Migration and Selective Memory in Fortress Europe

Abstract

Migration and Selective Memory in Fortress Europe Kristen Hill Maher (bio) Guests and Aliens, by Saskia Sassen. New York: The New Press, 1999. 202 pp. $25. Given a common misconception that there are endless numbers of people from poor states clamoring to enter rich economies, immigrant-receiving countries share a crisis mentality about immigration control. The primary purpose of Saskia Sassen’s Guests and Aliens is to historicize and counter this perception of crisis. Through an examination of the past two centuries of migration history in Europe, she demonstrates that the movement of migrants has been predictably patterned rather than an “indiscriminate flow of human beings from misery to wealth.” She reminds host countries that they have themselves contributed to migrant flows, often by inviting workers as guests, and therefore share responsibility for integrating settled migrants rather than disparaging them as unwanted aliens. In addition to actively recruiting guestworkers, host societies have also contributed to migration flows by promoting the deregulation and internationalization of economies since the 1980s. As Sassen has also argued in an earlier work, the globalizing economy has generated paradoxical policies in relation to borders: borders have been opened to flows of goods, capital, and [End Page 191] information, but simultaneously fortressed against flows of immigrants and refugees. In Europe, this fortressing has increasingly occurred at the boundaries of the European Union while internal boundaries between states have been dismantled. The popular refrain among political leaders in the European Union is that European states have had some history of emigration but have never been countries of immigration. Sassen’s new book takes issue with these claims and with fortressing immigration policies more generally, directing her argument at multiple audiences. At one level, her message is directed at European policymakers: it is time to move beyond the claim that these are not countries of immigration, given the extensive tradition of migration in Europe. It also targets U.S. policymakers, encouraging them to follow the European model of accommodating the free movement of peoples through multilateral agreements and policy innovations. The history Sassen traces is complex and detailed, but a number of moments stand out as critical. She reminds us, for instance, that the migrations of seasonal and craft workers prior to the nineteenth century were welcome events, and that most governments imposed restrictions on emigration in order to maintain population levels. Rural economies in the 1800s then underwent a number of transformations, including population growth, the introduction of capital, new ownership structures, and a displacement of rural industry by large-scale industrial production. While these developments generated migration flows both within Europe and overseas, their effect was geographically and demographically uneven. Not all peasants became migrants, and some rural areas maintained agricultural production while attracting short-term labor. Much of the migration occurred in highly patterned ways, with workers returning to the same places each year via the same routes, at least until later in the century, when proletarianized migrants were more likely to be displaced from any permanent home. In the early twentieth century, the consolidation of the nation-state as well as the nation-state system strongly shaped migration. Together, these factors produced not only the state regulation of foreigners but also the very concept of “the refugee.” That is, the position of a refugee as a displaced person lacking entitlement to the rights of a national only makes sense within a political world organized into a system of mutually exclusive nation-states. This development of the nation-state system was critical, given the [End Page 192] massive refugee flows that began with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. By the end of World War I, Western European states began to perceive a full-blown refugee crisis, made even more pronounced when North America—a common destination for European refugees—began restricting immigration in the 1920s. At this point, Western European states largely closed their borders to Jews and other stateless persons. The widespread economic depression and unemployment of the 1930s only increased this isolationism, which continued until after the end of World War II, with tragic consequences for many of those displaced and...