Migrant Struggles Research Articles

Response to Ben Herzog’s review of Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants

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Alain Badiou and the Sans-Papiers

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

Myra's Predicament: Motherhood Dilemmas for Migrant Care Workers

In this article, I examine the struggle of East European female migrants to reconcile their deeply held values about good mothering practices with the imperative of leaving their families to work abroad. Over the last 20 years, the concept of intensive motherhood has gained significant traction as an ideal and a norm, not only in Western care worker receiving countries, but also in post-socialist Eastern European migrant sending countries. This is surprising given that, during state socialism, the co-breadwinner model in combination with state support from cradle to grave was favored over the “bourgeois” male breadwinner and housewife model. With the case study of a Ukrainian shuttle migrant to Poland, I demonstrate that the emerging motherhood ideal has become a growing problem for circular migrants who leave their home, children, spouses and elderly parents behind. These workers are caught in dilemmas as the necessity of leaving their children behind to generate an income for their families is incompatible with an ideal of good motherhood that emphasizes the primacy of the mother–child bond, requires physical closeness, and condemns long absences from home.

Rightlessness in an age of rights: Hannah Arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants

Rightlessness in an age of rights: Hannah Arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants

Border Struggles in the Migrant Metropolis

The transnational conjunctures of migration and urban space radically destabilise and contradict the spatial premises and conceits of nationalism, and require us to examine the proliferation of sites of border enforcement far removed from physical borders at the territorial margins of states. The spatial practices of migrants and their struggles therefore provide crucial standpoints of critique from which to interrogate what we may call the ‘borderological’ fetishism of much border and migration studies. The migrant metropolis becomes the premier exemplar, simultaneously, of the extension of borders deep into the putative ‘interior’ of nation-state space through immigration law enforcement that increasingly saturates the spaces of everyday life, and of the disruptive and incorrigible force of migrant struggles that dislocate borders and instigate a re-scaling of border struggles as urban struggles.

New Keywords: Migration and Borders

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.

Transnational Indigenous Communities

Mixtecs are indigenous peoples from the southern Mexican states of the western portion of Oaxaca and small adjacent parts of Puebla and Guerrero. Mixtecs have been coming to the United States since the late 1970s as migrant workers. Michael Kearney became for the Mixtec migrant community in diaspora and in Oaxaca a solid ally and a critical thinker who contributed with his intellect and sometimes plain hard physical labor to the efforts of the Mixtec community to promote the fundamental human rights of all indigenous Mexicans. He played an important role in advancing the struggle of indigenous migrants by forging innovative theoretical concepts that indigenous activists appropriated to focus and advance their struggle, among them transnational indigenous community, Oaxacalifornia, and Mixtec political consciousness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s these concepts appeared strange and abstract to indigenous activists, but eventually they became cornerstones of the discourse of many activists and indigenous organizers both in the United States and Mexico and are now common coin.

Migrant struggles and legal pluralism: claiming citizenship across multiple scales

In January 2001, 800 undocumented immigrants (mostly from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa) staged sit-ins (encierros) at 10 churches for 47 days in the city of Barcelona. At the same time, other coordinated protests took place in other parts of Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Almeria, Murcia). The objective was clear: to resist the immigration law that discriminated, criminalized and condemned undocumented immigrants to an unlawful status. After three months of encierros, massive demonstrations and even hunger strikes, the Spanish Government was forced to negotiate the agreement of 8th March, and to open an extraordinary regularization process. During those three months of struggle, the resistance was shaped among different legal orders: human rights, transnational law, state immigration law, customary law from the immigrants’ origin, (religious) natural law and insurgent law. This paper aims to observe how the interaction of these different legal orders was used to achieve legal change and, ultimately, another way of constructing citizenship.

Reclaiming Justice and Eliminating Inequality through Compassionate Migration: The Relentless Struggle of Migrants Living in the Shadows

This article elaborates on the emerging concept of “compassionate migration” as a counter-hegemonic response to the institutions and systems that criminalize unauthorized immigration, including the assistance provided by those who aid such migrants out of a sense of compassion. In the name of human dignity, it is imperative that those who live in the shadows of United States immigration law and its enforcement system sense that social justice is a tangible possibility, and that they indeed may be able to free themselves from the structures that criminalize them and render them vulnerable to various forms of discrimination and other human rights abuses.

Ambivalence and Citizenship: Theorising the Political Claims of Irregular Migrants

Irregular migration gives rise to political claims that test the limits of political community and the expression of human rights in an increasingly interconnected world. This article provides a theorisation of the political claims of irregular migrants that starts with the notion of ambivalence. I argue that the ambivalence present in such claims can be understood as a political resource that is generative of new political relations across the terrain of human mobility and border control. In order to discern the generative quality of ambivalence, I argue in addition for an approach to theory production that is grounded in concrete migrant struggles. The argument is made via a critique of two theoretical perspectives that are influential amongst scholars working at the intersection of Migration Studies and Political and International Theory: the work of Giorgio Agamben and the ‘Autonomy of Migration’. An approach that avoids the reductive accounts of power evident in both perspectives provides a better starting point from which to assess the transformative potential of irregular migrants’ political claims.

Discourse or Merely Noise? Regarding the Disagreement on Undocumented Migrants

Drawing on Jacques Ranciere’s theorising of the political this article analyses the disagreement on undocumented migrants in recent legislation in Sweden and within the European Union as well as in Swedish labour union practice. Both the consensus understanding of the issue of undocumented migrants and the materialisation of dissensus through the political activities of undocumented migrants are studied. The aims of the article are: firstly, to show that undocumented migrants in Sweden engage in a political struggle that is not recognised as such, to analyse the structure or conditions of possibility of this non-recognition, and finally, to analyse the ways in which these conditions might be undone through the political activities of undocumented migrants. The theoretical claim is that the issue of undocumented migrants involve intimately core aspects of both politics and law and that the struggle of undocumented migrants is a process in which our understanding of political and legal subjectivity is called into question. In conclusion we reflect on the question of political change against the background of the theoretical and empirical findings of the analysis.

Discourse or Merely Noise? Regarding the Disagreement on Undocumented Migrants

AbstractDrawing on Jacques Rancière’s theorising of the political, this article analyses the disagreement on undocumented migrants in recent legislation in Sweden and within the European Union as well as in Swedish labour union practice. Both the consensus understanding of the issue of undocumented migrants and the materialisation of dissensus through the political activities of undocumented migrants are studied. The aims of the article are: firstly, to show that undocumented migrants in Sweden engage in a political struggle that is not recognised as such, to analyse the structure or conditions of possibility of this non-recognition, and finally, to analyse the ways in which these conditions might be undone through the political activities of undocumented migrants. The theoretical claim is that the issue of undocumented migrants involves intimately core aspects of both politics and law and that the struggle of undocumented migrants is a process in which our understanding of political and legal subjectivity is called into question. In conclusion we reflect on the question of political change against the background of the theoretical and empirical findings of the analysis.

Escuchando a Las Maestras/os: Immigration Politics and Latina/o Preservice Bilingual Educators

This article draws from a larger study based in South Texas that examines the professional and personal narratives of 63 Latina/o preservice educators preparing to teach in bilingual classrooms. Using qualitative methods, we collected data where participants' voices and opinions regarding U.S. immigration issues were documented during classroom activities that stimulated such discussion. We also administered a survey on the same topic. Findings suggest that while many bilingual Latina/o preservice educators may be sympathetic to the plight of undocumented immigrants—and hence, are working toward political and ideological clarity—they lack specific knowledge of laws that protect such children in this country. In addition, many participants utilized their own immigrant histories as a resource in relating to and understanding the contemporary struggle of economic migrants.

Organizing Learning for Transformation in College Outreach Programmes

A master narrative exists that operates to preclude Mexican migrant students from college access. By ethnographically examining the experiences of Mexican migrant students in the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Institute, I describe counterstories that show how Mexican migrant students disrupt the assumptions of the master narrative. Findings suggest that attending to the social organization of learning in college outreach programmes can afford transformative learning opportunities that fracture the master narrative, and provide for new potentialities to emerge in Mexican migrant students' struggles for educational opportunity. The UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Institute is used as an exemplary case showing how pedagogical interventions, such as college outreach programmes, can mediate college access for underrepresented students.

Migrant struggles for the right to have rights: three examples of social movements powered by migrants in New York, Paris and Barcelona

This article examines three specific examples of struggles waged by migrants who, through various forms of activism and mobilisation, and in collaboration with other collective actors, have called on the Spanish, French and United States governments to promulgate the unconditional regularisation of all persons currently suffering the condition of aliens as a result of these governments' policies. The migrant movements also demand social, economic and political rights for all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity, class and gender. The article looks at the migrants' movement in Barcelona, the Ninth Collective coordinating undocumented migrants (‘sans papiers’) in Paris, and the Movement for Justice in El Barrio, New York. This is a novel type of social movement, one that eludes formal structures of representation, such as are found in classic trade unionism, but which, we would argue, is, on account of its claims and activists, of key importance for anyone seeking to understand or promote workers' rights in contemporary urban settings.

Ethnic Networks and International Trade

There is a well-established high quality literature on the role of networks, particularly ethnic networks, in international trade. Ethnic networks are a way of overcoming informal barriers (information costs, risk and uncertainty) to trade by building trust and substituting for the difficulty of enforcing contracts internationally. The networks we are interested in are those that form between migrants and natives in the host country and between migrants and their home country. Ethnic networks exist when assimilation is not complete. We consider the struggle of migrants to assimilate and, at the same time, the struggle of the local population to prevent such assimilation. These activities affect trade possibilities. Moreover, we show that it may well be in the interest of migrants who specialize in trade to, at some point in time, turn from investing in assimilation activities and instead invest in anti-assimilation activities in order to preserve immigrants’ preferences for home country goods.

Residency Documents for All! Notes to Understand the Movement of Migrants in Barcelona

This text focuses on a concrete example of the political struggle of migrants which, beginning in the last decade and continuing to the present, occupies Catalan public space in the form of an extremely novel social movement led by migrants from the post-colonial peripheries. These migrants, upon installing themselves in the Spanish state and more specifically in the city of Barcelona, choose to escape the position of victim assigned to them by the “miserablist” representation of immigration to become agents and political subjects. This article is a socio-analytic reconstruction about this social movement which demands the unconditional regularization of all migrants without papers who live in Spain.