Jordan and Duvell's book formulates their research problem in terms of paradoxes to be solved or explained or transcended. A key paradox is that of mobility vs. membership. Mobility here refers to the interest of migrants to move out of their countries of origin and move into their chosen destinations. Rights advocates would elevate this interest into a right. Even Jordan and Duvell acknowledge that (economic) migration is a kind of "voting with the feet" or the "exit option", i.e., an exercise of a kind of a right to choose which kind of life to lead or which kind of polity/society to belong to (i.e., where or how to live, or, for some, whether to live at all). The other side of the dilemma is termed "membership" to draw attention to the fact that host states view themselves as rightly restricting or allowing movement into their borders/societies in order to maximize advantages for its own citizens/members. Irregular migrants then are seen by Jordan and Duvell as dealing individually and collectively with the consequences of the clash of two competing self-interests (that of their own and their host societies) in their own lives. "Dealing" with an irregular status means adopting some kind of strategy.
In the chapter on the role of support organization, Jordan and Duvell refer to perceptible differences in the strategies of Turkish irregular migrants in the UK, on the one hand, and their Brazilian and Polish counterparts as a result of intervention by support organizations. Because the Turkish community are well served by their support organizations, Turkish irregular migrants have more probability of applying for asylum, often engaging immigration authorities in long drawn-out legal battles which have very low chances of succeeding. In contrast, Brazilian and Polish migrants, who have no comparable ethnic/community organizations, adopt a strategy of avoiding contacts with authorities as much as possible, i.e., living in relative clandestinity. They will most probably contact support organizations only when they are already in trouble with the police or immigration authorities.
Quotes
p. 3
Individuals move to seek advantages for themselves; so too states restrict (or allow) movement in order to maximize advantages for their own citizens. [You are dealing here with two kinds of self-interests (rights) = when these clash, how can you say which self-interest is more weighty?] "People who break migration rules (irregular migrants) must therefore be seen, individually and collectively, as acting to deal with the consequences of these struggles on their lives." [Deal with it! I don't like the implication here. But it articulates well the the thinking behind migration law.]
p. 4 "voting with the feet" theme ("exit option")
"Irregular migration is part of the emergence of transnational communities, but transnationalism itself must understood within a broader analysis of how individuals and groups respond to globalisation (xxx) - moving between communities, forming and joining associations, clubs and networks. More generally, it raises the question of whether such movements across jurisdictions and among groups represent an alternative to collective action and political participation within them. xxx What does it tell us about the relative payoffs of democratic activity and for 'voting with the feet' ...?
another rendition of this theme is found in Ansley 2005, 209: "mass migration...best appreciated as a kind of collective civil disobedience"
yet another is Sassen (2003) "counter geographies of globalization" referring to migration as "resistance to hardships" (cited in Lutz, Helma.2008. "Introduction:Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe," in Lutz, H., ed., Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme. Hampshire, England/Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, p.3)
mobility vs. membership
In a globalized world, the state is less willing to make investments in welfare/redistributive policies because citizens can move (bring the benefits of their education, etc.) elsewhere. [True of both developed and developing countries.] This gives people more incentive to move (to take responsibility for their own welfare). [Yes, a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.]
p. 5
"clubs" - mobile people chose communities/countries as if they chose "clubs", going for "the most attractive bundle of collective goods they can afford" [a scathing remark which paints mobile people as disloyal/lacking deep commitment to a community/country]
p. 12 (gist of the argument)
the challenge is how to find a better balance between exit (right to move/voting with feet), voice (democratic participation), and loyalty (community commitment that is the prerequisite of welfare politics) = already the key problem of free movement within the EU
key chapters are: Chaps. 1, 10; read Chap. 6 (role of support organizations)
Chap 6
p. 158
"The problem with the strategy of focusing on arguing for asylum claims, and providing for those needs not met by public services, was that these agencies [support organization] have been caught up in a downward spiral of deteriorating standards, with ever more basic, crisis or destitution services. Instead of being able to advocate for better, more generous standards for their clientele, they have found themselves on the defensive, playing for time in appeal cases, or providing the bare minimum for people facing homelessness and hunger."
p. 167 (on the unenviable situation of asylum seekers in the UK)
"In many ways, a dispassionate observer looking at our data might advise a migrant wishing to enter the UK for any reason to avoid the status of asylum seeker if this was in any way feasible for him or her and opt instead for complete illegality. Inspite of the vast amount of advice, assistance and representation being provided for asylum applicants, and considerable sums of public spending (very little of which reached them as individuals), their situation is extremely unenviable."
Monday, December 20, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Note: a Swedish innovation in Labor Migration policy
An "objective" and expeditious way of ascertaining existence of need for migrant labor has been devised in Sweden. The discretionary power of government regulators has been curbed. They no longer need to make any determination whether hiring a foreign worker is "economically necessary" as is the case in many countries. This means avoidance of arbitrariness and less red tape. Employers need only advertise the job for ten days within the EU and show that there has been no takers.
Excerpt from http://www.focus-migration.de/Sweden.6245.0.html?&L=1
"On 15 December 2008, following several years of preparation and negotiation, new regulations came into force in Sweden concerning the immigration of workers from non-EU states. Most importantly, labour immigration is now almost fully dependant on the needs of Swedish employers; the controlling powers of government agencies are severely restricted and the labour market is open to workers of all skill levels. The Swedish Public Employment Service no longer carries out checks to establish whether the immigration of foreign workers is economically necessary. If an employer has a vacancy available but is unable to find a suitable candidate inside Sweden, they are first obliged to advertise the vacancy publicly through the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen). This agency also sees to the publication of the advertisement in the EU job mobility portal EURES. If once again there is no response, the employer may, according to the new rules, advertise for an applicant from any country in the world. All the employer has to do is prove to the migration authorities that the vacancy has, in fact, been advertised for a period of at least ten days throughout the EU. In this way the principle of giving priority to Swedish job-seekers and EU citizens is respected."
Relevance from labor migrants and irregular migrants: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdagensarena.se%2Freportage%2Fdokument-5-”arbetskraftsinvandring”%2F
"The new rules meant that the old system where applications for work permits, first tested in the domestic labor market finally abolished. The idea was that employers themselves better able to assess whether they need to recruit foreign workers or not. Neither authorities or trade unions, who previously served as a referral body, would no longer be part of the process. Employers were given full responsibility.
For individuals the opportunity to migrate and work in Sweden and the firms' ability to recruit staff abroad the new rules are a clear improvement. Although asylum seekers who have been denied may, if they have jobs, get work permits. After four years, is also the possibility of permanent residence."
But it can also generate new irregular migrants who "run away" from exploitative contracts.
Implementation of "deregulation of labor migration"/"flexible labor migration policy" criticized
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Faintiawomankampanjen.wordpress.com%2Fnyheter%2F
Situation of berry pickers from Thailand
http://dagensarena.se/reportage/dokument-5-”arbetskraftsinvandring”/
Excerpt from http://www.focus-migration.de/Sweden.6245.0.html?&L=1
"On 15 December 2008, following several years of preparation and negotiation, new regulations came into force in Sweden concerning the immigration of workers from non-EU states. Most importantly, labour immigration is now almost fully dependant on the needs of Swedish employers; the controlling powers of government agencies are severely restricted and the labour market is open to workers of all skill levels. The Swedish Public Employment Service no longer carries out checks to establish whether the immigration of foreign workers is economically necessary. If an employer has a vacancy available but is unable to find a suitable candidate inside Sweden, they are first obliged to advertise the vacancy publicly through the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen). This agency also sees to the publication of the advertisement in the EU job mobility portal EURES. If once again there is no response, the employer may, according to the new rules, advertise for an applicant from any country in the world. All the employer has to do is prove to the migration authorities that the vacancy has, in fact, been advertised for a period of at least ten days throughout the EU. In this way the principle of giving priority to Swedish job-seekers and EU citizens is respected."
Relevance from labor migrants and irregular migrants: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdagensarena.se%2Freportage%2Fdokument-5-”arbetskraftsinvandring”%2F
"The new rules meant that the old system where applications for work permits, first tested in the domestic labor market finally abolished. The idea was that employers themselves better able to assess whether they need to recruit foreign workers or not. Neither authorities or trade unions, who previously served as a referral body, would no longer be part of the process. Employers were given full responsibility.
For individuals the opportunity to migrate and work in Sweden and the firms' ability to recruit staff abroad the new rules are a clear improvement. Although asylum seekers who have been denied may, if they have jobs, get work permits. After four years, is also the possibility of permanent residence."
But it can also generate new irregular migrants who "run away" from exploitative contracts.
Implementation of "deregulation of labor migration"/"flexible labor migration policy" criticized
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Faintiawomankampanjen.wordpress.com%2Fnyheter%2F
Situation of berry pickers from Thailand
http://dagensarena.se/reportage/dokument-5-”arbetskraftsinvandring”/
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Renata Salecl: Lacanian psychoanalysis and human rights
I recently came across a very engaging article on clitoridectomy ("Cut in the body: From clitoridectomy to body art" in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds., Thinking Through the Skin, Routledge: London and New York, 2001), the practices of female circumcision, excision and infibulation among "traditional" Africans much maligned from the perspective of human rights, which discusses the issue from the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It is an essay by Renata Salecl, which my further googling revealed to be a prolific scholar in law and psychoanalysis, two fields you hardly see mentioned in the same line, from the same country and university as Marxist intellectual superstar Zlavoj Zizek (that's University of Ljubljana in Slovenia).
Why Lacanian psychoanalysis? How can it this body of theory be applied to analyze practical human rights issues?
The main concept that she uses in this essay is that of the symbolic order or the big Other．What she does is to use this concept of the symbolic order to distinguish our late modern or post-modern (in Slovenia, post-socialist) times from pre-modern and modern/Enlightened ages past. Our post-modern society is characterized by the total disbelief in the symbolic order. (The pre-modern world is governed by the symbolic order; in the modern world, the influence of the symbolic order is still felt through the law, but "freedom" can be obtained through the distancing/rejection of this law.) But it's not that people have recognized that the symbolic order is a fiction; rather, the symbolic order is experienced as a farce, and people have a desperate desire for this fiction to cease to be fiction. The result is a return to the pre-modern rituals of initiation such as female genital cutting. But this time around, people "chose" to be cut; it is their "permanent" answer to the absence of the big Other.
Salelc is pretty much saying that present-day female genital cutting (she is specifically referring to the practice by African immigrants in London where female genital cutting is illegal by statute) is not pre-modern or "backward"; on the contrary, it is post-modern. Hence, the human rights argument against female genital cutting is speaking past the post-modern African immigrants who are engaged in it.
It is not that Salecl rejects the human rights argument against female genital cutting. She says categorically that she is for human rights, and criticizes pre-modern views of women (only cut women are honorable). So what is she saying here and what does her choice of theory really contribute to the discussion?
(let me answer that later)
The following interview of Renata Salecl gives the Slovenian context which explains somehow the choice of theory :
From www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/radioeye/foreign4.doc
"Spoils of Freedom
Renata Salecl
I .
The political history that frames my work comes from my engagements with Slovenian politics and psychoanalytical movements. In my earliest writings, I was very much influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. However, there were many questions that pertain to the problem of the subject’s identification with power to which I didn't find sufficient answer in Foucault. I found Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis much more useful for understanding the logic of subjectivity in contemporary societies, especially in totalitarian regimes. In Slovenia, Lacanian psychoanalytic movements during the time of communism were strongly associated with the oppositional parties. At that time there were two main fronts among the oppositional intellectuals. On the one hand, there were mostly literary writers who were very much concerned with the issue of Slovene national identity. And on the other hand, there were intellectuals who were trying to build the opposition movement on non-nationalist grounds. Theorists who were influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis were among this second group of intellectuals. Lacanian theory helped us to understand why the communist system functioned for so long, although no one believed in it (especially not the top bureaucrats). Psychoanalysis also provided the framework for building up oppositional ideology which was not nationalist, but tried to incorporate the ideas of the new social movements.
Now I am supporting a party which is called the Liberal Democratic Party. This party came out of new social movements like Greenpeace, feminism and so on. It has become a strong party. I wouldn’t say the best party that you could find, but pragmatically in this situation, it is the one that I feel is worth supporting. The Party promotes issues that are linked with the socialist movement, and it has now turned into a contemporary centre left party.
...But the sad thing about the political situation here is the strong division between right and centre left. Both the political groups promote populist ideas of the nation and justice. For example, you take from the rich to give to the poor. Find people who are guilty for everything and then get rid of them, and you will solve all the problems. They all use this very elementary ideology. And, on the other side, you have a kind of coalition of more leftist parties who are not united but who are struggling to define their leftist position. But the left is not very welcome in the post-socialist scene.
*
In post-socialist states the hegemonic struggle for power incorporates many different discourses, and right-wing or populist discourses are very successful nowadays in reinterpreting liberal or leftist ideas. So the right wing in Slovenia incorporate and use liberal ideas which people can identify with, like rights, the freedom to choose, and so on. I would say that they do not differ that much from any western country. But their success, I think, in contrast to liberal or left-wing parties, is that they are able to touch the issues which people passionately identify with. Left wing or liberal discourses are very negligent on this point. For example, the question of maternity leave is a very touchy issue and the left wing don’t address it much in their political discussion. But the right wing bring out this dilemma of women struggling on two fronts: being mothers and working women. They appeal to both traditional family values and populist feminist thinking... So the right's success lies in their raising the issues. I think that on the ideological front they are much wiser than left-wing parties, who basically forget about these ‘passionate’ issues and think more about the economy and so on.
*
II
Fantasy, Hate, Nation
... If you take the problem of national identity from a Lacanian perspective, basically there lies an unsymbolisable kernel that you cannot define exactly, but you also can’t simply get rid of. So the nation is that point around which the social symbolic structure organises itself. Here, I would say, that the nation as a national community would be a fiction. But the problem of the nation touches more on the real in the Lacanian sense. This is not simply something that is pre-symbolic but, as I understand it, is the leftover of any kind of symbolisation; that is, a point around which the symbolic structures itself but where the structure also fails. So the national community would be a fantasy structure which tries to somehow deal with this unsymbolisable element of the nation. And this structures, I would say, a story, a fantasy, something that we are telling ourselves or something the community is telling itself, to make a coherent identity. The nation is an ungraspable element that you always need to deal with. Even if you take an anti-nationalist strategy as your political strategy, you are nonetheless dealing in some way with this ungraspable element of the nation — you are not simply annihilating it as a problem. From the left-wing or the liberal position you have to deal with this issue. I am not anti-national. But I think that liberal or left-wing politics has to incorporate the problem of national identity in their discourse if they want to be successful in any way. In Slovenia, our point was that you cannot escape the destiny to be Slovene. We were saying you can be proud to be Slovene but it doesn’t mean that you are against other nations and so on. So our party strategy was also to incorporate the idea of national identity in the political discourse, but not in the kind of aggressive anti-nation, anti-others rhetoric.
*
In some recent work I have dealt with the problem of hate speech and racism. I was trying to incorporate psychoanalytic work into this domain. I was primarily asking myself: what are the intentions of a certain percentage of people who use violent, racist or nationalist words against members of other races or nations? What is their intention? What is it the person tries to succeed in? The answer is not that the person simply tries to get rid of a member of another nation or race (because, as you remember from Nazism, the most anti-Semitic feelings were in the Austrian provinces where there were almost no Jews, so it doesn’t matter if the ‘others’ are really there or not). I argue that in psychoanalytic thinking what becomes crucial is that the person who attacks another tries to annihilate the identity of the other, and also tries to get confirmation for their own identity. So, what the person searches for in the other is an addressee who will give back a form of confirmation to the attacker’s identity. I think at that moment the attacker touches the real in the other, and the attacker tries to annihilate the identity of the other. This gives them a certainty and confirmation of their identity. Basically, my problem in the dilemma of this violent speech is how to attend to this logic, and how to think about this hostility in regards to an attack.
From the position of psychoanalysis, what Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis points out is that you are always determined by social (symbolic) structures. And yes you are quoting from the language that you are born into, but nonetheless there is a certain responsibility that the subject cannot escape. And this responsibility pertains to the enjoyment of a person...
In the racist attack, the question is: what is the enjoyment of the subject who utters violent speech? Even when the words that they utter are a quotation from past discourses, what is the enjoyment in re-uttering them? My point is that in re-uttering them, the subject does not simply quote from the existing historical discourse but re-establishes this discourse in a new way.
*
III
Dilemmas of Difference and Post-modern Racism
In The Spoils of Freedom I was trying to come to terms with the dilemma of cultural differences and universalism as understood in contemporary theory. My problem here is how the West is now engaging in a new form of racism; that is, how other nations are seen as ultimately ‘other’. They are seen as so ‘other’ that they do not understand the same notions, understandings and so on. The debates lately about human rights have been in this direction. Should the West insist that non-western countries understand human rights in the same way as we do?; that is the common question. Or should we really oppose other nations when they engage in certain acts, like female circumcision and so on? Unfortunately, I think we use this example too many times, and that raises other questions as to why we do it. But, around this issue, it is very easy to talk about the dilemma of liberals and left-wing intellectuals. They would believe in human rights and would oppose these kind of practices. But there is a problem when we know that, for example, Nigerian women in France who were denied circumcision claimed that they could not get married, and that their lives were ruined. So how do we behave when a national culture engages in practices which from the western perspective are perceived as cruel? It is easy to say that other cultures are just different and we oppose them, but there is nothing we can do to convince them not to engage in these practices which are part of their identity. I think there is a dilemma that liberals don’t want to face, which is that you always engage in some kind of violence when you take a stand.
.... Liberals try to have a comfortable escape in having the idea that they provide people with information, while they don’t want to see the information as already a form of violence. We cannot escape this dilemma of choosing one form of violence against another. In terms of female circumcision, I would definitely choose the violence of imposing universal human rights, but this should not be regarded as a good deed, since it imposes a certain kind of violence on the others.
*
...The West should not limit their understanding of human rights and equality to their own ideals. But they should understand that the fight for the meaning of what is universal is going on throughout the world, and that different parts of the world are engaging with it in particular ways. Recently I came across some debates about Vietnam and Vietnamese intellectuals. The opposition intellectuals (to the government) were struck by Westerners saying: ‘oh let’s not force the Vietnamese government to accept international human rights, because they as an Asian culture have a different understanding of human rights’. But Vietnamese intellectuals were saying: ‘please allow us at least the use of this weapon — the universal human rights, because this is what is left for us in our battle against the government; don’t become multiculturalist on this domain’.
My fear is that western intellectuals can very easily exclude others’ claim to ‘rights’ in their multiculturalist perspective. I think that this is a very comfortable position, which I perceive as extremely dangerous because the universal logic of capitalism is playing with this multiculturalism. Multi-capitalist corporations are now using the language of the left very successfully. When, for example, big corporations came to Eastern Europe we were hoping that they would bring the western standard of equal opportunity, sexual equality at the workplace and so on. But they immediately became defenders of cultural differences. They claimed: ‘oh we should not impose this because their culture is different' and we should respect the other. But I would say capitalism is using multiculturalist ideology for its own purposes. What you are seeing with these changes is that, basically, capitalist corporations become entities that are not controlled by anyone; not even western governments control them any more. So what is crucial is to observe how capitalist corporations now treat their own countries. For example, western countries are now colonies. It is no longer that the corporations are colonising the East or Third World, they are colonising the West itself. For example, in Germany big corporations like Siemens are not controlled any more by the financial institutions in their country. They can decide to move their production to another country to increase their profits, and usually they threaten their own government by saying: ‘OK if you are not going to obey us we will move out and you will lose jobs and so on’. So capitalist logic has changed significantly; you don’t have capitalism controlled by a nation state, but it is the company that is controlling the nation state. This is done precisely by being transnational, and by using multiculturalist ideology."
'Spoils of Freedom' is a modified extract from the book, Foreign Dialogues — Memories, Translations, Conversations by Mary Zournazi, published by Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998
Why Lacanian psychoanalysis? How can it this body of theory be applied to analyze practical human rights issues?
The main concept that she uses in this essay is that of the symbolic order or the big Other．What she does is to use this concept of the symbolic order to distinguish our late modern or post-modern (in Slovenia, post-socialist) times from pre-modern and modern/Enlightened ages past. Our post-modern society is characterized by the total disbelief in the symbolic order. (The pre-modern world is governed by the symbolic order; in the modern world, the influence of the symbolic order is still felt through the law, but "freedom" can be obtained through the distancing/rejection of this law.) But it's not that people have recognized that the symbolic order is a fiction; rather, the symbolic order is experienced as a farce, and people have a desperate desire for this fiction to cease to be fiction. The result is a return to the pre-modern rituals of initiation such as female genital cutting. But this time around, people "chose" to be cut; it is their "permanent" answer to the absence of the big Other.
Salelc is pretty much saying that present-day female genital cutting (she is specifically referring to the practice by African immigrants in London where female genital cutting is illegal by statute) is not pre-modern or "backward"; on the contrary, it is post-modern. Hence, the human rights argument against female genital cutting is speaking past the post-modern African immigrants who are engaged in it.
It is not that Salecl rejects the human rights argument against female genital cutting. She says categorically that she is for human rights, and criticizes pre-modern views of women (only cut women are honorable). So what is she saying here and what does her choice of theory really contribute to the discussion?
(let me answer that later)
The following interview of Renata Salecl gives the Slovenian context which explains somehow the choice of theory :
From www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/radioeye/foreign4.doc
"Spoils of Freedom
Renata Salecl
I .
The political history that frames my work comes from my engagements with Slovenian politics and psychoanalytical movements. In my earliest writings, I was very much influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. However, there were many questions that pertain to the problem of the subject’s identification with power to which I didn't find sufficient answer in Foucault. I found Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis much more useful for understanding the logic of subjectivity in contemporary societies, especially in totalitarian regimes. In Slovenia, Lacanian psychoanalytic movements during the time of communism were strongly associated with the oppositional parties. At that time there were two main fronts among the oppositional intellectuals. On the one hand, there were mostly literary writers who were very much concerned with the issue of Slovene national identity. And on the other hand, there were intellectuals who were trying to build the opposition movement on non-nationalist grounds. Theorists who were influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis were among this second group of intellectuals. Lacanian theory helped us to understand why the communist system functioned for so long, although no one believed in it (especially not the top bureaucrats). Psychoanalysis also provided the framework for building up oppositional ideology which was not nationalist, but tried to incorporate the ideas of the new social movements.
Now I am supporting a party which is called the Liberal Democratic Party. This party came out of new social movements like Greenpeace, feminism and so on. It has become a strong party. I wouldn’t say the best party that you could find, but pragmatically in this situation, it is the one that I feel is worth supporting. The Party promotes issues that are linked with the socialist movement, and it has now turned into a contemporary centre left party.
...But the sad thing about the political situation here is the strong division between right and centre left. Both the political groups promote populist ideas of the nation and justice. For example, you take from the rich to give to the poor. Find people who are guilty for everything and then get rid of them, and you will solve all the problems. They all use this very elementary ideology. And, on the other side, you have a kind of coalition of more leftist parties who are not united but who are struggling to define their leftist position. But the left is not very welcome in the post-socialist scene.
*
In post-socialist states the hegemonic struggle for power incorporates many different discourses, and right-wing or populist discourses are very successful nowadays in reinterpreting liberal or leftist ideas. So the right wing in Slovenia incorporate and use liberal ideas which people can identify with, like rights, the freedom to choose, and so on. I would say that they do not differ that much from any western country. But their success, I think, in contrast to liberal or left-wing parties, is that they are able to touch the issues which people passionately identify with. Left wing or liberal discourses are very negligent on this point. For example, the question of maternity leave is a very touchy issue and the left wing don’t address it much in their political discussion. But the right wing bring out this dilemma of women struggling on two fronts: being mothers and working women. They appeal to both traditional family values and populist feminist thinking... So the right's success lies in their raising the issues. I think that on the ideological front they are much wiser than left-wing parties, who basically forget about these ‘passionate’ issues and think more about the economy and so on.
*
II
Fantasy, Hate, Nation
... If you take the problem of national identity from a Lacanian perspective, basically there lies an unsymbolisable kernel that you cannot define exactly, but you also can’t simply get rid of. So the nation is that point around which the social symbolic structure organises itself. Here, I would say, that the nation as a national community would be a fiction. But the problem of the nation touches more on the real in the Lacanian sense. This is not simply something that is pre-symbolic but, as I understand it, is the leftover of any kind of symbolisation; that is, a point around which the symbolic structures itself but where the structure also fails. So the national community would be a fantasy structure which tries to somehow deal with this unsymbolisable element of the nation. And this structures, I would say, a story, a fantasy, something that we are telling ourselves or something the community is telling itself, to make a coherent identity. The nation is an ungraspable element that you always need to deal with. Even if you take an anti-nationalist strategy as your political strategy, you are nonetheless dealing in some way with this ungraspable element of the nation — you are not simply annihilating it as a problem. From the left-wing or the liberal position you have to deal with this issue. I am not anti-national. But I think that liberal or left-wing politics has to incorporate the problem of national identity in their discourse if they want to be successful in any way. In Slovenia, our point was that you cannot escape the destiny to be Slovene. We were saying you can be proud to be Slovene but it doesn’t mean that you are against other nations and so on. So our party strategy was also to incorporate the idea of national identity in the political discourse, but not in the kind of aggressive anti-nation, anti-others rhetoric.
*
In some recent work I have dealt with the problem of hate speech and racism. I was trying to incorporate psychoanalytic work into this domain. I was primarily asking myself: what are the intentions of a certain percentage of people who use violent, racist or nationalist words against members of other races or nations? What is their intention? What is it the person tries to succeed in? The answer is not that the person simply tries to get rid of a member of another nation or race (because, as you remember from Nazism, the most anti-Semitic feelings were in the Austrian provinces where there were almost no Jews, so it doesn’t matter if the ‘others’ are really there or not). I argue that in psychoanalytic thinking what becomes crucial is that the person who attacks another tries to annihilate the identity of the other, and also tries to get confirmation for their own identity. So, what the person searches for in the other is an addressee who will give back a form of confirmation to the attacker’s identity. I think at that moment the attacker touches the real in the other, and the attacker tries to annihilate the identity of the other. This gives them a certainty and confirmation of their identity. Basically, my problem in the dilemma of this violent speech is how to attend to this logic, and how to think about this hostility in regards to an attack.
From the position of psychoanalysis, what Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis points out is that you are always determined by social (symbolic) structures. And yes you are quoting from the language that you are born into, but nonetheless there is a certain responsibility that the subject cannot escape. And this responsibility pertains to the enjoyment of a person...
In the racist attack, the question is: what is the enjoyment of the subject who utters violent speech? Even when the words that they utter are a quotation from past discourses, what is the enjoyment in re-uttering them? My point is that in re-uttering them, the subject does not simply quote from the existing historical discourse but re-establishes this discourse in a new way.
*
III
Dilemmas of Difference and Post-modern Racism
In The Spoils of Freedom I was trying to come to terms with the dilemma of cultural differences and universalism as understood in contemporary theory. My problem here is how the West is now engaging in a new form of racism; that is, how other nations are seen as ultimately ‘other’. They are seen as so ‘other’ that they do not understand the same notions, understandings and so on. The debates lately about human rights have been in this direction. Should the West insist that non-western countries understand human rights in the same way as we do?; that is the common question. Or should we really oppose other nations when they engage in certain acts, like female circumcision and so on? Unfortunately, I think we use this example too many times, and that raises other questions as to why we do it. But, around this issue, it is very easy to talk about the dilemma of liberals and left-wing intellectuals. They would believe in human rights and would oppose these kind of practices. But there is a problem when we know that, for example, Nigerian women in France who were denied circumcision claimed that they could not get married, and that their lives were ruined. So how do we behave when a national culture engages in practices which from the western perspective are perceived as cruel? It is easy to say that other cultures are just different and we oppose them, but there is nothing we can do to convince them not to engage in these practices which are part of their identity. I think there is a dilemma that liberals don’t want to face, which is that you always engage in some kind of violence when you take a stand.
.... Liberals try to have a comfortable escape in having the idea that they provide people with information, while they don’t want to see the information as already a form of violence. We cannot escape this dilemma of choosing one form of violence against another. In terms of female circumcision, I would definitely choose the violence of imposing universal human rights, but this should not be regarded as a good deed, since it imposes a certain kind of violence on the others.
*
...The West should not limit their understanding of human rights and equality to their own ideals. But they should understand that the fight for the meaning of what is universal is going on throughout the world, and that different parts of the world are engaging with it in particular ways. Recently I came across some debates about Vietnam and Vietnamese intellectuals. The opposition intellectuals (to the government) were struck by Westerners saying: ‘oh let’s not force the Vietnamese government to accept international human rights, because they as an Asian culture have a different understanding of human rights’. But Vietnamese intellectuals were saying: ‘please allow us at least the use of this weapon — the universal human rights, because this is what is left for us in our battle against the government; don’t become multiculturalist on this domain’.
My fear is that western intellectuals can very easily exclude others’ claim to ‘rights’ in their multiculturalist perspective. I think that this is a very comfortable position, which I perceive as extremely dangerous because the universal logic of capitalism is playing with this multiculturalism. Multi-capitalist corporations are now using the language of the left very successfully. When, for example, big corporations came to Eastern Europe we were hoping that they would bring the western standard of equal opportunity, sexual equality at the workplace and so on. But they immediately became defenders of cultural differences. They claimed: ‘oh we should not impose this because their culture is different' and we should respect the other. But I would say capitalism is using multiculturalist ideology for its own purposes. What you are seeing with these changes is that, basically, capitalist corporations become entities that are not controlled by anyone; not even western governments control them any more. So what is crucial is to observe how capitalist corporations now treat their own countries. For example, western countries are now colonies. It is no longer that the corporations are colonising the East or Third World, they are colonising the West itself. For example, in Germany big corporations like Siemens are not controlled any more by the financial institutions in their country. They can decide to move their production to another country to increase their profits, and usually they threaten their own government by saying: ‘OK if you are not going to obey us we will move out and you will lose jobs and so on’. So capitalist logic has changed significantly; you don’t have capitalism controlled by a nation state, but it is the company that is controlling the nation state. This is done precisely by being transnational, and by using multiculturalist ideology."
'Spoils of Freedom' is a modified extract from the book, Foreign Dialogues — Memories, Translations, Conversations by Mary Zournazi, published by Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998
Monday, March 22, 2010
Irregular Migrants' Struggle for Human Rights: some more random notes
1. Community Unionism in Japan
"With the high economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s, however, Japanese trade union members became the members of a 'new labour aristocracy' which accepted the need for 'false part-time workers' to guarantee its own stability of employment. This has been the main reason why the unionization of part-time workers has not made much progress. Of course, there has also been a reluctance on the part of the part-time workers themselves to join unions, but more important has been the negative attitude of the full-time employees. One can therefore understand why there has been no interest at all among the enterprise unions in recruiting foreign workers who are hired on the same short-term basis as part-time Japanese employees. Neither can such interest be expected to develop in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, some Japanese unions are open to accepting foreign workers as members. These are the new-style "community unions" which begun to appear in the trade union movement in 1983 and has since spread rapidly across the country. At the end of 1987 they numbered more than thirty. Their organizing strength is still slight and, as in the case of the Edogawa Union and Union Higourou, membership is measured in the hundreds rather than in the thousands.
"The number of part-time workers has risen sharply and this has been one important factor which has caused a drop in union membership year by year. Both Souhyou and Rengou had therefore begun to emphasize the importance more active recruiting campaigns. If, on the other hand, the community union movement continues to grow, then the character of the trade union movement as a whole will change and may very well become more amenable to accepting foreign workers. ..." (p. 263)
(Nimura Kazuo, "The Trade Union Response to Migrant Workers," in Glenn D. Hook and Michael Weiner, eds., 1992/2001 The Internationalization of Japan, London: Sheffield Centre of Japanese Studies/Routledge Series)
Unions in US, UK construction industry
"Historically, there have been craft unions that developed more open organizing approaches, foreshadowing the inclusive strategies of industrial unionism. See, e.g., Dorothy Sue Cobble, Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL’s Direct Affiliate
Strategy, 36 INDUS. REL. 278, 279–80 (1997). Furthermore, in the past few decades, craft unions such as the building trades have found that their exclusivity has been their downfall in the face of an influx of nonunion construction firms, often staffed by new immigrants. The resulting loss of market share and decline in union strength in the construction industry has led many in the building trades to rethink the classic craft union model and to develop programs to draw in immigrants and others historically excluded from their ranks. See, e.g., Bruce Nissen, The Role of Labor Education in Transforming a Union Toward Organizing Immigrants: A Case Study, 27 LAB. STUD. J. 109, 109–13 (2002)." (p. 515)
"With the influx of immigrants into the industry over the past few decades, building trades unions’ control over construction jobs has been severely eroded. The unions’ first reaction was to seek to expel the immigrants. Of late, however, the construction unions who organize the less elite members of the construction workforce—including the bricklayers, laborers, and carpenters—have begun to invite them within the circle. Nissen, supra note 34 (providing a case study of the role of labor
education in efforts by the South Florida Regional Council of Carpenters to organize new immigrant workers); Miriam Jordan, Rebuilding Plan: Carpenters Union Courts Immigrants to Increase Clout— Undocumented Workers See Risk of Firings, Fewer Jobs, WALL ST. J., Dec. 15, 2005, at A1 (discussing union efforts to court immigrants); Nate Schweber, Worked Over? Union Organizers Say Immigrants Get Cheated, HERALD NEWS (Passaic County, N.J.), Sept. 6, 2004, at A1 (recounting outreach efforts
by the Laborers’ International Union of North America to reach out to immigrants on construction sites in New Jersey); Nicole Andrea Silverman, Deserving of Decent Work: The Complications of Organizing Irregular Workers Without Legal Rights (Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 21, 2005) (discussing a case study of efforts by the New England Regional Council of Carpenters to organize Latino immigrant workers)." (p. 517)
2. The Theory of Community Unions
"So, internationally, the situation in the late 1990s is that industrial unions have declining appeal and effectiveness, while enterprise unions have been an instrument for promoting functional flexibility and employment security for core workers. ... One can dimly see what is needed - institutions that can resist pressures of co-option, promote dynamic efficiency in production and have a redistributive effect beyond the confines of an individual firm. Are there any germs of hope?
"...In terms of flexible labour relations, what is needed is a movement that brings together bodies representing local groups of employed and those at the margins of the labour force to bargain over distributional, security and production issues.
"What might be called community unions or citizenship associations could be the most effective way forward if a strategy of ditributive justice is to be pursued. For this traditional unions must recognize that their long-term representative capacity will depend on their appeal to flexiworkers and those on the labour force margins. ... The agenda of community unions would differ from that of enterprise unions, giving higher priority for social income issues, including environmental protection and share entitlement to social benefits by those in regular and non-regular forms of employment, and from industrial unions, in that they would give less emphasis on the money wage relative to other components of the social income." (p. 391)
(Guy Standing, 1999, Global Labor Flexibility: seeking redistributive justice, New York: St. Martins Press)
3. European countries that deny that they have an obligation to respect human rights of irregular migrant: Sweden, Austria and Germany
"Another issue is whether irregular immigrants have social and human rights, whether these must be recognised wherever a person is and whatever his or her status is and whether states have a moral duty toward undocumented migrants. Most countries because they accept their international obligations under the various human rights conventions affirm this question and permit at least limited access to health care, primary education for children, and access to the legal system. Three countries as I have critically analysed this elsewhere deny these rights, Sweden, Austria and Germany." (pp. 12-13)
Countries where unions increasingly represent irregular migrant workers: US, Portugal, UK and Germany (p. 10)
(Frank Duvell, 2006, "Illegal Immigration in Europe: Patterns, Causes and Consequences")
"With the high economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s, however, Japanese trade union members became the members of a 'new labour aristocracy' which accepted the need for 'false part-time workers' to guarantee its own stability of employment. This has been the main reason why the unionization of part-time workers has not made much progress. Of course, there has also been a reluctance on the part of the part-time workers themselves to join unions, but more important has been the negative attitude of the full-time employees. One can therefore understand why there has been no interest at all among the enterprise unions in recruiting foreign workers who are hired on the same short-term basis as part-time Japanese employees. Neither can such interest be expected to develop in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, some Japanese unions are open to accepting foreign workers as members. These are the new-style "community unions" which begun to appear in the trade union movement in 1983 and has since spread rapidly across the country. At the end of 1987 they numbered more than thirty. Their organizing strength is still slight and, as in the case of the Edogawa Union and Union Higourou, membership is measured in the hundreds rather than in the thousands.
"The number of part-time workers has risen sharply and this has been one important factor which has caused a drop in union membership year by year. Both Souhyou and Rengou had therefore begun to emphasize the importance more active recruiting campaigns. If, on the other hand, the community union movement continues to grow, then the character of the trade union movement as a whole will change and may very well become more amenable to accepting foreign workers. ..." (p. 263)
(Nimura Kazuo, "The Trade Union Response to Migrant Workers," in Glenn D. Hook and Michael Weiner, eds., 1992/2001 The Internationalization of Japan, London: Sheffield Centre of Japanese Studies/Routledge Series)
Unions in US, UK construction industry
"Historically, there have been craft unions that developed more open organizing approaches, foreshadowing the inclusive strategies of industrial unionism. See, e.g., Dorothy Sue Cobble, Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL’s Direct Affiliate
Strategy, 36 INDUS. REL. 278, 279–80 (1997). Furthermore, in the past few decades, craft unions such as the building trades have found that their exclusivity has been their downfall in the face of an influx of nonunion construction firms, often staffed by new immigrants. The resulting loss of market share and decline in union strength in the construction industry has led many in the building trades to rethink the classic craft union model and to develop programs to draw in immigrants and others historically excluded from their ranks. See, e.g., Bruce Nissen, The Role of Labor Education in Transforming a Union Toward Organizing Immigrants: A Case Study, 27 LAB. STUD. J. 109, 109–13 (2002)." (p. 515)
"With the influx of immigrants into the industry over the past few decades, building trades unions’ control over construction jobs has been severely eroded. The unions’ first reaction was to seek to expel the immigrants. Of late, however, the construction unions who organize the less elite members of the construction workforce—including the bricklayers, laborers, and carpenters—have begun to invite them within the circle. Nissen, supra note 34 (providing a case study of the role of labor
education in efforts by the South Florida Regional Council of Carpenters to organize new immigrant workers); Miriam Jordan, Rebuilding Plan: Carpenters Union Courts Immigrants to Increase Clout— Undocumented Workers See Risk of Firings, Fewer Jobs, WALL ST. J., Dec. 15, 2005, at A1 (discussing union efforts to court immigrants); Nate Schweber, Worked Over? Union Organizers Say Immigrants Get Cheated, HERALD NEWS (Passaic County, N.J.), Sept. 6, 2004, at A1 (recounting outreach efforts
by the Laborers’ International Union of North America to reach out to immigrants on construction sites in New Jersey); Nicole Andrea Silverman, Deserving of Decent Work: The Complications of Organizing Irregular Workers Without Legal Rights (Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 21, 2005) (discussing a case study of efforts by the New England Regional Council of Carpenters to organize Latino immigrant workers)." (p. 517)
2. The Theory of Community Unions
"So, internationally, the situation in the late 1990s is that industrial unions have declining appeal and effectiveness, while enterprise unions have been an instrument for promoting functional flexibility and employment security for core workers. ... One can dimly see what is needed - institutions that can resist pressures of co-option, promote dynamic efficiency in production and have a redistributive effect beyond the confines of an individual firm. Are there any germs of hope?
"...In terms of flexible labour relations, what is needed is a movement that brings together bodies representing local groups of employed and those at the margins of the labour force to bargain over distributional, security and production issues.
"What might be called community unions or citizenship associations could be the most effective way forward if a strategy of ditributive justice is to be pursued. For this traditional unions must recognize that their long-term representative capacity will depend on their appeal to flexiworkers and those on the labour force margins. ... The agenda of community unions would differ from that of enterprise unions, giving higher priority for social income issues, including environmental protection and share entitlement to social benefits by those in regular and non-regular forms of employment, and from industrial unions, in that they would give less emphasis on the money wage relative to other components of the social income." (p. 391)
(Guy Standing, 1999, Global Labor Flexibility: seeking redistributive justice, New York: St. Martins Press)
3. European countries that deny that they have an obligation to respect human rights of irregular migrant: Sweden, Austria and Germany
"Another issue is whether irregular immigrants have social and human rights, whether these must be recognised wherever a person is and whatever his or her status is and whether states have a moral duty toward undocumented migrants. Most countries because they accept their international obligations under the various human rights conventions affirm this question and permit at least limited access to health care, primary education for children, and access to the legal system. Three countries as I have critically analysed this elsewhere deny these rights, Sweden, Austria and Germany." (pp. 12-13)
Countries where unions increasingly represent irregular migrant workers: US, Portugal, UK and Germany (p. 10)
(Frank Duvell, 2006, "Illegal Immigration in Europe: Patterns, Causes and Consequences")
Monday, February 22, 2010
Irregular Migrants and Human Rights: Random Notes
Notes taken while doing my self-collected readings:
1. Rejecting the term "illegal migrant"; questioning immigration law: No one is illegal (Cohen 2003). Only acts, not people, can be criminalized or declared or made illegal. And irregular migrants are not necessarily criminals either. The suggestion that migrants themselves are illegal eerily resonates with the process of legal dehumanization (Bauman 1989) that has historically been applied to the Jews and culminated in the Holocaust.
"Illegal migration" too doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny. Ultimately, what is illegal in "illegal migration" is the fact that it violates immigration law or regulation (pertaining to visa conditions, for example). The status (or importance in the system of laws) of immigration law, however, differs from country to country. More importantly, immigration law may sometimes run afoul of international human rights law, in which case, the illegality of some forms of "illegal migration" can even be questioned in reference to legal norms of presumably greater importance. (Question: What is the relationship between migration law and international human rights law? Answering this question in itself can generate a legal history of human rights activism against immigration law in the fom of a survey of human rights jurisprudence in which the validity of immigration law or regulation was challenged. I am guessing Steve Cohen must have gone to ECHR a number of times.) Advocates have also used human rights norms discursively to deligitimize certain immigration law and regulations. For example, migrants' rights advocates in Canada have shown how immigration regulations restricting migrant live-in caregivers to change their employers have resulted in women being trapped in a contractual relationship with abusive employers to the detriment of their well-being. (find source) This argument can be generalized to argue against blanket immigration regulations restricting the freedom to chose employers. (has been done in Japan re. trainees - find source) Women's rights advocates have also pointed out that allowing women married to high-skilled migrants to legally reside in the host country but preventing them from working there has the effect of making or keeping women dependent on their husbands. (look for that Korean author re. H1B visa in the US) Immigration law and regulations can therefore have human rights implications from migrants that are too often unexamined. Because it is highly problematic to simply accept immigration law as the having the final say on the legality or illegality of migration, "illegal migration" is a highly problematic term.
1.1. the right to mobility and the "heirarchy of mobility" (Bauman, 2000 cited in Duvell, 2008): Mobility or the freedom to cross borders, reside and find a living in a country other than one's own is a resource that is currently allocated through the overlapping migration laws and policies of states. While citizens of Western countries typically can move around and settle pretty much anywhere they fancy, citizens of the global South are typically denied this right. (Does this not establish a system of discrimination based on national citizenship which is incompatible with human rights?)
2. The term "irregular migrant" is the preferred term of researchers who adopt an explicit human rights perspective (both from the liberal "open borders"/anti-deportation activist variety, as well as by international organizations like UNHCR, IOM, Council of Europe, etc.). "Migrant workers in an irregular situation" is the expression adopted in the CMW. (Basok (2008) points out three strands of "migration without borders" discourse engaged in by academics and activists alike.)
It is also the preferred term of migration scholars who are dissatisfied with the lack of descriptive fit between the dichotomy "legal/illegal migration" and the much more complex reality of migrants who do not have authorization to leave (their country of origin), enter (another country), or reside or work in their host country. Duvell (2008, p. 488) explains this very well by simply listing down all the possible concatenations of legal/illegal exit, entry, residence and work. For example, not all "illegal migrants" illegally entered, are illegally residing and illegally working in the host country; some may have legally entered but residing illegally in the host country (e.g., visa overstayer) and may or may not be working; some may be legally residing in the host country but are not allowed to work or are allowed to work only up to a certain maximum number of hours per week and are working despite or beyond such restriction; some may have legally entered and are authorized to work but only for a particular employer or line of work and violate this restriction; some may not have entered the host country at all but were born there to parents who illegally entered the country; and some may not have had permission to leave their country of origin (i.e., exit visas). It is much better to call the lack of one or more form of authorization (to exit, enter, reside or work) as an irregularity, and view these migrants as falling into a kind of continuum of irregularity, rather than to draw a black and white "legal/illegal" dichotomy and lump all irregular migrants under the category "illegal".
3. If irregular migrants have human rights, what are they? How are they recognized recognized by states, or how will they be recognized by states, or will they?
3.1. O'Byrne: human rights discourse (in the singular) as a social reality (as opposed to religious or philosophical idea) only took off with the UDHR, and depended on the state-system (Freeman: human rights will have to be implemented within the existing Westphalian system of states). Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999): Human rights norms are diffused into the state system through a process of socialization of states. Basok's concept of counter-hegemonic human rights discourses: migrant's rights discourses are counter-hegemonic human rights discourses which challenge or even undermine the Westphalian system of states as well as the political economy which depends on the exploitation of migrant labor; therefore, their recognition by states through socialization are more problematic. Civil society's role is key. (To what extent are the human rights norms that have been adopted by states any less "transformational" than migrants' rights norms? In any case, migrants rights (CMW version) accommodates the nation-state, does it not?)
3.2. civil society interventions in support of migrants. In Japan, migrant support NGOs are typically divided between women NGOs and labor unions. (Roberts in Douglas and Roberts (2003)) Labor unions have represented irregular workers against abusive employers, though it can be imagined that this is a very atypical scenario as irregular workers who openly challenge abusive employers attract attention to themselves. Women NGOs have also sheltered and helped irregular migrant women access welfare benefits and legal recourse against abusive partners or human traffickers.
Labor unions and grassroots campaigning organizations intervening in support of irregular migrants in the US (and Canada, but not unions) are reported in Basok (2009). AFL-CIO reversed its long-standing opposition to irregular migrants in the labor force in February 2000 and the CIO executive council is calling for whistleblower protections for irregular workers who complain about abusive work conditions. (Basok, 2009, p. 193) In the US, with union support, irregular migrant workers have even marched in the capital to demand regularization (Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 reported in Moberg (2003)) Also, in France. (McNevin, 2006)
It can be imagined that NGO support for irregular migrants are influenced by the legal and policy environment, i.e., how much space the laws allows for such maneuvering (e.g., to what extent the firewall principle is adopted), whether they are able to frame the situation as human trafficking rather than labor migration, etc. Gibney (2000) suggested that European NGOs that assist or advocate for refugees and immigrants may have an interest in silencing irregular migrants in that involvement with them “might tarnish the causes of their main constituency”. (p. 2) This may well be because the space for legitimately espousing for irregular migrants' welfare has shrunk as a result of the present legal and policy environment. Perhaps the social environment (e.g., an aggressively anti-migrant media) too is to blame. But civil society does not only react to its environment, it is also a catalyst for legal and social change, or at least, should be. (So perhaps we need to conceptualize civil society's role in defining, developing, and promoting respect for migrants' human rights.)
(A satisfactory conceptualization of will have to be able to account for the discourse on "urban citizenship" or "local citizenship" which creates spaces of political belonging for the irregular migrants even as the nation-state system increasingly excludes them from the body polity.) "Don't Ask Don't Tell" campaign in Toronto used as a model the municipal policy of 28 US cities. (Basok, 2008)
3.1. humanitarianism or human rights? Civil society's concern for irregular migrants is not always framed in terms of human rights; sometimes it is framed in terms of humanitarianism or compassion. It may be because some migrant support NGOs do not consider irregular migrants as having legal rights.
But the fact that irregular migrants have basic human rights is quite clear. Proceeding from analyses of different legal sources, Katsuko Terazawa (in Douglas and Roberts, 2003) (japanese law) and Ryszard Cholewinski (2006) and the Council of Europe (2006) (EU and international law) point to the legal rights that irregular migrants are entitled to. Joseph Carens (2008) makes a broader normative analysis which assumes the state's prerogative to control migration but nevertheless arrives at a similar enumeration of rights for irregular migrants as well as the firewall principle necessary to safeguard these rights.
(To what extent do NGOs feel constrained by the fact that migrant-receiving countries have not signed up to the Convention on the Rights of Migrants Workers and their Families (CMW)? Are they even aware of it?)
1. Some terms used to refer to Filipino irregular migrants:
"TNT" - a term used in the Philippines to refer to Filipinos in other countries (most commonly in the US) who constantly hide ("tago ng tago") from authorities to avoid deportation;
"bilog" - Filipino term for visa overstayers ("O" for overstaying) in Japan, commonly entertainers whose visas were not renewed, but also visitors who stayed on to work;
TO BE CONTINUED
Tanya Basok (2009), Counter-Hegemonic Human Rights Discourses and Migrants Rights Activism in the US and Canada, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 50 (2): pp. 183-205.
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Human rights of irregular migrants, May 4, 2006.
Ryszard Cholewinski, Irregular migrants: access to minimum social rights (2006)
Steve Cohen (2003) No one is illegal: asylum and immigration control, past and present, Stoke and Trent: Trentham Books.
Micheal Douglas and Glenda Roberts (2003), Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (University of Hawaii Press)
Franck Düvell (2008), "Clandestine Migration in Europe", Social Science Information vol 47 (4): pp. 479-497.
Gibney, M.J. (2000) Outside of the Protection of the Law: the Situation of Irregular Migrants in Europe, Working Paper 6. http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/workingpaper6.pdf. Oxford: Refugee Studies Center, University of Oxford.
McNevin, A. (2006) Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: the Struggle of the Sans Papiers, Citizenship Studies, 10(2), pp. 135-151.
David Moberg (2003) The Road to Citizenship: Immigrants and unions get on the same bus, In These Times, 23 September, available at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/624/
1. Rejecting the term "illegal migrant"; questioning immigration law: No one is illegal (Cohen 2003). Only acts, not people, can be criminalized or declared or made illegal. And irregular migrants are not necessarily criminals either. The suggestion that migrants themselves are illegal eerily resonates with the process of legal dehumanization (Bauman 1989) that has historically been applied to the Jews and culminated in the Holocaust.
"Illegal migration" too doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny. Ultimately, what is illegal in "illegal migration" is the fact that it violates immigration law or regulation (pertaining to visa conditions, for example). The status (or importance in the system of laws) of immigration law, however, differs from country to country. More importantly, immigration law may sometimes run afoul of international human rights law, in which case, the illegality of some forms of "illegal migration" can even be questioned in reference to legal norms of presumably greater importance. (Question: What is the relationship between migration law and international human rights law? Answering this question in itself can generate a legal history of human rights activism against immigration law in the fom of a survey of human rights jurisprudence in which the validity of immigration law or regulation was challenged. I am guessing Steve Cohen must have gone to ECHR a number of times.) Advocates have also used human rights norms discursively to deligitimize certain immigration law and regulations. For example, migrants' rights advocates in Canada have shown how immigration regulations restricting migrant live-in caregivers to change their employers have resulted in women being trapped in a contractual relationship with abusive employers to the detriment of their well-being. (find source) This argument can be generalized to argue against blanket immigration regulations restricting the freedom to chose employers. (has been done in Japan re. trainees - find source) Women's rights advocates have also pointed out that allowing women married to high-skilled migrants to legally reside in the host country but preventing them from working there has the effect of making or keeping women dependent on their husbands. (look for that Korean author re. H1B visa in the US) Immigration law and regulations can therefore have human rights implications from migrants that are too often unexamined. Because it is highly problematic to simply accept immigration law as the having the final say on the legality or illegality of migration, "illegal migration" is a highly problematic term.
1.1. the right to mobility and the "heirarchy of mobility" (Bauman, 2000 cited in Duvell, 2008): Mobility or the freedom to cross borders, reside and find a living in a country other than one's own is a resource that is currently allocated through the overlapping migration laws and policies of states. While citizens of Western countries typically can move around and settle pretty much anywhere they fancy, citizens of the global South are typically denied this right. (Does this not establish a system of discrimination based on national citizenship which is incompatible with human rights?)
2. The term "irregular migrant" is the preferred term of researchers who adopt an explicit human rights perspective (both from the liberal "open borders"/anti-deportation activist variety, as well as by international organizations like UNHCR, IOM, Council of Europe, etc.). "Migrant workers in an irregular situation" is the expression adopted in the CMW. (Basok (2008) points out three strands of "migration without borders" discourse engaged in by academics and activists alike.)
It is also the preferred term of migration scholars who are dissatisfied with the lack of descriptive fit between the dichotomy "legal/illegal migration" and the much more complex reality of migrants who do not have authorization to leave (their country of origin), enter (another country), or reside or work in their host country. Duvell (2008, p. 488) explains this very well by simply listing down all the possible concatenations of legal/illegal exit, entry, residence and work. For example, not all "illegal migrants" illegally entered, are illegally residing and illegally working in the host country; some may have legally entered but residing illegally in the host country (e.g., visa overstayer) and may or may not be working; some may be legally residing in the host country but are not allowed to work or are allowed to work only up to a certain maximum number of hours per week and are working despite or beyond such restriction; some may have legally entered and are authorized to work but only for a particular employer or line of work and violate this restriction; some may not have entered the host country at all but were born there to parents who illegally entered the country; and some may not have had permission to leave their country of origin (i.e., exit visas). It is much better to call the lack of one or more form of authorization (to exit, enter, reside or work) as an irregularity, and view these migrants as falling into a kind of continuum of irregularity, rather than to draw a black and white "legal/illegal" dichotomy and lump all irregular migrants under the category "illegal".
3. If irregular migrants have human rights, what are they? How are they recognized recognized by states, or how will they be recognized by states, or will they?
3.1. O'Byrne: human rights discourse (in the singular) as a social reality (as opposed to religious or philosophical idea) only took off with the UDHR, and depended on the state-system (Freeman: human rights will have to be implemented within the existing Westphalian system of states). Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999): Human rights norms are diffused into the state system through a process of socialization of states. Basok's concept of counter-hegemonic human rights discourses: migrant's rights discourses are counter-hegemonic human rights discourses which challenge or even undermine the Westphalian system of states as well as the political economy which depends on the exploitation of migrant labor; therefore, their recognition by states through socialization are more problematic. Civil society's role is key. (To what extent are the human rights norms that have been adopted by states any less "transformational" than migrants' rights norms? In any case, migrants rights (CMW version) accommodates the nation-state, does it not?)
3.2. civil society interventions in support of migrants. In Japan, migrant support NGOs are typically divided between women NGOs and labor unions. (Roberts in Douglas and Roberts (2003)) Labor unions have represented irregular workers against abusive employers, though it can be imagined that this is a very atypical scenario as irregular workers who openly challenge abusive employers attract attention to themselves. Women NGOs have also sheltered and helped irregular migrant women access welfare benefits and legal recourse against abusive partners or human traffickers.
Labor unions and grassroots campaigning organizations intervening in support of irregular migrants in the US (and Canada, but not unions) are reported in Basok (2009). AFL-CIO reversed its long-standing opposition to irregular migrants in the labor force in February 2000 and the CIO executive council is calling for whistleblower protections for irregular workers who complain about abusive work conditions. (Basok, 2009, p. 193) In the US, with union support, irregular migrant workers have even marched in the capital to demand regularization (Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 reported in Moberg (2003)) Also, in France. (McNevin, 2006)
It can be imagined that NGO support for irregular migrants are influenced by the legal and policy environment, i.e., how much space the laws allows for such maneuvering (e.g., to what extent the firewall principle is adopted), whether they are able to frame the situation as human trafficking rather than labor migration, etc. Gibney (2000) suggested that European NGOs that assist or advocate for refugees and immigrants may have an interest in silencing irregular migrants in that involvement with them “might tarnish the causes of their main constituency”. (p. 2) This may well be because the space for legitimately espousing for irregular migrants' welfare has shrunk as a result of the present legal and policy environment. Perhaps the social environment (e.g., an aggressively anti-migrant media) too is to blame. But civil society does not only react to its environment, it is also a catalyst for legal and social change, or at least, should be. (So perhaps we need to conceptualize civil society's role in defining, developing, and promoting respect for migrants' human rights.)
(A satisfactory conceptualization of will have to be able to account for the discourse on "urban citizenship" or "local citizenship" which creates spaces of political belonging for the irregular migrants even as the nation-state system increasingly excludes them from the body polity.) "Don't Ask Don't Tell" campaign in Toronto used as a model the municipal policy of 28 US cities. (Basok, 2008)
3.1. humanitarianism or human rights? Civil society's concern for irregular migrants is not always framed in terms of human rights; sometimes it is framed in terms of humanitarianism or compassion. It may be because some migrant support NGOs do not consider irregular migrants as having legal rights.
But the fact that irregular migrants have basic human rights is quite clear. Proceeding from analyses of different legal sources, Katsuko Terazawa (in Douglas and Roberts, 2003) (japanese law) and Ryszard Cholewinski (2006) and the Council of Europe (2006) (EU and international law) point to the legal rights that irregular migrants are entitled to. Joseph Carens (2008) makes a broader normative analysis which assumes the state's prerogative to control migration but nevertheless arrives at a similar enumeration of rights for irregular migrants as well as the firewall principle necessary to safeguard these rights.
(To what extent do NGOs feel constrained by the fact that migrant-receiving countries have not signed up to the Convention on the Rights of Migrants Workers and their Families (CMW)? Are they even aware of it?)
1. Some terms used to refer to Filipino irregular migrants:
"TNT" - a term used in the Philippines to refer to Filipinos in other countries (most commonly in the US) who constantly hide ("tago ng tago") from authorities to avoid deportation;
"bilog" - Filipino term for visa overstayers ("O" for overstaying) in Japan, commonly entertainers whose visas were not renewed, but also visitors who stayed on to work;
TO BE CONTINUED
Tanya Basok (2009), Counter-Hegemonic Human Rights Discourses and Migrants Rights Activism in the US and Canada, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 50 (2): pp. 183-205.
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Human rights of irregular migrants, May 4, 2006.
Ryszard Cholewinski, Irregular migrants: access to minimum social rights (2006)
Steve Cohen (2003) No one is illegal: asylum and immigration control, past and present, Stoke and Trent: Trentham Books.
Micheal Douglas and Glenda Roberts (2003), Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (University of Hawaii Press)
Franck Düvell (2008), "Clandestine Migration in Europe", Social Science Information vol 47 (4): pp. 479-497.
Gibney, M.J. (2000) Outside of the Protection of the Law: the Situation of Irregular Migrants in Europe, Working Paper 6. http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/workingpaper6.pdf. Oxford: Refugee Studies Center, University of Oxford.
McNevin, A. (2006) Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: the Struggle of the Sans Papiers, Citizenship Studies, 10(2), pp. 135-151.
David Moberg (2003) The Road to Citizenship: Immigrants and unions get on the same bus, In These Times, 23 September, available at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/624/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
