Migrant Human Rights Research Articles

“One Does Not Do That to a Human Being”: Reading A Man of Good Hope (2015) as a Testimonio of Human Rights

Human rights are central to South Africa’s nationalist struggle and imaginings of a democratic dispensation. Amongst other institutions, the Human Rights Commission, the South African Constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Freedom Charter have historically been tasked with enshrining human rights in processes, relationships and moralities defining South African democracy. However, over the years, conceptions of who is entitled to human rights and protection have continued to shift, especially in the wake of increasing numbers of migrants seeking different forms of refuge in South Africa. This article turns to literature as a site to encounter contemporary discourse on migrant human rights in the country. Using Jonny Steinberg’s biography A Man of Good Hope (2015), the article explores how the biography’s styling as a testimonio allows it to critically engage the question of human rights and (in)justice in relation to migrants. Focusing on the protagonist’s witnessing of migrants’ violated lives and themes of victimhood, suffering and dehumanisation, the article examines the ethics of human rights and justice in A Man of Good Hope.

Countering Hegemonic Human Rights Norms through Migrant Labour Organising: The Case of Migrant Justice

AbstractThis article analyses undocumented migrant labour organising in a complicated context and site, the Vermont dairy industry, in relation to Tanya Basok's concept of “counter‐hegemonic human rights”. Taking migrant rights organisation Migrant Justice in Burlington, Vermont as a case study, this work examines migrant labour organising that calls upon notions of human rights for economic migrants in the USA. Migrant Justice works through commodity chain labour organising that transcends the scale of the state, calls on moral geographies of consumption and production, and autonomously redistributes not just capital, but power, from the corporation down to workers. An analysis of literature on migrant human rights in relation to labour organising will lead us to problematise mainstream human rights discourse, explore alternative conceptions of rights, and understand the liberatory components of the “counter‐hegemonic” employment of human rights by subversive actors, which may truly hold the potentials that mainstream human rights discourse claims.

Opportunistic oppression: U.S. migration restrictions and public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in Spring 2020, the Trump administration invoked war against the coronavirus to severely restrict admission of migrants and asylum seekers into the United States. At the same time, it declined to enact national measures to control viral community spread and sharply criticised public health policies. We analyse this notable inconsistency as a case of opportunistic oppression whereby policymakers take advantage of a crisis to pursue pre-existing, and often unrelated, policy preferences. We identify how the securitisation of health and the crisis-enabled politics of enmity allowed the Trump administration to cynically erode migrant human rights protections while simultaneously failing to contain the pandemic. Opportunistic oppression represents an attractive strategy for states facing real and imagined emergencies to pursue political agendas that are not necessarily part of a coherent and effective response to the crisis at hand.

EU migration policy and migrant human rights: the protection and negation of life at EU borders

This article addresses the contradiction between the generalised use of human rights’ protection within EU migration policy and the production of deaths at borders. Through an analysis of the EU’s migration policy, this article suggests using Esposito’s concept of immunitas to bridge inherentcontradictions. Protection of life and the production of death are constitutive mechanisms of Western modern politics. This argument implies thathuman rights and the protection of life metaphorically legitimise the EU’s control of migration from third countries, while blurring the underpinning logics of government, coloniality and racism. The article concludes that protection and the negation of (certain) lives are intrinsic to the EU’s migration policy.

Deviant heroes: an analysis of strategies of social control towards defenders of people on the move in Hungary

Abstract Historically, icons of social movements were treated as outcasts by established structures of social control. When activists break unjust rules to promote human rights, their noble causes do not seem to fit the commonsensical frame of ‘the deviant’, which brings up some questions. When they infringe norms to promote rights, how are activists inserted in the crime framework? How do people perceive their actions and why? This article aims to address these questions, by using the case study of migrant human rights defenders in Hungary. It navigates phenomena such as stigmatisation and criminalisation, and presents positive deviance, supranormality and functional stigmatisation as alternatives to traditional perspectives.

Documenting Death by Policy: Public Grievability, Migrant Lives, and Commonplace Denials

Abstract Documentary mediums have been called upon to refute denials of mass suffering throughout the twentieth century. This essay argues that refutation is a documentary impulse as definitive as the mission to amplify marginalized voices. Moreover, patterns in refuting denials of harm and moral responsibility indicate shifting conditions of public grievability. Comparing over a dozen documentaries about Prevention through Deterrence—a border control strategy nationalized under the Clinton administration—the analysis shows that migrant fatality maps and forensic lab footage not only document death but also refute commonplace denials of migrant human rights.

Migrant melodrama and the political economy of suffering

This article deploys the term “migrant melodrama” to describe contemporary cultural production that trains a melodramatic imagination on migrants. It argues that migrant melodrama often reconfigures suffering as a necessary step in the progress toward inclusion and belonging. To interrogate this assumption, the article analyzes three prominent examples of migrant melodramas that feature children traveling north across national borders without adult caretakers: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; a 2009 HBO documentary film inspired by Nazario’s book, Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Cammisa; and the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen. The article proposes that migrant melodrama plays a role in the commodification and circulation of undocumented migrant suffering in a global market, a phenomenon that the author terms “the political economy of suffering.” Performances of suffering can be exchanged in the political economy of suffering for any number of privileges, from a handout to a visa, and are linked to major international economic and political decisions, such as migration policies that regulate human mobility across nation-state borders. The political economy of suffering is a web of transactions in which performances of undocumented migrant suffering are exchanged in attempts to promote empathy, tolerance of mobility, and respect for migrant human rights. In different ways, all three of the works analyzed accept the underlying logic of the political economy of suffering.

La Mano Extendida: The Interaction Between International Law and Negotiation as a Strategy to End Gang Warfare in El Salvador and Beyond

In August 2012 and again in May 2013, gang members came face-toface with government leaders and representatives of the Organization of American States (OAS). The gang members arrived with hundreds of weapons; they were not there to use these weapons, but rather to lay down their arms as a sign of good faith in their struggle to negotiate a lasting peace. Over the past decade there has been increasing awareness of transnational gangs as a threat to regional security in the Americas. This led Silvia Aguilar, the El Salvadorian Vice-Minister of Justice, to say that “[d]omestic crime and its associated destabilization are now Latin America’s most serious security threat.” According to a 2012 report by the International Center for Migrant Human Rights, crime is now the main cause of displacement in Central America, and it is comparable to the displacement caused by civil wars in the region in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2011, the Geneva Declaration’s Global Burden of Armed Violence Report named El Salvador the country with the world’s most violent deaths. Transnational gangs have been linked to shocking displays of violence, drug and human trafficking, as well as extortion. The regional and domestic strategies of the countries most affected have been a blend of suppression

Incorporating cities into the EU anti-discrimination policy: between race discrimination and migrant rights

This contribution elaborates on the role of local governments in the implementation of EU anti-discrimination policy by taking as an example the work of Barcelona's Office for Non-Discrimination (OND) and its practice in dealing with issues of race and ethnic origin. First, the OND is presented as a local counterpart of state equality bodies. Second, in order to make a more solid argument around the incorporation of cities into EU anti-racial discrimination policy, the OND's broad and intersectional approach to race discrimination as part of migrant human rights is discussed, as well as the way in which the OND performs legal assistance. Based on these findings and drawing on concepts of governance and subsidiarity, the last part of the article reflects more generally on the position and added value of cities in a multi-level system of implementation of the EU racial anti-discrimination policy.

Socio-demographic aspects of globalization: Canadian perspectives on migration

Trends in Canadian immigration and emigration in the last decade are examined, distinguishing ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ movements, economic migrants and refugees. Comparisons are made with those of other OECD countries. Global migration patterns have changed as a result of post-industrial technologies. Although money, goods and services may move relatively freely, people do not. Processes of inclusion and exclusion occur within and between countries and regions. A typology of migrant incorporation is presented. Questions of human security and border controls are considered. Recommendations are made concerning the protection of migrant human rights.