Migrant Activism Research Articles

Governing migrants’ health: how activists in Taiwan construct Southeast Asian migrants’ access to (health)care

Access to healthcare among Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan is a pressing concern. Once migrants fall ill, they are at risk of losing jobs and even jeopardizing their legal status to work and stay. While existing studies have shed light on migrants’ experiences of alienation in healthcare, there has been limited attention given to the role of migrant activists in negotiating and mobilizing concepts of health. In this article, I examine how activists mediate migrants’ access to health resources. As migrant organizations step in to care for migrants, they render migrants’ bodies legible and admissible by guiding them through the healthcare system. I suggest that activists wield the power to govern by shaping the ideals of a healthy and morally responsible migrant. Their authority to care also hinges upon crafting narratives of collective wellness that foreground the interdependent relationship between citizens and migrants, elevating migrants’ health into vital projects of governance. Through a critical analysis of discourse and praxis around migrant care, my intention is not only to challenge the narrow focus on migrants’ physical wellbeing but also to cast light on the affects of mediating care and how it shapes meanings and values attributed to migrants’ lives.

Migrant Activists and Cultural Spaces of Anticolonialism in Weimar Berlin

Migrant Activists and Cultural Spaces of Anticolonialism in Weimar Berlin

Along the twilights of care

Abstract This article explores central dimensions of different forms of asymmetric care that fall between the competences of overlapping civil society organizations. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in São Paulo, Brazil, the article follows migrants arriving and integrating across different nodes of reception, including church-based NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and activist housing projects. Overlaps between these different forms of reception, care, and control do not arise only when migrants refer to different organizational structures. Instead, numerous formal and organizational similarities complicate a clear separation of these domains of asymmetric care. By concentrating on incidents when the encounters between migrant activists and Brazilian activists are disturbed, this article traces the mutual irritation of differently positioned actors, who calibrate their moral claims and produce new understandings of “worthiness.”

Territory, rights, and migrant justice: Undocumented first amendment rights, or the deterritorialization of rights access

This paper analyzes the work of the powerful migrant rights organization Migrant Justice, as they exemplify ways in which migrant activists in the U.S. today are challenging the socio-political confines of bordered state territory and are pushing the landscape of rights access in new directions. This work utilizes a year-long ethnography conducted with Migrant Justice as they faced intense targeting and surveillance from immigration authorities, including the use of a covert informant, in response to their successful labor and human rights organizing in the state of Vermont. This work in particular details Migrant Justice’s First Amendment rights lawsuit against the federal government in response to this targeting. Here, Migrant Justice directly challenged the federal government in a groundbreaking lawsuit that saw federal immigration authorities forced to acknowledge constitutional rights for undocumented migrant activists. In this confluence of opposing forces, we of course see egregious abuses against migrant actors, but we also see exemplifications of new and progressively powerful forms of resistance that are posing a specific challenge to the state’s bordered and territorially based limitations on human and civil rights. This work utilizes Stuart Elden’s conception of territory—as a process and a praxis of control—to understand migrant resistance to state-sanctioned exclusion and exploitation and the ways in which these challenges to state power are creating new spaces for political belonging. An analysis in this way allows us to see the work of Migrant Justice as that which increasingly deterritorializes relationships between residents and state power—an undoing of spatial limitations on rights and belonging. Throughout this work, the concept of deterritorialization as a form of migrant resistance is unpacked and defined to understand the full potentials of migrant activism today.

‘Citizenship as incorporated beyond’ – Challenging national citizen–migrant categorisations with transnational (post)colonial relations of incorporating agrifood

ABSTRACT Migrant activists in Bremen, Germany, challenge classifications of people as national citizens or migrants by highlighting the (post)colonial and capitalist relations that have contributed and continue to contribute to this citizen–migrant divide. Based on ethnographic research and using the relational–ontological tools of material semiotics, I concretise these alternative-knowledge claims by tracing two of many entanglements (1) between the EUropean border regime, the exploitation of migrant labour in the agrifood industry, and the enactment of European citizens and companies and (2) with the (post)colonial histories underpinning these exploitative relations. First, I argue that citizen bodies and migrants’ labouring bodies are intimately related in bodily, fleshy ways. Moreover, corporations that pay taxes for national states are materially related to transnational, (post)colonial migrant labour. Second, I contribute to the literature that challenges the notion of independent individual national citizens or states. Considering citizenship–migrant categorisation based on those agrifood relations, I conceptualise ‘citizenship as incorporated beyond’. This means that national citizens and body politics such as Germany have been and continue to be brought into being by incorporating (i.e. eating, embodying, forming a corporate body, black boxing), among others, (relations of) agrifood from beyond their ‘national’ bodies and borders.

The Impact of Public Policies on Return Migration and Human Capital Development in the Republic of Moldova

The article addresses the issues related to migration and reintegration of migrants in the Republic of Moldova in the last decade. The Government of the Republic of Moldova has shown an increased interest in diaspora and migration policies, developing strategies and policies on migration. However, it is noted that they are mainly focused on actual migrants, neglecting potential migrants and optimizing the migration process. It is also mentioned that the reintegration policies of migrants in the Republic of Moldova were mostly informative, focusing on the individual level and providing reintegration services and tools for citizens, but not for communities. The article mentions the institutionalization of the State Policy Coordination Mechanism in the field of Diaspora, Migration and Development in the Republic of Moldova and the inclusion of the reintegration of migrants on the government’s agenda as a priority.

Migration, memory, and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in time within human geography. This temporal ‘return’ is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting and uncertainty. There has been less attention to the temporalities of resistance, the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists disrupt the temporal frameworks of migration governance. In this paper I explore the ways that sanctuary practices achieve these forms of temporal disruption. Sanctuary challenges the flow of modern, progressive time by altering time’s rhythm and direction. It does so through four alternative time trajectories – historical-memory, legal, collective, and spiritual – that effectively challenge state hegemony over the meaning and control of migrant time. This challenge enables new forms of resistance to normative disciplinary temporalities associated with the control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. It also explodes the linearity and stability of the modern present, revealing a constellation of subaltern movements contesting both the violent flows and blockages of racial capitalism. Through recognizing and refracting these global movements in what Allan Pred termed ‘a montage of the present’, an alternative spatio-temporality of modernity may be glimpsed.

Migration and European History’s Global Turn

Abstract: The global turn is central to the study of Europe’s many migration histories—outwards, inwards, and internal—and encompasses transatlantic, imperial and post-imperial, and other global arenas. Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this article advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late-modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926-2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multi-media representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves—Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France—renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings—and continue to do so today.

We don't remember the O‐Platz protest camp for the sake of it. Collective memories and visibility of migrant activism in Berlin

AbstractThe activists opposing border regimes in Berlin still vividly remember the migrant protest camp on Oranienplatz (O‐Platz), a square in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, a decade after its establishment in 2012. For them, the protest camp is the ideal type of mobilization against border regimes; the opportunity for racialized migrants to engage in politics and formulate grievances based on their own experiences of border regimes. O‐Platz is remembered as a visible migrant grassroots protest in the backdrop of a history of invisibility of migrant struggles in Germany. In contrast, activists frame their mobilization after O‐Platz as invisible and fragmented, despite the emergence of new networks and alliances, which, however, are not led by migrant activists. Collective memory bridges different movement phases and emphasizes the importance of visibility achieved by collective action centered around the experiences of subaltern groups, specifically racialized migrants with precarious legal status. I argue that memory work is crucial for countering the invisibility and erasure of grassroots migrant struggles in Germany. Memory work has an aspirational function as it transforms characteristics of past mobilization into aspirations for the present, especially in a phase where new players emerge, and the role of grassroots migrant activism seems fading.

‘We are all refugees’: how migrant grassroots activism disrupts exclusionary legal categories

ABSTRACT Migrant activists with precarious legal status mobilize against border regimes in Berlin under the label of ‘refugees’. They engage in a classification struggle through which they disrupt the legal notion of refugee by reappropriating an externally assigned category. Their struggle is crucial because legal status categories produce an exclusionary system in which only some migrants can obtain residence rights as well as other rights. I contend that migrants, in the context of their mobilization, collectively interpret their structural position vis-a-vis border regimes, characterized by oppression and exclusion. This collective interpretation is associated with the emergence of a refugee* collective identity that disrupts the legal notion of refugee. I argue that migrants mobilize under the label of ‘refugee’ not only for strategic reasons but also because of their shared beliefs regarding the unfairness of the asylum system. The refugee* collective identity not only disrupts exclusionary legal status categories but also interrupts some of the divisions among migrants that border regimes produce. This article contributes to showing that while migrant activism takes place in a political field that is not chosen by migrants, it has an impact on the regulatory framework that characterizes that political field. Moreover, my findings emphasize the importance of the connections between structural forms of oppression, including regulatory frameworks and classificatory systems, and collective identity processes emerging in the mobilization of subaltern groups.

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Understanding the Socioeconomics of International Migration Decisions and Outcomes Through the Capability-Based Migration Framework

Abstract This dissertation critically reviews neoclassical migration theories and conceptualises the capability-based framework as a prospect in migration theory. I show that most of the neoclassical migration theories were formed in the twentieth century. They therefore require an update to accommodate contemporary migration dynamics. I argue that a multifaceted and multidimensional capability-based approach that centralises human agency and capabilities can address the earlier theories’ shortcomings. Hence, I adopt the capability-based migration framework as the main framework in my dissertation. The dissertation differs from previous empirical studies in its unique methodology and exceptional attention to the grey areas in the migration discourse. Using data from prospective Nigerian migrants living in Nigeria, actual migrants living in Italy and a collection of secondary data sources, the dissertation addresses three research questions: how do capabilities influence migration decisions in the home country; what are the capability-depriving constraints faced by migrants in the host country; and how do migrants contribute to capability improvement in the home country?

Speaking up, rising above: Latina lived citizenship in the metropolitan US South

ABSTRACT Based on original ethnographic material, this piece explores the relationship between legally precarious Latina migrants and the co-ethnic activists serving as their advocates and mentors, treating this relationship as generative of a dynamic process of being and becoming political for migrant women and youth in the metropolitan US South. I adopt an intersectional and intergenerational feminist lens to analyze Latino educational and civic engagement programs in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, showing how migrant mothers, daughters, activists, and educators inside these programs became variously implicated in cultivating and performing new right claims to the local community. Overall, the piece contributes to theorizing the intertwined normative and subversive dimensions of lived citizenship, showing how intersubjective processes and radical acts of care are central to the ways racialized migrants re-imagine citizenship and belonging in hostile new destinations.

Bricolage in labor organizing practices: Spanish and Italian migrant activists in Berlin

This article analyzes how Southern European workers create bricolage by combining creatively organized practices of collective action, such as those of conventional labor unions, with self-created practices when facing oppressive labor relations and widespread downgrading of social mobility. We compare two cases of networks formed by Spanish and Italian migrant workers in Berlin: the Grupo de Acción Sindical and Berlin Migrant Strikers. Drawing on an ethnographic study of these groups, the article argues that the networks have different logics of action and political strategies. Their dissimilarities are manifested in different outcomes and organizational dimensions. Key factors include their founding members' social and activist backgrounds and leaders' countries of origin. It can be argued that, through these networks, migrants produce and reproduce political practices and collective actions, shaping a transnational social space that connects migrants and non-migrant individuals and organizations from both origin and destination countries.

Take back the city: Building an interracial class coalition to fight for ‘Homes for All’

This article draws on empirical data collected through in-depth interviews conducted with Irish and migrant activists from the Take Back the City housing coalition to incite the debate about the potential of interracial class coalitions and to point out the challenges of migrant activism in Ireland. Take Back the City was a movement from below, which through the praxis aimed to challenge common sense with good sense. It questioned the commodification of housing in Ireland by reframing the housing crisis as a result of political and economic decisions, as well as in its strategy of occupying empty buildings. Claiming Homes For All, activists noticed that this slogan was not all-encompassing and as such was insufficient to help recognise that it also referred to those who came to Ireland to study, work or seek asylum. As the hegemonic narrative understands the world through concepts such as the nation-state, borders and citizenship, it automatically excludes non-nationals as the people, the subject of rights within a nation-state. This article locates Take Back the City experience within the discussion on race and class dynamics addressed by anti-racist and anti-capitalist scholars and activists.

Sub-Saharan leaders in Morocco’s migration industry: activism, integration, and smuggling

ABSTRACT The migration industry includes governments and private companies wanting to control and limit human mobility, but also nonstate actors who help facilitate it. This article addresses the multiplicity of roles that Sub-Saharan migrant activists and community leaders play in Morocco’s migration industry. The article draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2018 among 39 sub-Saharan activists and community leaders and 4 Moroccan activists throughout the Kingdom. I argue that while activists and community leaders are front line defenders of migrants’ rights, they are also caught up in the migration industry that emerged after the National Strategy for Immigration and Asylum (SNIA) was implemented in 2014. They attempt to enter the humanitarian aid or migration control sectors of the industry, but are often prevented from extracting monetary value from it due to racial discrimination. Migrant leaders turn to using their social capital to facilitate border crossings for other migrants in exchange for financial compensation. These activists and community leaders are instrumental in the mobility apparatus in Morocco as without them other sub-Saharan migrants would not have the information, networks, or support to access aid to stay in the country or continue their journey to Europe.

Covering Migration—in Africa and Europe: Results from a Comparative Analysis of 11 Countries

ABSTRACT While the issue of migration has heavily impacted on public debates in the Global North, much less is known about coverage of migration in the Global South. This pilot study sets out to de-westernize the discussion, by analyzing and comparing news coverage in migrants’ destination countries and countries of origin. The study’s focus is on media coverage of migration from Africa towards Europe. The paper builds upon prior studies on the coverage of migrants and refugees. A consortium of African and European researchers has conducted a comparative content analysis of migration coverage in 22 opinion-leading newspapers in six European and five sub-Sahara African countries. The study has retrieved 1,512 articles which have appeared in 2015/16. The topic was much less salient in African countries, with only 175 articles found in the African news outlets under study. Coveragein the European destination countries was dominated by domestic issues like border security and migration policy, but also paid attention to the actual migrants—who received much less coverage in the sending countries. Coverage of migration in African media was more negative and focused on disasters at sea. Both African and European media ignored the causes of migration.

재외 한인 이주 사회 여성 주체의 등장: 인도네시아 한인 여성 활동가 모빌리티 차별, 네트워크 자본 배제 극복 실천 사례를 중심으로

재외 한인 이주 사회 여성 주체의 등장: 인도네시아 한인 여성 활동가 모빌리티 차별, 네트워크 자본 배제 극복 실천 사례를 중심으로

Receiving Country Investments and Acquisitions: How Migrants Negotiate the Adaptation to Their Destination

This article looks at the adaptation patterns of EU migrants—Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian and Spanish—in European markets, and uses several interviews of overseas non-EU migrants in the UK and Germany. The interaction of migrants with the receiving context is being considered. Drawing on several interviews with actual migrants and recruitment agents collected in the GEMM (Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets) project in four major immigrant societies (Germany, UK, Spain and Italy), this article focuses on the receiving country acquisitions that facilitate the adaptation of migrants along their journeys. EU migrants have very different adaptation strategies to non-EU migrants, and this article comments on the differences observed as well as on the differences between them according to skill levels. Migrant adaptation challenges are acknowledged and studied dynamically. Thus, this unique data brings forward a multi-layered picture of the migrant adaptation process in Europe.

Speaking on behalf of oneself and others: Negotiating speaker identities in journalistic discourse on refugee activism in Sweden

Journalism has an important role in making political participation visible to the public. In representing the voices of the public, journalism produces discourses on democratic engagement that tell us a great deal about the norms of how these discourses conceive of practices of political engagement. The aim of this article is to study the ways in which speaker identities are given to and taken by migrant activists participating in Swedish radio interviews. Employing Goffman’s concept of footing, this article shows that there are conflicting speaker identities that the activists are adopting and are given by the framework of the radio interviews. The main conflict in how the speaker identities are made up is based on the negotiations around how the activists are talking about themselves or about others. The article further shows how talking about others in a public discourse such as journalism requires speakers to make difficult choices in how to represent oneself as a speaker, and that such choices might stand in conflict with a news discourse’s preferred authentic and experiential identity of its sources.