Exclusion Of Migrants Research Articles

Undeserving and Undesirable: Representing New Migrants and Refugees in Costa Rican Media.

Since 2014, Costa Rica has faced a 'migration crisis' tied to the arrival of new asylum seekers from El Salvador, Venezuela and Colombia and transit migrants from Africa, Haiti and Cuba. This article examines representations of these groups through a qualitative analysis of newspaper coverage (2011-2017). Representations of these groups build on existing threat narratives to position transit migrants and asylum seekers as inherently dangerous, undeserving of public concern, and a drain on Costa Rican hospitality. These framings reinforce social and political boundaries and justify the exclusion of migrants and refugees from public resources.

Mechanisms of migrant exclusion: Temporary labour, precarious noncitizenship, and technologies of detention

Abstract‘Mechanisms of Migrant Exclusion’ focuses on the exclusionary measures that migrant workers confront. Although migration studies have long attended to various social and structural systems of exclusion, for instance, xenophobia and nativism (De Genova, 2005,https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387091; Golash‐Boza, 2011,https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203123928, and 2015,https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479894666.001.0001), recent global shifts in immigration politics and temporary labour regimes have increased the urgency of attending to the rise of global and transnational systems or regimes of exclusion. Internationally, noncitizens have grown increasingly vulnerable to detention and deportation (Mountz, 2020, 10.5749/j.ctv15d8153), whereas migrant contract workers continue to be systematically denied rights and protections in the labour market (Strauss and McGrath, 2017, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.01.008). These mechanisms of exclusion illustrate the range of limitations faced by migrants, particularly those who are undocumented, refugees, or temporary workers.

The spatio‐temporal ordering of migrant detention: Exclusion, hierarchy, and human disposal

AbstractThis paper analyses the spatialities and temporalities of a U.S. migrant detention centre, to demonstrate the entanglement of migrant exclusion with dehumanisation and racialisation. I examine spatial orderings such as isolation, segregation, and regulated mobilities in detention alongside the arbitrary and deadening tempos and rhythms of detention. I find patterns of inclusionary exclusion through which the “consent” of detained people to their own deportation is conditioned by dehumanising spatio‐temporalities. These patterns are the product of the highly standardised, regulated, and ordered spatio‐temporalities of detention. I ultimately argue that the spatial and temporal ordering of detention, in all of its standardisation, is a racialising project that rationalises exclusion and dehumanisation, placing responsibility for degradation, deportation, and even premature death, upon those in detention.

Human Rights of Forced Migrants During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Opportunity for Mobilization and Solidarity.

The question of human mobility is inextricably tied to the COVID-19 pandemic that started in late 2019 and whose effects continue to unfold. Human mobility—especially with global advances in transportation and interconnectedness—is an important factor in the spread of the pandemic. Yet, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the millions of people forced to migrate for safety and economic reasons has received little attention. In this article, we provide an overview of human rights challenges that forced migrants currently face during this pandemic. While we do not address all dimensions of the impact COVID-19, we highlight several troubling situations that have emerged for refugees and asylum seekers. These include entry restrictions into some countries that had formerly welcomed asylum seekers, overt and covert forms of exclusion of migrants from labor markets due to rising unemployment and economic hardship, and implementing new deportation policies, as well as new exclusionary policies for immigrants who would have been authorized to work in past. Without concerted efforts to amplify solidarity with all forced migrants and ensure their human rights, discriminatory and restrictionist policies enacted in the Global North over the past decade will become entrenched. As a result, fewer refugees and asylum seekers will be accorded protection and continue to face violence and persecution in their home countries.

Black Feminist Ethnography and the Racial Politics of Porter Labor in Ghana

AbstractBlack scholars have long been at the forefront of ethnographic accounts of race and racism. Still, ethnicity rather than race is a preferred valence for understanding identity politics in Africa. The marginalization of African and diasporic women's intellectual output on race and gender on the continent contributes to a vision of Africans as perennial subjects and overlooks a rich discourse on global antiblackness and white supremacy. With ethnographic attention to Ghanaian women migrants known as kayayoo/kayayei (head porter[s]), this article draws on the work of Black women scholars – and African feminists in particular—to interrogate the racial politics of gender in Africa. In addition to analyzing the enforcement of class hierarchies, I examine how migrant exclusion at Accra's Makola Market reflects racialized sentiments about rural Ghana that are associated with slavery and colonial sensibilities about modernity. To meet these aims, I draw on somatic praxis of radical listening and haptic experience to demonstrate how affective relationships can productively theorize race and exclusion in Ghana.

Left Out: How Political Ideology Affects Support for Migrants in Colombia

Do perceived political views of migrants affect their treatment? This question has been neglected in studies of migrant reception. The overlap between ethnicity and partisanship makes it hard to disentangle political fears from other status and identity concerns. We leverage a case in which migrants come from a similar ethno-linguistic background to explore the role of political fears. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey with over 1,000 Colombians and 1,600 Venezuelans in Colombia, we find that Colombians view Venezuelan migrants as left-wing even though actual Venezuelan migrants are more right-wing than their Colombian hosts. These political misperceptions are consequential: Colombians who view migrants as left-wing are less likely to support welcoming border policies. In a conjoint experiment, Colombians strongly oppose the settlement of left-wing migrants in their communities. One implication is that societies can construct out-groups along political lines when the ethnic and cultural bases for migrant exclusion are weaker.

Rural Geographies of Refugee Activism: The Expanding Spaces of Sanctuary in the UK

The steep rise in the number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe in 2015 prompted widespread pro-migrant political mobilisation in the UK, including in rural areas. This article argues that more account should be taken of rural sanctuary movements in academic and popular understandings of pro-migrant activism, which remain largely urban-centric. It examines why the growth of rural sanctuary movements is significant, identifies how the distinctive qualities of rural communities shape the configuration of social relationships and networks within them, and contributes to scholarship on the nexus between rurality, migration and activism. In so doing, the article demonstrates the unique opportunities that rural communities offer to address social issues such as migrant exclusion and disadvantage.

Protestors’ Emotional Work in Contexts of Marginalisation: The Emancipation of “Forced Migrants” in Germany

AbstractThis article explores the relation between migrants’ political subjectivity and the emotional dimension of protest. Although a vast literature analyses these dimensions, few studies have explored how social movements aim to trigger processes of political subjectivity formation and emotional transformations in contexts in which activists face marginalisation. I propose to analyse the effects of such a context through the focus on a movement mobilising against the exclusion of migrants in Germany. I show how activists strategically construct a political subjectivity based on the “forced migration” and “resistance” framework and aim to trigger feelings of emancipation among participants. At a more general level, I explore the transformative dimension of protest through the analysis of how activists strategically aim to transform negative and deactivating emotions (isolation, humiliation, and fear) into positive and activating emotions (loyalty, determination, and pride) in the course of collective action.

From Legal Mobilization to Effective Migrants’ Rights: The Italian Case

The article analyses the process of legal mobilization for migrants’ rights and investigates how and with what effects, measured in terms of obtaining general policy response and ensuring implementation, legal actors and in particular civil society organizations have mobilized EU, international and domestic legislation on discrimination to promote migrants’ rights in Italy. It focuses in particular on two issues: access to employment in the public sector and access to welfare. Both issues have generated significant levels of litigation in domestic courts, with increasing involvement of civil society organizations. In relation to both, national legislation has been amended, in accordance with EU law, allowing access to employment in the public sector and extending the area of those that have the right to access to social welfare under equal conditions to categories of migrants protected under EU law. The article outlines the EU, International and domestic legislation on non-discrimination and equality for migrants, provides an overview of how litigation has been used to challenge in court the exclusion of migrants from employment in the public sector and welfare, tracks the process that brought to the reform and litigation in the aftermath highlighting the effects of litigation as a means for policy response and implementation. Discrimination, multilevel protection, migrants, welfare, employment, legal mobilization, policy response, implementation, civil society, courts.

Forced Displacement of Central American Communities: Human Rights Violations in Their Transit through Mexico

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore the relationships between forced migration of Central American communities and the global and national exclusion of migrants in their transit through Mexico on their way to the US. It is divided into the following sections: a) description of the main causes of Central America migration; b) responses of the Mexican government from the 1980s to 2018; c) the role of organized crime and the official “war on drugs” (2007-2018) in human rights violations to Central American migrant; and lastly, d) some changes in the Mexican State regarding the management of Central American migration. Although the act of migration is intrinsically human, it has been hard to conceive migration as human rights in the current conversations. “The refugee and migration crisis,” have received unprecedented political and media attention around the world. Transnational migration is one of the core elements of late modernity given the historical acceleration of global processes. There are currently about 244 million people who have migrated from their country of origin, (which is three percent of the world’s population). One third of global migration happens in a south-north direction, while the rest happens in a south-south direction. The focus of this article is to describe and analyze aspects of Central American migration to/through Mexico, human rights violations experienced in transit, and different responses of the Mexican State to the “crisis of migration.”

‘If he dies with the papers of his brother, his brother will be considered dead’. Moral understandings of health professionals about the use of deception to overcome restrictions in access to healthcare

Although scholars in bioethics usually consider the exclusion of migrants from basic healthcare as unjust, it remains unclear how health professionals should ethically deal with policies restricting access to healthcare for undocumented migrants. Debates on offering less than the most beneficial healthcare have been limited to contributions on ethical bedside rationing. This article draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews that explore health professional’s acceptance, as well as their willingness to resort to the use of deception to secure third-party payer approval for undocumented migrants. The results show that health professionals (1) are sceptical about both the possibility and desirability of verifying whether a patient’s declarations are deceitful in the setting of a consultation, but (2) are reluctant to use deception themselves to circumvent government policies restricting access to healthcare for undocumented migrants. We discuss how this approach of ‘relative impartiality’ threatens professional autonomy and conclude that professional associations should play a much more important role in supporting health professionals in relation to healthcare institutions and governments when their members are confronted with specific rationing practices forcing them to provide suboptimal healthcare.

Modelling the impact of migrants on the success of the HIV care and treatment program in Botswana.

Botswana offers publicly financed HIV treatment to citizens, but not migrants, who comprised about 7% of the population in 2016. However, HIV incidence is not declining in proportion to Botswana's HIV response. In 2018, Botswana had 86% of citizens living with HIV diagnosed, 95% of people diagnosed on treatment, and 95% viral suppression among those on treatment. We hypothesised that continued exclusion of migrants is hampering reduction of HIV incidence in Botswana. Hence, we modelled the impact of including migrants in Botswana's HIV response on achieving 90-90-90 and 95-95-95 Fast-Track targets by 2020 and 2030, respectively. The Optima HIV model, with demographic, epidemiological, and behavioural inputs, was applied to citizens of and migrants to Botswana. Projections of new HIV infections and HIV-related deaths were compared for three scenarios to the end of 2030: (1) continued status quo for HIV testing and treatment coverage, and maintenance of levels of linkage to care, loss to follow-up, and viral suppression among citizens and migrants (baseline); (2) with scaled-up budget, optimised to achieve 90-90-90 and 95-95-95 Fast-Track targets by 2020 and 2030, respectively, for citizens only; and (3) scaled-up optimised budget to achieve these targets for both citizens and migrants. A baseline of 172,000 new HIV infections and 8,400 HIV-related deaths was projected over 2020-2030. Scaling up to achieve targets among citizens only averted an estimated 48,000 infections and 1,700 deaths. Achieving targets for both citizens and migrants averted 16,000 (34%) more infections and 442 (26%) more deaths. Scaling up for both populations reduced numbers of new HIV infections and deaths by 44% and 39% respectively compared with 2010 levels. Treating migrants when scaling up in both populations was estimated to cost USD 74 million over 2020-2030. Providing HIV services to migrants in Botswana could lead to further reductions in HIV incidence and deaths. However, even with an increased, optimised budget that achieves 95-95-95 targets for both citizens and migrants by 2030, the 90% incidence reduction target for 2020 will be missed. Further efficiencies and innovations will be needed to meet HIV targets in Botswana.

Growing Visibility: Migration and Transformations in Saint Petersburg’s Linguistic Landscape

Transformations in the linguistic makeup of Russian cities resulting from massive— in comparison with the Soviet period—migration of nonnative speakers, often with low proficiency in Russian, can be fast; acknowledgement of these transformations by society, however, demands more time. Attitudes to actual urban multilingualism are determined by the domineering monolingual ideology demanding communication only in Russian. The social inequality of native and nonnative speakers becomes apparent if we consider how different languages spoken in the city are reflected in its linguistic landscape, in other words, different written signs, both formal and informal. Saint Petersburg’s linguistic landscape underrepresents the languages of labor migrants; on the rare occasions when these languages are used, signs in Chinese (not targeting Chinese tourists) and in Uzbek can be found in places hidden from the eyes of general public. However, this trend is gradually changing; new practices drawing local citizens and migrants into interactions are emerging. This article aims at revealing the situations making migrants and their multilingual existence visible to the receiving community; it focuses not on the exclusion of migrants from the linguistic landscape but rather on new developing practices of contact and urban domains favoring such practices. The article is based on Saint Petersburg’s linguistic landscape (signs, unofficial announcements, advertising, etc.) as a primary source; as additional sources it uses interviews with labor migrants and focus groups with local citizens discussing multilingual communication, everyday linguistic practices, and public representation of languages in urban space. Ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis (ELLA), focusing on the context of communication, is used as a methodological approach to analyzing the data. Article in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-1-48-80

Work and Family Life among Migrant Factory Workers in China and Vietnam

ABSTRACT Through on-site interviewing, a comparative study has been carried out about migrant factory workers in industrialised parts of China’s Guangdong province and in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. Even though China and Vietnam possess similar legacies of socialist transformation and have household registration regulations that restrict rural migrants’ access to urban social services and impede their settlement in cities, there exist marked differences in Guangdong and Ho Chi Minh City in migration patterns, factory work conditions and migrant worker family livelihoods. In particular, migrant families in Ho Chi Minh City largely stay intact and tend to settle there permanently, while married migrant workers in Guangdong normally need to split up their families and remain trapped in circular rural–urban migration. As shall be seen, the national and local governments play important roles in determining the inclusion or exclusion of migrants from urban life, the wages they are paid and their standard of living and, most important of all, their children’s access to education. Each of the two countries’ differences in implementing policies is examined and comparatively analysed.

Multilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Migration: A Critical Assessment

AbstractThis essay-review assesses what has been dubbed a hybrid or mobile turn in work on immigration, literature, and language. Analogous to a broader mobility turn in studies of migration, scholars in literature and linguistics emphasize the fluidity, hybridity, and mobility of migrants’ (multi-)lingual practices and literatures, aiming to challenge sedimented ideas about linguistic assimilation or nationalism and monolingualism. While finding merit in these works, this essay argues that celebrations of migrant multilingualism and linguistic hybridity also can work in tandem with the racialization, economic exploitation, and exclusion of migrants. This is because certain forms of migrant multilingualism become forms of human capital under neoliberalism, while other forms of linguistic diversity or fluidity are, at best, made illegible or, at worst, used to racialize otherwise ideal neoliberal migrant subjects. Tracing how arguments for linguistic fluidity and hybridity are folded into complex and stratified forms of neoliberal subjectivity, multiculturalism, and economic value, the essay illustrates the necessity of situating studies of immigrant language practices and language policy within broader political, economic and world-historical contexts such as global racial capitalism.

Recognition in urban climate justice: marginality and exclusion of migrants in Indian cities

This paper explores the recognitional dimensions of urban climate change justice in a development context. Through the lens of migrants in the Indian cities of Bengaluru and Surat, we highlight how experiences of environmental marginality can be attributed to a lack of recognition of citizenship rights and informal livelihood strategies. Specifically, the drivers of non-recognition in this situation relate to broken social networks and a lack of political voice, as well as heightened exposure to emerging climate risks and economic precariousness. We find that migrants experience extreme forms of climate injustice as they are often invisible to the official state apparatus, or worse, are actively erased from cities through force or discriminatory development policies. Current theories must therefore engage more seriously with issues of recognition to enable more radical climate justice in cities.

Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa

ABSTRACTEvidence suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South Africa’s democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain of struggle.

Slippery discrimination: a review of the drivers of migrant and minority housing disadvantage

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to identify housing disadvantages faced by migrants and ethnic minorities; the legal, policy and market forces that shape them; how they have developed over time; how they are manifest nationally and locally; and how they are being responded to locally by those concerned with mitigating them. The paper thereby intends to provide a foundation to inform future research and policy and to engage with local actors to develop ways of overcoming migrant housing disadvantage and challenging discrimination. The paper finds that the interplay of legal changes, which have increasingly differentiated migrants since the 1940s, and shifting housing markets, has driven exclusion of migrants and minorities such that considerable disadvantage is revealed by analysis of census data. However, attention to local specificity provides evidence of positive responses. Examples are presented in relation to access to affordable housing, enactment of homelessness duties and community actions. Methodologically, this paper highlights the importance of simultaneous consideration of migration and ethnicity as markers of difference and exclusion, and the potential of co-production approaches for socially meaningful research concerned with inequalities.

Remembering Spanish Migration to Germany in Late Francoism: Migrant, Embodied Memories and Imagining the Futurity of the "Not-Yet Community" in El tren de la memoria

This article argues that El tren de la memoria, through its emphasis on female witnesses, confronts and “works through” personal and collective memories of Spanish economic migration to West Germany during the Franco regime. El tren de la memoria functions as a mode of witnessing, and mediates between subjective and collective experiences of the migration. The documentary invites us to re-assess the cinematic archive and to rethink the historical past, so we can foreground the political ontology of the documentary image in terms of its historiographical function. I depart from an exclusive sociological focus in order to explore how the migratory is articulated in, and transmitted through, the documentary form. In addition, I ask whether El tren de la memoria enables us to reflect on whether elements of past totalitarian violence could still seep into the sovereign power of capitalist democracies. While El tren de la memoria may seem to be essentially an historical documentary, this article argues that it is far more; it demands a rethinking of migrant subjectivity, which reveals an irreduc-ible alterity always already constitutive of the self. Thus the documentary does not simply reflect reality, but contributes to the imagination or transformation of reality and its structures of discrimination and exclusion of migrants. El tren de la memoria encourages us to imagine a community based on singularities, which share a world inhabited by plurality, a community in which our relation to alterity is based on our common finitude.

From exclusion to expression in A Sud di Lampedusa and Come un uomo sulla terra: Visualizing detention centres along Italy-bound migrant routes

Abstract The article analyses two Italian documentaries – A sud di Lampedusa (South of Lampedusa) by Andrea Segre et al. (2006) and Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth) by Andrea Segre et al. (2008) – whose novelty lies in their focus on the Sahara Desert crossing of undocumented migrants instead of the more common Mediterranean crossing, and in the latter film, the recollection of the traumatic experience of the detention in Africa once they arrive in Italy. The films reverse the effacement typical of news reportages by giving direct voice and agency to the migrants through interviews, or also including the migrants in the filmmaking process. In denouncing the trans-national government-assisted control and exclusion of migrants, the two documentaries visualize through silence, storytelling, and props what remains otherwise ‘undocumentable’ – the detention centres – of which the article offers a brief history as places of ‘legal exception’ both in Africa and Italy.