic of the urban as it is of the human condition it embodies, where products of value are exchanged for labour and where, as David Harvey explained in Social Justice and The City, ‘capitalism annihilates space to ensure its own reproduction.’ Historically facilitated by barbaric internal mechanisms in the West, from blockbusting and redlining amongst a spectrum of variable living standards that extend from unthinkable to the decadent, urbanisation and urban expansion reassembling the natural spaces in the pursuit of capital will naturally enhance and further facilitate the growth of inequity and thus, further strengthen the boundaries of the risk landscape.

This does come down to a fundamental connection between capital and risk, where risk is largely framed in the context of ‘asset loss’ but the landscape in which it is most acutely observed, where capital value is most apparent, the city, is where it is, and will continue to be, predominant. Harvey concludes his vision on the engagement with political process as fundamental to traversing the forms of inequality and injustice generated and facilitated through ties to this form of ‘development’. Consequent of the unprecedented recent times we have lived in, and now continue to live through, together, the public inquisitions regarding the moral constitution of those responsible for overseeing political processes challenges any desire for engagement. Age old theoretical undercoats of societal constitution and modernity begin to peel away under the searing heat of growing public discontent whilst those at the very zenith continue to profit financially.

The risk landscape is one fraught with conflict and is perpetually in crisis. However, were this crisis to be wholly one of capital, it would affect everyone. Capital and inequity are one facet of the greater conflict the risk landscape has with the environment at large, as even when this crisis is framed in the context of equity, it finds equilibrium in the continuation of the trend that, depending on where you are categorised within the social hierarchy of the city, you will continue to be worse off from here on out and no amount of ‘levelling up’ will bring about a truly positive change to this course. We are beginning to feel this at home, on a personal scale now through a volatile geopolitical landscape, but that doesn’t mean that labour is any less abundant. The boundaries of the risk landscape will continue to expand beyond this and find a continuing but ultimately existential conflict with the natural environment, generating an accelerated form of risk that is much more linear in outcome. The general message related to this is clear: ‘Adaptation of current modes and systems to emergent environmental risk is needed, with further mitigation required to prevent the acceleration of this risk’

The modern human age is liquid, where change and continuity are seen to different degrees and operate at various tempos across time. Were I to define which of the processes discussed throughout this missive are representative of change and continuity, I would posit that the ultimate defining factor of both lie in the hands of nature and not my own. Whilst social categories become redefined through mechanisms closely tied to the city, overwriting of old landscape structures through the proliferation of the urban over time generates a legacy of risk through reparation and over expansion. In appropriating space that is not in the interest of that which inhabits that space, be it the development of floodplains to accommodate homes, the utilisation, or lack, of land due to pollution from past industry, processes of land reclamation, we are clutching at straws. Yet, capital is generated and claimed with little interest for the longevity or safety of those inhabiting these new spaces, asserting a dynamic of equitability for whom exactly?

It is in this dissection of value, its definition and by whom (or what), that the vision of the risk landscape becomes truly material. How these values shift, and to what benefit, must continue to be explored if we are to make a sustainable vision of the city into a liveable environment, equitable for all who will call it home. If our mobility within this exploration could be versed in the cognitive, as Mark Fisher did for us, then we are becoming more aware of the trends that connect the naturally seen and unseen with the landscape of risk. Supporting us in the delineation of what is really of and for us against that which appears to be, revealing what it is to be truly of and for the natural.

Thomas O’Shea is a postdoctoral research associate with the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. The primary focus of his research is on developing understanding of the human-water interface with specific interests in the application of social theory, urban and hybrid geographies towards shaping narratives and strategies of sustainability.  

Migrants and miners: gender, age and precarious labour in a Tajik resource extractive landscape

Posted on by Emily

Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment.

By Negar Elodie Behzadi.

Migration is both gendered and aged. It is also deeply tied to the emergence of new extractive landscapes around the world, marked by extractive frontiers pushing into already stressed and fragile environments.  The story of the village of Kante in Tajikistan, of its male migrants and its coal miners – men, women and children – illustrates the ways in which multiple forms of precarious labour appear alongside these new landscapes.

The village of Kante, Tajikistan, 2014

In Tajikistan, a landlocked country in post-Soviet Muslim Central Asia, men started migrating seasonally for work following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In Kante, a village of 1,500 inhabitants on the slopes of the Fann Mountains, 2,000m above sea level, the men gradually began leaving a derelict landscape and a run-down collective tobacco farm. Like most Tajik male seasonal migrants, they left for Russia to find new livelihoods and to escape a country torn by civil war. During the seven years of conflict, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who did not fight travelled as far as the Kamchatka peninsula in search of work. Some Kantegui mountaineers became fishermen. Others went to Moscow, Sverlovsk, Irskuk and other big Russian cities to do ‘mardikor’ (the work of men) on construction sites.

Young boys coming back from the mines with coal bags on donkeys, 2014

When the war ended, some men came back to Kante, only to find destroyed infrastructure, abandoned fields and an uncertain future. So most returned to Russia. In Kante, as in the rest of Tajikistan, migration became a way of life and a rite of passage – every real man in Tajikistan has migrated, provided for his family back home, drunk alcohol in overcrowded compounds, travelled illegally through borders. Some have slept with Russian women, fallen in love, even taken a second Russian wife, leaving a Tajik wife back home (Behzadi, 2019). Life has also changed for those referred to as ‘the left-behind’. Women, children and the elderly live without husbands, fathers or sons for most of the year. Men become absences, photos, voices down the phone, heroic stories, the amount of remittances arriving at the Western Union in the local town.

Unlike villages in the rest of the country, however, Kantegui men have an alternative to migration. The village lies on one of the largest coal reserves in the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, families started digging up the mountain with pickaxes to extract coal, using donkeys to haul their load. At first, families extracted the coal for subsistence, but later they started selling it on a growing informal market. This coincided with a broader turn to coal as a major source of energy across the country. Following Uzbek/Tajik resource conflicts, Uzbekistan shut off the pipeline providing Tajikistan with gas in 2012/13, leading to a new Tajikistani coal development strategy (Behzadi, 2019). The same year, a formal Sino-Tajik mine was established in the village, which blew up the Southern slope of the mountain with dynamite. The rolling stones and big machinery crushed some of the donkeys of the informal miners and damaged their houses. The company brought in engineers and managers from China and pushed informal miners away.

Map of informal and formal mining areas in Kante, 2018

In 2014, around 300 men from Kante and neighbouring villages worked in the formal Sino-Tajik mine. Most Kantegui miners in the ‘Chinese’ mine were men who had retired from migration, tired of the back and forth between Russia and the village. In their 30s and 40s, these men had nothing to prove anymore – they were the ‘djahon didir’ (those who have seen the world) who had come back to a quieter life (Behzadi, 2019). But the formal mine does not offer jobs to all. Those who do not work for the Chinese carry on splitting their year between labour migration to Russia in spring and summer and informal coal mining in autumn and winter. In 2014, around 500 men were working in the informal mines. The hardship of their labour and the simplicity of their tools contrasted with the relative ease of labour in the Chinese mine. Although less arduous, however, work for the Chinese project is a mixed blessing: precarious contracts, unpaid salaries and difficult relationships with Chinese managers take their toll in other ways. And the trade-off is significant: men who accept work for the Chinese mine know it is threatening the very existence of their village. The Chinese are ‘taking all our coal’, many villagers say, in particular the informal miners. Part of the informal mines have already been destroyed, and they fear that the whole village might follow.

Sino-Tajik mine containers in Kante, 2014

Like migration, extractive labour in mines is gendered and aged. Women and children cannot work in the Sino-Tajik mine, but they do work in informal mines. In the past decade about 20 women have been going mining every day high above the village, and sometimes at night when they know they can go unseen. Some of their husbands, like Nadirah’s (a female miner in her 30s), left the country straight after their wedding and took a second wife in Russia. Now he sends only sporadic remittances. Nadirah goes mining with a friend and her daughter who is 13. Her work is considered ‘ayb’ (shameful) in the village and, as a result, Nadirah is stigmatised and excluded from social networks. But while it is considered unacceptable for women to work underground, it is tolerated for children. Most children start at the age of five, leading the donkey in and out of the coal galleries to the market while their parents extract the mineral on the coalface. ‘Coal,’ says Gulnissar, a mother of a 10-year-old child coal miner, ‘there is only coal in children’s heads today.’

Male seasonal labour migration, the ‘shameful’ work of female miners and the spread of child mining comprise a few of the many precarious forms of labour that emerge in new extractive landscapes around the world. The story of Kante illustrates the fragmentation of societies along gendered and aged lines that occurs in such extractive landscapes. These new extractive frontiers also often emerge in places that are already socio-ecologically stressed, such as in the countries that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union.  

Negar Elodie Behzadi is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. She is a feminist political geographer and political ecologist who explores questions of resource extraction and migration in Tajikistan and France. She has also co-directed two ethnographic films on resource extraction in Tajikistan: Komor: Journeys through the Tajik Underground and Nadirah: Coal Woman.

(All images by the author.)

What protections are available to people displaced by climate change?

Posted on by Emily

Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment.

By Kathryn Allinson.

Climate change will impact all our lives in the coming years and many people will experience extreme events due to climate  change resulting in displacement, both internally and across international borders. This has become the reality for some already within low-lying archipelago islands within the South Pacific, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati. Despite the certainty of increased climate change-related displacement, there is still no specific frameworks which protect those moving for climate related reasons (see a detailed discussion here).

The site of the village of Tebunginako, Kiribati – relocated due to severe coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion (image: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia

Are people displaced by climate change refugees?

Under Article 1(A) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, climate-related displacement does not constitute grounds for international protection. I will take the essential elements of Article 1(A) in turn. First, a refugee must have crossed an international border, whereas climate-related displacement is expected to be predominantly internal.

Second, a refugee must have a well-founded fear of persecution. Persecution requires an egregious violation of human rights, which is assessed in light of the nature of the right and the severity of the violation (see here for further discussion). It also requires that the fear of persecution must be well-founded – this does not require certainty – but it must not be far-fetched and should be based upon both an objective assessment of the likelihood of persecution and the subjective nature of the individual’s fear (see Chan v Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, 1989). Climate change is unlikely to fulfil this requirement despite the detriment it can have on an individual’s access to human rights. It is unlikely to meet the severity threshold even in relation to socio-economic rights and, as McAdam (2016) highlights, it is difficult to identify a ‘persecutor’ that the refugee fears; instead, many refugees are likely to be moving to states that are major greenhouse gas contributors.

Third, persecution must be related to a reason given by the Convention of ‘race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion…’ The impacts of climate change do not discriminate. Even if an individual did establish persecution based upon an egregious socio-economic rights violation caused by climate change, they would need to argue that this affected them because of their membership of one of these groups. At best, an individual could argue that a government had consciously withheld assistance to address the impacts of climate change to a specific group, amounting to persecution (see here) but the group must be connected by an immutable characteristic (Applicant A v Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, 1997), not just the impact of the climate change.

Courts have firmly established that the Refugee Convention does not protect victims of natural disasters, slow-onset degradation, poor economic conditions or famine – even when the country of origin is unable or unwilling to provide protection (Canada (Attorney General) v Ward, 1993; Horvath v Secretary of State for the Home Department, 2001). UNHCR has echoed this in its own discussions of how to respond to climate-related displacement (see here and here).

What protections are available to people displaced by climate change?

A response to climate-change related displacement must therefore be sought through other international legal mechanisms. In 2009, the UN Human Rights Council recognised under resolution 10/4 that there is a ‘core inter-linkage between human rights and climate change’ such that those displaced by climate change would be able to rely on the obligations outlined in the ICCPR and the ICESCR. In particular, this would include state’s non-refoulment obligations as the cumulative effect of socio-economic harms can amount to inhumane and degrading treatment such that an individual cannot be returned to such conditions (see Sufi v Elmi, 2011). However, courts may require an immediacy to the rights violation such that future fear of climate-related impacts is insufficient grounds to provide protection from return (see AF(Kiribati), 2013).

In the specific situation of small island states whose territory is threatened by climate change, the law relating to statelessness may also be able to provide some protection and a remedy (see the 1954 Statelessness Convention; Rayfuse 2009). UNHCR has a mandate to prevent and reduce statelessness enabling them to work with states to respond, including coordinating international cooperation, providing protection and resettlement. However, issues concerning when a state will have ceased to exist under international law remains unsettled. For example, for a state to be recognised by international law, Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention requires a permanent population, territory, government and capacity to enter international relations (see Lauterpacht, 1944, and Crawford, 2007, for further discussion). However, there is a lack of clarity on when these criteria will cease to be fulfilled. The problem that international law has grappled with until now has been when new states are formed, not when existing ones have disappeared. As a result, it is unclear when protection for stateless persons of ‘disappeared’ states will be triggered.

There are also regional frameworks that provide broader protections to displaced people, beyond the narrow 1951 definition. In particular, the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration both contain provisions relating to ‘events seriously disturbing public order’, which could be taken to include the events resulting from the effects of climate change. These are both non-binding instruments, whereas Article 5(4) of the Kampala Convention is within a binding instrument and explicitly includes protection for those affected by climate change:

 ‘States parties shall take measures to protect and assist persons who have been internally displaced due to natural or human made disasters, including climate change.’

This focusses protection on internally displaced individuals and ensures that signatory states are required to provides protection and assist those displaced by climate change.

The Kampala Convention is largely based upon the UN Guiding Principles on internal displacement which, under Principle 6(d), outlines that internal displacement is prohibited including in the context of disasters. The principles then provide a framework for states to respond to internal displacement, including that resulting from disasters. The extension of human rights protections to those fleeing climate change is echoed in the Global Compact on Migration, which calls for humanitarian visas for people migrating due to natural disasters and climate change (see objective 2 and 5), as well as similar commitments in the Sustainable Development Goals. Such a response to climate-change related displacement is required under the commitments of Article 14(f) of the Cancun Adaptation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This aims to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement…’ These instruments represent moves by the international community to consolidate existing legal frameworks to respond to climate-change related displacement. However, they are not binding treaty law. They demonstrate political commitments not legal obligations. It is evident that, outside the Africa region, mechanisms for protecting individuals from climate-change related displacement are often non-binding and ad-hoc.

The future of climate-related displacement

The term ‘climate refugee’ is conceptually flawed. Such individuals will not constitute refugees for the term ignores the complex causation involved in any displacement, let alone that related to climate change, which in itself is a multi-causal phenomenon. Whilst human rights law, the law relating to statelessness and regional arrangements do provide for some protections to individuals displaced by climate change, these approaches remain disparate and uncoordinated. A lack of clarity can lead to legal loopholes that are abused by states to limit protections.

To respond to this complexity, there are calls for a separate framework for cross-border climate migrants. Commitments within the Global Compact on Migration and the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the Cancun Agreement, represent attempts by the international community to start to coordinate and elucidate protection for climate-related displacement. However, much more must be done to ensure clarity on the personal, material and temporal scope of protections and obligations for climate change-related displacement.

Kathryn Allinson is a Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol Law School. Her research concerns the establishment of state responsibility for breaches of international law focussing on the interaction of human rights and humanitarian law in relation to displacement, and the protection of socio-economic human rights during conflict.

For more on climate change and displacement see the MMB blog by Ignacio Odriozola about at a landmark decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee on people seeking international protection due to the effects of climate change: Climate-change displacement: a step closer to human rights protection.