ASA Globalog

 

By Magnus Course

A recent proposal to make a documentary on Shuar head-hunting has a led to a flurry of activity on a variety of lowland South America anthropology lists. The ensuing debate evolved gradually from the airing of concerns about the proposed documentary, to a more reflective discussion about what we as anthropologists want to see in popular ethnographic films. Following Steve Rubenstein’s suggestion that a good place to start is by looking at films we regard as successful and positive, several anthropologists sent lists of their favourite ethnographic films about indigenous South American peoples. Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority cited films made by indigenous peoples themselves. Such films of course bypass (or at least, obscure) several rather sticky problems of the ethics and politics of representation. Furthermore, many of these films are beautiful, evocative, and provocative from an anthropological perspective. The question I want to pose in this post is that of whether such films really offer a solution to the central problem we are addressing in this blog: the nature of representation of indigenous peoples in popular ethnographic television documentaries. I am inclined to say that, despite their undoubted worth, they do not. My reason is that what makes them interesting to anthropologists is precisely what makes them uninteresting to everyone else: their capacity to represent life from a truly indigenous perspective. Put simply, anthropologists are trained (and paid) to understand and appreciate these perspectives, general television audiences are not.

There is of course a much broader debate in public broadcasting, to which Andre referred, about the extent to which progamming should be determined by audience demand. Is television entertainment or education? Of course it is ideally both; simultaneously informative and entertaining. Yet the recent plethora of ‘tribal’ reality shows favours entertainment at the expense of education, while the indigenously-produced films favoured by anthropologists (at least, the ones I have seen) are heavily weighted towards the informative end of the spectrum. I would be very surprised (and very pleased!) if a film made by indigenous peoples about themselves made it onto British television at this particular juncture in time. The issue for anthropologists and broadcasters alike, then, is that of how to educate an audience, how to increase awareness of alternative understandings of the world, in increments small enough to prevent the viewer reaching for the remote, but big enough to lead to significant change. My next post will contain a few ruminations about how this might be achieved.

by Daniel Rodriguez

I would like to continue the discussion by making a further point in connection to the complex issue of representation of indigenous peoples in current television trends. It could be argued that one of the consequences of the ongoing profusion of essentialised images of indigenous peoples in television is the collapse of the ‘indigenous’ to the ‘tribal’. The emerging discursive space of the idealized ‘Tribe’ has created a new site to reinforce long-standing views on the ‘indigenous’ and the constructing of new ones in the context of the ‘extreme’ exotica. This contrasts radically with the present complexities of indigenous identities, views and politics –particularly evident for instance in Latin America where indigenous peoples are increasingly active in broad social changes.
Careless or purposeful stereotyping of indigenous peoples in current television shows is particularly striking considering that the essentialisation of collectivities in the media (and western societies) has become an increasingly sensitive issue. This raises the question whether the media, and to a certain extent ‘us’ (meaning the public and those who hold media accountable) might not be applying different ethical standards regarding the representation of different minority groups?
Stereotypes- of course- are not value-free; they are (and have been) traditionally used to justify violence, rights, deny political agency and so on (see for instance the recent cases of Peru and Bolivia). Hence, I think we could rightly ask those who produce and consume this form of media to examine at which point these exoticised representations of indigenous peoples express a form of racism. I wonder if us anthropologists have a tendency to regard these images just as ‘inaccurate’ or ‘biased’ representations of indigenous peoples. The question to ask seem to be at what point does an essentialised ‘innacuracy’ become racism?

by André Singer

It has been a momentous few years for representations of anthropology on television. When in the 1970’s we thought Disappearing World would be a pioneering experiment aimed at popularizing the discipline and in turn providing visual insights,  it was not universally welcomed by anthropologists.  Over time, I think it is fair to say that the ouevre of more than 50 films that formed that series became more and more acceptable and set standards that lasted for decades. For many years up to 2004, the demands of UK television have consistently blocked the production of many new series as other disciplines (history, science and always, natural history) became broadcaster and audience favourites.  Then came Tribe. It was with some misgivings that I acted as consultant to BBC Wales when they proposed this project, but their willingness to listen to objections from anthropologists, and their wish to treat the film subjects with respect and sensitivity, won the day.  What was unforseen was the impact of that series on broadcasters desperate for popular formats and ideas in a television age where so-called reality television ruled.  Tribe spawned an endless array of derivative programming much of which not only used indigenous goups for pure entertainment but also could be seen to put vulnerable peoples  at risk.

Out of that morass, there are two areas that this blog could fruitfully tackle.  The first is to see what anthropologists feel about all or any of the many series that have crossed our screens in the past few years/months.  The second is to discuss the ethical impact of fim crews chasing stories in every accessible village or community  in order to feed television’s voracious hunger to take things a step further in the name of entertainment.

By Simone Abram, ASA Secretary

Welcome to the latest ASA Globalog.

Members of the committee of the ASA have been increasingly concerned about the boom in TV programmes based on the idea of an ‘encounter with the primitive’, from The Tribe to what we teasingly referred to as ‘tribal wife swap’ (but which to our horror did actually appear as ‘tribal wives’).

The issue came to a head for us when we received news of a film company heading into the Peruvian jungle to looked for ‘uncontacted tribes’, leading to accusations of the spreading of respiratory infections. The ASA commissioned a full report from Daniel Rodriguez about the Cicada affair, and we are delighted that he has agreed to start off the globalog this time.

The blog will continue until the end of November, with guest bloggers Andre Singer and Magnus Course. We look forward to a lively blog, and hope that there will be many of you who have comments and responses to add to this debate.

By Ruben Andersson

In a migrant shelter run by a feisty Italian priest outside the muggy border town of Tapachula in southern Mexico, I was once put up in a room with two east African refugees, whose case was pending approval; they had been stuck there for months. When heading back towards Mexico after a trip to Guatemala a week later, the highway police entered our bus at night and beckoned me outside, their torchlight flickering over the pages of my passport. At the border, I was asked whether I was Polish – at this time, a trickle of eastern Europeans were said to be moving through, alongside the central Americans heading north towards the United States. 

A strange geography is springing up across the world, of disjointed territories created and re-created by the migrants that flow through them and defined by the barriers that shoot up around them – the wall at the US-Mexico border, the EU-patrolled waters off Senegal and Mauritania, the fences of Melilla and Ceuta in northern Morocco.

What I want to get at with my anecdote above is, I guess, the patchy, paradoxical and intensely personal nature of today’s movements through this fragmented landscape. Researchers and journalists get entangled in the web of border controls and misidentifications; African asylum seekers languish in nondescript Latin American border towns; south Asians brave the overland route through west Africa to Europe. Meanwhile, policing measures are converging across the world, as are migrants’ techniques for evading these measures; and through it all move the coyotes, NGO workers, anthropologists and others who feed off the migration circuit.

The risk is, perhaps, that migration research follows this trend and becomes increasingly disjointed and split up into specialised fields – helped along by both methodological nationalism and its regional equivalent, as not just governments but blocs such as the EU set research priorities. More cross-pollination across ‘regions’ is needed - especially when it comes to research on the two main trails into the rich West: between northwest Africa and Europe and Latin America and the US. Transnational activist platforms can help foment such a global perspective – the upcoming world social forum on migrations in Madrid, for one, is sure to bring together perspectives from the two sides of the Atlantic.

Fragmentation can also be combated by integrating the work of researchers, activists, artists and journalists. This means exploring new modes of intervention, as well as experimenting with styles of presentation beyond the ring-fenced academic essay, activist pamphlet, artwork or journalistic feature story. Some of this is already being done, of course, but the possibilities are endless – online documentaries and diaries created in collaboration among migrants, researchers and artists; multimedia installations; and writing in the borderlands of social science, reportage and fiction.

To capture the paradoxes of today’s migrations, which seem to pound against the walls of our reality, we might similarly need to break through the conventions that have defined so much research, activism, art and journalism concerned with migration. The key to this enterprise must be the energy, creativity and determination of migrants themselves - and anthropology would do well to follow their lead. This means more fieldwork ‘on the move’ rather than in pre-defined places; a global, inter-regional perspective to combat myopia; and a healthy dose of stylistic and methodological promiscuity to get round the limits of research and dissemination. As the borders of the rich West are solidifying into barriers and walls, both people on the move and the anthropologists who research their movements might have to become as fluid as water: somewhere, we can at least hope, a crack might open and something will trickle through.

By Ruben Andersson

Last week, seven ‘inmates’ escaped a privately run immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire. Thankfully, the three of them who eventually remained at large were not dangerous, the media assured us. However, the public was advised not to approach them but to notify police if they were spotted.

The production of illegality has reached a stage where those crossing a border can end up facing what is, in effect, a prison sentence. In the US, federal criminal charges are increasingly used against irregular migrants; the UK relies on the migrant and asylum-seeker detention regime vividly described in Imogen Tyler’s previous blog and gloriously depicted by this video (thanks Jack at Human Rights TV):

Dungavel detention centre, as seen by the Camcorder Guerillas

And, in yet another draconian turn, the European Parliament has finally got round to rubberstamping its ‘return directive’ in spite of international protests.

The UK has wisely opted out of this directive, since it’s anyhow in the migration control vanguard with what it has called the ‘biggest shake-up of Britain’s border security for 40 years’. Fresh government initiatives as part of a joined-up immigration crackdown are drip-fed to the public almost weekly: the latest news is that we’ll have teams from the UK Border Agency fan out across the nation, where they’ll help stamp out ‘immigration crime’.

But who are these criminal migrants? Who is it that the UK government and pretty much all other EU member states so desperately want to smoke out, lock up and deport?

It’s obvious why I – a Swede in London – don’t feel personally threatened by these crackdowns, but less so why I don’t feel targeted by government exhortations that migrants ‘earn their right to stay’. Neither, I suspect, do the thousands upon thousands of other ‘old EU’ citizens or the Antipodeans and ‘non-domiciled residents’ on tax breaks who flock to London. Together ‘we’ steal plenty of jobs and benefits, evade millions in taxes and overstay heaps of visas. But most of us are not reproached for our lack of ‘Britishness’, targeted in crackdowns, or hounded by media campaigns. We are not swamping anybody’s country. We are legitimate.

Migrants might be a symbol of unfettered globalisation and encroaching otherness, but certain ‘migrants’ – the rich, the white, the western Europeans – get their ‘migranthood’ erased. Add to this another erasure, of the domestic migrants who fail to encroach on anyone’s border – including mobile professionals, poor labourers fleeing into the febrile metropolitan economies of India, China and Brazil, and those internally displaced by conflict, land grabs or disaster – and ‘the migrant’ starts looking like a brittle ideological construct in need of thorough interrogation.

However, this brittleness makes those defined as ‘migrants’ a perfect target. As they do not constitute a ‘community’ and don’t have the vote, politicians, chained to the nation-state, gain nothing from assisting ‘them’. The print media, too, can sell papers by inciting hatred against ‘them’ as they are hardly a target audience and not rich enough to make editors think twice about being sued for defamation.

A comment on my previous blog rightly spotted a kneejerk reaction of mine to the ‘gutter’ press: to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the media are pretty much all in the gutter nowadays, and few journalists are looking at the stars. Papers of all shapes and sizes are in on the ‘migrant game’ (see, for example, this Observer story). And, perhaps, contesting what they say (or watching MigrationWatch) is a task that increasingly needs to be done online. As a UK newspaper editor told the BBC – off the record – at a recent conference on ‘Britishness’, it’s no surprise that the papers target white readers since they make up the ‘overwhelming majority of potential purchasers’. This ‘targeting’, as far as the depiction of migrants is concerned, involves a jumble of natural and military metaphors: the ‘migrants’ alternately flood, swamp, attack and invade the country.

These military metaphors have taken an ominous literal turn in the UK’s new ‘risk-based’ migration management system. A recent cool-headed policy analysis notes how Raytheon Systems, a private sector partner in the migration control business, talks about ‘network-centric warfare’ through the use of ‘tactical point solutions’ and ‘defence-developed mission-critical systems’. On a more humdrum scale, the new BIA teams will ‘gather intelligence’ on migrants from Yorkshire to Enfield. As the ‘war’ intensifies and newcomers get sifted through an ever-finer sieve – through pre-embarkation controls, the points-based system and British residency and citizenship tests – even some of ‘us’, the ‘legitimate’ face of migration, get caught. As potential ‘casualties’, we briefly face our own ‘migrantness’ – an experience that Nina Glick-Schiller evokes so well in her ASA blog.

But the real casualties and action await elsewhere. It’s in the hazy, vast borderland of the so-called ‘transit countries’ that the battle is in full swing through patrols, swoops and the ‘externalisation’ of migration controls. The result? ‘A common grave of citizens of the south’, as an activist working in northern Morocco once told me, sweeping his hand over the cloudy Atlantic coastline where the rickety pateras used to set off before business moved further south.

Many of these ‘citizens of the south’ – though far from all, as a recent IOM paper stresses – have been pushed into what could be called an imposed primitivism, a postmodern wilderness, created by the network-centric risk management systems of Europe: rusty trucks and rickety boats, the Saharan desert and the high seas. A curious Swedish and German word for ‘migrant’, invandrare or Einwanderer, almost takes on a literal meaning at Europe’s frayed, forgotten edges: those who wander, climb, stumble into this tightly patrolled little piece of the globalised world (see image above from Adelante).

How should anthropologists situate themselves in relation to a split in the category of ‘migrant’ that leaves those at one end criminalised and drubbed by state violence and those at the other with research grants or tax breaks? The anthropologist’s subjectivity must be added to the mix; our ‘migranthood’ – whether in fieldwork, residence, or both – is part of a shared condition. Migration presents us with a crack in the global order – and what discipline could be better suited to spying through this crack than that built on the work of an expat Pole in London who set sail for the Trobriand Islands? We’re only left to wonder what would have happened to anthropology had the points-based migration system been in place at the time of Malinowski.

By Ruben Andersson

It’s been a terrible month for migrants. In South Africa, they have been hounded, lynched and necklaced in pogroms that have left more than 50 people dead. In Italy, vigilante attacks on Roma have accompanied the new government’s xenophobic rhetoric and promise to deport even fellow Europeans. In France, Sarkozy has flagged a hardline EU-wide ‘pact on migration’ – including provisions on ‘European values’ – for when his country assumes the Union presidency. And to top it off, the European Parliament is set to vote tomorrow on the ‘return directive’, an initiative deplored by Amnesty that will allow member states to detain migrants for up to 18 months before deportation.

Meanwhile back in the UK, it’s just been another dreary slog; more howling headlines in the gutter press; a byelection where New Labour pushed ID cards for foreigners up the agenda; and chilly upbeat announcements from the new, unified Border Agency – including the burgeoning migrant detention business discussed by Imogen Tyler in her recent ASA blog.

But as far as scholarship is concerned, here’s something that’s slightly puzzling an outsider to the bountiful field of ‘migration studies’ and its offshoots. The propaganda wars, rollercoaster politics and injustices that surround migration seem to get drained of colour and controversy once they get churned through today’s savvy, slick and streamlined academic machine. There is plenty of brave and original work out there, to be sure, but my overall impression remains: it’s disappointing how much academic ‘freedom’ and energy is squandered on timid, managerial, ‘policy-relevant’ research that neatly fits the needs and preferences of politicians.

Several problems and gaps have already been pin-pointed by my fellow, better-informed ASA bloggers: methodological nationalism, which moulds studies of migration to fit the narrow concerns of the nation-state; a lingering conceptual divide between ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’; a dearth of migrant’s voices; the need for critical inquiries into the state-corporate nexus driving migration policy; and so on.

What we end up with – correct me if I’m wrong, outsider as I am – are endless conferences and seminars on how to ‘manage migration’ and foster ‘integration’ (or its latest, vaguely sinister post-9/11 sister, ‘community cohesion’). Policy papers are churned out by the humblest of redbricks; PhDs on how assorted nationalities are adapting their cultural (or preferably religious) idiosyncracies to the UK mushroom from Oxbridge to ex-polytechnics; integration studies still get the funding bodies to shake some loose coins out of their pockets. And anthropology’s in on the game, too – disconcertingly so, considering the discipline’s not-too-glorious past. The colonial-era exploitation and control of ‘otherness’ seems to be rearing its ugly head in a more insidious and subtle way than in the controversial case of military intelligence (as discussed in ASA’s previous blog).

The mix-up of academic and political agendas takes another dubious turn when government officials and grey eminences are given a respectable academic platform by research institutes eager to have ‘big names’ gracing their speaker rosters; ergo keynote appearances such as that of Jacqui Smith at the LSE this winter, courtesy of a new Migration Studies Unit, to announce her government’s tough new points-based system for migrants. The star appearances supposedly do boost attendance, clout, and success in the Darwinian funding struggle. Needless to say, they do boost politicians’ clout as well, and add next to nothing to a critical debate on migration.

It seems that, as Oxford’s migration doyen Stephen Castles insists, ‘migration studies’ – including its fast-reproducing anthropological outcrops - is too eager to please, too close to policy for its own good. But at the same time it’s too removed. Many migration NGOs, human rights lawyers and activist networks are crying out for some flesh on their bones: in-depth research to back up studies, vivid fieldwork accounts to bring the tribulations of migrants to life, hard-nosed ‘expert statements’ to support legal cases – as Kathryn Cronin points out in her ASA blog.

For a story of failed engagement, just look at the British media, the gloomy terrain where I’ve been working for the past few years. Forgetting, for a moment, that the tabloids are a migrant-bashing bunch only too happy to cash in on ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’ – who do they, and their upmarket cousins, quote? Who’s their source of knowledge and headlines? Why, the think-tank MigrationWatch, who else - something of a one-man band pushing for strict controls of non-EU migration. Where are the policy institutes, the devout research teams, the inter-disciplinary networks lurking when needed to contest figures, to write angry letters, to post blogs, to ‘rent-a-quote’ to a newspaper?

An engagement with the ‘real world’ is urgently called for, but not of the kind bloated by funding and buried under piles of policy papers that we’re currently getting. And here anthropology, supreme trickster of a discipline that it is, can play an important, even insurgent, role, in defying the dead hand of politically corrected and ideologically innocent migration research.

A few thoughts on the immigration industry and the politics of scholarship

Dr Imogen Tyler, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, UK.

British Borders

“My name is Fatmata and I come from Sierra Leone. I left my country because of the problems I had with my family. I claimed asylum when I arrived at the airport […] I was taken to Tinsley [Immigration removal centre] and then to Yarl’s Wood [immigration removal centre]. The Home Office said they would provide me a solicitor but he only came once. My case was still pending when I was taken to the airport for removal, so I was brought back to Yarl’s Wood. But then it was refused at the High Court, so they scheduled my removal […]. When that day came I was seriously sick. I was 26 weeks pregnant […] Then they came to take me, but I was not well, I couldn’t even walk. A different officer came, he told me to get up, but I was so sick I couldn’t. Then he told my room-mate to get out, but she protested and refused to leave. The manager called seven officers to come to my room. They took my room-mate to a cell. One officer lifted my feet onto the floor; one hit me; one held my head down and I was dragged out of the room. […] After that I was released from detention, and I gave birth on 2nd January. And now I have to report once a week in Old Street. I can’t afford to go and sign, I can’t afford the travel costs, because I’m destitute and I get no benefits, nothing. […] If I go back to Sierra Leone I’m sure my parents will kill me, so I have nowhere to go.[…] My father raped me. He beat me mercilessly. And when people tried to come to my aid he told them “I’ve just caught her with men outside”. I had to leave again. I had a distant relative in England. I contacted this uncle and asked him to send me an invitation to come. He accepted and sent me this. We arranged that he would contact me when I arrived but we have never communicated. I have nowhere to go. Now I don’t have any support here. At times I just feel like killing myself. I’m tired. It’s so difficult. I’m really suffering”.

(Fatmata, 23 years old, was detained for six months in 2007 in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, she is likely to be taken back into detention with her baby and deported.) Interview by Helen Raynsford.

Since 1989 the Institute for Race Relations, an independent educational charity based in Britain, has been documenting the deaths of asylum seekers and undocumented ‘illegal immigrants’ who have died in Britain or attempting to reach here. A report, entitled ‘Driven to Desperate Measures’ lists the names (if known) of 221 migrants and details the ways in which these individuals died; many are recorded as suicides.

In July 2007, British Immigration Minster Liam Byrne presented an extraordinary paper entitled ‘Border Security and Immigration: Our Deal for Delivery in 2008’ in which he announced that one `failed asylum seeker’ is deported every eight minutes. He promises to improve vastly on this `performance target’ with further massive expansion of Britain’s detention estate. In January 2008 the same minister reversed previous government policy in a statement which suggests that the government will begin to deport the two thousand unaccompanied ‘failed’ child asylum-seekers who arrive in the UK each year. These policies, Byrne argued, are necessary to keep `Britain safe in an era of global movement’.

The detention of people subject to migration control in Britain was first codified under the 1920 Aliens Act and elaborated in the 1971 Immigration Act. Britain now has more wide-ranging powers than any other European nation to imprison asylum seekers. The detention of asylum seekers is ‘a phenomenon that may seem to some to be almost a contradiction in terms’ as ‘social convention in many societies has frequently dictated that a stranger with no hostile intent, or in a condition of distress, should be met with hospitality rather than with the prospect of incarceration’ (Robin Cohen, 1994: 99). In contemporary Britain the very act of seeking asylum has effectively been criminalised. This shift in the meaning of ‘asylum’ is not unique to Britain, of course. As Derek Gregory and Allan Pred note “affluent states now routinely fortify their borders against the threat of unwanted peoples, often the surplus residue of their own neo-liberal and military adventures and the physical architectures that are involved—walls, fence, detention centers and the like—depend on a spatio-legal strategies” (2007 4).

Current capacity of detention spaces across the estate:

Campsfield, Oxford: 215

Dover: 316

Dungavel, Prestwick: 188 (male, female & family)

Harmondsworth, Heathrow: 259

Haslar, Portsmouth: 160

Lindholme, S Yorkshire: 112

Oakington, Cambridge: 352

Tinsley House, Gatwick: 146 (male, female & family)

Yarl’s Wood, Bedford: 405 (female & family)

Colnbrook, Heathrow: 313 (plus 40 STHF)

TOTAL: 2,506

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/Content/Detail.asp?ReleaseID=302003&NewsAreaID=2

Seven of these immigrant prisons are run by private companies for profit under contract to the Home Office. A new detention centre is currently being built under a private finance agreement- the massive Brook House near Gatwick, which will open in 2008. Britain is the only EU state which has no legal limit on detention- there are documented cases of people held for over three years. Amnesty International estimated the number of people detained in immigration centres in the UK during 2003 to be 27,000, at least two thousand of whom were children. (see also Tyler, 2006)

The immigration detention industry is a global billion-dollar business, one profitable part of a massive ‘industrial corrections complex’. In Australia, Europe and the United States the same multinational corporations compete for lucrative government contracts to build detention centres and lock up immigrants with global banks, investment funds and airlines lining up for a slice of the action. Indeed, detention policies and practice in the UK are driven by corporate interests. Indeed, the expansion of the detention estate is not based solely on ever-restrictive state-based asylum laws and policies, but must also be understood as a global business in which corporations compete to win and maintain contracts. Profit margins improve year on year through an increase in `turn-over’: keeping detainees on the move, keeping facilities full to capacity and increasing the number of deportations.

European Borders

Since 2002, the European ‘wing’ of the international activist network, noborders, has been collating news reports of incidents when dead would-be migrants have been found - mainly bodies found at sea, or washed up on European beaches. This list of the dead is composed of links to news stories which report 2,909 deaths to date. These news reports are short, often vague and reveal few details about the deceased:

06.Jun.08: In the last few days 8 dead bodies of migrants were found in the sea around Lampedusa as well as on beaches in Lampedusa and Sicily. It is believed that they drowned when one or more boats sank during the passage from the North African coast. (source: AGI news)

As the deaths of individual or small groups of immigrants are not considered `newsworthy`, noborders concede that their list represents only a tiny percentage of the large numbers of migrants who die on sea-crossings to Europe.

Figure 1. The body of an unidentified would-be immigrant lies covered on the beach of Solana Matorral, the Canary Islands. (BBC News)

A longer list of dead immigrants exists on a website produced by `UNITED for Intercultural Action` a pan-European anti-racist network which has been documenting deaths since 1993. In an project it describes as ‘the Fatal Realities of Fortress Europe’ it produces a database of the dead, which, at the time of writing contains details 11,105 immigrant deaths.-within and between European borders.

These lists offer only a glimpse of the scale of the horror. For example, it has been suggested that up to 6,000 people are killed each year attempting the perilous 2,000-kilometre sea crossing from North Africa to the Canary Islands alone. Most are never found, dead or alive, and those that survive can remain in detention for years. According to human rights watch the hundreds of unaccompanied children in detention camps in the Canaries are living in ’squalid, overcrowded conditions` and are at high `risk of abuse from their custodians and other children’. (The Canary Islands is one of the most popular holiday destinations for wealthy Europeans, with an estimated 10 million visitors per year).

Figure 2. Tenerife Tourists Tourists help migrants

In order to deter unwanted travellers to the Canaries, Spain has acquired European funding to step up sea patrols (mainly through Frontex, the EU border security agency ). It has also built a series of extraordinary electrified walls around the Spanish ports of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African mainland. One consequence of this is that African migrants now take much longer and more dangerous routes across the sea . As one newspaper report recently put in, the bodies of African immigrants are piling up around sunbathers.

Figure 3: Tenerife Tourists help Migrants

Of course the number of immigration detention centres within the EU and in bordering states has been rapidly increasing . Outside of Europe, activists and humanitarian networks around the globe are involved in the kinds of documentation, data collection and memorialisation described above. To take just one example, the US based organisation, ‘No More Deaths No Más Muertes’ compiles lists of migrant deaths on the US/Mexican border where several hundred immigrants die each year. [video] Meanwhile, since 2001 the US has incrementally increased its immigration detention estate: the number of people detained in immigration cases has more than tripled since 2001 with at least 33,000 immigrants in custody at any one time.

So what can be made of this kind of data? These incomplete and fragmentary accounts of the missing, the imprisoned, the dying and the dead offer us only a glimpse of the abject underside of global immigration debates. This incoherent archive of ‘facts’, snatched photographs, blogs, lists, news reports, maps and humanitarian reports from a few of the world’s borders haunt the reader with the knowledge that many more immigrant lives and deaths remain undocumented, and this is perhaps what grants this archival material its particular affective power. At the very least it reminds “us” that immigration is about people, and, as Kathryn Cronin suggests in her blog, is about journeys once told but now unheard in the context of nationalistic (and increasingly regionalistic) governmental rhetoric and corporate news media (See Bennett 2008).

The Politics of Immigration Scholarship

Some questions then: What role should or could academic scholarship have in effecting and shaping public debates about immigration? How can scholarship produce alternative (and resistant) accounts and knowledges of immigration? What is the relationship between scholarship and political practice, particularly the kinds of local and trans-national activist practices which characterise movements such as noborders? What is the place/space for immigrant protest and politics within these debates?

In her blog ‘Who belongs where? A Global Power Perspective on Migration’ Professor Nina Glick Schiller focuses on the inadequacies of contemporary `migration scholarship`. She criticises the ways in which ‘methodological nationalism’ underpins this area of enquiry. As she states:

“There has been little conceptual room in this scholarship for tracing and theorizing networks that extend into, are shaped by, and shape particular localities. Nor has there been sufficient conceptualization of the relationship between transnational social fields that extend between localities, the neoliberal restructuring of specific places, and the current restructuring of migration policy and rhetoric”.

Glick Schiller’s central point is that a focus on `the state` limits the ability of scholars to fully comprehend the global structures and local complexities of immigration. She argues that we will only be able to open up the immigration debate and fully interrogate and explore migration in all its contradictory global permutations, if there is a change in methods of enquiry. Scholars need to move away from ‘national frames’ and place much more of an emphasis on the shifting relationship between the local and the global. She suggests that it is only the emergence of more thoroughly trans-national methodologies or ‘g-local’ ways of thinking that will be able produce effective scholarship in this area. As she writes:

By paying more attention to locality in migration studies we can also understand the seeming contradictory national anti-immigrant discourses, the celebration of migrant remittances by global financial institutions, the policies that divide global talent from the apparently unwashed and unwanted and the significant role played by immigrants in specific cities”.

In short, Glick Schiller calls for what she terms `a global power perspective on migration’ in which we can account for the ways in which migrant and native experiences are `simultaneously transnational, globally reconfigured, and place-based`. But how does this translate in terms of research methods, design and practice, in terms of making an intervention?

I agree that the local specificities of immigrant experience need to be understood in dialogue with wider trans-national perspectives. However, we also need to reflect carefully on what is meant by `the global` and `the trans-national`, both highly over-determined categories. Many humanitarian organisations networks already operate within a ‘g-local’ logic and yet they remain complicit with neo-liberal agendas at both national, regional and global levels. Moving `beyond the state` is, perhaps, not enough and can in some instances be a way of veiling local operations of state violence. The state can also be an important site of resistance. There is an urgent need for multiple perspectives to map and make sense of contradictions of anti and pro-immigration rhetoric, but scholars also need to explore in much more depth the economics which fuels this rhetoric: the desire for cheap and skilled labour and the interests of global corporations in escalating immigration detention and border security technologies. Here a consideration of the role of global corporations needs to take account of the intimate relationships between states and corporations and the ‘intricacies’ of public-private financial arrangements. The same companies who are building and running detention centres, are operating our state prisons, schools, hospitals and even parts of our universities.

What is also needed is more reflection on broader epistemological and political questions. What is immigration or migration studies? Whom is it for? What do those of us enagaged in this work hope or imagine it might do in terms, for example, of producing alternative forms of knowledge about the world or intervening into wider public debates? Research as pedagogy. What too often remains implicit is the relationship between the politics of research (desire for political change) and research design, practice and methods. If one wanted to really want to get more `radical’ here, why not look outside of academia for methods which might produce the kind of transformations in perspective required to produce alternative ways of thinking about immigration.

A suggestion: To begin with, there could be much more engagement with the radical anti-state activism of the political networks and groups who often gather under the umbrella of the international noborders network. The methods which characterize noborders activism and anti-deportation activism, offer immigration scholars resources for rethinking research design and practices, particularly in terms of how immigrants can play a central role in the research process. In order to effectively critique immigration rhetoric, there needs to be more collaborative forms of knowledge production. Direct forms of collaboration between migrants, activists and scholars are already underway. The first noborders camp in the UK in 2007, hosted a ‘migrating university’ in which academics and activists collaborated to exchange ideas. These are small sites of change which perhaps shouldn’t be over invested with political hope. Nevertheless, immigrant/activist/scholar collaborations within local communities and at protest camps and conferences around the world are shaping new debates. Moreover, these collaborations are increasingly impacting on university curricula; with new postgraduate courses in political activism (see the new Leeds, UK-based MA in activism and social change ).

Who speaks? Who listens? Immigrant Subjectivities

So what about the role of immigrants in the research process? Are they only to figure as abject others? As lists of the dead, or silent invisible populations moving among us, but unable to speak out? In her blog, Cronin points to the ways in which ‘the law’ as a field of knowledge and discipline silences immigrant voices- they simply cannot be heard. As she notes, `we have little evidence concerning our understanding of how the immigrant’s experience [their] journeys and we have no real accounts of how immigrants cope with their reception in places of arrival’. One of the risks of scholarly work is that it becomes another site in which the migrant is produced as an other, as an object to be researched, `uncovered`, and exchanged. (As here in this blog, with its lists of the dead, with accounts of people who have no chance here to speak for themselves). If analogy, generalization and abstraction take the place of listening and translation in research about immigration then what is ultimately foreclosed is the subjectivity of immigrants themselves, abjected once more.

On a more positive note, whilst the interim findings of the British Independent Asylum Commission are extremely bleak, the methods by which they have distributed their findings are inspiring. For example, collaboration with human rights TV has enabled the testimonies of asylum-seekers and other citizens and non-citizens to be watched or listened to online. This commission, however ineffective it may prove to be in generating political pressure for change, has created a unique space for recent immigrants to Britain to tell their stories and to protest. We might also look to Glasgow and the community activism and anti-deportation movements on estates like the Kingsway Estate, or to the students in Leeds and Manchester having ‘sleep-outs’ on the street to protest at the enforced destitution of refused asylum-seekers, and to theatres and art galleries across Britain, in which actors, artists, immigrants and activists are collaborating in plays and monologues about their journeys and lives, and the emergence of online blogs and video diaries made by immigrants. Of course, visibility of any kind comes with risks (as many of the failed asylum seekers who have become involved in local activism and then been targeted by immigration officials have found out), but I want to end hopefully by suggesting that collaboration can not only begin to expose the abject underside of mainstream immigration debate but, as Peter Nyers (2006) suggests, challenges preconceived notions of who can speak with a political voice.

Figure 4: Stop The War

References

Robin Cohen (1994)Frontiers of identity: the British and the others, Longman

Derek Gregory and Allan Pred eds. (2007) Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence New York and. London: Routledge.

Peter Nyers (2006) Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency, New York and London, Routledge.

Bruce Bennett and Imogen Tyler (2008) `Screening Unliveable Lives: The Cinema of Borders’ in Anikó Imre, Katarzyna Marciniak, Áine O’Healy (eds.) Transnational Feminist Encounters in Film and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York: 21-36.

Imogen Tyler (2006)`”Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 185-202.

Nina Glick Schiller, University of Manchester and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

I woke up in early March to find that I was now a global talent— but only if I had enough ‘points’ to keep my job and life as I was building it in the UK. Unfortunately, I could not readily ascertain whether I was now a valuable asset to Great Britain or whether I was consigned to the category of faceless undesirable labourers, who apparently were destroying British society. The government website that promised to add up my points and indicate my fate kept crashing. The change in British immigration regulations came in the wake of a debate that built public opinion for the latest exclusionary policies. British politicians, demagogic leaders, and media personalities joined their mates in a host of other countries in blaming migrants for national economic problems such as the growing disparity between rich and poor, the reduced quality and availability of public services and education, and the rising costs of health care and housing. Calls for tightening borders and ending immigration are widespread, while countries around the world increasing deny asylum to people desperately seeking refuge from war, rape, and pillage. Rates of expulsion are rising dramatically. Yet the immigration policies of countries in many places in the world have been rewritten to facilitate the migration of ‘highly skilled professionals’ and various forms of short term ‘low skilled’ contract labour.

Meanwhile, public polemics denounce the remittances that migrants send to sustain family as evidence that migrants drain money from the national economy and are disloyal to their newly embraced nation-states. Rarely noted in public discourse but apparent in the new economics of restrictive labour contracting is the fact that family members who are not living in Britain do not benefit from services that are provided by migrant labour and paid for by migrants’ taxes. As if oblivious to the growing exclusionary policies and efforts to denounce and stem the flow of remittances, a host of global actors —the World Bank, the ‘global lending community’, central and private banks, government policy makers, multilateral and bilateral donors, NGOs, and various academics– have begun to celebrate migrant remittances as a new path of development for the ailing economies of the global south, as well as Eastern Europe.

The question I wish to raise here, is how we can anthropologist make sense of these apparently contradictory trends and respond to them? Migration scholars generally have put little effort into developing a framework that speaks simultaneously to the denigration of migrants and asylum seekers, the worldwide search for highly skilled talent, and the celebration of migrant remittances. How for example, should we approach the assertions of Lord Wakeham, who chaired the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee’s inquiry on immigration? Defending his report, Wakeham (2008) argues that it is a ‘£6bn fallacy’ that immigrants contribute to the British economy because

once migrants fill some vacancies they spend some of their earnings. This increases demand for goods and services, which leads companies to produce more. But to increase production, companies need more staff, creating more vacancies and so defeating the objective of reducing vacancies. The total number of vacancies has remained at about 600,000 since 2001 despite high net immigration.

Now there are two possible genres of response to this kind of statement. One is to indicate that it is only by the most distorted of logics and a basic anti-immigrant bias that one can read evidence that the presence of immigrants contributes to economic growth and job production as proof that claims that immigrants contribute national economy of their country of settlement are a massive fallacy. However, if we take that route and confine our response to arguments that the data demonstrate that migrants do make contributions or do not threaten social cohesion, we accept the assumptions that: (1) there are currently discrete national economies and policies regulated by central governments; and (2) the nation-state should be our unit of analysis in discussing migration issues. Neither of these assumptions is sustainable.

The second route of response to narratives such as Lord Wakeham’s is to place migration and the restructuring of local and national economies and policies within global efforts to reconstitute capital and facilitate its flexible accumulation. However, it is difficult to pursue this perspective because of the conceptual constraints currently being imposed on public debate and scholarship. At the heart of these constraints is the use of the nation-state as a unit of analysis and identification. Often mainstream migration scholars, especially those concerned with public policy, respond to the contemporary attacks on migrants and migration by adopting the perspective of their respective nation-states. They rarely confront the conceptual underpinnings of the native-foreigner divide that has remained so fundamental to the entire enterprise of migration research.

Politicians and journalists, on the other hand, are increasingly directly confronting and defending the nation-state building that lies underneath migration policy and discourses about social cohesion and ‘earned citizenship’. We have witnessed an increasingly intensive campaign to insure that public opinion as well as scholarly debate is confined within the logic of the nation-state. Some of this campaign is being waged in terms of national security issues, which makes any criticism of irrational and unjust immigration policies akin to treason. Other aspects are more subtle, falling back on the apparent necessity and sanctity of states organized around national cultures and identities. For example, David Goodhart, a former Financial Times journalist and founder of Prospect magazine, a current affairs monthly, argues

The justification for giving priority to the interests of fellow citizens boils down to a pragmatic claim about the value of the nation-state. Without fellow-citizen favouritism, the nation-state ceases to have much meaning. And most of the things that liberals desire - democracy, redistribution, welfare states, human rights - only work when one can assume the shared norms and solidarities of national communities.

Anthropologists need to query such assumptions and ask whether the native/ foreign divide is the best way to understand issues of distributive justice or social cohesion. Building on several decades of scholarship on the construction of and naturalization of ‘national communities,’ we need to identify the methodological nationalism that pervades migration scholarship. Methodological nationalism is an ideological orientation that approaches the study of social and historical processes as if they were contained within the borders of individual nation-states. Nation-states are conflated with societies and the members of those states are assumed to share a common history and set of values, norms, social customs, and institutions.

I suggest that a more adequate response to contemporary migration processes and discourses requires abandoning methodological nationalism and adopting a global power perspective on migration and the nation-state. Only such a perspective can place within the same analytical framework migration and development debates, national anti-immigrant rhetoric, migration and refugee policies, and the celebration of global talent. By a global power perspective, I mean an analytical framework rather than a systems theory. This analytical framework must facilitate a theorization of the reproduction, movement, and destruction of various kinds of capital and human populations across national borders. It also must enable scholars to examine the construction of social relations, institutions, systems of governance, legitimating cultural norms of consumption, and modes of identification in particular localities and across space, national borders, and time. Such a framework will allow migration researchers to identify AND empower forms, spaces, ideologies, and identities of resistance to oppressive and globe spanning relations of unequal power.

A global perspective on migration and nation-state building can begin to make sense of the contradictory narratives around immigration, global talent, and remittances. Anti-immigrant polemics, it turns out, cannot be simply countered with data because they have very little to do with the actual economic or social impact of immigrants. Instead, they constitute everyday forms of nation-state formation within a neo-liberalizing, crisis ridden, globally structured economy. A global power perspective on migration facilitates the description of social processes by introducing units of analysis and research paradigms that are not built on the essentialism of much of migration discourse. Instead it builds on the current scholarship on the neo-liberal restructuring of locality to offer fresh perspectives to the contemporary migration debates.

I want to be clear that by eschewing methodological nationalism and establishing a global framework for the study of migrant settlement and transnational connection, I am not saying that the nation-state is withering away. I am also not saying that we currently can dispense with states as instruments of creating and protecting rights and public goods and services. I am saying that both migration scholarship and debates about citizenship and immigrants routinely ignore the obvious fact that the human, cultural, and natural resources that constitute wealth deemed as “national” are produced within transnational processes that extend across states borders. This means that the constitution of social cohesion, rather than a process situated within national communities and threatened by foreigners, is also a transnational process.

My particular interest is the contemporary restructuring of capital, which is repositioning the specific localities within which migrants and natives build their lives.. To understand the restructuring of globe spanning structures of power, including the changing role and continuing significance of states, migration scholars need a perspective that is not constrained by the borders of the nation-state but directs our attention to the reconstitution of place. Migration and native experiences and relationships are simultaneously transnational, globally reconfigured, and place-based.

The methodological nationalism of many migration scholars precludes them from accurately describing the transnational social fields of unequal power that are integral to the migrant experience. Because their scholarship is built on units of analysis that developed within nation-state building projects, few migration scholars situate national terrains and discourses within an analysis of the neo-liberal restructuring of the global economy and the rescaling of cities. The irony, of course, is that in a period during which many areas of scholarship have developed an analysis of uneven and unequal globalization, migration scholars who study globe spanning flows of people remained inured within concepts of society and culture that reflect essentialist and racialized concepts of nation.

Much of the European and US scholarship on migration confines itself to the questions ‘how well do they fit into our society’, ‘what are the barriers that keep them from fully joining us,’ or ‘which cultures or religions don’t fit in.’ In these analyses, migrants’ tendencies to cultural persistence and ethnic organization, attributed either to their identity politics or to a reactive ethnic response to discrimination, become the independent variable that determines the degree of fit for migrants within the context of a specific nation-state. Most scholars of migration reflect and contribute to an approach to the nation-state that poses a nation and its migrants as fundamentally and essentially socially and culturally distinct.

In migration studies methodological nationalism facilitates: (1) the homogenization of national culture (2) the homogenization of migrants into ethnic groups – seen as bearers of discrete cultures – who arrive bearing cultural, class, and religious differences, and (3) the use of national statistics organized so that ethnic difference appears as an independent variable in the reporting of levels of education, health status, degrees of employment, and level of poverty. In other words, as they are currently constituted, migration studies and their ethnic studies counterparts contribute to the reinvigoration of contemporary nation-state building projects.

Most commonly, when research is based in a particular city, specific ethnic groups or communities are studied in particular cities and then the data is generalized to the level of the state and the processes of settlement are spoken of in terms of the nation-state. At the end of the day we hear about Mexicans in the US, Turks in Germany, or Pakistanis in Britain. If there is comparative research, nation-states are compared in terms of their migration policies. At best, the city is described as the context for a larger national process of migrant adaptation.

Even the scholars of transnational migration or diaspora bound their unit of study along the lines of national or ethnic identities. A literature of transnational community has developed without a theorization of place. The end result is that the unit of analysis becomes a migrating population defined and delimited by shared cultural identities. It is for this reason, I believe, that so much of the scholarship about transnational migration is about identity formation or persistence across borders. There has been little conceptual room in this scholarship for tracing and theorizing networks that extend into, are shaped by, and shape particular localities. Nor has there been sufficient conceptualization of the relationship between transnational social fields that extend between localities, the neoliberal restructuring of specific places, and the current restructuring of migration policy and rhetoric.

Scholars of urban restructuring and rescaling have documented that currently cities everywhere are participants in the same global trends that the global cities hypothesis maintained as the defining characteristics of a handful of global cities. Rather than just categorizing cities into a typology of ‘global’ or ‘non-global’, these scholars note that the implementation of neo-liberal agendas had disrupted fixed notions of nested territorially bounded units of city, region, state and globe. That is to say, the scholarship of the neoliberal reconstitution of cities documents the way in which all cities are global in that none are delimited only by the regulatory regime and economic processes of the state in which they are territorially based. The state itself is rescaled to play new roles by channelling flows of relatively unregulated capital and participating in the constitution of global regulatory regimes enforced by the World Trade Organization and international financial institutions. Cities do, however, differ in their positioning in terms of globe spanning hierarchies of economic and political power.

More specifically, this scholarship highlights the various mechanisms of neoliberal restructuring and privatization that require all cities to compete for investments in new economies. They compete in an effort to attract flows of capital and a mix of ‘new economy’ industries and their clients and customers. ‘New economy’ industries are ones that produce services demanded within the global economy including the very consumption of locality in the form of tourism. Central to this new economy are ‘knowledge’ industries, which produce the workers, skills, technologies, and consumptive patterns necessary to organize, agglutinate, and concentrate capital. Each city markets itself globally as a brand and produces its own image based on its mix of resources including cultural diversity.

However, discussions of migration policies have not been part of the study of neoliberal restructuring of locality. In fact, except for global cities theory, the insightful and powerful theorizing about the neo-liberal restructuring of locality and the scalar positioning of cities by urban geographers has barely entered into the study of migration. Nor have migration scholars, constantly pulled into discussions of national migration policies, paid sufficient attention to the way inn which the neo-liberal restructuring of specific localities shapes the way in which migrants live in a specific place. Neither urban geographers nor migration scholars have examined how migrants become active agents of rescaling policies as they settle in specific places. Drawing from the literature on urban restructuring and repositioning, Ayse Caglar and I (2006; forthcoming) argue that we can differentiate and understand the dynamics of migrant incorporation and transnational connection in different cities better if we relate them to the rescaling processes of political and economic space taking place within the context of the neo-liberal regulatory systems.

By paying more attention to locality in migration studies we can also understand the seeming contradictory national anti-immigrant discourses, the celebration of migrant remittances by global financial institutions, the policies that divide global talent from the apparently unwashed and unwanted and the significant role played by immigrants in specific cities. The anti-immigrant rhetoric adopted by so many countries contains within it several different kinds of messages. On one level, anti-immigrant discourse remains a nation-state building process, a ritual of renewal that engages its participants in defining their loyalty to a country by differentiating them from stigmatized racialized others. At the same time, migration discourses and laws meet the needs of specific restructured localities by differentiating different streams of labour. Faceless migrating labour is portrayed as invading borders, potentially lawless, and so requiring restriction, regulation, and contractual constraints that limit the rights of workers to change employers or challenge working conditions. It is differentiated from highly skilled professionals recruited by cities that have become talent scouts within global circuits of educated labour.

Those localities that are successful global competitors are increasingly able to recruit and maintain the labour they need by using visa categories or a preference system for skilled professionals. The various national policies of labour differentiation that now exist in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Singapore, among others, become understandable when situated within the restructuring and rescaling processes of specific localities. Migrants are not only part of the new just-in-time sweat shop industries or low wage service sectors that accompany the restructuring of various cities. They provide highly skilled labour that also contributes to the human capital profile of various cities. And they become marketable assets for the cultural industries of the cities in which they are settling. The place and role of migrants differs depending on the scalar positioning of each city

The actual incorporation of migrants into very different positions in the labour force varies with locality and must be addressed in terms of the restructuring and rescaling of locality. National discourses on migration cannot be assumed to describe local conditions. Localities and their specific iterations of neo-liberal agendas and governmentalities are situated at the intersection of national discourses and transnational fields of power. Unequal globalization rests on a framework of imperial states that serve as base areas for institutions that control capital, the productions of arms, and military power.

As Aihwa Ong (2006) has pointed out, it is essential that discussions of neoliberalism be grounded in the particularity of specific governance regimes. To adequately address this task, I suggest that migration scholars need an approach to neo-liberal projects that can theorize the insertion of differentiated streams of migrants into the restructuring of specific places. Migration scholars need to put aside all forms of methodological nationalism so that their units of analysis do not obscure the localized processes through which capitalism is continually restructured and reproduced. The current celebration of migrants as agents of development in their homelands, at the moment that migrants are being defined as foreign bodies who threaten the integrity of their new lands, contributes to the neo-liberal projects of reconfiguring states, localities, and subjectivities.

The projection of migrants as undesirable ‘others’ revitalizes national identities and loyalties of citizens whose relationship to the state as provider of services and social supports has been undermined by neo-liberal projects. At the same time, the dehumanization of migrating bodies allows for their insertion and control as various forms of unfree contracted labour. Meanwhile, migrant professional can be welcomed in specific places as contributors to the neoliberal restructuring and rescaling of various cities. And migrant remittances can be relied on to transmit foreign currency to families, localities, and regimes left behind enabling their inclusion, however unequally, in global patterns of consumption and desire. Neoliberalism is both embodied and contested as global processes of the reproduction of capital come to ground and are reconstituted by local populations—migrants and natives alike.

Anthropologists entering into debates about migration must examine our units of analysis and the politics embedded in them. We can either remain within national narratives of the defence of the borders of the sovereign state or acknowledge the globe-spanning forces that are reconfiguring governance, locality and opportunity for migrants and natives alike. Our challenge is to engage in research that contributes to the migration debate by placing it within an analysis of global processes and their underlying tension, contradictions, and possibilities.

References Cited

Glick Schiller, Nina and Ayse Caglar 2007 ‘Migrant Incorporation and City Scale: Towards a Theory of Locality in Migration Studies’ http://dspace.mah.se:8080/handle/2043/5935

Glick Schiller, N., Çaglar, A. and Guldbrandsen, T.C. (2006) ‘Beyond The Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation’, American Ethnologist, 33(4): 612-33. http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/ae.2006.33.4.612

Goodhart, David 2008 ‘The Baby-Boomers Finally See Sense On Immigration’, The Observer, Sunday February 24 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/24/immigration.immigrationpolicy

Ong, Aihwa 2006 Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham NC: Duke University Press

Wakeham, John 2008 ‘The £6bn Fallacy’, The Guardian, Comment & debate, p21 April 1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/immigrationpolicy.immigrationandpublicservices

Kathryn Cronin, Garden Court Chambers, 5th May 2008

This contribution to the discussion is written from the perspective of an immigration lawyer.

I have spent almost 30 years in practice either teaching or advising on immigration law or representing many hundreds of applicants in their quest to enter or remain in either Australia or the UK. I have also written a history PhD on nineteenth century Chinese immigration to Australia and my research on this earlier immigration has informed my understanding of the modern phenomenon of migration. I combine both of these perspectives in this piece.

I propose to focus on certain features of immigration which I assume will be of interest to anthropologists and also to document the role and insights which immigration lawyers and decision-makers derive from social anthropology.

Immigration Law and ‘The Immigrant Journey’

My family were Irish immigrants who migrated to Australia. I therefore grew up hearing the tales of their journey by ship and their travel overland to ‘outback’ Australia. Australia has a number of museums celebrating pioneering immigration. These recreations emphasise the privations experienced by immigrants in their journeys to Australia as evidence of the immigrants’ resilience, courage and aptitude for settlement. The message conveyed is that these early immigrants were resourceful, hard-working, had initiative and the flexibility to adapt. Their journeys to Australia are presented as proof of their endurance and tenacity, as proof that they were good, useful immigrants.

As a practising lawyer, I am continually struck by our changed reception to immigrant journey stories. We no longer view their privations as evidence of their skills, but of their duplicity – their evasion of immigration control. Their endurance is not celebrated but featured as threatening – as their unremitting determination to take from not to add to our societies. We no longer celebrate plucky entrepreneurial immigrants but we reward those who wait their turn in orderly queues for immigration vetting and punish the ‘self-selecting’ immigrants who arrive through irregular immigration routes. We no longer marvel at the risks encountered and overcome on immigrant journeys; nor do we assume (as we did in the 1950-70s) that only genuine refugees would make their risky journeys by small leaking boats, under railway carriages or hidden in the cargo of lorries. The term ‘economic migrant’ once a commendation of European migrants relocating to the colonies is now a pejorative appellation. Used in asylum appeals it is indicative of deceit and fabrication. In all we have travelled quite an intellectual journey in our images of immigration.

Immigration law both reflects and has fashioned this transformation in our perception of and reception to immigrants.

It is worth noting that our modern immigration law and practice was largely developed within the British Commonwealth; particularly in the ‘old’ Commonwealth countries of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. These countries were the first to adopt all of the legal sanctions we still use to control immigration namely:

• the imposition of visas (the requirement that certain passengers obtain formal permission to travel to as well as to enter their countries);
• carrier sanctions (fines on shipping agents and captains (now airlines and lorries) for bringing in too many immigrants or unvisaed immigrants) and
• post-arrival sanctions in the form of discriminatory employment, taxation and strict nationality laws to prevent the social absorption of certain immigrants.

Each and all of these Commonwealth countries (and from the 1880s the United States) were focussed on excluding non-European immigrants, particularly the indentured workers from south Asia or the ‘free’ immigrants from southern China.

Within the British Empire (as it then was) legal exclusion of certain immigrants required inventive law-making as many if not most of the immigrants sought to be controlled or excluded were British subjects travelling from one British colony to another. The British Commonwealth then operated as a free movement zone, much as Europe does today. From the 1880s courts within the common-law system, including the Privy Council, began enunciating a legal principle or presumption ostensibly extracted from international law, that each nation State has the right to admit or deny entry to any and all foreign nationals. The Commonwealth subjects from Hong Kong or India migrating to Australia, Canada or South Africa were not ‘foreign’ but (as British subjects seeking to enter British colonies) had the same nationality as those in the reception country. In response, from the 1990s Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia began developing new legal tests for exclusion - language/ ‘dictation’ and other tests – such that if the Asian workers failed their English language, or in one celebrated case, their test in Scottish Gaelic, they were excluded.

We now rely on nationality as the basis for immigration entry and exclusion; although we still use language and now ‘points’ (occupational and income) tests for assessment and selection. Immigration objectives have been the justification for redefining nationality. Thus we have different types of British citizenship, some which afford free access to the UK, and others which don’t carry any immigration entry rights. And as an echo of the old free movement regime in the British Commonwealth we now have numbers of free movement zones in Europe, the Americas and Africa where certain nationalities have residence and work rights and others are controlled. These supra-national arrangements may in time foster new identities.

This (rather lengthy) digression is the background against which our response to migrant journeys has changed. Immigration is less about travel than compliance with law and bureaucracy. In my study of nineteenth century Chinese immigrants, it was clear that immigrants dealt with immigration regulation by large scale evasion. The children of Chinese immigrants whom I interviewed had been told of the rigours and perils of the family journey to Australia; but they also had been schooled to maintain the false family identity and history constructed around the immigration rules and knew they must preserve these identities when questioned by government officials. To evade the visa requirement, Chinese immigrants used their given names as family or surnames and thus visas issued to an ‘Ah Chong’ could be circulated and re-used by anyone adopting this name. These immigration identities frequently were fixed and the families I interviewed (the second generation) often had no idea of their real family name or family village. They were aware that the family identity was created and maintained for immigration purposes. Their real family identity was lost.

Immigration as between many developing countries is still an informal, self-selected process. The immigration to developed countries is a mix of the formal/ bureaucratic and the informal and irregular.

I could not begin to count the number of clients I have represented who entered the UK in lorries, under railway coaches, hidden in cars or ships or who used false documents to enter by airlines. In many countries migrant agents make regular visits to source villages and sign up contenders. Nuns and priests frequently ferry children out of Africa. Trafficking networks comprise many small operatives, some who arrange the documentation; others who liaise with local officials, or who escort the immigrants through airport or border procedures. We now have extensive documentation of migrant journeys but this documentation is maintained on government files and has a clear control function. When applicants first make their application to remain in the UK on asylum, human rights or family grounds, they are ‘screened’ – that is interviewed in some depth concerning their journey to the UK. They are asked about stop-overs, the uniforms of airport or train staff; the cargo on board their lorries, the colour of their passports, their food, toilet arrangements and the names of any agents. These accounts provide immigration departments with intelligence about trafficking routes or become the evidence used for a prosecution of the applicant – who are now increasingly being charged, convicted, imprisoned and then deported for their use of false identity documents.

It is interesting to ponder whether governments in the developed world will ever eradicate these informal travel routes. They seem determined to do so. Immigration rules are becoming more and more restrictive; the identification arrangements more elaborate and intrusive and the penalties for irregular immigration more extreme.

From my experience I consider we lose a great deal if we eradicate self selecting migration. I am so often struck at the fortitude, courage and endurance of my clients. It will be a loss if these immigration networks are lost before we properly study them as a social phenomenon. I am not referring here to the sex or labour trafficking networks which are most often run by criminal gangs and very frequently expose their victims to abuse and violence enroute and after their arrival in the host country. I am concerned with the entrepreneurs who simply facilitate the travel of self-selecting migrants and refugees. There are certain features of these networks that I am aware of through my clients that deserve close attention. These would include:

• The community of agents and travellers. There appear to be an eclectic mix of people involved in the trade. One might have a Turkish agent escorting Somalis or a Russian bringing Vietnamese. Those travelling overland by lorry or by ship are often mixed nationality groups – for example a single lorry might carry Iraqi, Albanian and Chinese.
• I see only the migrants who safely reached their destination. We are all aware of the many lives lost on migrant journeys; but of my clients I am generally struck at how their personal safety was protected enroute. Young single women are not molested; fellow travellers rarely interact and certainly respect privacy; the migrants are provided with food, bags for toileting and occasional fresh air. On long overland journeys this can involve multiple agents, changes of lorry and passengers added or reaching destinations. The agents are the Thomas Cooks of this alternative travel package. They do rather more for their money than the established version.
• We have little evidence concerning or understanding of how the immigrants experience these journeys. In my representation, the journey features only as a basis for challenging a client’s credibility – their account of the journey is challenged as part of a general discrediting of their claims to be at risk in their home country. Most agents tell clients not to disclose information about the journey. In consequence we know little of how these immigrants experienced the journey, whether it left them fearful or with a sense of accomplishment.
• I am also conscious of the associated experience of immigration process, which immigrants then experience on arrival– the repeat immigration interviews, the appeal procedure, solicitor, medical and court interviews. Some are sent to immigration detention. Again we have little real analysis of the capacity and understanding of our clients to deal with these processes. I often try to remind immigration judges that many of the young women (say from Somalia) will never have lived outside a small familiar social circle, will have no experience in ordering, sequencing and narrating her life experiences, and should not be seen as untruthful, when in fact the deficits in her account spring from a lack of experience with our processes. I can see the difficulties such applicants have with immigration process; it would be good to have some studies which might assist to establish sensitive and congruent vetting procedures. For those who have experienced torture or persecution, repeat questioning (even when well-intended) involves revisiting the events. We have no idea how damaging, how distressing these processes are.

From my vantage point I can see how immigration law has distorted the natural processes of immigration. Social anthropologists may have insights and suggestions.

Immigration Decision-making and Anthropology

I want to conclude this contribution by encouraging anthropologists to be available to assist in immigration decision-making. It is necessarily a close association. We already use numbers of established anthropologists as experts in asylum cases. They provide vital evidence on a wide range of issues - clan structures and relationships in Somalia, genital cutting practices, family relationships, child custody practices, military discipline, honour killings – the list is long and covers almost every country and community. Anthropological expertise is required because of the precise social issues in contention in asylum and some immigration cases. The Home Office and Asylum and Immigration Tribunal may have to decide whether Sierra Leonean soweis (the genital cutters) are appointed on a hereditary basis, whether a young woman can resist the appointment and can safely relocate in another part of Sierra Leone if she defies the village elders concerning this appointment. Tribunals are frequently dealing with relocation issues – if a person is at risk in their home area , can they safely relocate. For many young , single women this involves as assessment of their skills, whether they can access community support outside their home area, and whether they can remain anonymous in the new location. I have had cases where the applicant’s identity is unknown and anthropologists were instructed to ‘read’ her scarification marks to give some clues on her place of origin.

Being an expert in asylum/immigration appeals can be difficult. The Home Office and Tribunal scepticism is visited not only on applicants but also their medical and country experts. Even so, such expert assessments are critical to proper understanding of cases.

As a telling example of necessary anthropological evidence, its sceptical reception by the Tribunal and validation by the Court of Appeal, there is not better case example than HK v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1037 (20 July 2006) (available on www.bailii.org/ew/cases)

The case involved a young Sierra Leonean man from the Temne tribe who had been captured and partially initiated by a secret society, the Wunde. He claimed to be at risk from his own tribe and the Wunde, as his scarification marks showed his partial initiation. As the Court summarised, there was expert evidence presented in this case on these issues:

‘.. there was a report from Professor Melissa Leach of the University of Sussex, who has a doctorate “based on two years of field work research in Sierra Leone in the late 1980s”, and who made subsequent visits to that country during the following decade. She said that she remained in close touch with what was going on in that country while working in neighbouring Guinea. She considered herself “well placed to comment on [HK’s] appeal” and it is noteworthy that one of her books, published in 1994, refers to the Mende in its title.

She explained that the Wunde are one of a number of secret societies in Sierra Leone, and that they “control particular spirits which they deploy in rituals” including “initiation rituals held in special parts of the bush”. She went on to explain that “virtually all Mende boys and girls are initiated”, as well as people who aspire to posts in the Sierra Leone government and administration. She also said that the power of such societies is “deeply respected and feared”. She explained that little was known about “precise events and activities except by those who had been initiated” because “initiates are under strict orders not to reveal what they saw in the bush at pain of death”.

She went on to say that the location of the initiation described by HK and the warning sign of “three leaves on a path” were consistent with her understanding and experience. As to the person who helped HK escape, the evidence that he spoke Temne was, she thought, not unlikely, because “the Bo area… is close to the northern border where Mende country shades into Temne country, and, as I know from living there, it is common to encounter people with one parent of each or who speak both languages”. She went on to say that HK’s evidence “that he saw skulls and body parts in the bush” was consistent with the reputation of the Wunde “for performing human sacrifices and for using body parts in a variety of rituals”. She thought the three leaves HK said he saw on the path were consistent with the signs used by the Wunde.

While she could not say anything useful about HK having to place his penis in a hole, Professor Leach could “confirm that biting ants have long been a stock in trade form of torture and punishment among Mende people”. While she could not “comment authoritatively on the precise scarification”, Professor Leach thought that the suggestion that the three scars on the left side of HK’s chest resulted from a Wunde initiation ceremony was “entirely plausible”.

Professor Leach went on to “opine that scars only on one side would mark [HK] out as someone who had escaped halfway through an initiation ritual”. She described this as “a very problematic position” because “Wunde society members – and possibly other Mende men – would view him as a threat to their interests. They would probably be keen to re-capture him either to silence him or to complete the initiation process.” She was sceptical about HK being protected, because most “officials such as police officers… are afraid of the Wunde society, and in my opinion resist becoming involved.” She explained that “high ranking national politicians and other important people [in Sierra Leone] are Wunde members”. She also said that as “a single young man with no family connections”, HK’s “family circumstances thus enhance his vulnerability.”

In a subsequent report, Professor Leach described HK’s “claims as plausible”. She also said that, while she could not “say with authority… exactly what would happen should he be recaptured by [members of the Wunde], I do believe that he would be right to live in a state of fear and uncertainty… from one of the powerful and secretive cultural and political groups in the upper Guinea sub region.”

The Court of Appeal made important observations on the nature of fact finding in the immigration jurisdiction and the particular difficulties this presents for Courts and tribunals. Again these observations are worth quoting in full:

The difficulty of the fact-finding exercise is particularly acute in asylum cases…The standard of proof to be applied for the purpose of assessing the appellant’s fear of persecution is low. The choice is not normally which of two parties to believe, but whether or not to believe the appellant. Relatively unusually for an English Judge, an Immigration Judge has an almost inquisitorial function, although he has none of the evidence-gathering or other investigatory powers of an inquisitorial Judge. That is a particularly acute problem in cases where the evidence is pretty unsatisfactory in extent, quality and presentation, which is particularly true of asylum cases. That is normally through nobody’s fault: it is the nature of the beast.

Further, in many asylum cases, some, even most, of the appellant’s story may seem inherently unlikely but that does not mean that it is untrue. The ingredients of the story, and the story as a whole, have to be considered against the available country evidence and reliable expert evidence, and other familiar factors, such as consistency with what the appellant has said before, and with other factual evidence (where there is any).

Inherent probability, which may be helpful in many domestic cases, can be a dangerous, even a wholly inappropriate, factor to rely on in some asylum cases. Much of the evidence will be referable to societies with customs and circumstances which are very different from those of which the members of the fact-finding tribunal have any (even second-hand) experience. Indeed, it is likely that the country which an asylum-seeker has left will be suffering from the sort of problems and dislocations with which the overwhelming majority of residents of this country will be wholly unfamiliar. The point is well made in Hathaway on Law of Refugee Status (1991) at page 81:

“In assessing the general human rights information, decision-makers must constantly be on guard to avoid implicitly recharacterizing the nature of the risk based on their own perceptions of reasonability.”

Inherent improbability in the context of asylum cases was discussed at some length by Lord Brodie in Awala –v- Secretary of State [2005] CSOH 73. At paragraph 22, he pointed out that it was “not proper to reject an applicant’s account merely on the basis that it is not credible or not plausible. To say that an applicant’s account is not credible is to state a conclusion” (emphasis added). At paragraph 24, he said that rejection of a story on grounds of implausibility must be done “on reasonably drawn inferences and not simply on conjecture or speculation”. He went on to emphasise, as did Pill LJ in Ghaisari, the entitlement of the fact-finder to rely “on his common sense and his ability, as a practical and informed person, to identify what is or is not plausible”. However, he accepted that “there will be cases where actions which may appear implausible if judged by…Scottish standards, might be plausible when considered within the context of the applicant’s social and cultural background”.

The Court concluded:

Professor Leach was an undoubtedly relevant expert, and she produced what appears to have been a full, balanced, and informed report, which, on a fair reading supported HK’s story, albeit to a limited extent. In particular, to my mind, it supported some aspects of his evidence which might otherwise have seemed dubious (e.g. the existence of the Wunde, the initiation in the bush, the scarring on the chest, the use of biting ants, the presence of body parts and three leaves on the path, the presence of a Temne speaker). … All in all, it does not appear to me that it was appropriate to reject Professor Leach’s evidence as “not of assistance”, because her opinions on specific aspects of HK’s evidence of which she had no direct knowledge were “unanalytical assertions” or “mere speculation”, as the Tribunal did. First, there were specific aspects of HK’s story, which might otherwise have seemed far-fetched, and appropriate to reject, which were supported by Professor Leach’s evidence. Secondly, the description of her views on other aspects of HK’s evidence as “unanalytical assertions” is unreasonably pejorative, and the description as “speculation” is unhelpful. She was plainly an expert, with plenty of experience in the field, and her views, even on those aspects of HK’s evidence of which she honestly admitted she had no knowledge, were based on that expertise and experience. Of course, the Tribunal was not bound to accept her evidence or to hold that it ultimately validated HK’s story. However, to dismiss her views as “not of assistance” appears to me to be simply wrong.

Not all experts undergo dismissal and re-instatement is so clear a fashion as in HK. Even so the case is an excellent example of how important anthropological expertise can be in determining asylum and immigration cases.