1
Transnational Migration, Development
and Human Security
Thanh-Dam Truong and Des Gasper
[This is a pre-final version of the introductory and overview chapter in:
Transnational Migration and Human Security, eds. T-D. Truong & D. Gasper,
Heidelberg: Springer, 2010. The final version appeared as Chapter 1, pp. 322. Literature references are given at the end of the book: see
http://www.afes-press-books.de/html/hexagon_06.htm
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-12757-1]
1.1 Introductory Remarks
Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate
change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human
migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and
labour. Yet, it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing
body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume brings
into question the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders’, from such a
more comprehensive phenomenological and historical perspective.
The ‘migration-development-security’ nexus has deep historical roots
set in the construction of the modern state, but has only recently emerged as
subject of a self-conscious discursive field. It has been influenced by the
changing modalities of governing, with processes of neoliberal globalization
contributing to the intensification of the existing forms and the creation of new
forms of transnational migration. The acceleration of globalization has
produced unprecedented transnational flows (of finance, goods, ideas, people,
small weapons and substances), changed the organizational frameworks that
facilitate them, and altered the workings of the modern nation-state in dramatic
ways. A host of complex questions have been raised regarding how the
organization of these cross-border flows undermines, or alters, state authority
over national security and people’s security in daily lives. The sociological,
political and economic drivers behind these flows, the multifaceted identities of
their actors, and the permeability of territorial, cultural and political borders
reveal the limits of the traditional conception of the ‘nation-state’ and the need
to rethink its dynamic construction beyond a self-identified and fixed entity.
The ongoing reconfiguration of borders manifests attempts to revise this
centuries-old concept which has sought to integrate the meaning of a
geopolitical entity with a cultural and/or ethnic entity. ‘Re-bundling’ of
economic, social and cultural affinities at regional levels is one way to provide
more effectiveness in the management of resources and human flows, given the
lack of consensus at the global level. The management of human flows remains
problematic due to the tension between legal approaches that judge the
legitimacy of border crossing according to a codification system of singular
reasons for movement (business, tourism, employment, education, asylumseeking, or family reunion) and the sociological realities that involve
intermeshing motives and evolving human relationships within and across
borders. Although migrants’ choices are conditioned by legislation, their
actions also transform the legal space. For this and other reasons, the migration
policy domain is essentially interactive and can be torn by competing goals and
rationalities.
Foucault’s insights into the mechanisms of societal control and the
delimitation of scientific discourses are suggestive for exploring the ‘migrationdevelopment-security’ nexus. He emphasizes the need for attentiveness to the
institutional context of emergence of mechanisms and discourses, and to how
different ideas have been brought into a field of intervention and become
enacted in particular directions (Gutting 1994). Questioning the fundamental
epistemological and ontological assumptions and exploring their biases and
how they drive the dynamics of practice are fundamental to understand current
social tensions and find possible ways of transformation.
This volume tries to bridge the divides in social thought between
explanation and justification, and between philosophical and substantive
concerns. In doing so it is part of a wider search for new pathways for change.
Approaching the subject of migration by way of revisiting presuppositions that
have been taken as givens, and exploring their role in shaping rules and
institutions governing the movements of people across borders, have helped to
reveal the mentalities and rationalities that made up, and continue to make up,
the reality of today.
The essays contained here reveal aspects of power and privilege set
within the discursive field of international migration at its intersection with two
other fields, development and security, with attention to the human
implications. The essays bring to the fore areas that require more systematic
assessment of the knowledge claims that inform migration policy regulation,
penalties and incentives, and the modality of intervention, in order to draw
lessons for theory and practice. Time-bound and historically situated meanings
ascribed to human movement across borders vary greatly. Territoriality,
sovereignty and their reconfigurations play a central role in shaping such social
meanings, which consequently also affect lives and experiences of the subjects
of migration themselves. The volume attempts a cross-disciplinary way forward
in contemporary understanding of international migration and its links with
both development and human security as research fields and policy domains.
Collins’ (2000) concept of matrix of domination, derived from
Foucault’s knowledge/power apparatus, addresses interlocking systems of
oppression and disempowerment (race, class and gender) by shifting social
thought away from the conventional additive approach to relations of
dominance. She reveals how different systems of domination may operate
through reliance (in varying degrees) on mechanisms that can acquire
simultaneously a systemic and interpersonal nature. Her matrix of domination
is relevant to migration as a field of intervention and its intersections with the
two associated fields of security and development. An adjusted version of this
matrix for our purposes contains the following:
2
1) A hegemonic dimension: how ideology, culture, knowledge and
consciousness can lend legitimacy to the workings of power in the
delimitations of human movement as a subject of study and field of
intervention.
2) An institutional dimension: how dominant values, norms and beliefs produce
and reproduce practices that define ‘security’ in relation to forms of human
movement in particular ways.
3) A disciplinary dimension: how bureaucracy and surveillance practices that
use these values play an important role in hiding the effects of structural
inequality among the population on the move.
4) An interpersonal and inter-group dimension: how the first three dimensions
are played out in everyday life situations and affect people on the move
under specific circumstances.
The next two sections in this introductory chapter sketch the domains of
migration, security and development, and suggest their interconnections in
terms of the dimensions mentioned above. We highlight key dividing issues,
and identify areas for reflection, conversation and action on different ethical
frameworks in relation to migration, within a core concern for the improvement
of the position of groups subjected to various forms of disempowerment.
1.2 The ‘Migration-Security-Development’
Nexus: Danger and Opportunity
1.2.1 Migration and security
The term ‘migration’ stems from the Latin root migrare, meaning to move from
one place to another. It first appeared in the English language in the 1610s,
referring to persons, and in the 1640s referring to animals. 1 Today the term also
refers to a variety of movements, amongst them the processes of transferring
data between storage types, formats or computer systems, or the movement of
microorganisms between people, animals and plants. It is clear that migration of
all kinds is essential to life in all aspects, and that at the human scale it involves
organization, change and adjustment.
Surveillance of human movement has been a core activity for modern
nation-states since their inception in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe.
Foucault (1975) traced the historical transformation of discipline and
punishment associated with the rise of the modern state and provided insights
into why and how human migration became an issue for state surveillance.
Begun as a system of permanent registration of the population in a given
locality in order to control the plague, systems of registration became extended
to the documentation of growing floating populations in urban areas. With
population dislocation and pauperization growing as the capitalist system took
hold, anti-nomadic techniques – such as workhouses, schools and the military –
were adopted to neutralize dangers, fix those people seen as ‘useless or
disturbed populations’, and avoid the inconveniences and perceived threat of
over-large assemblies. Over time, the function of these techniques of power was
adapted to take up a more positive role in the society – notably to increase the
1
See at: <http://www.etymonline.com/index.phip?term=migration> (30 January, 2010)
3
possible utility of the individuals subjected to these techniques of surveillance –
in other words, to make them ‘productive’. This inversion of the functionality
of power – from repressive to ‘enabling’ – initiated the formation of a
disciplinary society, connected to the broader historical processes of economic,
juridico-political and scientific reform in the search for progress. 2 Viewed from
this vantage point, human movement between different localities within modern
Europe was originally framed in the negative terms of a danger to society3 But
over time, with transformations of production relations and the recognition of
migration as a structural and durable phenomenon with far-reaching economic,
social and political consequences, the notion of ‘danger/threat’ started to be
juxtaposed with that of ‘opportunity’.
Torpey’s (2000) analysis of the gradual emergence of the passport over
the past three centuries extends Foucault’s insights on state surveillance of
population movements and complements two key perspectives in historical
analyses of the state. These are Marx’s concept of appropriation of the means of
production by the capitalist classes, and Weber’s concept of appropriation of
the means of violence and the control of their legitimate use by the state.
Torpey emphasizes a third dimension of these processes of appropriation and
monopoly: that of “the legitimate means of movement” (2000: 1).
Torpey shows that the passport was not an invention of the early 20 th
century, but of a much earlier era. Monopolization of the right to authorize and
regulate movements has been intrinsic to the state, even in its early modern
form. The progressive advance of the use of the passport as a means of
controlling population movements today expresses the stateness of states and
their power to provide an ‘identity’ – a national identity – for citizens, which is
not independent of the documents that ‘prove’ it. It distinguishes the
‘national/citizen’ from the ‘alien’ and from the undocumented. Without this
passport as a document of national identity, not only is identity unknowable, it
is non-existent from a legal perspective. Although a national identity gives
access to rights, and can be therefore crucial to livelihood, people can only
enter it on stringent conditions and escape from it with difficulty. This
monopolization has the effect of reinforcing an interlinked set of processes.
They include:
the (gradual) definition of states everywhere – at least from the point of view of the
international system –as ‘national’ (i.e., as ‘nation-states’ comprised of members
understood as nationals); the codification of laws establishing which types of
persons may move within or across their borders, and determining how, when and
where they may do so; the stimulation of the worldwide development of techniques
for uniquely and unambiguously identifying each and every person on the face of
the globe, from birth to death; the construction of bureaucracies designed to
implement this regime of identification and to scrutinize persons and documents in
order to verify identities; and the creation of a body of legal norms designed to
2
See at: <http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.
panOpticism.html> (14 September, 2009)
3
According to Bader (2005), in the Western world, membership regimes in the city-states of
classical Greece were severely restrictive. Aristotle who initiated a long tradition of
republican exclusionism declared them legitimate. The subsequent decline of the city-states
and the rise of the Roman Empire saw unprecedented freedom of movement and multiplecitizenship, supported by the idea of cosmopolitanism and moral inclusiveness.
4
adjudicate claims by individuals to enter into particular spaces and territories
(Torpey 2000: 7).
A product of incremental juridico-political reform, the passport joined
the repressive side of state discipline to its enabling side. State-security and the
security of its citizens or nationals were connected through this means. The
question of states accepting aliens from other countries arose as an issue during
the two World Wars, owing to rising concerns for institutional accountability
for the massive movements of refugees across the continents. Ambivalence
about state accountability was evident and has persisted until today, leaving
only the economic utility of aliens as the prime area for assessing the impact of
immigration (O’Brien 2003). Nevertheless, the legacy of inter-state
collaboration did provide a certain degree of institutional accountability for
international labour migrants as guest workers (Cholewinski 1994) and for
refugees, most of whom would be today termed ‘forced migrants’ or ‘asylum
seekers’.
Cross-border migration patterns since the end of the Cold War show
complex characteristics that pose new challenges to established notions of
identity and security. Attempts to address problems arising from cross border
migration have given birth to several different policy agendas on migration in
development cooperation:
1) Post-conflict reconstruction, durable solutions for refugees, and co-development to stem the outflows of economic migrants;
2) Control over the modalities of movement facilitated by privately organized
networks that challenge state surveillance and undermine state security; 4
3) Economic costs and benefits of migration to sending and receiving countries;
4) Globalization, the knowledge economy and the supply of talents.
Government control is compartmentalized into these separate policy agendas
and remains within the dualistic frame of ‘danger’ (to be contained) and
‘opportunity’ (to be promoted). Taking into account the mixed forces that often
drive the migration processes remains a challenge for policymakers.
From a developmental and North-South perspective, although the
volumes of the flows of people and remittances are often referred to as a key
concern, there is reason to think that the politics of human migration and its
relationship with the nation-state are really the core issues. In 2003, the United
Nations estimated that the total number of international migrants in the world
stood at 175 million in 2000, up from 154 million in 1990, or about three per
cent of the total world population. 5 Today the estimated stock of people living
4
For example, in the case of Canada, Bear (1999) illustrates seven distinct categories of
migrants based on their entry status and long-term status, being: 1) legal-legal (legal entry
and legal immigration); 2) illegal-legal (illegal entry under false or undocumented methods
with the goal to change status after arrival); 3) legal-illegal (legal entry with time-specific
visas and overstay); 4) illegal-illegal (by independent means such as own-account or through
friends); 5) illegal-illegal (by indentured means such as through the service of organized
crime networks who prepay migration costs to be repaid after successful entry, sometimes
even when entry is unsuccessful); 6) legal-legal (through similar indentured means as under
5, but with a legal status); 7) internal migration (mobility within the same national
jurisdiction during intermediary status prior to integration).
5
See at: <http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/policy_and_research/un/58/
A_58_98_en.pdf>
5
outside their country of birth is 214 million in 2010, or 3.1 per cent of the total
world population of 6.9 billion. The statistical picture shows gravitation from
low to high-income areas, suggesting that cross-border labour migration is to a
great extent an issue of security of livelihood and economic advancement.6 By
contrast, refugees and internally displaced persons are primarily located in the
developing world, reflecting pervasive conflicts in the development process.
The UNHRC database shows that there were some 42 million forcibly
displaced people worldwide at the end of 2008, including 15.2 million refugees,
827,000 asylum-seekers (pending cases) and 26 million internally displaced
persons. Developing countries are host to 80 per cent of the world’s refugees. 7
Unlike cross-border movements of goods – which can be stored,
destroyed or sold cheaply when in excess – the movements of people involve
human lives, which are inevitably interwoven in intricate ways. States’
handling of migrants affects both the individuals concerned and the lives of
those connected to them, and therefore human rights and dignity have always
been a primary issue. Beyond the questions of economic efficiency and
effective border control, migration policy of all types has broader implications
for social ethics and the morality of a given polity.
Attempts to make social ethics more prominent in international relations
have brought the link between international migration and human security to
the fore (Graham/Poku 2000; Truong 2006; Gasper/Truong 2010). The concept
of human security entails that states are responsible not only for national
security but also for protecting the basic rights of citizens and residents. The
concept challenges the orthodox approach to international security that leaves
human concerns at the periphery. The international security policy agenda has
tended to marginalize issues of human displacement and migration – both as a
cause and a consequence of conflict (Newman/van Selm 2003; Fagan/Munck
2009). The concept of human security further seeks to address the connections
of migration issues in a continuum of events, from conflict to failures both in
development efforts and development-related global governance frameworks
(Commission on Human Security 2003; Truong 2009a; 2010; Gasper 2010).
The concept respects the personal dimensions of security, and factors of
oppression and exploitation derived from the specific nature of migrants’ entry
to circuits of cross-border movement. Migrants are often placed in a situation of
liminality, suspended at a threshold, straddling between different administrative
and juridical systems, cultures and identities. Apart from social and economic
6
See at: <http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=3585_0_5_0>, 16 February 2010. This
source indicates that the countries with the most international migrants are: US (43 million);
Russia (12 million); Germany (11 million); Saudi Arabia, Canada, and France (about seven
million each). Forty per cent of the total population of migrants are found in these six
countries. Oil exporter states in the Gulf of the Middle East have the highest shares of
international migrants. In Qatar, more than 85 per cent of residents are migrants, and UAE
and Kuwait have 70 per cent migrants. The countries with the lowest international migrant
shares of residents include China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Peru and Cuba. There, less than onetenth of one per cent of residents are international migrants.
7
See at: <http://www.unhcr.org/4a375c426.html> (30 March, 2010). Open conflicts in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Georgia have contributed to the
growing number of refugees, though localized conflicts are also accountable. It is doubtful if
UNHCR figures on internally displaced persons also cover those affected by large-scale
development projects, such as the construction of dams and infrastructure.
6
vulnerabilities, this situation generates new types of risks for migrants, owing
to the perceptions held by society about the legitimacy of their presence and to
a process of identity construction based on fear and distrust for the ‘Other’.
Since 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ has re-asserted the orthodox approach
to international security, thwarting the concept of human security. Security now
acquires communitarian meanings (e.g. ‘homeland security’ in the U.S., or
‘societal security’, which involves the security of a collective identity in the
E.U.). Law and policy in many parts of the world today reflect the tendency to
approach migration management in a narrowly instrumental way. Emphasis is
placed on economic expediency, exclusionary communitarian principles, and
technological fixes in surveillance aimed at discouraging particular types of
migrant.
The legal space around international migrants is hierarchical,
conditioned by state preferences and admission policies that define the relation
between the alien and the state in specific ways. Those in the lower strata are
the least protected groups under international law. The race, class and gender
effects of migration restrictions are visible through societal discourses
characterized by polarizations between ‘cultural diversity’ versus
‘homogeneity’, economic ‘gains’ versus ‘losses’, or ‘social cohesion’ versus
‘disintegration’. These framings of ‘opportunity’ and ‘danger’ can translate into
discriminatory practices that impose great financial, social and physical costs,
especially upon the weakest groups.
1.2.2 Migration and development: connecting
perspectives from across a fragmented field
Migration became a subject of scientific interest in the late 19 th century with the
work of Ernest Georg Ravenstein, an English geographer of German origin who
sought to demonstrate that migration occurs according to specific laws rather
than erratically. 8 In the last few decades, the subject has proliferated across
many disciplines: economics, legal studies, sociology, anthropology, history,
political science and international relations. Until recently, the field of study has
largely concentrated on deepening some of Ravenstein’s ideas with the
intention to provide answers to the following questions: Why do people
migrate; through which pathways, how and with what consequences for
sending and receiving areas. Traditional pursuits on the behaviour of migrants
and states continue to dominate the field. Recently questions regarding cultural
identities and associational life, assimilation and resistance have been added.
Massey and colleagues note that the field consists of “a fragmented set
of theories that have developed largely in isolation from one another,
8
Using census data from the United Kingdom, Ravenstein (1885 and 1889) developed his
‘Laws of Migration’, which included, among others, 1) ‘push-pull’ process, or a gravitation
from unfavourable conditions in one location – such as oppressive laws, and heavy taxation
– towards another location with more favourable conditions; 2) each main current of
migration produces a compensating counter current; 3) the decrease in volume of migration
as distance increases; 4) migration takes place in stages rather than one long move; 5) social
differentials (e.g., gender, social class, age) influence a person's experience and pattern of
mobility.
7
sometimes but not always segmented by disciplinary boundaries”
(Massey/Arango/Hugo/Kouaouci/Pellegrino/Taylor 1998: 17). Given that
migration has accelerated in the last centuries, with distinct cycles correlated
with changes in the world economy and transformations of polities, there is
now consensus on the need to study this phenomenon as part of the globalizing
processes driven by the emergence and growth of capitalist economies. Close
reference to the perspectives of social ethics in migration, the meanings given
to ‘economic efficacy’, and the consequences for polities and cultural systems
in the long term become vital.
The field is currently subdivided into different study areas. Forced
migration covers displacement and cross-border refugees. International
migration is sub-divided into different foci (labour, education, marriage
formation, retirement, assimilation, ethnic relationships). It overlaps with
transnational migration research that examines a variety of practices, including
plural civic memberships, economic involvements, social networks and cultural
identities linking people and institutions together across two or more nationstates in diverse and multi-layered patterns (Lewitt/Schiller 2004).
An emerging area of research on transmigration examines the
phenomenon of migrants-in-transit in one or more countries while on the way
to their planned destination of settlement. Exploring the movements and
adaptations of this group (the routes chosen, the use of multiple locales and the
livelihoods they pursue), this area of research looks at ‘transitivity’ as a social
condition within the continuum of a migratory trajectory. There are some
important implications for understanding ‘temporality’, ‘permanence’, and the
notion of country of origin and transit. The traditional understanding of
migration trajectories based on a linear and bidirectional move – from a country
of origin to a recipient country and return – no longer holds. Instead, multidirectional patterns have emerged among those passing through one or more
countries while on the way to their preferred destination. Their trajectories are
not comparable to the conventional definition of international (or transnational
migrants) who usually cross borders, settle in a recipient country and maintain
ties with their home countries. Labour migrants can enter a recipient country
legally, but may consider it an in-between station on the way to somewhere
else, rather than a final destination.
In human trafficking, the term ‘transitivity’ is used to bring to light the
complexity of this process, which may start in a different country than the
country of origin, or occur in distinct phases. Diverse forms of transitivity have
been found: people migrating legally from one country to another who find
themselves at risk because of poverty, discrimination and marginalization and
become trapped in a trafficking network; people trafficked from one country to
another for a particular purpose who are later trafficked to a third country for a
different purpose; and people trafficked internally, from a rural area to an urban
area, who are later trafficked to another country for a different purpose
(UNICEF 2003: 13).
Driven primarily by immediate policy concerns, migration research has
been influenced mainly by behaviourism, in varying forms and degrees. It
draws largely from the body of thought of various orientations in the fields of
neoclassical microeconomics and macro-sociology (Arango 2000). These
8
traditions have only considered observable behaviour as relevant, and place
issues of ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ in the subjective domain and outside the
area of focus of objective social science.
Attempts to overcome the limits of the dominant frameworks in
international migration studies have produced a rich body of literature on
transnational migration, most of it recent, concerned with migrants’ agency and
the formation of their social identities. Scholars have borrowed insights from
recent social constructivist theories in international relations to analyse the
relations between nation-states in light of activities of transnational
corporations and civil society organizations that pierce through borders. Such
studies use the term ‘transnationalism’ to refer to the multifaceted and multilocal processes of cross-border migration (Smith/Guarnizo 1998). The
transnational approach aims to expose the deceptive binary constructs – such as
national-international and local-global – found in dominant discourses on
migration, to reveal and explore the locations of transnational interactions,
including villages and townships, borders and bureaucracies.
Built on an actor-oriented approach to study of the ‘missing middle’, or
the meso level of interaction, this approach offers valuable alternative methods
to analyse how rights, security and livelihoods are affected by migration, at
multiple sites, thus uncovering the broader significance of ‘transnationalism’
for sending and receiving societies. Faist (2000) introduces the concept of
‘transnational social spaces’ as virtual as well as real spaces, made up of
practices adopted by migrants and stay-behinds that connect both worlds as
well as the activities of institutions, such as nation-states, that try to control
these spaces. Activities in such spaces also influence the dynamics of mobility
and immobility (e.g., providing resources and information for those wishing to
move, and supporting the stay-behinds).
Migrants’ social identities, subject positions and agency are formed by a
convergence of diverse social forces, which can involve complex intersections
between different structures of social inequality (legal status, gender, class, age,
race and sexuality) and social consciousness. Representation, boundary
marking and the construction of social and political space in relation to
migrants as subjects reflect this complexity and pose great challenges to
deliberative democracy and access to rights. Far from being uniform, diverse
power relationships control these transnational social spaces. For those who
migrate through ‘irregular means’ today, information asymmetry and cognitive
conflicts about the rights and obligations of the actors involved prevail.
Information asymmetry can lead to unjust economic redistribution, and
cognitive conflicts add to the denial of rights because of ‘culture’. 9
Today transnational migration often occurs in cross-cultural contexts,
implying an encounter between different frames of reference about rights and
obligations. Cognitive conflicts about rights and obligations that arise at
different moments in the entire migration process (decision-making, during
9
For example domestic workers perform household tasks that historically have been assigned a
diminished value due to the culture of gender, a problem further exacerbated by their
association with particular groups (women, minorities, migrants). They are often forbidden
from leaving the house. See at: <http://www.globalrights.org/site/DocServer/
Domestic_Workers_report-_FINAL.pdf?docID=5503> (25 February 2010).
9
migration, job placement, return) typically leave those who are voiceless with
no support, at best, and with fatal consequences at worst. The fluidity of
migrants’ social identities may obstruct the kind of consciousness required to
overcome social divisions, and hence may undermine resistance to oppression,
or may enhance competition where there are opportunities.
More analysis is required of the transnational social spaces through
which migrants can assert their sense of being and belonging in order to claim
rights. The nation-state, its polity, territorial and cultural boundaries pose
significant barriers to the deliberative agency of footloose transnational
migrants and transmigrants, with or without a formal identity. Thus, as useful
as it is, the transnational migration paradigm must accord greater significance
to structures of state, local configurations of administrative power, and the
glaring imbalances in power relations between different transnational actors.
Recent study of the migration industry as a loosely formed entity
comprised of private employment agencies, migrant networks and state
agencies has helped to reveal the working of social hierarchies within
transnational spaces. Despite fragmented knowledge lacking an evaluative and
comparative dimension, existing studies show that practices of states and
political norms do establish the conditions under which migration brokers can
operate (Lucas 2004). Therefore, migration policy regimes and recruitment
practices bear specific regional geopolitical and cultural features. Particular
macro-economic and institutional linkages also play an important role in
selectively channelling certain types of migrant labour to particular sectors
within a country or region. These linkages also influence the behaviour of
recruiting networks, which not only provide services passively but also actively
mobilize labour and shape migrations.
The emerging architecture of the migration brokerage industry formed
by interactions between different actors – the state through its administrative
laws, service providers and migrants through market mechanisms – now
involves a plethora of activities (recruitment, providing loans, arranging legal
documents and travel, job placement and so forth) and operates across different
national jurisdictions. In a neoliberal environment that advocates free
movement of factors of production but imposes selective restrictions on the
movement of people, the operation of this industry generates intermeshing
practices that need to be scrutinized from a human rights perspective.10 Studies
have shown a wide range of rights violations in the low-skill sectors, some of
which are not formally classified.
A widespread practice is to tie migrants to their employers or
‘sponsors’, who withhold travel documents and identity papers, or impose
excessive charges for food and accommodation, not only reducing migrants’
earnings but also preventing them from finding alternatives. Excessive fees
charged upon arrival for non-transparent purposes, failure to fulfil placement
obligations, contract substitution and disappearance of agents after collection of
10
Goldstein (2006) describes the ‘sweating system’ or labour recruitment practices prevalent in
the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries in low-skilled work, in which workers’ bargaining
power was weakened and improvements in wages and working conditions suppressed.
Today’s realities, he suggests, may well mean a return to this system, which is an outcome of
the dysfunctionality of law and democratic deliberation at several levels.
10
fees, have also been widely reported (Kuptsch 2006). Practices in the migration
industry also contribute to the shaping of the conditions of migrants’ entry to
the labour market indirectly, such as becoming ‘structurally embedded’ in
‘temporary’ arrangements, meaning: circular labour migration on short-term
visas without the possibility for extension (Tsuda 1999), and ‘Just-in-Time’
labour delivery to support the ‘flexible staffing’ system adopted by employers
to operate in highly fluctuating markets (Higuchi/Tanno 2003).
Maltreatment of migrant workers can lead receiving states to encourage
direct recruitment, in order to eliminate brokers’ fees and malpractices.
However, direct hiring has failed due to ‘kickback’ arrangements involving
employers, brokers and state officials (Tierney 2007). Close cooperation
between recruiters and state agents in sending countries can lead to the
formation of an alliance of interests which can be detrimental to migrant
workers’ rights (Wee/Sim 2004). The scope for justice-seeking actions in
migration is often limited by the monopoly of the state over the means of
movement, since this monopoly can be abused. Governments are the only
actors who can provide legal papers, but government officials can collude with
recruiters, by receiving ‘kickbacks’ to grant permissions without having
checked the true nature of the work contract. These problems, reflecting
information asymmetry between recruiting agents and the migrants, then spill
over to the domains of work place entitlements and remittances..
The return to a systems approach in migration studies recognizes the
mutual interplay between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, and how migration systems
evolve from interactions between regulation and the (potentially
transformative) actions of those involved – the migrants, employers, social
networks, civic organizations and law enforcement agents. This has contributed
to new theoretical insights, which must be extended to the domain of
intersecting inequalities that shape security-seeking actions of particular groups
of migrants, and the challenges these may pose to justice-seeking actions.
Feminist scholarship on migration investigates the relationships
between gender, worlds of work and culture. It has revealed the emotional and
social as well as economic values of female niches of migration for work – such
as domestic and care work, commercial sex work, or cross-cultural family
formation (Truong 1996; Ehrenreich/Hochschild 2003; Palriwala/Uberoi 2008).
The cultural representation of ‘women’ and ‘gender’ has become a site for
competing understandings of many different migration-related controversies
(such as prostitution and trafficking; migration for marriage formation through
brokers; global care chains, outsourcing care; deficit and crisis). These analyses
reveal rival ethical-political rationalities that establish the ‘objects’ of
protection in opposed ways – in terms of asserted public morality and general
societal wellbeing versus concern for specific categories of migrants. 11
Analyses of gender dynamics in the socio-cultural contexts of migration
decisions further show how state ideology and policy shape the social
11
For example, the focus on the care sector has exposed the chains of negative externalities by
which an enhancement of care provision through labour import in some country can lead to
the denial of the entitlement to care of others who stay behind (Parreñas 2001). In many
countries this has led to a moral outcry about the care crisis that places the blame on women
migrants (for neglecting their children and families) rather than examining state policy and
the organization of care as a domain. See: Perera (2009)
11
environment in which networks operate and form distinctive spatial
arrangements and pathways of movements (Tyner 2000; Oishi 2005).
Feminist scholarship in migration studies has furthered our
understanding by bringing to bear the significance of ‘gender’, and distinct
epistemological and methodological values, into research and interpretation.
Besides gender-differentiated patterns of mobility, identified by Ravenstein
more than 100 years ago, scholarship shows how gender moulds thinking,
reasoning and understanding of human movements and the identities of those
on the move. Now seen as a multifaceted process, transnational migration is
analysed as something that profoundly influences a variety of domains in social
lives – sexuality, gender, work, organization of caring practices, institutional
life, as well as domination and resistance. In this respect, feminist scholarship
has deepened the meaning of the term ‘feminization of migration’, far beyond
just one of Ravenstein’s laws of migration.
Practices of control of migration in most countries today are born out of
shifting modes of power, the declining commitment to welfare provision or
assurance, and the ascendancy of a new logic dominated by public fiscal
concerns. Today’s new forms of debt-financed migration12 undertaken by
individuals for the sake of private household survival and growth are being
stimulated by a migration industry that extends itself in the nebulous zone of
services. The new forms reflect a complex web of inequalities co-constituted by
neoliberal doctrines and pre-existing hierarchical relations between knowledge
forms, people and their societies. Despite processes that enhance the
interdependence between reproductive, productive and virtual economies and
weave human lives together, people remain divided by unequal structural
relations based on race, gender, class and nation (Peterson 2003). A cognitive
frame that insists on sharply distinct social entities, rather than acknowledging
their interconnectedness and interlocking nature, serves to reinforce these
structures.
1.3 Overview of the Chapters
The book contains twenty two chapters, grouped in five parts.
1.3.1 Part I: Introduction
The two chapters in Part I address the main themes of the book. This
introductory chapter presents the field of discussion and outlines the chapters. It
is followed by a keynote chapter by Thanh-Dam Truong on “The
Governmentality of Transnational Migration and Security: The Making of a
New Sub-Altern”, which provides a historical and factual survey that sets the
scene and an exposition of interpretive themes relevant to the whole book. By
tracing the main lines in the framing of ‘security’, Truong identifies the
historical junctions where its specific meanings have intersected with those of
12
Debt-finance migration is a phenomenon characterized by the central role of intermediaries in
financing the migration costs of resource-constrained migrants, who enter temporary
servitude contracts to pay back the debt.
12
‘migration’ and ‘development’, involving the use of particular ethical norms
and modes of conceptualization. A core issue today is the gradual practical and
conceptual erosion of the legal boundaries set in the Westphalian framework of
inter-state relations and the emergence of fragmented modes of regulation. By
exploring the meanings of human mobility in the four extant frameworks of
international legislation, Truong shows how the differentiation of meanings
reflects an ‘art’ of governing migration, which seeks to maintain a hierarchical
global society supported by a particular politics within nation-states rather than
securing human rights in the migration process. She argues that this ‘art’ of
governing has been bolstered by a neoliberal perspective on ‘being human’,
centred on a restricted notion of autonomy that contains a serious ontological
and epistemological bias. It also carries important ethical implications because
it promotes excessive individualism at the expense of relations of care and
reciprocity in mutual recognition and respect. This perspective cannot be
expected to deliver human security outcomes. The challenge ahead is for
critical thought to engage with, and learn from, the experiences of insecurity
endured by the ‘subalterns’ – those who have no line of social mobility
although their existence may involve a constant physical re-location. Learning
from these experiences can help expose the currently fragmented vision of
human movement across borders and the utilitarian logic of triage that
underpins it. Such an engagement, combined with learning from practices of
reflexivity within and across cultures, can help to introduce an alternative
conception of security-oriented collective agency by building on an ontology of
care and deepening the notion of caring in social thoughts and action.
1.3.2 Part II: Neoliberal governmentality and
transnational migration: The interplay of business
forces and security fears
Governments frequently select migration policy positions which privilege
security, trade and finance considerations over more people-centred concerns.
The chapters in Part II show how giving priority to business concerns can lead
to support for forms of migration considered ‘desirable’ and ‘profitable’ for
business while retaining tight restrictions on those forms labelled as
‘undesirable’ and ‘costly’ to the state. Mirroring the wider construction of a
‘neoliberal subject’, migration management policy is biased towards the
entrepreneurial aspects of ‘being’ and of ‘moving’. The chapters show the
entrenched instrumental reasoning that sees people overwhelmingly as tools for
economic gain rather than integrally as whole human beings. At the same time,
a wish to keep out some of the types of migrant attracted by better economic
prospects means that immigration and asylum issues often become framed as
matters of security, a language that can override routine economic concerns.
Mexico is one of the top handful of countries as a source of emigrants
and is a major transit country for aspirants from further south who seek to enter
the United States or to return from there and travel home. Responding to
demands for labour, and seeking to support or join their families, these
travellers and work-seekers are often harassed, legally victimized and culturally
denigrated within both Mexico and the U.S. Chapter 3 on “Human Insecurities
13
and Migratory Policies for Migrants from Mexico and Central America to the
United States”, by Gustavo Verduzco and María Isabel de Lozano, looks at the
experiences of those who attempt to cross Mexico, both Mexican and nonMexican nationals. It draws on secondary data and a survey of migrants in two
Mexican cities on the U.S. border and interviews with migrants, officials,
priests and representatives of human rights groups. The chapter illustrates how,
located at the intersection of the two universes along the Mexico-U.S. border,
the cities on the Mexican side have become extraordinary containers of mobile
populations: those expelled from the U.S., those seeking to get in or get back in,
and those returning home and becoming stranded.
The Mexican government has come under great pressure from the U.S.
to seal both its northern and southern borders against migrants and drug
smugglers. While on paper Mexico’s internal surveillance of migration has
been relatively humane (protecting transit migrants from abuse, not treating
them as criminals), policy practices have hardened in recent years. Intensive
border patrols and increased roadside checks within Mexico have led to use of
more dangerous routes, and to higher prices charged by person-smugglers
(polleros), suggesting that it is the migration-facilitating networks who benefit
most from the surveillance. Prices for crossing the northern border have
increased more than ten-fold in the last 15 years, from U.S. $250 in 1994 to
U.S. $3,000 by 2009. Large-scale movements across Mexico’s southern border
involve third country nationals from Central America and elsewhere. Polleros
now offer to take these transmigrants to U.S. territory for a price between U.S.
$7,000 and $14,000 per person.13 A high proportion of transmigrants are
subjected to abuse, including sexual abuse, both by officials, notably from the
Mexican migration agency, and non-officials such as truck drivers. It is
reported that some women, aware of the high probability of being raped,
receive contraceptive injections prior to transit. Some polleros dupe migrants
and channel them into sex-work, or kidnap them in order to demand a ransom
from family members in the U.S. In turn, the U.S. border police avoid
paperwork and expense, by placing all captured illegal migrants in one category
and repatriating all to Mexico, including third country nationals, without the
consent of the Mexican government. One result is homelessness among
transmigrants. Many of those dumped in this fashion by the U.S. police are
minors. Verduzco and Lozano underline the irony that in the land of
opportunity and the market economy where many citizens wish to hire the
services of these willing potential immigrant workers, the ‘huddled masses’
face such difficulties. They also show a further irony, for as migrants face
greater difficulties now in crossing borders to revisit their country of origin, the
motivation increases for dependants to permanently join wage-earners already
in the U.S.
In chapter 4 on “The Blind Spot of Repression: Migration Policies and
Human Survival in the Central Sahara”, Julien Brachet examines the growth of
measures by European Union (E.U.) countries to block trans-Sahara and transMediterranean migratory flows. Labour migration from the Sahel countries into
North African countries includes long established migratory patterns connected
with livelihood systems. Most of those involved in newer patterns of movement
13
A return flight Phoenix-Cancun costs around U.S. $500 at current discount prices, showing
the enormous financial burden of being without a valid travel document.
14
northwards in and across the Sahara also seek to go no further than the North
African countries. However, fears of massive inflows of sub-Saharan migrants
into Europe seem now to drive policy in E.U. states and they have taken what
appear to be disproportionate actions, including several recent bilateral
agreements with North African states to curb the flows. Libya – a country that
seeks to re-establish its international respectability – agreed to increase border
controls and to accept illegal migrants deported from Italy who had purportedly
entered via Libya, in exchange for considerable development aid. Brachet finds
that for the E.U., virtually all sub-Saharans travelling in the Sahara are now
redefined as intercontinental economic migrants. The rhetoric of fear and
control contributes to a misinterpretation of all trans-Saharan migration as
trans-Mediterranean migration. No reliable precise figures exist, but based on
several years of research in Niger – the country that provides the entire northern
border of Nigeria, by far the most populous country in Africa – Brachet
estimates that only 10 to 20 per cent of the migrants travelling to North Africa
through Niger every year continue on to Europe, or between 5,000 and 20,000
per year. The total numbers reaching Europe across the Sahara through Niger
and its neighbours appear rather modest.
The new policies and practices in North and West African countries
towards migrants, under pressure from the E.U., have doubtful impact in
curbing the number of migrants reaching Europe, yet they carry broader
consequences for the region. First, they disrupt patterns of movement within
this region of Africa and endanger the livelihoods of large populations. Second,
while increased controls along borders and roadsides and street-level checks do
not effectively prevent movements, they drive them into more dangerous routes
and channels; the greatest danger that those crossing from Niger to Algeria
face, Brachet reports, is abandonment in the desert by their drivers. Third,
detention and deportations of migrants into North Africa become increasingly
frequent, often in deplorable conditions that trample basic principles of human
rights whose defender the European Union claims to be. Brachet concludes that
the new policies put ordinary inhabitants of the sub-Saharan region “under
house arrest”, and contravene the guarantee in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights that everyone has the right to leave any country, including his
own.
Chapter 5 on “Europeanization and the Right to Seek Refugee Status –
Reflections on Frontex”, by Wies Maas and Thanh-Dam Truong, looks at E.U.
border and asylum policies and practices. The effects of the abolition of internal
borders through the implementation of the Schengen Agreement since 1995,
amplified also by unanticipated external pressures, led to the creation of this
agency in 2005 by the European Council of Ministers, with the aim of
strengthening the E.U.’s external borders. Placed at the junction between
migration and security politics, Frontex’s formation and trajectory reflect both
the flaws in the process of European integration and the limited success in
harmonizing asylum policy. These have produced a more restrictive
interpretation of the right to seek asylum and a higher degree of control,
without ensuring transparency and fairness. The result is that asylum seekers
are now almost forced to enter illegally. Now overseeing a hybrid policy system
with blurred competences and various opt-outs, Frontex’s effectiveness requires
public scrutiny. However, with the European Parliament only marginally
15
involved and national parliaments of member states not being part of
controlling Frontex operations, a ‘democratic deficit’ has arisen. Together with
a surveillance approach that is focussed on danger and crime, this has
dangerous implications for basic liberties within the E.U. itself.
The sheer scale of Europe’s demographic imbalance — a fast aging
population, and reproduction by the indigenous population at far below
replacement levels — brings both strong demands for immigrant workforces
and major resistance to them. In chapter 6 on “Fortress Europe and the Dutch
Donjon: Securitization, Internal Migration Policy and Irregular Migrants’
Counter Moves”, Godfried Engersen and Dennis Broeders discuss the measures
in the EU to identify and penalize those migrants who still gain unauthorized
entry, with special reference to the Netherlands, one of the countries where
resistance to immigrants has become intense. They present in particular the
measures to prevent unauthorized (‘irregular’) migrants from having access to
formal employment and social services, and evidence on the various intended
and unintended effects.
Recognizing that the Union’s external borders are inevitably somewhat
porous, E.U. leaders and officials have instituted an array of internal ‘gates’ by
which to capture irregular migrants or exclude them from important goods. The
Netherlands is at the forefront here. First, there is identity control: to prevent
irregulars from acquiring the documents required to access vital goods; and to
acquire information on excluded individuals in order to identify and continue to
exclude them, including expel them after due legal process. Identity control
measures include database projects at the E.U. level, including for biometric
data. People unable to provide legally satisfactory documents are held in a
greatly expanded system of detention centres while they are investigated prior
to possible expulsion. ‘Irregulars’ sometimes resist by destroying their original
legal identity markers — individuals with no confirmed legal identity are
difficult to expel, since other countries are unwilling to accept them — and/or
by acquiring new ones. Inevitably, the situation has generated a market in
‘legal’ identities. Second, there are increased inspections and penalties imposed
on employers of irregular migrants, although various adaptive responses exist
for employers and migrants, including use of subcontractors and intermediary
recruitment agencies who are skilled in operating the system. Proportionately
speaking, irregular migrants are being driven out of formal sector work into
informal employment, as in hotels and restaurants, and more than before into
criminal activities. The mega database projects have a similar perverse effect:
the more that those who have overstayed — after an original legal entry on a
visitor’s visa or as an asylum applicant — become at risk of detection, the more
that latecomers instead enter illegally via smuggling organizations.
The next step in the migration control chain, after seeking to block and
discourage entry, and to detect, discourage and expel illegal migrants, is to
encourage return to the country of origin and to reduce the pressures for others
to come. The expectation among Northern policymakers has been that
economic development in sender countries will reduce migrant outflow.
Various studies suggest instead that economic development increases the ability
to move and perhaps also the aspiration to move; and further it increases the
need to move in the case of people who are physically displaced by new
infrastructure or economically displaced by restructuring.
16
Chapter 7 by Alejandra Boni and Joan Lacomba on “The New CoDevelopment Agenda: Official and Non-Official Initiatives between Morocco
and Spain” looks at how the idea of ‘co-development’ emerged in negotiations
between the European Union and especially its immediate southern neighbours
during the 1990’s, and how it has grown since then. They show how advocates
of co-development in Europe express the need to consider a migrant population
as a vector or agent of development between its ‘host’ country and its ‘sending’
country, establishing a central role to be played by migrants by becoming a
development link on both sides. Yet E.U. policy on co-development has in
practice been subordinate to measures of direct migration control and
prevention. The authors observe that the reference to positive links between
migration and development is absent at the level of the relationship between the
E.U. and Morocco, where a view of migration centred on illegal immigration
and migratory flow control prevails. Similarly, Spain’s migration policies
perceive co-development as linked to economic development in the countries of
origin and to the return of migrants. Yet Spain’s multi-level polity allows for
independent initiatives from Autonomous Communities, as well as from NGOs
and migrant groups, and these agents have been more flexible and imaginative
than Madrid. Referring to Ramón (2005: 51) Boni and Lacomba emphasize that
the agents of co-development are not just governments in their bilateral
relationships, but primarily migrants themselves and secondarily the social
agents of both societies (labour unions, companies, teaching institutions, citizen
organizations, NGOs). A large gap typically exists between migrant
associations and official co-development programmes: the former lack
recognition and resources and distrust the very term ‘co-development’ as
officially used, owing to its strong connotations of migration control and
encouragement to return. Official co-development policies, Boni and Lacomba
reveal, are characterized by a remarkable distance between discussions and
actions, and between the statements that present migrations as positive for
development and the attempts to prevent them. A less contradictory and better
scientifically grounded conception of co-development, they suggest, may be
found in Malgesini (2007: 31) who defines it “as the set of positive effects of
immigration for the development of the origin and hosting society generated by
the contact and exchange between people from different backgrounds”.
The major recent focus of attention regarding relations between
international migration and economic development has been the rapidly
increasing and impressive volume of migrants’ financial remittances to lowand middle-income countries of origin. This has been matched by ambitious
schemes to facilitate, channel and regulate the remittances through formal
banking channels. At present half or more of remittances are still handled
through informal providers, who offer a flexible, non-bureaucratic, door-todoor service, which is also anonymous, a vital consideration for migrants with
irregular legal status. Chapter 8 on “The Rise of Migrants’ Remittance
Institutions: Driven by Supply or Demand?” by Amrita Sharma and Karim
Knio, examines the motives involved in creating a new ‘financial architecture’,
with attention to the cases of India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Financial
sector agencies have become keen to control what are seen as substantial and
fast growing money flows, and to weave around them new financial products
that can be traded as part of the realms of speculation that eventually crashed in
2008-2009. In addition, some governments of migrant sending countries have
17
been keen to compensate for actual or expected declines or fluctuations in
foreign aid or foreign private investment; and governments of many countries
have feared that informal remittance channels are or can be used to fund
terrorist organizations. Reviewing the evidence, the authors suggest that the
current drive to formalize remittance channels, and the mechanisms thus set up,
come more from commercial interest than from concerns for migrants’
wellbeing. Financial system regulators should seek to understand and serve
migrants’ needs rather than to drive their monies into the circuits of speculative
financial capitalism.
Spanning all these concerns — recruitment, legal and illegal; prevention
and repatriation; remittances and other lines for ‘co-development’ — stands the
largest specialist organization in the field: the International Organization for
Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental giant with more than 7,000 employees.
Originally the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, it
continues to be dominated in funding and orientation by its high-income
member states. It produces the largest periodic survey, the World Migration
Report, a series that started appearing from 2000 as high-income countries
began to realize that a stance of exclude-and-restrict, while domestically
politically popular, could not meet their economic and social demands.
Elaboration of the ‘migration management’ agenda has involved two broad
thrusts. First, arguments to persuade low-income country governments that be
while high control and selectivity with respect to migration into high-income
countries would prevail, there would be large potential profit from cooperation
with the governments of these countries to prepare and supply various
categories of skilled and semi-skilled labour, typically through temporary but
often recurrent migration. Second, work to quietly persuade the populations of
high-income countries that continuing inflows on a large-scale are unavoidable
and that it is better to handle these through legally controlled channels. In
effect, the model low-income country becomes the Philippines. Since the
1970’s this country has done as recommended above and built an enormous
bureaucracy that helps place Filipino workers in high-income countries around
the world. More than ten per cent of its population are at any given moment
abroad, sending remittances that comprise around ten per cent of GDP,
although, as many scholars judge, with little long-term benefit for its economy,
society or polity: remittances have become a substitute for internal reform.
Chapter 9 on “Managing Migration in the IOM’s World Migration
Report 2008”, by Beatriz Campillo Carrete and Des Gasper, looks at the most
recent of the World Migration Reports. The chapter illustrates the use of
methods of discourse analysis to identify the principles of selection,
interpretation, prioritization and argumentation that structure such a report. It
gives particular attention to the choices and use of key terms, like ‘mobility’,
‘needs’ and ‘globalization’, and of key metaphors that guide the discussion,
notably the metaphor of ‘flows’. Dominated by the mental models of
neoclassical and neoliberal economics and the policy preoccupations of highincome countries, the central policy claims in the Report concern the ‘need’ for
international cooperation to match labour demand and supply within a global
framework (as a concomitant of economic globalization in other respects), and
that such cooperation will support economic development worldwide. It
proposes in great detail methods for managed labour migration. A human rights
18
stance makes occasional appearances, represented by uses of the term ‘human
mobility’ rather than ‘labour mobility’ or ‘mobility for economic purposes’, but
it remains firmly subordinated to economic priorities based on market power.
Migrants’ opinions and agency receive little attention. Even so, the World
Migration Report 2008 represents efforts towards a more open global economic
order and an attempt to shift from an agenda overwhelmingly focused on
restriction, by building public acceptance of substantial immigration to match
labour demand. Low-skilled migrants, however, will remain largely excluded
formally, since the informal supply of such migrants is expected to be ample,
and formal exclusion helps to keep their labour low-cost.
1.3.3 Part III: Migration as life experiences: Agency in
the grey zone
The chapters in Part II were largely discussions at the macro-level, examining
also the perspectives of officials in governmental or intergovernmental
organizations or associations of employers or bankers, with only occasional
references to the life experiences of individuals who seek a livelihood or family
reunion through migration. In contrast, the focus in Part III is on migration as
life experiences, to consider the unintended or intended effects of the migration
management regimes which combine formal restriction and controlled entry
with large-scale informal reliance on immigrant labour. Policies shaped by
global market expansion under a cloud of security fears create ‘grey zones’ for
specific groups of migrants, with little concern for their welfare. The panoply of
legal controls creates a series of ambiguous spaces in interpreting and applying
the laws, in balancing the wishes of employers and potential employees against
the fears and objections of others, and in living outside the law. Part III
examines the effects and side effects, the resulting lived experiences, in a series
of locales: foreign women working as street prostitutes in Norway; young
women in South East Asia on the move in order to seek work; youth moving
likewise between European countries; and students from low-income countries
who combine studies in Australia with paid work while also aiming for longerterm residence. The essays show how migrants negotiate their way in pursuit of
economic and personal goals while facing the risk of falling into exploitative
traps, and the importance for policy formulation of taking cognisance of this
insiders’ knowledge and experience.
The population of women in street prostitution in Norway became, in
the few years from 2003 to 2008, predominantly composed of women from
Nigeria. A high proportion of these have been trafficked — brought in illegally
and with elements of deception or even duress by organizations that typically
continue to control and to some degree exploit them. Chapter 10 on “Mission
Impossible? Voluntary and Dignified Repatriation of Nigerian Victims of
Trafficking”, by May-Len Skilbrei and Marianne Tveit, builds on interviews
with 150 Nigerian women in street prostitution, representing one-third of that
group in Norway in 2006, to cast light on the possibilities for repatriation of
identified victims of trafficking who request assistance. Driven by poverty and
deteriorating family circumstances, and in consultation with their families in
Nigeria, these women sought entry into Europe to earn and send money back
home. To gain entry they used the services of smugglers, for amounts between
19
US $13,000 and $80,000, often closer to the higher figure, leaving themselves
with large debts, in addition to their targets for earning in order to save and
remit. In many cases deception was involved: women were promised a job and
residence permit, but subsequently received no such document and were forced
into commercial sex work. Most of the interviewed women had spent some
years already in other European countries before beginning to work in Norway,
and often were not permanently resident there but flew in periodically, to take
advantage of the higher prices paid for sexual services. Uninterested in the
option of assisted return made available by the Norwegian government, most
interviewed women felt strong needs to make something out of their huge
investments of money and personal suffering, rather than return ‘home’ merely
older, empty-handed and humiliated. Many also indicated fear of punishment
by their pimp or madam if they return to Nigeria, as well as dissatisfaction at
the male dominance and relative frequency of violence there. Fear of arrest and
detention upon return—the alternative being to bribe the responsible state
officials—was also prevalent. Returning home in such circumstances would
make sex work in some other part of Nigeria the only viable ‘home’ option for
many of them; taking up new debts and re-entering the stream of trafficked and
smuggled persons returning to Europe was a more likely outcome.
The Norwegian-Nigerian case study shows limitations of the
assumption that victims of trafficking want, or will benefit from, repatriation.
Chapter 11 on “Migrant Women and Their Vulnerability in the TraffickingMigration Continuum: Evidence from Asia”, by Yu Kojima, shows how a
policy approach built on a dichotomous contrast between human trafficking and
legal routes of migration is misguided. She examines the full spectrum of the
migration process of female migrant workers in some parts of Asia who are
involved in private care and commercial sexual services. Many are drawn into
illegal work after an initial period in legal activity. From the experiences of
these young women, Kojima shows how the scope of present legal measures
does not fully reflect the complex process and context of migration in which
these women are involved. Kojima argues for greater attention to the various
intersecting aspects of inequality and vulnerability. Understanding the complex
and dynamic nature of the material and subjective conditions associated with
the migration-trafficking continuum and the importance of intersecting
processes of discrimination against migrant women and youth could
significantly improve policy and human rights protection.
Chapter 12 on “The EU’s Ambiguous Position on Underage Migrant
Workers”, by Roy Huijsmans, examines the European Union’s possible
circumvention of human rights policy on children by adoption of the conceptual
category of ‘youth’. Huijsmans explores the (in)compatibility of the dominant
concept of children (those under the age of 18, according to the Convention on
the Rights of the Child) and the phenomenon of adolescent migrant workers
(between the ages of 15 and 18) within the E.U., for example under the ‘Youth
in Action’ programme that promotes inter-E.U. cultural exchange and labour
movement. Besides, among young people who move for purposes of work, a
majority combine study, ‘volunteering’, ‘traineeships’ and ‘exchanges’ with
paid work. The 1994 E.U. Directive on the Protection of Young People at Work
in fact allows that children be employed from the age of 13, if it will not be
“detrimental to regular school attendance or prevent children benefitting fully
20
from their education”. 14 Full-time work by 13 and 14 year olds during school
vacations and by 15-17 year olds throughout the year and in any part of the
E.U. appears permitted. Seeing the positive in the possibilities opened up for
children to express agency and independence, Huijsmans examines also the
risks to children’s rights. The introduction of the term ‘youth’ (understood as
from 13 to 30 by the ‘Youth in Action’ programme) may be seen as an attempt
by the EU to free itself from some of the constraints set by the rights-based and
human trafficking discourses. Huijsmans considers the data on migrant teenage
workers, and notes the risks that the introduction of the ‘youth’ terminology
within the EU entails, including for temporary seasonal work under harsh
conditions and possibly even for trafficking into sex work. He concludes
however that adolescents of 15, 16 and 17 are not infants. The chances that they
make high-risk choices are no greater than those for adults in comparable
situations. While some migrants classified under the category of ‘youth’ may
become subject to abusive practices, the alternative should not be to condemn
their migration for work but to find a framework for safe migration. Overall, he
suggests that, by endorsing migrant work under the age of 18 but making it
subject to labour law at the national level, the E.U. provisions for free
movement of workers can make involvement by minors in migrant work safer,
targeting exploitation and abuse rather than migration itself.
The following essay (chapter 13) on “Learning how to Work the Grey
Zone: Issues of Legality and Illegality among Indian Students in Melbourne,
Australia”, by Michiel Baas, takes us from teenage workers to international
university students who also become involved in paid work. Baas examines the
aggressively marketed tertiary education industry in Australia, which plays a
significant role in facilitating the entry of migrants. Indeed chapter 4 of the
2008 World Migration Report is devoted to this type of migration. In 2006,
almost two per cent of Australia’s population consisted of foreign students, and
there are now close to 100,000 students from India alone. Many of the Indian
students whom Baas interviewed spoke of a problematic quality of education
and of current poor conditions of living and working, but said that they planned
to apply for permanent residence. Many had this intention in advance of
applying for a study programme. Almost half of foreign students come through
private agencies, which channel them to particular educational institutions from
which the agencies receive a commission, and to particular courses that favour
the students’ qualification for permanent residence. To obtain this qualification
and pay off educational debts, they work long hours in paid employment
alongside their studies — often beyond the legally permitted 20 hours per week
and with ‘cash-in-hand’ payment to avoid any paper trail. Baas indicates that
the motivation of Indians to study in Australia has increasingly become to
acquire residence rights. An ‘Overseas Students Act’ and an associated
‘National Code’ in Australia regulate the international marketing of educational
services. Recruitment with a primary purpose to provide an immigration route
14
EU Council Directive 94/33/EC of 22 June 1994 on the protection of young people at work,
consulted on 24 May 2010 at: http://eurlex.europa.eu/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexapi!prod!CELEXnumdoc&lg=EN&numdoc
=31994L0033&model=guichett
21
is prohibited, but many tertiary education organizations and immigration
businesses are critically dependent on income from foreign students. At the
same time, economic analysis is insufficient, at least for the side of the
prospective migrants. It cannot explain why still relatively so few people try to
migrate, and why emigrants are concentrated among particular social groups
and localities. So Baas explores also the imaginative dimension of transnational
migration: how large numbers of middle class young Indians have become able
to not just imagine but also act on a vision of an alternative life based far away
in Australia. The gains reaped by the providers have led the Australian state and
universities to ignore the grey zone that has emerged, and the lifestyles
envisaged by the students inure them to endure it.
1.3.4 Part IV: Transnational identities and issues of
citizenship
The meanings ascribed to citizenship are under intense pressure from
globalization. Migration in particular leads to the reconstruction of social
identities and worldviews, for both migrants and non-migrants. The chapters in
Part IV illustrate how identities, belongingness and relationships are repositioned by the effects of globalization, the political and policy environment
and the predominance of market imperatives. Several chapters examine
migrants’ transnational identities and multi-local politics, to explain tensions
and dilemmas arising around state obligations to citizens and migrants. They
attend to the life realities of the subjects themselves – whether migrants,
‘indigenous’ citizens, or state-less nationals. They imply the need to reconceptualize citizenship and re-cast state obligations in ways that are more
ethically inclusive and appropriate for societies that are increasingly
heterogeneous and multicultural — themes that will be taken further in Part V.
Chapter 14 on “Gender, Technology and Migration in Export-Production of
Shrimps: Identity Formation and Labour Practices in Surat Thani Province,
Thailand”, by Bernadette P. Resurreccion and Edsel E. Sajor, illuminates how
migrants seek to make sense of and in their lives, in their specific geographical,
social and legal context. Their identities are formed and re-formed in daily
interactions and discourses in their work ‘habitus’. In particular, the identities
of ‘gender’, ‘migrant’ and ‘worker’ interact to produce specific labour control
practices affecting wage levels and migrant workers’ wellbeing. The chapter
draws from research on the use of migrant labour from Northeast Thailand,
Laos and Myanmar in the production of genetically engineered shrimp in
Southern Thailand for export. Whereas large-scale enterprises employ Thai
migrant workers coming from the North, medium and small farms employ
mainly migrant husband-wife couples from neighbouring countries. Owners
consider migrant couples more reliable and more productive: the wife is
available to support in the round-the-clock tasks of shrimp farming, as well as
to provide comfort to the male worker. The couples are paid a ‘family wage’ far
less than a double wage; classically a wife is are not considered a ‘real worker’.
Migrant couples are often together with their pre-school children; school age
children have to be sent to the home area. The family wage system does not
seem to be applicable to Thai workers. Thai female workers receive a separate
wage, and although they too fulfil supplementary and lower status roles, they
22
are able to engage in additional income generating activities locally in
combination with childcare. Burmese workers have much less latitude to
engage in supplementary paid work, though their ‘wife’ role is comparable to
their Thai counterparts. Resurreccion and Sajor explore how a particular set of
life world niches has emerged around shrimp farming, and how, through
migration, different gender and ethnic identities are formed and solidified,
partly according to the scale of production, re-enforcing different systems of
rights and entitlements,
Chapter 15 on “Changing Identities, Multi-local Politics and
Citizenship: Reflections on the Agency of Migrants from Indonesia and their
Descendants in the Netherlands”, by Ton van Naerssen, looks at the dialectics
of migrant identity formation and transnational practices among people from
the former Dutch East Indies who moved to the Netherlands, concentrating on
the two largest groups: the Nederlands-Indisch (mixed-race ‘DutchIndonesians’ or in this chapter, ‘Indisch-Dutch’) and the Moluccans (from what
are now two provinces in the east of Indonesia). The case has particular interest
since it extends over several generations, has been much studied, shows both
continuing evolution of identities and continuing distinctive group identities,
and provides a sharp contrast between these two groups. The differences are
understood within a transnational perspective, including reference to factors in
both the host country and the migrant-sending country as well as to their mutual
relations. For example, Moluccan identity and citizenship in the Netherlands
have critically depended on the Moluccan struggle for independence from
Indonesia. Historically classified as temporary residents in the Netherlands by
the Dutch state, the Moluccans’ failure to realize an independent Moluccan
Republic pushed them into a grey zone owing to their inability to identify as
either ‘Dutch’ or ‘Indonesian’. The chapter asks how this identification may
change if and as meanings ascribed to citizenship undergo fundamental
changes. Second, van Naerssen explores how the increasing economic linkages
between Indonesia and the Netherlands in the various strands of the ‘migrationdevelopment nexus’ are at the same time a cultural space which provides new
dimensions to the identities of some of the migrants and their families, and to
the meaning of their citizenship. For both groups, the Moluccans and the
Indisch-Dutch, ties to Indonesia seem not to wither over time: instead, the
number of transnational community organizations grows. The chapter casts
implicit light at the same time on the ‘host’ community of white Dutch and on
their Netherlands-specific concept of allochtoon, whereby the grandchildren
and great-grandchildren of immigrants 60 years ago from ‘the Indies’ remain
conceptually separated from the white Dutch, whether or not they are Dutch
citizens and regardless of how they identify themselves.
Chapter 16 on “Pro-asylum Advocacy in the EU: Challenging the ‘State
of Exception’”, by Helen Hintjens, Richa Kumar and Ahmed Pouri, looks at the
motivations and practices of activists and advocates who seek to protect the
rights of asylum seekers and refugees in Western Europe. The chapter discusses
the limits of the 2008 amnesty for asylum seekers in the Netherlands, and draws
lessons from a campaign to prevent deportations from the UK to the
Democratic Republic of Congo in early 2007. It looks in particular at the felt
identities of the activists, and how these are affected by their resistance to the
‘3-Ds’ that have become central instruments in E.U. policy towards asylum
23
seekers—destitution (via exclusion from all forms of legal income), detention
and deportation. As seen earlier in Maas and Truong’s chapter on Frontex,
people claiming asylum in the European Union are now virtually forced to enter
illegally. If they reach Europe they face the battery of deterrence policies
illustrated in the chapter by Engbersen and Broeders, that seek to exclude
asylum seekers from all access to a legal existence. Hintjens, Kumar and Pouri
describe not only the policies but also the practices of how asylum-seekers’
rights are routinely suspended by officialdom and decision-makers, whenever
they see fit, within the ‘state of exception’ that now operates across the E.U..
Detention camps, often run by private companies, are intended as instruments
of deterrence; similarly, lessons learned by the destitute are intended for a wider
audience of transmigrants or potential asylum seekers as well. Private
companies and corporatized public agencies have quotas and targets for
deportations.
In the context of the felt threat of ‘terrorism’, the rise of a ‘surveillance
state’, and the progressive erosion of the rights of asylum seekers, those who
seek to assist or defend them are themselves increasingly liable to surveillance
and harassment. What motivates them to enter and persist in such work? The
cases from the Netherlands and UK presented by Hintjens, Kumar and Pouri
show people who ‘stumbled’ by chance onto the harsh realities of current-day
practice of the 3-Ds in the E.U.. The experiences of the activists, including
these authors, leads them to reflect on the nature of the world system and the
possible parallels now at a global level to the elaborate system of privilege,
exclusions and deportations that was practiced in apartheid-era South Africa.
Advocates across Europe converge on a perception of the 3-Ds as part of a
system of global injustice.
Chapter 17 on “Human or Public? The Referents of Security in
Discourses on Migrants in Japan”, by Tatsuo Harada (with Kenji Kimura),
highlights that Japanese government policy documents on development
cooperation and international relations use the discourse of ‘human security’ to
stress the security of the individual human being, worldwide. In stark contrast,
the internal discourse about those ‘distant others’ who have arrived as labour
migrants in Japan identifies them as threats to ‘public security’ whose
‘dangerous’ character justifies their exclusion from mainstream society: even
from the public education system. The ‘human’ seen at a distance becomes the
dangerous ‘other’ when viewed at close quarters in the homeland. Strikingly,
this exclusion, which relates in part to the Japanese self-image of being
ethnically homogeneous, has occurred for groups who had been identified as
preferred immigrants after Japan’s domestic ‘reserve armies’ of rural labour
and women were exhausted: the Nikkeijin, the ethnic Japanese from Brazil and
Peru, whose entry was permitted by the immigration law of 1990 based on jus
sanguinis. Understanding of the real and felt insecurities of people in Japan,
migrants and indigenous, becomes an essential but neglected task in the
voluminous Japanese work on ‘human security’. The chapter takes up this
challenge with special reference to the Chubu region, one of Japan’s
manufacturing heartlands, to which many Nikkeijin workers were drawn. It
looks first at Brazilian Nikkeijins. Their children speak Portuguese at home and
often cannot cope in Japanese schools; those rejected by the school system have
no access to other state-supported education (indeed foreigners in Japan have
24
no legal right to education at all) and become adrift, rendering them almost
unemployable except in illicit activities. Second, it summarizes research on
overstayers from South Asia who work in factories under exploitative terms.
Rather than requesting approval to hire foreigners, the factories prefer to use
‘illegals’, who can be paid less, lack medical care rights, and can be easily
dismissed. Given trends that undermine local communities, such as local
government expenditure cuts and closure of local hospitals and small shops, the
immigrants become targets for expressions of felt insecurity. Harada advises
that responding to these negative cycles of social exclusion requires that
domestic policymakers absorb the principle of pervasive interconnection that
has justified adoption of a ‘human security’ perspective in international
relations.
The themes of mutual interconnection, inclusion and mutual benefit,
and preservation or building of community all appear again but in special forms
in the final chapter in Part IV, “The Global Forum on Migration and
Development: ‘All Talk and No Action’ or ‘A Chance to Frame the Issues in a
Way that Allows you to Move Forward Together?’”, by Bernice Roldan and
Des Gasper. It explores the proposed rationale of the Global Forum launched by
Kofi Annan in 2006 as UN Secretary General, as an informal intergovernmental discussion space rather than as part of the UN system. The first
part analyses Annan’s advocacy of the Forum, through close textual analysis of
his speech to the High-Level Dialogue that he convened in New York. His
position involved a series of claims: 1) migration must be managed; 2) to
proceed from the present entrenched disagreements and mistrust requires
constructive structured communication; 3) the Global Forum can provide this
and is a feasible way forward, unlike proposals for binding international
conventions; 4) through processes of growing mutual education and mutual
acceptance the Forum can be fruitful. Annan’s hypotheses could appear to be
rather optimistic when the implied notions of building trust and community
(amongst those referred to in the chapter as ‘migro-crats’, the managers and
policymakers in the global networks of migration) are unpacked, and the
validity of assumptions (about how regular channels and fora of systematic but
relatively informal communication can affect attitudes and in turn affect
choices) are questioned. The second part of the chapter monitors how these
hypotheses had fared by the time of the second GFMD conference, held in
Manila in 2008, using other methods of discourse analysis to dissect its
concluding report. The Manila meeting’s declaration of a ‘focus on the person’
appeared in reality to mean a focus on the ‘migro-crats’ and their interactive
processes of mutual education and teambuilding aimed at producing practical
cooperation. The report is relatively silent on migrants themselves, but claims
that the Forum process is “changing the way the world looks at migration and
development” and, “more importantly…changing the way we deal with each
other on [migration and development]” (paragraphs 2 and 3 of the conference’s
final report: Conejos 2008). To clarify this strategy and draw out its mindset
and assumptions, the chapter presents some accessible tools of discourse
analysis that may be more widely useful in migration studies and for
participation in migration policy debate.
25
1.3.5 Part V: Ethics of modern-day transnational
migration: A human security perspective
Transnationalism involves the intensive routine interconnection of what were
previously largely separate national spaces. We see diverse competing global
projects that seek to order this global space. One is the vision of a world of
separate national homes in which international migrants are felt as a
complication, considered useful but also a threat. Second is the project of the
global market in which migrants are considered as a mobile factor of
production with few rights. Thirdly we have the vision of a world of
international human rights in which migrants share and belong, and which
includes instituted accountability for protecting migrant rights and wellbeing.
The final section of the volume consolidates a framework for description,
explanation, evaluation and response: a version of human security thinking that
provides a critique and alternative to predominant forms of liberal and
neoliberal thought and seeks to adequately ground human rights thinking. Intranationally, we must move beyond a Rawlsian liberal justice framework and
conception of a social contract, which continues to conceive of people only as
autonomous legal units. Focus only on the individuality of people narrows
down the potential for fellowship with others. Internationally, a human security
framework goes beyond the Westphalian conception of states and citizenship
and responds to a transnational and interpenetrated system. It offers a suitably
pluralist approach, setting universal human rights thinking within humanly
richer and more conflict-aware perspectives.
Chapter 19 on “International Migration, Well-being and Transnational
Ethics”, by Des Gasper, gives a perspective for considering the well-being of
migrants, of people in the ‘sender’ society, and people in the ‘receiver’ society,
integrating human rights thinking with care ethics and sensitivity to
subjectivities. Active respect for each person worldwide relies on some
informed awareness of the contents of their lives. In reaction to much
philosophical literature in international relations, the chapter seeks a better
empirical grounding for the stage of philosophical argument. Starting by
looking at the contents of migrant life, it moves to consider its evaluation, as
well- and ill-being and the justice and injustice of their generation and
distribution, including reference to criteria of fair process, desert and fair
opportunity. The relevant empirical background includes awareness of the
historical record of dispossession, domination and discrimination over the past
five centuries. Linking to the chapters in Part IV, Gasper notes how migration
jumbles up the contents of the national ‘societies’ that are assumed to be
discrete units by ‘realist’ international relations and nationalist ethics theorists.
Migration creates new liminal zones and increases the plurality within identity,
building a world system of a myriad of overlapping communities, not of selfcontained nation-states. These more complex liminal identities can help to
counter the ‘othering’ processes that often render identities crude and mutually
antagonistic. Nevertheless, any rethinking of the contents of the ‘self’ and of
one’s ‘interests’ is a long-term process that may depend on a prior phase or
respectful coexistence motivated by enlightened self-interest. Human security
thinking thus centrally emphasizes the theme of ‘common security’: in an
interconnected world to disrespect the security of others will undermine your
own security. Cooperative coexistence motivated by awareness of
26
interdependence can gradually foster acceptance of plurality within and
between identities, and of sharing across identities, and the perception that
one’s identity can be enriched rather than threatened by that of others.
Chapter 20 on “Migration, Morality and Finance”, by Amiya Kumar
Bagchi, investigates further the assumptions used in philosophical discussions
of the ethics of migration. Bagchi challenges the lack of attention to macrostructures and systems that reproduce and exacerbate inequality and poverty,
including the financial and trade structures that contribute strongly to injustice
in most societies, and the assumption that dramatic socio-economic inequality
is inevitable. He posits that the root causes of streams of ‘illegal’ migrants are
gross international inequality and poverty. Here he removes the ‘veil of
ignorance’ placed over the historical record, and posits several recent major
shifts that have aggravated international inequality and fed pressures to
emigrate: the movement since the 1970s against granting predominant roles to
the state in developing countries in long-term economic development strategy
and in provision of social services; the transfer instead of sovereign authority to
financial markets; and the decline and fall of the Soviet bloc. The nature, and
widespread failure, of the associated economic structural adjustment
programmes implemented in the 1980s and 90s fed new waves of migration. So
too has unlimited and unregulated capital mobility across international borders,
including the acceptance of funds by many international banks without asking
any questions, which permits continuous capital flight from poor economies.
Yet the countries that receive these funds impose the strictest restrictions on
inflows of labour. Bagchi suggests that the required reforms must start from
principles of universal human rights. They should include regulation of the
export and import of capital in all countries, with prohibition of trading in
derivatives; and compensation to low-income countries for acquisition by highincome countries of their highly skilled personnel, balancing the right of
freedom of movement against obligations arising from sponsored education;
and granting citizenship to willing immigrants after a brief period.
Not only are national boundaries and systems of migration control
associated with different treatment of those inside and those outside a national
border, they can lead to different treatment of groups within a nation’s borders.
In the case of apartheid South Africa, its rulers insisted that there was nothing
peculiar about their arrangements but that they merely reproduced within one
country the set of principles used globally. They then aimed to make the
arrangements more defensible by declaring a few pockets of South Africa to be
separate countries. These pockets, the historic ‘reserves’ or ‘homelands’ were
where low-income workers would be born and bred, transferred to the ‘white’
areas when ready to work, periodically returned to the ‘reserves’ at the end of
each contract, and permanently returned when old, ill or otherwise no longer
wanted. While the more skilled types of black labour were permitted to settle
permanently in South Africa’s cities, the less skilled were admitted only as
workers without families for fixed-period contracts.
In Chapter 21 on “Migration Regimes and the Politics of InsidersOutsiders: Japan and South Africa as Distant Mirrors”, Yoichi Mine sees
parallels between this system of exploitation and the currently practiced and
promoted arrangements in high-income countries. The system of ‘reserves’ was
used in many colonial situations, for it allowed employers to avoid
27
contributing, or to pay much less, towards the reproduction costs of workers’
families. When formal influx control in South Africa was abolished in the
1990s, the expected massive influx from the reserves did not happen: if poorly
educated rural dwellers have access to some resources in the ‘reserves’ they do
not necessarily abandon this (not to speak of their homeplace and loved ones) in
order to take their chances in urban shantytowns. What has happened instead in
South Africa is an influx of perhaps three million illegal migrants from other
African countries, who are cheaper and more compliant because they are illegal
and thus more attractive to businesses that now face global competition.
Continuation of strong segmentation in the workforce plays the same roles as
under apartheid: to divide and rule, and to exploit more intensively particular
groups. Mine suggests that these principles are at play also in modern-day
Japan, and elsewhere. In Japan as in most high-income countries, global
competition increases employers’ interest in cheap labour, and jobs that are
nowadays considered demanding, dirty, dangerous, or otherwise undesirable,
are left for immigrants. The Immigration Control Act was amended in 1990 to
allow corresponding supply, including from Brazilians and Peruvians of
Japanese background. As discussed in the chapters by Harada and Mushakoji,
these groups remain largely socially excluded. In addition, a ‘trainees’ system
has been established to bring in unskilled foreign labour on fixed-term
contracts, allocated to specific employers and often without protection of labour
legislation. Such migration regimes in Japan and elsewhere have the same
rationale as in the apartheid system: to benefit from the labour of groups who
are kept socially marginal and excluded from most of the benefits that they help
to produce, and who will have to bear most of their own costs of social
reproduction. South African history suggests that institutionalization of such
divisive exploitative systems, with dichotomization of insiders and outsiders,
jeopardizes social morality and, eventually, social peace.
Chapter 22 on “State and Immigrant Diaspora Identity in Contemporary
Japan: From a Developmentalist National Ethic towards a Multicultural
Development Ethic of Common Human Security”, by Kinhide Mushakoji,
offers thoughts on how to inspire and guide moves towards more moral and
sustainable systems. Mushakoji goes beyond Bagchi, to argue that human rights
thinking alone will not suffice. He outlines an approach to synthesis of
collective and individual rights and norms. Without such a synthesis, positive
Enlightenment values will continue to be perceived in many societies as
exogenous and will be subject to criticism as an imposition of cultural
colonialism. Universalist and individualist ethics in the tradition of the Western
Enlightenment must be adapted to allow different identity communities to have
each an acknowledged and respected right to identity reproduction. The right to
identity reproduction applies to states but cannot be limited to these. The
Japanese state, which Mushakoji characterizes as ‘developmentalist’, enforces
this right when it comes to the reproduction of the identity of Japanese people
and the nation. When it comes to diaspora communities, this right is ignored.
Like many countries pursuing a developmentalist approach, Japan emphasizes a
proud and unified national identity as a key value (to be reproduced through the
education system) that provides a basis for preservation and advancement of the
nation-state. Such an ethic was articulated in the late 19th century Meiji
construction of the modern Japanese state, which emphasized loyalty to family,
superiors and the nation, rather than starting from rights of the individual.
28
Under the American occupation in 1947, a new Law on Education emphasized
instead the formation of responsible individuals. It was replaced in 2006 by a
new Law that reaffirms the reproduction of a homogeneous unified Japanese
nation. Like the previous Laws, it covers only Japanese nationals, ignoring nonnationals residing in Japan. For them the state accepts no responsibility in
education. In principle, immigrants are expected either to go ‘home’ once they
have made their economic contribution, or to assimilate and become
‘completely Japanese’. In Mushakoji’s view, this dichotomous approach forces
the marginalized, unprotected and partly ‘illegal’ immigrant communities into
an informal sector which does not in reality promote the security of the
Japanese state and people.
Premised on a Westphalian notion of competing nation-states based on
single identities, the Japanese state views immigrant communities that have not
been homogenized into the Japanese mainstream as problems, rather than as
assets who, thanks to their more complex identities provide creative bridges
between Japan and the rest of the world. In reality, security is only attainable as
common security, based on respect for assuring each other’s security. It is
necessary to extend the Bandung Principles of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and
‘equal mutual benefit’ to relations between all identity communities, non-statebased as well as state-based. Mushakoji argues that a human security approach
recognises this need to empower non-state identity communities and not only
states, for identity production and reproduction forms the basis for practices of
caring and for every ethical framework. He sets this proposal within a larger
perspective, of movement towards transcendence of all exclusionary identities,
and towards cross-cultural as well as multi-cultural democracies.
1.4 Conclusion
This volume examines the historical experience of cross border migration in
recent decades as co-constituted by the enactment of economic
cosmopolitanism under neoliberal doctrines and pre-existing hierarchical
relations between societies and peoples. Processes of structural reform on a
global scale in the last three decades have stimulated multi-scale
transformations and social re-ordering that generate insecurity and drive
migration. To help societies find adaptations to the multiple realities of
migration that are integral to globalizing processes, we argue for alternative
ethical modes of reasoning about the ‘migration-development-security nexus’,
and for ways of thinking that can transcend duality and emphasize the relational
and processual nature of being. Peoples and societies have become inextricably
linked through the interconnected processes of globalization. It is no longer
acceptable to view morally relevant identities within narrow cultural or
territorial boundaries. At the same time, ethical reflection here requires
understanding the diverse relations between different forms of deprivation and
responsibility, and the range of emergent subjectivities and practices that extant
frameworks of cosmopolitanism and universal rights do not easily capture.
29
Des Gasper