The militarization of islands and migration: Tracing human mobility through US bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific

In this paper, we argue that the confinement of people on island military bases, whether narrated as humanitarian rescue, migration management, refugee resettlement, or militarized border enforcement, is an imperial process of ruination that impairs human possibility and erodes access to rights. Furthermore, the government's categorization of mobile people – as refugees, displaced, detainees, or migrants – informs the naming of these spaces, the bureaucratic and legal processes that they are subjected to, and their treatment (by local communities, federal authorities, the media, and the law). Empirical material is drawn from qualitative research conducted on US migration control in the Caribbean and Pacific. We identify spatial patterns of militarization operating across these sites, wherein migration is intertwined with enforcement, confinement, and militarization.     

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.     

Introduction: Italy and the Euro–Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’: national reception,lived experiences,E.U. pressures

The introduction discusses the origins of this themed section of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, based on a 2017 interdisciplinary conference about migration and the migrant experience in Italy. The co-editors recognized early on that the U.S. media was paying inadequate attention to migrant landings in Italy during the so-called refugee crisis around 2015–16, and engaged scholars active in Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. to provide further nuance to this particular migratory flow, and in particular to question how the term ‘crisis’ was used in describing it. In response to a public debate increasingly prone to alarmism, the articles produced after the conference investigate the contradictions of the Italian reception system of migrants and refugees; the often glossed-over labour, race, and gender aspects of the flows; and the critical conditions of the Mediterranean crossing as represented in film and theatre. The contributions specifically bring forward the migrants’ voices to challenge the exclusionary practices adopted in Italy and Europe in favour of structured legal channels, and to reveal the growing crisis of E.U. democratic principles.     

Binding Gestures: a customary norm regarding the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?

ABSTRACT

In March of 2017, officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security publicly acknowledged a proposed policy of forced separation of unauthorized migrant children from their parents. Conceived as a deterrent to other families that might yet contemplate crossing the U.S. southern border, the proposal sought to formalize and expand on similar practices of deterrence already implemented on a more ad hoc basis. By way of a brief examination of the internal logics and implications of deterrence thinking in this context and more broadly, fundamental incompatibilities with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child are revealed. Although the U.S. has not ratified the Convention, I argue that it is nonetheless beholden to a robust and binding customary norm of international law obliging all states to respect its key provisions, including rights that would prohibit the separation of children from their parents as a preemptive measure to deter unauthorized migration.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.     

Hybrid governmentality in practice: Territoriality and biopolitics in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This article discusses how the Rohingyas – a forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I argue – a. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include - labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.     

Sanctuary Revisited: Central American Refugee Assistance in the History of Church-based Immigrant Advocacy

Abstract

Extant literature on the U.S. Sanctuary movement of the 1980s mainly facilitates an understanding of the movement as part of liberal religious resistance to the Reagan-Bush Administrations' policy in Central America. However, I argue that Sanctuary should also be understood as pivotal to church involvement in a longer lineage of social activism that can be called immigrant advocacy. Church-based immigrant advocates (CBIAs) were in short supply until the end of World War II, when Christian clergy and laity used biblical calls for hospitality to argue for the admission of thousands of displaced persons from Europe. Over the next quarter-century, many CBIAs provided services to political refugees admitted under State Department criteria. But as CBIAs grew frustrated with double standards in refugee admissions, they began to develop discourses legitimating hospitality work outside of a nation-state framework. In tracing the history of church-based immigrant advocacy, Sanctuary indexes the juncture at which many Christian organizations widened their operations beyond the standard of sovereignty to accommodate undocumented refugees as well as immigrants motivated by economic need.     

Towards a countertopography of intimate war: contouring violence and resistance in a South Sudanese diaspora

Recent feminist geographic scholarship insists we rethink domestic violence as ‘intimate war’. Using this concept I analyze narratives of violence and resistance articulated by U.S.-resettled South Sudanese women and collected in the wake of a fatal incidence of domestic violence in 2005. One of a spate of intimate partner murders that shook the community at this time, this tragic event spurred debates about shifting gender norms, the stresses and opportunities of life in the diaspora, and the irradicable legacies of war. Bringing Pain and Staeheli's ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ to bear on this particularly violent, momentary and publicized aggression, I situate it within a more complex, quotidian, and dynamic terrain of power. In line with feminist political geography, this analysis complicates scalar distinctions of body, home and nation-state, demonstrating the common foundations of ‘private’, domestic and ‘public’, state-sanctioned violences. Inspired by Katz’s countertopographical approach, I extend our understanding of intimate war by contouring moments of violence and resistance in a diasporic context, over the lifecourse of refugee women, and across their sites of flight, displacement and resettlement. Tracing the mobilities of intimate war in this way productively reveals the spatial and temporal, as well as scalar, folds that may form part of its foundation.     

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction,Refugee Survival,and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi,Cape Town,and Paris

Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.     

Undocumented Immigration and Host‐Country Welfare: Competition Across Segmented Labor Markets*

Abstract. In this paper's model, undocumented workers are endogenously sorted into secondary labor markets. When further illegal immigration occurs, some new migrants follow their fellows into already migrant‐dominated jobs, lowering migrant wages and raising real incomes of host‐country labor and capital. Some submarkets switch from employing legal workers to employing migrants, lowering demand for and wages of legal workers. Undocumented immigration is Pareto‐improving when enforcement reserves primary‐sector jobs for legal workers. Pareto‐dominant policies target the number of migrant‐dominated submarkets, not the number of migrants. This appears consistent with U.S. enforcement practices. The effects of deportations, employer sanctions, and amnesties are explored.     

Role playing: a feminist-geopolitical analysis of the everyday workings of the Mexican state

Participatory methods are increasingly important to geographical research of ‘the everyday,’ yet their viability as a means to understand on-the-ground geopolitical processes has been less explored. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on participatory research in geography and feminist geopolitics by arguing for the use of a specific participatory tool – role play. We present an example of our employment of the technique in a case study on using the method during research with Central American immigrants living in the Mexico–Guatemala border city of Tapachula, Mexico. In doing so, we provide an in-depth examination of the implementation of role play, demonstrating its usefulness in revealing immigrant women's daily experiences with low- to mid-level state actors as they seek to avail themselves of their rights. We conclude that role play is particularly well suited to revealing these experiences due to its encouragement of creativity, embodiment through performance and facilitation of in-depth discussion of difficult subject matter.     

“Like the father's home:” perceived state of the Turkish-Sunni community in Germany

Focusing on a mosque organization, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), this paper engages with the Turkish-Sunni diaspora's complex perception of the ‘state’ in Germany. DITIB is a Sunni-Islam based mosque organization that oversees over 900 mosques across Germany. However, the Turkish-Sunni diaspora does not consider DITIB mosques as simply religious or cultural spaces but instead attributes a highly complex quasi-stateness to it. My field research between 2016 and 2018 reveals that for this community, DITIB reflects an intimate familial version of the Turkish state in Germany. While DITIB has significant connections to the state in Turkey, based on my findings I argue that these connections alone do not explain why the diaspora perceive DITIB like a state. Rather, DITIB's perceived stateness has been constructed through a historical process that brings to the fore diasporic experiences, feelings, and memories centered at the ethnoreligious spaces of mosques. Thus, this research produces new questions for, and theoretical approaches to geographies of states, extending this literature's emphasis on everyday and intimate perspectives. I build on feminist geopolitics and diaspora studies to contribute to this scholarship by analyzing the role of feelings and memories in forming perceptions of the state. I explain how spaces of perceived states become fluid, cross the borders of officially defined national territories, and exceed the classical spaces and embodiment of states. Instead, spaces like mosques come to be perceived like a state through their association with care, unity, and a home. This analysis points to the emotional and memory-based production of what is perceived as a state and how those perceptions are formed.     

Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border

Despite the centrality of Mexico–US border policing to pre‐ and post‐9/11 US immigration geopolitics, perhaps the most significant yet largely ignored immigration‐related fallout of the so‐called war on terrorism has been the extension of interior immigration policing practices away from the southwest border. As I outline in this paper, these interior spaces of immigration geopolitics—nominally said to be about fighting terrorism, but in practice concerned with undocumented labor migration across the Mexico–US border—have not emerged accidentally. Rather, the recent criminalization of immigration law, the sequestering of immigration enforcement from court oversight and the enrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub‐state scales have been actively pursued so as to make interior enforcement newly central to US immigration geopolitics. I argue here that these embryonic spaces of localized immigration geopolitics shed new light on the spatiality of US immigration governance, which has typically been thought of by geographers as active predominantly at the territorial margins of the state. I conclude the paper with some thoughts as to how geographers might rethink the what and where of contemporary US immigration geopolitics.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Policy Climates,Enforcement Rates,and Migrant Behavior: Is Self‐Deportation a Viable Immigration Policy?

U.S. immigration policy has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Previous research has focused on how temporal variation in federal policy has altered the migratory behavior of immigrants. The effect of spatial variation in enforcement remains untested. Relying on the criminological distinction between general and specific deterrence, we argue that high rates of enforcement are unlikely to encourage undocumented immigrants to self‐deport. We also examine the effects cultural and economic immigration policies adopted by the states. Previous research suggests that migrants will choose to remain in states with favorable environments, but this claim has not been directly tested. We draw on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to address these gaps. MMP data are supplemented with government data on federal enforcement obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and measures of state policy. Our findings suggest that higher rates of enforcement and the establishment of negative policy environments do not encourage undocumented immigrants to leave the United States at a higher rate than their documented counterparts do. Rather, high enforcement contexts exaggerate the differences between documented and undocumented migrant behavior, with undocumented migrants staying longer. Liberal state policies have no discernible effect.     

The politics of migration

This editorial introduces the Virtual Special Issue on the Politics of Migration by presenting a review of migration and refugee related articles published in Political Geography. We have identified two major shifts in scope during the last 30 years. First, the scalar focus has changed from nation-state policies to supranational migration agreements and transnational migrant experiences. Second, the theoretical focus has moved from geopolitics to biopolitics. Ten selected articles illustrate three central themes: regulation of migration, practices of border enforcement and migrant experiences.     

Segmented Paths and the Differential Role of Primate Immigrant Centers

New York, Los Angeles, and Miami are primate immigrant centers within the U. S. metropolitan system, attracting new immigrant arrivals as well as serving as focal points for internal migrants. Using the segmented assimilation framework as a foundation, this paper emphasizes the role of geography and migration within the assimilation process. Focusing upon selected origin groups, migrant selectivity and the determinants of migration are evaluated and compared, highlighting the differential role of primate centers. While the New York and Miami metropolitan centers clearly dominate Dominican and Cuban migration systems respectively, the role of primate centers is less clear among other national origin groups.     

Practices of Illegalisation

This article contributes to theorising the often unrecognised continuities between the illegalisation of migrant and refugee mobilities as an effect of lawmaking or other state practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement and the illegalisation of the rights, claims, and juridical status of minoritised citizens. Against a backdrop of resurgent right-wing nationalisms, we pursue this transversal analysis of state practices of illegalisation to draw attention not only to labour subordination and disposability but also the more fundamental relationship between law and terror. The making of such regimes of citizenship takes place in obvious ways at the ostensible outer edges of nation-state territories. They are also replicated in the various spatial arrangements that ensure racialised dispossession within global cities, cities that are better understood as reconfigurations of settler-colonial cities. We argue that the study of practices of illegalisation allows critical poverty scholarship to better discern how sociopolitical categories and classifications that are central to wider processes of marginalisation and domination may arise or be reinforced as effects of the state’s legal productions of illegality.     

From spaces of exception to ‘campscapes’: Palestinian refugee camps and informal settlements in Beirut

The recent literature on the refugee condition and spaces has heavily drawn on Agamben's reflection on ‘bare life’ and the ‘camp’. As refugees are cast out the normal juridical order, their lives are confined to refugee camps, biopolitical spaces that allow for the separation of the alien from the nation. But is the camp the only spatial device that separates qualified and expendable lives? What happens when the space of the camp overlaps with the space of the city? Taking the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut as a case, this study problematises the utilisation of legal prisms and clear-cut distinctions for the understanding of the production of bare life and spaces of exception. Isolated at the time of its establishment, Shatila is today part of the so-called ‘misery belt’. Physical continuities are also reflected by the distribution of the population as both Palestinians and non-Palestinians, including Lebanese, live in Shatila and the surrounding informal settlements. As physical and symbolic boundaries separating the refugee and the citizen blur, I argue that the exception is not only produced through law and its suspension. While legal exceptions place the Palestinians outside the juridical order, other exclusions run along sectarian and socio-economic lines cutting through the Lebanese body. As Shatila and the informal settlements are entangled, a new spatial model of analysis defined as the ‘campscape’ is proposed. Once the exception leaks out of the space of the camp, the campscape becomes the threshold where the refugee, the citizen and other outcasts meet.