From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Rethinking Human Migration
... Later, optimism re-emerged during the 1990s as global fl ows began to dynamise, and it was hoped that the borders of sovereign states would also be opened or more fl exible, but it turns out that this expectation was an illusion (Bauder, 2022). In the European Union, border entry and exit from Member States was liberalised for a while, and the Schengen visa was enabled to facilitate entry and exit, but all of this border liberalisation was not directly related to the migration process. ...
... This example can be taken as a facilitative model of how competences for managing migrants are assigned at the urban level. The position of close communication gives opportunities to provide relief to migrants as it seems to be the right alternative as they know their own specifi c needs (Bauder, 2022). ...
... During the migration wave of 2015, the countries of the European Union that stood for welcoming migrants, i.e., refugees and asylum seekers, were Germany and Sweden (Petersson, Kainz, 2017). At that time, citizen solidarity was also manifested, which was shown in the people's mobilisation to help migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, by supplying them with food and clothing (Bauder, 2022). ...
Migration in relation to democracy and sovereignty is considered one of the great challenges of this century. At the local, national, and global levels, migration is causing tensions in the development of democracy and security, which often calls the sovereignty of a given state into question (International IDEA, 2017). The challenges about migration in relation to democracy and sovereignty will increase even further since, according to relevant data, it has been warned that the next exodus is likely to occur as a result of climate change. In accordance with the assertion of the UN Climate Panel, it is said that this coming exodus will occur in the distant future as it is calculated that somewhere around the year 2100 there will be a climate-related warming of the planet of 2 to 3 degrees. The emergence of violent conflicts, climate change, persecution based on ethnic and religious affiliations, and various forms of violence are also en-dangering state sovereignty. These reasons why migrants leave their own countries, along with migrant perspectives, are topics that need to be addressed. It is important to examine migration as the main topic, especially migration in relation to democracy and state sovereignty. Seen in its totality, migration is taking on global dimensions and will be the hottest point of political topics with regard to finding the formula for its management in accordance with democratic values and their compatibility with state borders. Therefore, a debate should be subject to the following questions: how are we to preserve democratic values and the stability of sovereignty, and, should sovereignty be democratised?
... Our findings suggest that the local response towards irregular migrants is largely determined by the presence of political polarization between local government and nation states in combination with strong alliances between the local governments and civil society organizations. Alliances, as argued by Bauder (2022) and Bazurli (2019), allow cities to strengthen their political power and implement policies that are against the direction of national governments. Except Budapest, Prague and Rome, all cases have political discrepancy with leftist local governments active against the restrictive policies of the right-wing national governments. ...
The present study seeks to understand under which conditions cities enact inclusionary policies and practices for irregular migrants. Previous research points out the influence of political ideology, local autonomy, economic capacity, diversity, or civil society alliances. We argue that a city’s proactive and supportive stance towards irregular migrants may not be explained fully by one or another single factor, but rather by their combination. Through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 13 European cities, it was found that the combination of a political discrepancy between the local government and national state, as well as local alliances between the municipality and local civil society organizations, is a necessary condition for municipalities to take a proactive and supportive stance towards irregular migrants.
This paper engages with the relationship between dissident European mayors and the migrant solidarity movement in Europe after 2015. With the case study of the coalition “From the Sea to the City”, I examine how its members institutionalise mayors’ dissent at a transnational level through the International Alliance of Safe Harbours. Employing primary empirical data, the study finds that coalition members create a political sequence in four ways: developing a storyline and setting up a broad coalition of migrant solidarity; referencing mayors’ disruptive acts; nurturing counter‐imaginaries; and laying the foundation for further action towards transforming the instituted order of European migration politics. To conceptualise the empirical findings, I draw on concepts of political organisation. In this vein, the paper calls for an assessment of movement politics that goes beyond the belief that local disruptions will suffice to set in motion a progressive transformation of European migration politics.
While current interpretations of sanctuary are most often associated with practices to protect, support, and accompany migrants with precarious status in countries of destination in the Global North, debates around the concept and practice of sanctuary in countries of origin reveal different historical and contemporary understandings. This article explores questions related to sanctuary’s symbolic and political power in the Mexican context, specifically examining three cases: the Mexico City government’s declaration as a sanctuary city—specifically for returned migrants—in April of 2017, the work of migrant shelters along migration routes in Mexico, and the work of Otros Dreams en Acción to accompany deported and returned migrants and the establishment of Poch@ House as a sanctuary space in Mexico City.
Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates , there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact the production of collective common spaces, occupying abandoned buildings in the urban core and claiming the right to the centre of the city. In this context and following the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city and the spatial analysis on commons and enclosures, we explore the actions of refugees, and the way they engage in commoning practices that not only strive against the official state policies, but also often contest city-branding policies. In particular, we focus on the area of Exarcheia in Athens, which is an emblematic case of the conflicted nexus between investors' and refugees' right to the city.
In the summer of 2015, an extraordinary number of German residents felt an urge to provide help to refugees. Doing good, however, is not as simple and straightforward as it might appear. Practices of solidarity are intertwined with questions of power. They are situated, relative and contested, unfolding in an ambivalent space between humanitarianism and political activism. This ethnographic account of the German »welcome culture« provides insights into the contested practices, imaginaries, interests and politics of refugee solidarity. Drawing on works from critical migration studies to social anthropology, Larissa Fleischmann develops an empirically grounded understanding of solidarity in migration societies.
This article develops a conceptualisation of transversal solidarity in relation to migration and migrants. It reflects different ways of practicing, organising and articulating solidarity. We proceed through a conceptualisation of solidarity in terms of ‘transversal solidarity’ relating to three dimensions involved in solidarity practices from below and discuss how to bridge their respective dichotomies: identity and the related in-group and out-group dichotomy; space, in terms of the separation of the local from the national and international; organisation, related to the incompatibility of the social and the institutional. We link this conceptualisation to a typology of solidarity working on three different scales (autonomous solidarity, civic solidarity and institutional solidarity), which reflects these dynamics of solidarity as well as the degree of institutionalisation. We use different examples to illustrate various types of transversal solidarity.
This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post‐racial self‐image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.
In what ways has migration as a field of scholarship contributed to the discipline of International Relations (IR)? How can migration as a lived experience shed light on international politics as a field of interconnections? And how might migration as a political and analytical force compel IR to confront its privileged subjects? This article addresses these questions by focusing specifically on precarious migration from the Global South to the Global North. It shows how critical scholars refuse the suggestion that such migrations pose a ‘global challenge’ or problem to be resolved, considering instead how contemporary practices of governing migration effectively produce precarity for many people on the move. It also shows how critical works point to longer standing racialised dynamics of colonial violence within which such governing practices are embedded, to emphasise both the limitations of liberal humanitarianism as well as the problematic politics of ‘the human’ that this involves. By building on the insights of anti-racist, indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, critical scholars of migration are well placed to draw attention to the privileging of some subjects over others in the study and practice of international politics. The article argues that engaging IR while rejecting the orthodoxies on which the discipline is built remains critical for such works in order to advance understanding of the silences and violences of contemporary international politics.
This chapter considers municipal responses to irregular migrants living in their area and in particular the significance of inclusive responses to restrictive national welfare provisions. It questions whether, as tensions in the multi-level governance on this issue suggest, inclusive responses run counter to national immigration control objectives or whether these apparently divergent approaches are in fact more coherent than the tensions between them suggest. Setting municipal service provision in its structural, demographic, governance and policy context, the chapter shows that some municipal measures facilitate the regularisation of immigration status, voluntary return and compliance with national return procedures, while others contribute to shared social and economic objectives. The chapter asks why in that case national governments regularly challenge inclusive municipal measures and posits four potential reasons for further empirical investigation. In conclusion it argues that the impact of municipal measures on national policy objectives will be fundamental to resolving what the extent of irregular migrants’ access to services should be.
In urban spaces, racial profiling is a widespread police practice that dramatically reveals who is not considered a citizen of the nation. As the so-called majority society tends to see racial profiling as an indispensable police measure to maintain ‘order’ and ‘security’, initiatives of solidarity with people experiencing this form of institutional racism are rare. Nevertheless, a movement against racial profiling has emerged in Switzerland since 2016, protecting People of Color against local border policing and challenging the racialized boundaries of national citizenship. To analyze the convergence of differing solidarity practices, I propose the concept of ‘infrastructure of solidarity’. As I show in the empirical analysis, this ‘infrastructure of solidarity’ contesting racial profiling consists of a diverse set of actors deploying various forms of (counter-)knowledge and different political, social and spatial registers: from being involved in direct actions within urban citizenship struggles to artistic interventions and activist research to highly professional strategic litigation; and from solidarity as intimate, friendship-based care relationships to more strategic political relationships.
New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy – but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism, arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting neoliberal austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms – platform, autonomist, managed – whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention.
The article develops the concept of "fortress capitalism." The concept has two dimensions. First, it describes those elements within today's migration and border regimes that aim to control the mobility of the global working class in repressive ways. Second, it designates a dystopian future scenario, in which these repressive elements have massively expanded. Such a formation might develop as part of a twenty-first-century fascism. Based on historical materialism and critical theory, the article makes four points. First, it asserts that migration regimes are being transformed toward a new level of restrictiveness. Second, it argues that fortress capitalism complements theoretical motives that emphasize the uncontrollability of migration. Third, it contends that migration and border regimes in their emergence, dynamics, forms, and effects are closely linked to the intersectional dynamics of global capitalism as a whole. Fourth, it points out that global capitalism fundamentally depends on border regimes to regulate its contradictions.
© 2019 The Authors. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
The sanctuary city movement is aimed at limiting the local enforcement of federal immigration law. Canadian cities have joined this movement by pledging a) to provide access to municipal services without regard to immigration status, and b) to not share information identifying non-status migrants with federal immigration authorities. Despite these promises, local police continue to cooperate with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Continued cooperation raises questions about the capacity of cities to honour these promises. This paper shares the results of a preliminary study of the policing of non-status migrants in the Canadian province of Ontario. Relying on interviews with high-ranking police officers in eight local jurisdictions, the authors analyze police perceptions regarding their role in the enforcement of federal immigration law as well as their obligations to honour the spirit and the substance of sanctuary city policies. The study reveals that many police officers believe they possess legal authority to report non-status migrants to federal authorities where, in fact, this authority does not exist. The authors argue that this belief rests on a host of misconceptions about the relationship between criminal law and immigration law, claims of jurisdictional immunity from municipal government, and distortions of the historic, foundational principles of policing in Canada. The authors argue that greater protection of the rights and privacy of non-status migrants requires at a minimum a rescaling of sanctuary policies to the provincial level, where policing may be subject to more stringent laws and regulations.
Africa was the birth-place of Homo sapiens and has the earliest evidence for symbolic behaviour and complex technologies. The best-attested early flowering of these distinctive features was in a glacial refuge zone on the southern coast 100–70 ka, with fewer indications in eastern Africa until after 70 ka. Yet it was eastern Africa, not the south, that witnessed the first major demographic expansion, ~70–60 ka, which led to the peopling of the rest of the world. One possible explanation is that important cultural traits were transmitted from south to east at this time. Here we identify a mitochondrial signal of such a dispersal soon after ~70 ka – the only time in the last 200,000 years that humid climate conditions encompassed southern and tropical Africa. This dispersal immediately preceded the out-of-Africa expansions, potentially providing the trigger for these expansions by transmitting significant cultural elements from the southern African refuge.
Modern Nordic church sanctuary practices have far reaching roots in the official and legal position of sanctuary during pre-Reformation times. Although this legal and legitimate position vanished as such after the Reformation, the dual principle of helping everyone entering the holy territory of churches (‘asylon’) and priests’ ethical duty to help the distressed (‘asylos’) remained among Lutheran state churches and various other Christian churches. The principles ‘activated’ especially after the increase of asylum seeker migration to Nordic countries since 1980’s. This article sheds a comparative light on recent sanctuary practices and politics in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It shows that there are many similarities but indicates also about differences which stem from different state–church-relations, migration histories and situations, and actor positions and networks of both administrators and sanctuary providers.
The Fearless Cities summit, coordinated by Barcelona en Comú in June 2017, marked the first global gathering of the nascent “new municipalist” movement. Responding to the “imperative that geographers engage critically and creatively with the way localism is being articulated”, this paper argues that the new municipalist initiatives are developing urban political strategies that successfully avoid the Local Trap. Rather than essentialising cities as inherently progressive or democratic, the municipal is instead becoming framed as a “strategic front” for developing a transformative politics of scale. Given this critical awareness, this nascent movement demonstrates how local loyalties can be mobilised as part of a progressive scalar strategy without falling into the trap of a “particular localism”. What remains to be seen is whether these initiatives are able to develop a variegated scalar strategy of transformation that retains the democratic essence that underpins them. © 2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Providing—and also not providing—public services to unlawful residents implies a certain cost for host societies, and both inclusion and exclusion involve localized renegotiations of fundamental rights, legitimate needs, and social membership. Based on original qualitative research data, this article compares how, why, and under which conditions irregular migrants are granted or denied access to healthcare services provided in London and Barcelona. From a multi-level perspective and by drawing on organization theory, I highlight key differences in how the responsible governments deal with the underlying contradictions and thereby either help or hinder effective policy implementation.
This book rejects a commonplace of European history: that the treaties of Westphalia not only closed the Thirty Years’ War but also inaugurated a new international order driven by the interaction of territorial sovereign states. Benno Teschke, through this thorough and incisive critique, argues that this is not the case. Domestic ‘social property relations’ shaped international relations in continental Europe down to 1789 and even beyond. The dynastic monarchies that ruled during this time differed from their medieval predecessors in degree and form of personalization, but not in underlying dynamic. 1648, therefore, is a false caesura in the history of international relations. For real change we must wait until relatively recent times and the development of modern states and true capitalism. In effect, it’s not until governments are run impersonally, with no function other than the exercise of its monopoly on violence, that modern international relations are born.
Many cities have adopted welcoming strategies, branding themselves as cities of welcome or of solidarity. Urban scholarship to date has interpreted these efforts either under the rubric of municipal governance reform or urban citizenship, frameworks which both sideline the role of civil society and social movements of refugees. Since these actors play crucial roles in negotiating the terms of solidarity, hospitality and inclusion, this paper brings together research perspectives from urban governance, civil society, and (migrant) mobilization literatures to gain a better understanding of the collaborative/competitive interactions between the key players engaged in this urban policy arena. This discussion reveals that the evolving practices and interrelations of municipalities, civil society actors and social movements of refugees imply opportunities, but also difficulties in building substantively welcoming arrival structures, highlighting the contested meaning of terms such as “solidarity city” in the contemporary constellation.
Asylum laws cannot function without spatial technologies and practices. Refugee camps, detention centers and accommodation facilities, in addition to dispersal and residential obligations, highlight the spatiality of asylum laws and policies. They are not only designed to regulate forced migrants' movement and place them in alternative legal and spatial regimes, but they are also spaces where migrants’ legal rights are violated and access to integrating institutions are restricted. Based on findings from Germany and the United States, this paper argues that current asylum regimes are characterized by a system of legal-spatial violence; a process in which a form of violence is embedded in law, implemented through policies and formal processes, and realized and reproduced spatially. This entanglement between the law, space, and violence involves complex and paradoxical processes: immobility and internal bordering practices (where forced migrants are confined and their movement is limited), as well as forced mobility and situations of unbordering (where movement is forced, and where spatial restrictions are either repealed or replaced). These processes fragment and prolong the trajectories of forced migration. Compulsion, displacement, and the dispossession of rights—which constitute the process of forced migration—do not cease on entering Germany or the United States, but can continue. The rationale for legal-spatial violence goes beyond the securitization of forced migration and the control and deterrence of forced migrants, and also includes economic logic and profit making.
The Solidarity City movement that has emerged in Europe over the past few years shows the growing significance of urban policy coalitions for the struggle against the rightward drift and the ever more restrictive border and migration policies at the national and European level. In this context, the notion of urban citizenship has become an important point of reference when it comes to the question of how cities can counter repressive European border regimes and foster access to rights for non-citizens and cultural pluralism on a local level. Drawing from the authors’ empirical research on various European cities, as well as from the literature on global social inequalities, urban citizenship and radical cosmopolitanism, this chapter investigates the Solidarity City networks and the ways they envision new forms of citizenship.
Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant enquiry into the question of nationalism won further acclaim for his 'colossal stature … his incontrovertible excellence as an historian, and his authoritative and highly readable prose'. Recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics have since reinforced the central importance of nationalism in the history of political evolution and upheaval. This second edition has been updated in the light of those events, with a final chapter addressing the impact of the dramatic changes that have taken place. It also includes additional maps to illustrate nationalities, languages and political divisions across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This article recounts the story of sanctuary city organizing in Ottawa, Canada to explore the politics and potential of a transformative approach to sanctuary rooted in anti-prison activism and abolitionist feminist thought. More specifically, we have adapted the abolitionist framework of reformist reform and non-reformist reform and applied it to sanctuary city organizing. Analysis of the Ottawa case draws on research with frontline service providers and migrant justice organizers, as well as our own organizing experiences, observations, and adaptive practices as sanctuary city campaigners. The paper also elaborates on the forms of solidarity and citizenship that have emerged or have the potential to emerge in the context of a non-state centric vision of sanctuary that prioritizes grassroots transformative practices over municipal policy and that do not bolster or legitimize the state’s capacity to deport, punish, and exclude.
Individuals in agrarian societies are attached to the land, so those who control the land control the people who work it. Control over land was gained through military power, which gave them political power. Their control over land also gave them economic power, so political and economic power were held by the same people. This produced a feudal system of governance, and coordination among individuals was accomplished more by control than by voluntary cooperation. Those who held power used it to maintain their positions in the hierarchy of power. Political motives dominated economic motives, so agrarian societies are characterized by stagnation rather than progress. Because it is difficult for people to exit an agrarian society, rulers have more authoritarian political control.
Urban refugees are widely viewed as anomalous—people who stand outside a refugee regime which, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is based upon rural encampment. This article considers why states and humanitarian agencies view urban refugees in this way. It examines the history of the refugee as an urban person and the recent change in perspective which has enforced a rural norm. It considers the extreme pressures placed upon displaced people in the city and the consequences for communities which contest their marginal status.
We are confronting today in many global borderscapes (including the US/Mexico borderlands and the Mediterranean Sea) a criminalization of humanitarian intervention in support of people in transit. This raises important questions with respect to the critique of the governmental turn of the ‘humanitarian reason’ articulated in recent years by critical border and migration scholars. This article discusses such questions through an engagement with the issue of the ‘human’ inspired by black abolitionist thinkers. It also dwells on the transformations of the maritime border regime in the Mediterranean, emphasizing the relevance of the stubbornness of migrants challenging that regime and examining emerging forms of border activism and the practices of solidarity they embody. A discussion of freedom of movement as a political project concludes the article.
The article argues that the governance of immigration, especially at local level, can be considered a “battleground” involving diverse actors. Beyond the idea of a “negotiated order” as the result of the interaction among actors (mainly institutional) in the multilevel governance framework, the management of asylum at a local level is the outcome of conflict and cooperation, of alternative views and political actions, of official policies and practical help, of formal statements and informal practices. The practical governance of immigration and asylum is not only determined at an institutional level; it is also influenced by this mobilization on the part of civil society.
In order to reconstruct the dynamics of this “battleground”, the article first analyses the different attitudes of Italian municipalities to asylum seekers, and in particular the mobilization of local governments against refugees’ reception. It then shows by contrast how civil society actors mobilize either in favour of the reception of refugees and immigrants with dubious legal status or against them. Thereafter, among civil society actors, it focuses in particular on “supporters” acting on behalf of asylum seekers in various ways, for moral, political or religious reasons, and on the issue of their political engagement.
The liberation wars in the Portuguese colonies were not merely local processes, circumscribed to the geographical areas where armed combat was taking place. This article sheds light on this phenomenon by examining the ways in which the PAIGC’s struggle, combined with Amilcar Cabral’s political performance, influenced the activism of anticolonialist committees in France, particularly in Paris. After mapping out the committees’ actions and discourses concerning the PAIGC – as well as their broader critique of Portuguese colonialism and authoritarianism – the article analyses a set of cultural artefacts (books, plays, etc) produced by these groups which helped disseminate the Guinean war at an international level. It also discusses the articulation between the committees’ demands and their positions vis-à-vis the politics of France and Portugal, as well as their wider denunciation of western imperialism and the Cold War system. The aim is to assess the interplay between domestic and internationalist agendas, demonstrating how, on the one hand, the French committees’ rhetoric and actions were influenced by the liberation movements and, on the other hand, the support for the African struggle served a purpose in their political strategy at home.
In 2008, findings from the People’s Inquiry into Detention were published as Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia. The People’s Inquiry, led by social work academics in Australia, exposed injustices within Australia’s privatised detention network for asylum seekers and interrogated policies and practices that ensued since mandatory immigration detention was introduced by legislation in 1992. With reference to the global context, the article presents a snapshot of policies and practices revealed by the People’s Inquiry that were considered antithetical to human rights and discusses this extensive undertaking within a broader context of asylum seeker social movements and professional advocacy endeavours that continue as harsh policies escalate. The article speaks to the resilience of the asylum seeker movement, often against the odds, a movement that includes responsive and tenacious professional groups.
This editors’ introduction examines the genealogies of sanctuary as a space—and movement-based oppositional practice, one that contests the sovereign power of the nation-state and the structural roots of multiple, intersecting oppressions. Like each contribution to this special issue, the introduction challenges readers to reconsider the meanings and possibilities of sanctuary movements across time and place. It raises contexts and themes that are investigated in the issue’s contributions on the struggles of migrant communities in a context of increasingly militarized borders, Indigenous practices of radical hospitality, GLBTQ spaces of refuge, policing reform efforts, and practices of civil disobedience. This introduction looks to both the history and the radical future of sanctuary.
International migration and refugee scholars have made extensive use of the concept of solidarity in light of the recent arrival of migrants and refugees in Europe and elsewhere. They observe multi-dimensional solidarity practices and interpret solidarity from a variety of disciplinary and conceptual angles with different philosophical underpinnings. In this review article, I assume a geographical perspective to argue for a Marxian-Hegelian understanding of solidarity as a process of subject formation. I illustrate how solidarity relates to a politics of place that shapes migrant struggles in urban contexts and that promise to facilitate Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization in settler societies.
Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the 1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the East Coast have, meanwhile, focused on Ellis Island, which opened in 1892. In this groundbreaking work, Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy, offering the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century, nativists in New York and Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident to Europe, Canada, or other American states. These policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. By investigating state officials’ practices of illegal removal, including the overseas deportation of citizens, this book reveals how the state-level treatment of destitute immigrants set precedents for the use of unrestricted power against undesirable aliens. It also traces the transnational lives of the migrants from their initial departure from Ireland and passage to North America through their expulsion from the United States and postdeportation lives in Europe, showing how American deportation policy operated as part of the broader exclusion of nonproducing members from societies in the Atlantic world. By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice against the Irish and, more essentially, economic concerns about their poverty in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.
Taking into consideration three levels of government (regional, national, and sub-national) that potentially offer protection to refugees, this paper is concerned with changes initiated by the 2016 Presidential Regulation on Handling Foreign Refugees. This regulation has delegated more responsibility for managing refugees to the sub-national levels of administration in Indonesia, which, like other nations in the Southeast Asia, has been reluctant to provide protection for refugees or any options for their integration into society. The reason for this is that, despite many vociferous demands in favor of a 'regional solution' in the aftermath of the 2015 Andaman Sea Crisis, most attempts ended up in abeyance. Following suit with the so-called 'local turn' in migration studies, which increased attention to the local dimensions of refugee protection due to the receding capacities in the major actors involved both in global refugee protection and international migration management, we direct attention to the sub-national level of refugee management in Indonesia using as a case study the city of Makassar, which has hitherto enjoyed a fairly positive reputation for welcoming refugees. By examining the current living conditions of asylum seekers and refugees in Makassar and comparing them to other places in Indonesia, we ask whether the concept of 'sanctuary city' is applicable to a non-Western context and, in doing so, hope to enhance current discussions of creating alternative models for refugee protection beyond the national and regional level.
What does it mean to be an American? The United States defines itself by its legal freedoms; it cannot tell its citizens who to be. Nevertheless, where possible, it must separate citizen from alien. In so doing, it defines the desirable characteristics of its citizens in immigration policy, spelling out how many and, most importantly, what sorts of persons can enter the country with the option of becoming citizens. Over the past century, the U.S. Congress argued first that prospective citizens should be judged in terms of race, then in terms of politics, then of ideology, then of wealth and skills. Each argument arose in direct response to a perceived foreign threat--a threat that was, in the government's eyes, racial, political, ideological, or economic. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty traces how and why public arguments about immigrants changed over time, how some arguments came to predominate and shape policy, and what impact these arguments have had on how the United States defines and defends its sovereignty. Cheryl Shanks offers readers an explanation for immigration policy that is more distinctly political than the usual economic and cultural ones. Her study, enriched by the insights of international relations theory, adds much to our understanding of the notion of sovereignty and as such will be of interest to scholars of international relations, American politics, sociology, and American history.
New forms of solidarity are being shaped as a response to the European “refugee crisis.” National governments have not been able to implement any sustainable solution to the crisis, but the solidarity movement has been very active. This book offers a conceptualization of three types of solidarity—autonomous, civic, and institutional solidarity—and applies it to three case studies, which illustrate the emergence of different forms of solidarity: the City Plaza Hotel in Athens, the Danish “friendly neighbors,” and Barcelona as refuge city.
Óscar García Agustín is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Martin Bak Jørgensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark.