Migration Borders Freedom

Front matter

Migration Borders Freedom

International borders have become deadly barriers of a proportion rivaled only by war or natural disaster. Yet despite the damage created by borders, most people can’t — or don’t want to — imagine a world without them. What alternatives do we have to prevent the deadly results of contemporary borders?

In today’s world, national citizenship determines a person’s ability to migrate across borders. Migration Borders Freedom questions that premise. Recognizing the magnitude of deaths occurring at contemporary borders worldwide, the book problematizes the concept of the border and develops arguments for open borders and a world without borders. It explores alternative possibilities, ranging from the practical to the utopian, that link migration with ideas of community, citizenship, and belonging. The author calls into question the conventional political imagination that assumes migration and citizenship to be responsibilities of nation states, rather than cities. While the book draws on the theoretical work of thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre, it also presents international empirical examples of policies and practices on migration and claims of belonging. In this way, the book equips the reader with the practical and conceptual tools for political action, activist practice, and scholarly engagement to achieve greater justice for people who are on the move.

Contents

List of figures

Preface Acknowledgments 1 Introduction PARTI Diagnosis 2 Borders in Perspective 3 Access Denied!

PART II Solutions 5 Mobility and Domicile 6 Sanctuary City 7 Right to the Future 8 Conclusion Index

Preface

The title Migration Borders Freedom is a play on words. It can be interpreted as three nouns, in which case it describes the key concepts addressed in the book. The publisher was keen to have the book’s key concepts included in the main title to “signify the market.” Thus, a reader browsing the internet or bookshelf immediately knows that this book is about migration, borders, and freedom.

The book’s title can also be interpreted as a sentence, in which case the word “borders” becomes a verb. There are at least two ways in which the title can be read as a sentence: first, it can mean that migration creates a border around freedom. This meaning signifies that migration does not lead to greater freedom but is rather a limitation thereof. It may apply, for example, to people who possessed the freedoms associated with citizenship, economic security, belonging to a community, and protection by the state in their countries of origin, but who lost these freedoms when they migrated to a different country where they lack citizenship, are denied access to the labor market, experience discrimination, and may even be treated as criminals.

The second way of reading the sentence “migration borders freedom” is as “migration is on the border of freedom.” I visualize this meaning as a mediaeval European city that is bordered by a fortified wall. Inside the wall reside free citizens; in the surrounding hinterland live serfs who are bonded to their feudal lord. Migration can take the serfs to the gates of the city, which is as close as migration can bring them to freedom. However, it is up to the city’s gatekeeper to permit the migrants entry and thus to gain freedom. According to this meaning, migration is just outside of the realm of freedom. Migration isn’t freedom — it’s close to it but not quite there.

The various ways of reading the title reflect the content of the book. On the one hand, the book addresses the problem of how borders and migration are often associated with the denial of rights and freedoms. On the other hand, it acknowledges the prospect that migration offers to gain freedom in the form of rights, protection, belonging, and economic security. The book also searches for solutions that enable migrants to leap over the metaphorical city wall that stands between them and freedom. In fact, the city will reappear as an important figure in the second part of the book, in which I discuss such solutions.

x Preface

In addition, the ambiguity of the title — that it can be interpreted in various ways — mirrors the approach I chose in this book to explore the concepts of borders, migration, and freedom. These concepts, too, can be interpreted in various ways, depending on the vantage point and interests of the observer. Engaging the various interpretations — and their contradictions — are an integral part of the way in which this book searches for alternative border and migration practices.

Throughout the book, I use the terms migration and migrant. Some of my colleagues are critical of these terms and would argue that “mobility” is a better term to capture the complex patterns of the movement of people across the surface of the earth. Others may suggest that the term “migrant” represents oppressive state practices that created this category and imposed it on human beings in the first place. I decided nevertheless to use the term migrant because, to me, it represents a person who is not only mobile but also lays claims to rights and belonging. The people who Europeans enslaved in Africa from the 15th to the 19th centuries, whose rights were revoked, and who were shipped in chains to the Americas were considered a mobile commodity by the slave traders. These slaves were denied being migrants, which would have granted them their humanity, rights, and free will. By using the term migrant, I acknowledge the humanity, the rights to belong, and free will that people on the move possess.

Migration Borders Freedom is an exploration of ideas. It not only critiques the suffering that border practices are inflicting on migrants; it also seeks practical as well as far-sighted solutions. The book is thus intended to equip its reader with the practical and conceptual tools for political action, activist practice, and scholarly engagement towards greater freedom and justice for migrants.

As I embarked upon writing Migration Borders Freedom, I envisaged an audience of academics, researchers, advanced students, activists, and policy makers with an interest in migration and cross-border mobility and who do not shy away from “big” thinking that challenges taken-for-granted ideas. Although my discipline is geography and this book is part of the Routledge Studies in Human Geography series, Migration Borders Freedom is an interdisciplinary book that can be read across the spectrum of social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology, and in transdisciplinary fields such as border, international, migration, and refugee studies.

To attract a general audience with interests in progressive border and migration politics, I made every effort to write in a jargon-meager manner accessible to non-expert audiences. For most academics, such a writing style does not come intuitively. Often, I think, we shortcut our thought processes by relying on terminology that conveys previously developed ideas that other expert scholars are supposed to be able to decipher. I found that by dropping these academic terms, I could no longer hide behind a veil of jargon that is habitually vague and confusing. Moreover, explaining myself in clearer language forced me to sharpen my stream of thought, which not only benefits

Preface xi the reader, but helped me to refine the logic of my argument. Nevertheless, there were instances when I found it challenging to drop academic jargon. For example, I could not find an effective way to circumvent the term “dialectics,” a word that my spouse — an editor by profession — finds eminently repulsive. Instead of avoiding the term, I tried to make sure that the reader understands the meaning in which I apply it. One of my proudest achievements is that I managed to write a book without footnotes or endnotes, which I hope has improved the flow of the ideas within the text.

With examples drawn from different historical periods and geographic locations, Migration Borders Freedom is intended for a global readership. The reviewers of the book’s prospectus suggested that I include even more historical material to increase the “shelf life” of the book and illustrate the “timeless” nature of the topic. While I agree that the topic of mobility across borders is a perennial issue, the practices and policies involving borders, migration, and freedom are particularly problematic today. These policies and practices have killed and disenfranchised record numbers of people in recent years. While I heeded the reviewers’ advice and included some historical material, I wrote the book primarily from a contemporary vantage point. At the time of writing, the topics of migration, border controls, and the infringement of the freedom of mobility captivated the attention of the news and politics. In fact, cross-border migration was the dominant issue in the news and the most hotly debated political topic in Germany between mid-2015 and early 2016, when I completed the manuscript.

The reviewers also encouraged me to illustrate my argument by including more examples from around the globe. In this way, the book would emphasize that problematic border practices are not isolated cases, limited to a few locations, but that they are a systemic problem in a global order that divides the surface of the earth and its population into territorial nation states. While I tried to follow this advice as much as possible, I had to balance it with the need for scholarly rigor; otherwise, the credibility of my argument would have been compromised. In the end, I chose to illustrate my argument with examples that represent my areas of scholarly expertise, which disproportionately includes contexts from Europe, North America, and the global north. I encourage other scholars to examine whether and how my argument applies to different geographical and historical contexts.

Some readers may find that Migration Borders Freedom represents a Eurocentric and Western perspective in another way: my treatment of central concepts — such as the concepts of freedom and utopia — is located firmly in a European and Western philosophical tradition. These readers have a valid point. In this sense, this book may not offer a truly global or timeless perspective. Rather, it recognizes that knowledge about freedom, borders, and migration is not universal but always situated in particular geographical and historical contexts.

Acknowledgments

I completed the manuscript of the book during a sabbatical year, which I spent at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Germany, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Tim Freytag and his colleagues at the Institute for Environmental Social Sciences and Geography. This stay was enabled by the Konrad Adenauer Research Award, which is granted jointly by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Royal Society of Canada. I also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which supported the research for other parts of the book. The index of this book was funded by a grant provided by the office of the Dean of Arts, Ryerson University.

At Ryerson University, I thank my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Community Services, in particular the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, the Graduate Program for Immigration and Settlement Studies, and the Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement, for providing a supportive, dynamic, and highly stimulating environment. The individuals who deserve special mention include Jean-Paul Boudreau, Wendy Cukier, Usha George, Janet Lum, Claus Rinner, John Shields, Myer Siemiatycki, Vappu Tyyskä, and Shuguang Wang. I also thank Ratna Omidvar and her team at the Global Diversity Exchange for their inspiring work linking research with practice.

While I was in Germany, I had enriching discussions with Heike Drotbohm, Anna Lipphardt, Albert Scherr, and Inga Schwarz and their colleagues at the Freiburger Netwerk fiir Migrationsforschung. Over the course of developing the material for this book, I benefited from discussions with many good colleagues and friends, including Bernd Belina, Uli Best, Ranjit Bhaskar, Franck Diivell, Salvatore Engel-di Mauro, Fabian Georgi, Ken Hewitt, Dan Hiebert, John Kannankulam, Audrey Kobayashi, Valerie Preston, Michael Samers, Nik Theodore, and Christina West. In addition, I received valuable feedback on various ideas presented in the book from John Agnew, Klaus Kufeld, Fiona McConnell, Alexander Murphy, Ulrike Ramming, Michael Weingarten, and Jan Winkler.

The research for the book has been an ongoing effort over a number of years, and during this time I benefited from the help of outstanding research assistants. In particular, Clair Ellis and Charity-Ann Hannan at Ryerson University, and Marc Schulze and Helge Piepenburg at the University of Freiburg were highly competent researchers who helped me identify and

Acknowledgments xiii compile the information I needed to make the arguments presented in the book. Birgitt Gaida deserves special thanks for designing the two maps, and Michael Bauder (not related) for preparing the data for one of the maps.

Three anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback on the book’s proposal, which helped me strengthen many parts of the book. In addition, Sutapa Chattopadhyay and Pierpaolo Mudu commented on the Introduction; their insights and constructive critique challenged me to refine my argument throughout the book. Karen Uchic read the entire manuscript, provided competent advice on how to make the text accessible and readable, and should be credited for the idea to use the term “possibilia,” which plays an important role in this book. At Routledge, I thank commissioning editor Faye Leerink, and her colleagues Emma Chappell, Priscilla Corbett, Cathy Hurren, Dawn Preston, and Megan Smith. The index was compiled by Sarah Ereira.

Many of the ideas used for this book developed over the past decade, and appeared in a series of previously published, peer-reviewed journal articles. My initial exploration of the topic of open borders led to the publication of the article “Equality, Justice and the Problem of the International Borders: A View from Canada” in the open-access journal ACME: An International E- Journal of Critical Geographies (volume 2, issue 2, pp. 167-82) in 2003. The editors of the journal at the time, Lawrence Berg, Caroline Desbiens, and Pamela Moss, thought that this topic was worthy of inviting Uli Best, Franck Diivell, Dan Hiebert, Valerie Preston, and Michael Samers to critically comment on my ideas. The papers were published together in a themed section “Engagement: Borders and Immigration.” This interest in the topic of open borders motivated me to pursue the topic further. Over the subsequent years, my search for a better understanding of the problem of border controls and its potential solutions led me to expand the focus of my research to the fields of critical borders studies, citizenship studies, and no-border perspectives, and to concepts such as domicile and urban citizenships, the right to the city, utopia, and the possible.

Over the years, I published several journal articles on these topics. It is the very nature of a journal article to make a narrow, single point, and this book gave me the opportunity to revisit some of those articles and develop them into a more far-reaching and cohesive narrative. For inclusion in Migration Borders Freedom, I revised a number of publications significantly from their original form and added previously unpublished material. I thank the journals for letting me reuse the material from the following single-authored articles in revised form:

“Perspectives of Open Borders and No Border,” Geography Compass 9 (7) (2015): 395-405.

“Possibilities of Open Borders and No Border,” Social Justice 39 (4) (2014): 76-96.

“Open Borders: A Utopia?” [Un monde sans frontières: une utopie? translation: Sophie Didier], Justice Spatiale/Spatial Justice 5 (December) (2013): 1-13 (available at: http://www.jssj.org/article/un-monde-sans-frontieres/).

xiv Acknowledgments

“Jus domicile: In Pursuit of a Citizenship of Equality and Social Justice,” Journal of International Political Theory 8 (1-2) (2012): 184-96.

“Towards a Critical Geography of the Border: Engaging the Dialectic of Practice and Meaning,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (5) (2011): 1126-39.

“Possibilities of Urban Belonging,” Antipode 48 (2) (2016): 252-71.

What we seek is freedom. Freedom to move, return, and stay Syed Khalid Hussan (2013, 280)

A drowned two-year-old boy became the first known migrant casualty of the year on Saturday after the crowded dinghy he was travelling in slammed into rocks off Greece’s Agathonisi island.

This is how the consortium the “Migrants’ Files” recorded the tragic and unnecessary death of a toddler on January 2, 2016. The consortium, created by journalists from over 15 countries in Europe, aims to provide reliable and comprehensive data about the men, women, and children who have perished during their attempt to reach Europe. It does more than count the dead: it gives the migrants a human face by recording their names, age, gender, and the exact location where they died or went missing (Migrants’ Files 2016).

A small sample of the entries recorded on the consortium’s website paints a grim picture. On December 24, 2015, while the Christian world prepared to celebrate the birth of its savior, “at least 18 migrants drowned when their overcrowded boat sank in the Aegean Sea, the Turkish coastguard recovered the bodies including several children from the sea, and were hunting for another two who were missing.” On August 27, 2015: “Up to 200 bodies have been discovered floating off the coast of Libya.” Earlier in the year “about 400 migrants are feared died in an attempt to reach Italy from Libya when their boat capsized, survivors said” (April 13, 2015). “An overcrowded boat broke apart shortly after leaving Tripoli en route to Italy,” resulting in 600 missing people who likely drowned (May 8, 2011). The list goes on and on. It includes not only drownings, but also fatalities among stowaways in trucks, deaths by starvation and exhaustion, migrants shot to death by border guards, desperate suicides, and other causes of death. A map of the 196 recorded incidents in 2015, resulting in 1,472 deaths and 2,130 persons missing, shows that attempts to enter Europe by sea claimed the most human lives (Figure 1.1). Most fatalities occurred in the Aegean Sea as migrants tried to reach Greece from Turkey, and off the coast of Libya as they attempted to reach Italian shores. Border-related deaths also occurred after migrants had crossed the epep m3ng Aq dew ‘soy SIULIZIN :a0un0g odomy 0} INOI Ud s]URISIU peop pue SUISSIP, J" aungi

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(S LOZ) syues6IW a Fe N n ints i K pue al} physical border, such as in Austria, where 71 migrants were found dead in the back of a truck in August of 2015. Altogether, the database contained 3,049 entries in early January 2016, with an estimated 31,811 men, women, and children dead or missing since 2000. The numbers are staggering. The disheartening truth, however, is that the actual numbers are even higher. Despite the journalists’ valiant efforts to record carefully every fatality, many deaths occur that nobody sees or documents.

In Australia, researchers at Monash University have created a similar database. The Australian Border Deaths Database records the known deaths resulting from Australia’s border practices. It contains entries such as the drowning of 58 persons on April 11, 2013, including “Rehmatullah Muhammad Kan, male; Mahidi Fidayee, 16 years, male; Abdul Aziz, 63 years, male; Ibar Hussain Rajabi, 17 years, male; the rest unknown, all Afghan.” Their boat was “lost at sea in Sundra Strait off Indonesian coast carrying 72 asylum seekers bound for Australia. 14 survivors found, 5 confirmed deaths, 53 missing presumed drowned.” Another incident was the loss of 353 persons on October 19, 2001 — 146 children, 142 women, 65 men from Iraq and Afghanistan — who “drowned after [their] refugee vessel codenamed ‘SIEV X’ sank off Indonesia, but in Australian aerial border protection surveillance zone.” Altogether, the database recorded 1,947 deaths between early 2000 and January 2016 (Border Crossing Observatory 2016). As in the case of the European statistics, the actual number is likely much higher (Pickering and Cochrane 2012).

Meanwhile, in the USA, forensic anthropologist Lori Baker is running a lab at Baylor University in Texas, where she and a team of scientists and students extract and analyze the DNA from the remains of migrants who died trying to cross the border from Mexico into the USA. Baker told the Los Angeles Times about her first case: in 2003 she examined the bones of a woman found in 2003 in Pima County, Arizona. A voter registration card found nearby provided clues about the identity of the deceased migrant, and Baker’s analysis revealed that the DNA and the name on the card matched.

Rosa Cano Dominguez, 32, was a mother of two from the Yucatan region who had been traveling to work in the Pacific Northwest when she sprained her ankle. She was abandoned by smugglers.

(Hennessy-Fiske 2013)

The scientist and the migrant had a lot in common. Both were pregnant, working mothers in their 30s, and both were from families with low socioeconomic status. “I cried and cried over that case,” Baker told the Los Angeles Times reporter, revealing the emotions she experienced when she discovered who the deceased person actually was.

Deaths at the border occur not only at the perimeter of rich countries in the Global North. In 2015, the global media reported about thousands of Rohingya people who were rescued at sea by Southeast Asian fishermen after fleeing Myanmar, where they have been denied citizenship and faced various forms of abuse. Since legal ways to migrate were unavailable and neighboring countries said they would not take them, the Rohingya were forced to rely on unscrupulous smuggler syndicates. These smugglers then abandoned the refugees at sea, often leaving them without water or food (NPR 2015). If they succeeded in bringing the refugees to their agreed-upon destination, they often held them to ransom in jungle camps to extract additional funds from them or their families. The media reported about mass graves littering the border between Thailand and Malaysia, containing the bodies of Rohingya who did not survive the brutal conditions in the camps or who were killed outright (Davis and Cronau 2015; Beech and Kelian 2015).

International borders have become deadly barriers that are on a par with war, genocide, and major epidemics and natural disasters in the number of fatalities they produce (Brian and Laczko 2014). Although border deaths are not a recent phenomenon, the horrific death counts of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, in the waters between South East Asia and Australia, along the US- Mexico border, and in the waters of Southeast Asia illustrate the catastrophic dimensions this phenomenon has now assumed.

Migration scholars are increasingly speaking of “border regimes” to capture the complex and ever changing practices that govern migration (Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). These regimes do not neatly distinguish between the migrant-as-victim and the state seeking to constrain mobility. Rather, they focus on the interplay between governments and administrations, civic institutions, other actors using various technologies of surveillance and mechanisms of control, and migrants’ efforts and motivations to circumvent these technologies and mechanisms. These regimes have assumed a new quality that explains a large portion of the increase of migrant deaths in recent years.

These deaths are not primarily a problem of smuggling, as the mainstream politicians and media would like us to believe. Certainly, there are smugglers without scruples who care little about migrants’ lives and use the migrants’ vulnerable situation to extort as much money from them as possible. These smugglers are monsters. Without closed borders, however, these smugglers would not have any desperate “customers” to prey upon.

People have always migrated to escape war and hunger, to be with loved ones, or to seek out greener pastures. Today, however, advancements in transportation have made travel faster and cheaper, and communication technologies have made it possible to connect with family and friends independent of physical distance. As a result, the mobility of the global population has increased in volume and migration flows have diversified. At the same time, political developments have fostered global migration. With the downfall of the Iron Curtain, for example, migration has become possible for significant numbers of people in Asia and Europe; and the political turbulences following the Arab Spring displaced millions of people and forced them to cross borders to seek refuge. Meanwhile, a parallel development is the increasing integration of national economies and a corresponding growing political interdependency of countries.

The growing global political and economic integration prompted globalization scholars and corporate strategists to predict that borders would become irrelevant (e.g. Ohmae 1991, 1995). From today’s vantage point, these predictions were wrong. Rather than vanishing, borders continue to be highly relevant. Faster and cheaper transportation does little good when entry to safer destinations in Europe, Australia, the USA, and other countries is off limits. In fact, many people are completely immobilized when they are detained in their attempts to cross these borders. In the context of migration, borders and their regimes are not disappearing but are becoming stronger and increasingly deadly.

Interestingly, the enduring relevance of borders has gone hand in hand with the ongoing transformation of economic and political relationships between nation states. Europe exemplifies how these relationships are in constant flux: the European nation states that belong to the Schengen Area may have opened their borders to each other’s citizens, but, at the same time, they militarized the border at the perimeter of the Schengen Area. In 2015, some nation states, such as Austria, Germany, and Sweden, temporarily re-established controls at their borders in an effort to regulate the migration of refugees. The continual changes in policies and practices related to migration give me hope that the hardening of borders for a large part of the world’s population is not an unstoppable trend that will end only when borders are completely sealed. Rather, governments and other actors involved in regulating migration may come to their senses and realize that it is impossible to completely seal borders; they may seek alternative solutions by reducing the barriers to migration for everyone and, at one point, eliminate them altogether.

In the long run, political and economic structures are likely to continue breaking away from the national scale. Although the national imagination is still a powerful force — for example, to mobilize national electorates, as can be seen by the recent rise of nationalist anti-immigrant political parties and party programs throughout the Global North — it may eventually be replaced by new geopolitical imaginaries. Sociologist Saskia Sassen (2008, 147) sees “globalization and electronic networks” as such new imaginaries that will sooner or later transform politics and rearrange political systems as we know them today. If indeed this trend continues, the long-term scenario in which borders are irrelevant may be possible after all. People may then be free to migrate.

Currently, however, migration is still controlled and negotiated at international borders and by national citizenship, which most people receive at birth. In fact, free cross-border mobility would do little to improve the situation of migrants if they continue to be put in danger due to lack of citizenship. To address the root problem of closed borders and exclusion, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions. Should migration be unconstrained by international borders? How can such firmly established political practices and principles regarding national boundaries change? What kind of political imaginations would be required for a world in which all people possess the freedom of migration? Migration Borders Freedom seeks to answer these questions.

6 Introduction Freedom, Borders, Migration

Modern society cannot be imagined without the concept of freedom. It was central to the philosophies of enlightenment thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant and Georg W. F. Hegel, as well as John Locke and Adam Smith. Their ideas shaped not only the field of philosophy but also the political and economic systems that organize almost every aspect of our lives today. Nevertheless, there is no universally accepted definition of freedom. Instead, this concept has been interpreted in various ways.

One interpretation of the concept of freedom relates to the autonomy of individuals to reason and decide. This autonomy includes the freedom to decide on religious matters, freedom of speech, the freedom to negotiate and sign a contract, to buy, sell, and own property, and the freedom from being told by others what to do and how to live. This liberal interpretation of freedom relates to the concept of equality: every person should equally be able to enjoy freedom, and no person or group should possess an asymmetrical ability or right to interfere with another person’s freedom. Individual freedoms have also provided the philosophical basis for a set of laissez-faire economic and political practices commonly known as neoliberalism, which emphasizes the freedom to own, trade, and use property and the freedom of contract.

According to critics, the liberal interpretation of freedom is an ideological deception. Half a century ago, philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1964) observed that mass society had appropriated the vocabulary of the enlightenment, including the concepts of freedom and equality, and puts this vocabulary to use in a way that constrains rather than enables independent thinking and human emancipation. More than four decades later, geographer David Harvey made a similar observation when he examined the history of neoliberalism. According to Harvey (2009, 2005, 5-38), neoliberal ideology has applied the concept of freedom in a rather narrow sense to market forces, enterprise, and property ownership. This particular application justified the expansion of capitalist practices into ever more aspects of our lives and into the last remaining corners on the surface of the earth. In the name of freedom, societies have commodified water resources and ecologically sensitive woodlands, scientific knowledge, genetic codes of living organisms, and the care for their children and elderly. Even air space is for sale. My own employer, Ryerson University, traded the rights to the “air” above its parking structure to allow a private company to build a movie theater in exchange for using the facility as a lecture hall during the daytime. A bewildered university president, Sheldon Levy, quipped: “Who knew about air rights?” (Brown 2015), expressing his surprise about his university’s “freedom” to rent out even the air above it.

However, the liberal interpretation of freedom is not the only one, or even the most compelling. Indeed, the liberal and neoliberal incarnations of individual freedom have often restrained other types of freedom, such as the freedom of self-determination, the freedom from subordination and domination, or the freedom from exploitation and unfair distribution of wealth and opportunity.