The anti-policy of European anti-smuggling as a site of contestation in the Mediterranean migration ‘crisis’

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the European anti-smuggling agenda as an anti-policy that derives legitimacy from fighting ‘bad things’, in terms that mask political disagreement. By juxtaposing the agenda to the experiences and understandings of those whom such measures affect most directly – people migrating without authorisation to the EU – it uncovers the productivity of anti-smuggling and the political contestations surrounding it. Based on a qualitative analysis of 257 interviews carried out with 271 people who travelled – or sought to travel – across the Mediterranean Sea by boat using smuggling networks, the article highlights the complicity of governing authorities and officials with smuggling networks and practices, as well as the diversity and ambivalences of relationships between smugglers and the smuggled. Going further, the article points to the specific ways in which anti-smuggling is contested by those on the move, which expose a central political disagreement over the legitimacy of mobility across borders.     

The three worlds of emigration policy: towards a theory of sending state regimes

Migration theory has historically dismissed the role of sending states in labour migration, with theories grounded in social and economic mechanisms that left little room for political interventions. The theory was supported by evidence from major cases, like that of Mexico, in which sending state policies were understood to be either altogether absent, or overridden by other processes. However, migration flows have changed significantly in the neoliberal era, and these changes have produced different policy orientations among sending states. Many sending states – the Philippines is a prominent example – now have explicit migration management policies that are geared towards promoting and facilitating particular types of labour migration. Even sending countries without such programmes have policies to manage relations with their diaspora, whose remittances now play critical roles in their economies. Drawing from primary case studies of the Mexican, Moroccan, and Philippine cases, with additional evidence from a number of key cases, I propose a tripartite typology for theorising sending state interventions in labour migration.     

Citizenship in hard times: intra-EU naturalisation and the Euro crisis

Demarcated by growing austerity, economic uncertainty, and EU-exits, the past decade witnessed monumental shifts across the political and economic landscapes of Europe. Citizenship is a stabilising force in this era of crisis, particularly for intra-EU migrants. In this contribution, I examine how the Euro crisis impacted citizenship acquisition among these migrants. Building upon the model proposed by John Graeber’s article [2016. ‘Citizenship in the shadow of the Euro crisis: explaining changing patterns in naturalisation among intra-EU migrants.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (10): 1670–1692], I discuss the relative importance of citizenship in times of crisis from global and regional perspectives. I argue Graeber’s theory presents a strong model for citizenship acquisitions during the crisis, yet leaves the core dyadic structure and several inconsistent findings unexamined. I replicate these models and introduce a dyadic model using bilateral data from 21 receiving and 23 sending states in Europe between 2007 and 2013. Contrary to Graeber’s theory, I find citizenship acquisitions among intra-EU migrants primarily coincide with increased in-migration, rather than influences of the Euro crisis. I conclude that while economic sending and receiving contexts matter, the Euro crisis did not appear to restructure intra-EU migrant citizenship incentives.     

Precarious intimacies – Europeanised border regime and migrant sex work

This article examines the meaning of borders – the spaces where immigration policies and restrictions are materially condensed – in the lives of migrant sex workers. I provide a theoretical and conceptual framework to discuss the role of borders in creating living and working conditions for sex workers within the European border regime. This regime both restricts and enables a structural background for migrant sex work. I argue that sex work scholars should pay closer attention to the heterogeneity of non-citizenship and the effects of different immigration statuses on the working conditions and forms of intimacies migrants create. Borders need to be viewed as institutions that produce social relations. I categorise these relations as precarious intimacies to describe the ways in which intimacy, commerce and borders often intertwine in the lives of migrants engaged in commercial sex work. The article draws upon 18-month ethnographic fieldwork among and interviews with migrant sex workers in Finland.     

Mixed matters in Australia

ABSTRACT

Mapping attitudes toward intermarriage – who is and who is NOT considered an acceptable mate – offers an incisive means through which imaginings of belonging – ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship, race, and culture – can be critically evaluated. Looking specifically at Australia, despite a growing body of research on whiteness, and Mixedness, there is very little qualitative research on attitudes toward mixing among the different groups in Australia. Therefore, in this article, I document attitudes towards ‘mixed’ marriage through focus group interviews in communities across Australia to explore what boundaries, if any, exist and the attitudes of different groups toward intermarriage and ‘mixed’ families in Australia. Drawing from these 69 focus groups conducted across seven cities and the surrounding area of the six states of Australia: Darwin, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, and Melbourne with homogenous groups based on the ways Australians self-identify – indigenous (Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander), white (differentiating if applicable between those who identify as Australian as opposed to European or South African), African Australian, and other groups at various community locations, I argue that national discourses of multiculturalism and imaginings of who and what constitutes being Australian heavily influence attitudes toward mixing. Furthermore, there is a clear hierarchy of desirability in terms of who is considered marriable, with pattern in the narratives and counter-narratives offered by different groups. These findings are presented within a larger discussion of how the contemporary situation in Australia compares to the institutional, individual, and ideological practices that discourage mixing globally.     

Promoting majority culture and excluding external ethnic influences: China’s strategy for the UNESCO ‘intangible’ cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

China’s enthusiasm for having many World Heritage–listed sites is well-known as a national strategy of cultural soft power, economic development, and incorporating minority groups into the Han-dominated Chinese state. Relatively understudied are China’s efforts related to UNESCO’s lists of ‘intangible’ cultural heritage, which inscribe people’s living culture – such as dances, costumes, and songs – as world heritage. This study focuses on how some ethnic groups’ intangible culture has been objectified for the World Heritage Lists by the Chinese state. This study argues that by enlisting ethnic minorities’ culture under the name of Chinese state, the state can reinforce state borders that often run across ethnic and cultural boundaries, reducing external influences on minorities from their trans-border ethnic or cultural kin. Concomitantly, the majority’s cultural prominence is further entrenched in this process by the emphasis placed on minorities’ folklore in contrast to the Han’s culture of civilization.     

Reconciling transnational mobility and national social security: what say the welfare state bureaucrats?

The welfare state was constructed to ensure the well-being of a sedentary population, consisting of citizens living within the territorial boundaries of the nation. However, mobility patterns change, and more people lead lives that criss-cross national borders while drawing on different sources of transnational social protection – the welfare state included. Now, the daily work of bureaucrats involves delivering national social security benefits to transnationally mobile recipients. Through encounters and casework processes, these welfare state bureaucrats observe how ‘transnationals’ deal with complex regulations and make use of the social security system. This article explores bureaucrats’ perceptions of individuals’ agency and behaviour as they reconcile their transnational mobility with national social security. It builds on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in the Norwegian welfare administration, including 36 interviews, participant observation and informal conversations. The analysis identifies an institutional perspective of transnationals’ agency as shaped by their level of regulatory awareness and compliance. The bureaucrats observe some types of transnational behaviour to be more prevalent than others. As the article concludes, these bureaucratic perspectives have major implications for transnational social security delivery and how the welfare state accommodates transnational mobility.     

Negotiating race in stand-up comedy: interpretations of ‘single story’ narratives

This paper explores how narratives of personal experiences among audience members in Midwestern comedy clubs shape their receptivity to the racial discourses deployed by stand-up comedians. Conducting a Midwest-based ethnography of comedy clubs located across three states, I collected data through a variety of methods, which included: live stand-up performance observations; interviews of comedians and audience members from the same shows to better situate their respective strategies and reactions; and audience surveys. My analysis reveals how the subtlety and art of stand-up performance styles combine with the pleasurable medium of humor to alternately reinscribe, challenge, or proudly celebrate audience understandings of race. The accounts shared by comedians and audience members at these clubs demonstrate the potential for stereotype humor – contingent on presentation styles and audience experiences – to foster ethnic solidarity or complicate racial-behavioral associations through repeated encounters with comedians who either indirectly challenge or actively critique familiar types.     

Making a difference in Mogadishu? Experiences of multi-sited embeddedness among diaspora youth

ABSTRACT

Civic participation today is increasingly multi-sited, operating in, between and across specific locations. Growing numbers of people experience multi-sited embeddedness, which I understand both in the sense of belonging to and engaging in multiple communities. In this article, I focus on those who left Somalia as young children or were born to Somali parents in exile, and ask what motivates these young people to return or turn to the Somali region. What experiences shape their civic engagement and where do they engage? How does their hybrid, multi-sited or embedded sense of identity impact their engagement in several locations? And how does that engagement affect their sense of identity? The article is based on 80 in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions in Garowe, Hargeisa, Mogadishu, Oslo and the Twin Cities. Informants stayed for shorter or longer durations in the Somali region but lived for the larger part of their lives in Norway or the United States. I illustrate how young people’s civic engagement impact feelings of belonging as much as their sense of belonging influences their civic actions. In this article, I argue for non-binary ways of studying multi-sited embeddedness that do justice to diaspora youth’s everyday negotiations.     

Kingdoms,republics and people's democracies: legitimacy and national identity in European constitutions

This article uses constitutional texts to explore the models of national identity which elites in European states have apparently wished to endorse. It analyses three types of constitutions – of constitutional monarchies, democratic republics, and former revolutionary communist states – to establish how the primary principle of legitimacy is identified, and how the concept of ‘the people’ is understood. It concludes that these issues evoke a different response in the three types of constitution, suggesting a surprising survival of the implications of the monarchical-republican distinction, and a brief flowering of at least the principle of international proletarian solidarity in communist constitutions.     

Home and belonging: a comparative study of 1.5 and second-generation Egyptian ‘expatriates’ in Qatar and ‘immigrants’ in the U.S.

This article compares how two different migration models – legal permanence and legal temporary settlement – shape 1.5 and second-generation Egyptians’ feelings of belonging towards the host countries of the U.S. and Qatar. Relying on formal semi-structured interviews, I argue that the inability of Egyptians in Qatar to obtain Qatari citizenship contributes greatly to their lack of sense of belonging to Qatar. However, a central paradox appears when Egyptians in Qatar simultaneously discuss other factors, such as family and/or friends’ networks, comfort, safety, and country familiarity, which make them feel Qatar is home. Conversely, while Egyptian-Americans appear to be more confident with their host country relationship because of their experience in a country of immigrants, factors such as post-9/11 discrimination and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East complicate their relationship with the U.S. Both groups reflect simultaneous feelings of home, belonging, discrimination, and/or exclusion in their respective ‘host’ countries but in different ways. These case studies demonstrate that different migration models do not necessarily lead to predicted understandings of home and belonging. This article thus argues for the need to reassess the assumptions we have of the relationship between citizenship and belonging.     

Moving Subjects,Stagnant Paradigms: Can the ‘Mobilities Paradigm’ Transcend Methodological Nationalism?

This article contends that an emerging ‘mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility.     

Making the transnational move: deliberation,negotiation, and disjunctures among overseas Chinese returnees in China

As Chinese cities compete aggressively for foreign-educated Chinese labour from afar and offer enticing recruitment packages, little is known about how targeted foreign-educated Chinese navigate these programmes across transnational space. This article explores the relationship between the talent recruitment programmes the Chinese state fiercely promote and the experiences of U.S.-educated Chinese returnees. Drawing upon the literature on neoliberal globalisation, skilled return migration, and Chinese diaspora engagement, I argue that transnationally connected and mobile migrants do not subscribe to the nationalistic development agenda of a particular state but move across transnational spaces by strategically utilising different forms of capital at their disposal. Based on qualitative data collected in China between 2014 and 2016, this article demonstrates that despite strong push from the Chinese state towards patriotism, foreign-educated Chinese returnees do not subscribe to the inherently place-based, nationalistic development agenda. Rather, they utilise different forms of capital that these initiatives provide in ways the Chinese state has not intended: to enhance mobility across national borders and flexibility to organise their careers and detach themselves from particular places. More work is called for to further theorise the experiences of these transnational elites and the new subjectivities emerging from these processes.     

An invisible minority? Return migration and ethnicity in Okinawa*

This paper examines ethnic return migration in Japan by looking at a particular case – that of people of half-Okinawan parentage returning to Okinawa, referred to in this paper as the Nisei. By going beyond conventional theories that entice people to return migrate to their ethnic homelands, I also look at issues regarding nationality and how the category of ‘Japanese’ tends to conflate race and ethnicity, thus creating boundaries as well as ‘invisible minorities’. I also explore how ethnicity and nationality intersect using this particular case and how these intersections are actually created and enabled through processes of migration. In line with this, I also discuss how ‘Japanese’ and ‘half’ are both ascribed and self-ascribed identities, and how each of these two categories delineate ‘boundaries’ and hence engage in ‘boundary-making process/es’.     

Europe's failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration: ethnographic notes on a counterproductive industry

Despite Europe's mass investments in advanced border controls, people keep arriving along the continent's shores under desperate circumstances. European attempts to ‘secure’ or ‘protect’ the borders have quite clearly failed, as politicians themselves increasingly recognise – yet more of the same response is again rolled out in response to the escalating ‘refugee crisis’. Amid the deadlock, this article argues that we need to grasp the mechanics and logics of the European ‘border security model’ in order to open up for a change of course. Through ethnographic examples from the Spanish-African borders, the article shows how the striving for border security under a prevailing emergency frame has generated absurd incentives, negative path dependencies and devastating consequences. At Europe's frontiers, an industry of border controls has emerged, involving European defence contractors, member state security forces and their African counterparts, as well as a range of non-security actors. Whenever another ‘border crisis’ occurs, this industry grows again, feeding on its own apparent ‘failures’. This vicious cycle may be broken, the article concludes, once policy-makers start curtailing the economies of border security underpinning it – yet the challenges are formidable as the industry retrenches along with the political response to the drama it has itself produced.     

Out-migration,social capital and the cooperative dilemma: evidence from Bulgaria’s population crisis

This study examines the effects of out-migration on social capital in sending communities. I first conceptualise social capital as the presence of social trust and engagement at the individual-level of analysis. Drawing from established theories of cooperation, I then argue that subnational out-migration acts as a structural-level signal that changes people’s incentives to trust others and engage in social activities. I use the current migration crisis in Bulgaria to test this argument. Findings from multi-level models that combine cross-sectional survey data and subnational migration flows indicate that high out-migration is correlated with lower levels of generalised trust. Out-migration is also associated with higher frequencies of informal social engagement, indicating that people rely more on their immediate social networks in environments of heavy out-migration. The overall evidence suggests that out-migration is a threat to social capital in sending communities.     

Seeking refuge in Europe: spaces of transit and the violence of migration management

ABSTRACT

In the past few years, spaces of transit have become prominent sites for people seeking refuge in Europe. From railway stations and parks in European cities, to informal settlements around Calais, to the hotspots in Italy and Greece, the movements of people and the techniques that govern them are at the heart of what has been misnamed the ‘European refugee crisis’. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, this article takes spaces of transit as a vantage point for interrogating the relationship between mobility, migration management and violence, focusing on the fracturing of journeys due to forced and obstructed mobility both outside and within the EU. We develop the notion of ‘politics of exhaustion’ to highlight the impact and protracted character of these forms of migration management – its accumulated effects over time and across spaces – yet without reducing people seeking refuge to passive victims. Struggles for mobility are closely related to the existence and continued adaptation of migration management practices. The notion of fracturing can thus be employed not only to make sense of the violent effects of migration management but also the ways in which conventional conceptions of state and citizenship are challenged by the emergence of alternative living spaces, communities and politics.     

Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development–security nexus

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the observation that, since the collapse of eastern European state socialism, the Roma have become the subject and target of Europe-wide development programs and discourses, while, at the same time, they have been problematized in terms of social, public and national security. Due to the ways in which development and security have ambiguously come together in Europe’s recent history, I will argue that the living conditions of the poorest among the Roma have not only worsened, but also, and more fundamentally, the divide between Europe’s rich and poor has become seriously racialized and almost unbridgeable. I explain how the bio- and geopolitical conditions under which development and security have merged in Europe’s engagement with the Roma have led to a situation in which the official aim of Roma-related development programs – the improvement of their living conditions and life chances – tends to result in a dreadlock.     

A vision of social justice in intergroup dialogue

Intergroup dialogues (IGD) – face-to-face, structured interactions between people of different social identities – is one educational intervention used to foster engagement across differences and to promote social justice. Using an 18-month case study methodology, we examined the experiences of IGD students and facilitators at one campus to gain a deeper understanding of what happens in IGD, specifically how social justice is understood and cultivated. Findings suggest that the primacy and limitations of individual experience, the tension facilitators experience about stepping in to dialogue, and the confounding nature of comfort in IGD contribute to a dialogue experience that better addresses some aspects of social justice than others.