Unwanted Immigration Research Articles

‘If I climb a wall of ten meters’: capoeira, parkour and the politics of public space among (post)migrant youth in Turin, Italy

ABSTRACTRather than being seen as citizens, the children of immigrants are portrayed as a population to be controlled and contained across Europe. In Italy today, debates about cultural ‘authenticity’ and renewed nationalism accompany waves of moral panic that depict a country under siege by illegal and unwanted immigrants. Specifically in cities, immigrants and their children are imagined and portrayed as alien and out of place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Turin, Italy, with children of immigrants aged between 16 and 21, De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer illustrate how these youth make use of their bodies through capoeira and parkour practices to contest and reappropriate public spaces, thereby challenging dominant visions about what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. They analyse the ‘body in place’ to understand how the children of immigrants navigate unequal spatial relations and challenge dominant regimes of representation, while also attempting to improve their life conditions and reach their personal goals.

Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border by Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins

Reviewed by: Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border by Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins Jillian Báez Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border U of Texas P, 2014 by Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins Central to President-Elect Donald Trump's platform is building a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border and holding Mexico responsible for the expenses. Although a wall already exists on many parts of the border due to the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the wall was never completed due to a lack of funding. Nevertheless, people crossing from Mexico into the U.S. are still policed by border patrol and drone surveillance. In addition, [End Page 304] during the Obama administration over two million people were deported, more than ever in the history of the U.S. Reflecting nativist anxieties across the nation, the prospect of fortifying the wall clearly appealed to many voters. Edward S. Casey's and Mary Watkins' book Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border intervenes in the current debate over immigration and offers a timely meditation on the significance of the wall for both sides of the border. Up Against the Wall argues that building walls between nations erodes our humanity and environment. Casey and Watkins assert that the U.S.-Mexico wall is self-defeating because "walls beget walls" (252). In other words, the presence of the wall stands in stark contrast to people, animals, and botany that reside on the borderlands and for whom crossing the border is a matter of survival. On a material level, the U.S. constantly needs to add more policing and surveillance as migrants find new ways to cross borders. On a symbolic level, the wall also engages in "walling out others" (252). A wall is the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Casey and Watkins urge us all to pause before building the wall. They implore us to reflect on the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, consider the consequences of colonization, and imagine new possibilities for living in relation to one another. The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective guided by Casey's training as a philosopher and Watkins as a psychologist. This interdisciplinary contribution should not be overlooked. Philosophy and psychology are fields that are currently not very prominent in border studies, especially in work on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Most of the work in this area is situated in history, anthropology, sociology, English, Spanish, Chicana/o Studies, and Latina/o Studies. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is written by Casey and illustrates how the wall divides communities (sometimes literally people's backyards), animals, plants and water. This part of the book offers case studies of three border cities: Nogales, Tijuana, and Brownsville in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Watkins penned the second part of the book, which offers a historical and sociological overview of Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest. This section also includes a chapter on border art (on the Mexican side of the border) and a chapter that offers concrete ways ordinary people can foster "hospitality" across borders. Part I, which makes important distinctions between walls, borders and boundaries, is notably much more theoretical than Part II which is more historical and engages in praxis. The book's strength lies in its treatment of the wall as both a material and symbolic border and boundary. In regards to the wall's material function, Casey and Watkins demonstrate that the wall not only serves to enclose people on opposite sides of the border, but also it disrupts an eco-system that spans across and in between the border. Thus, there are grave ecological effects of the wall on animal migration, plant life, and water supplies. This ecological perspective is rare, but much needed, in studies of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Up Against the Wall also seriously considers the symbolic weight of the wall, that is, it serves to exclude and dehumanize poor and working class Mexicans. Fortifying the wall to keep out unwanted immigrants also erases the history of colonization in the U.S. In these ways, the...

The Right to Exclude, Human Rights,and Political Facts

AbstractIn this paper I will defend a limited right to exclusion. Legitimate states are entitled to refuse the entrance of unwanted immigrants, if necessary with force. However, I will also work out leverage points for a cosmopolitan critique of this view, one that starts with national borders as they are and constructs human rights conditionalities as they could be. In particular, I propose an immanent critique of Michael Blake’s jurisdictional theory of immigration. Blake gives a compelling argument that sovereign states have a prerogative to decide upon their own border policies, a prerogative that is only constrained by the international human rights regime. However, even if cosmopolitans accept this argument (which I think they should), they still have good reasons to expand the prevailing human rights regime in three respects: with regard to the classification of basic human rights, the domain of human rights obligations, and blind spots of the current human rights regime.

“A Thing Apart”

Although gender offers valuable perspectives for understanding migration law, masculinity has received little attention. In family migration, men are generally regarded as economic agents and family as marginal to their lives, a view that is difficult to dislodge because it serves the purposes of governments anxious to reduce unwanted immigration. In British immigration law, measures have often explicitly or implicitly relied on such gender-based assumptions. Recently, lawyers have utilized the gap between official and unofficial standards by promoting test cases involving either a woman or a vulnerable man but where the principles established will benefit all migrants. Gains may be short-lived however as new ways emerge of making distinctions. These arguments are demonstrated in this article through examination of British immigration control and judicial decisions. The article finds that, in this arena, new understandings of masculinity and fatherhood have yet to make much impact.

Human Rights, Immigration, and Border Walls

A peculiar construction boom is in progress worldwide: border walls are being installed at an unprecedented rate in order to control unwanted immigration by poor people into wealthy countries. This paper asks why, almost a quarter of a century after the Iron Curtain came down, the walls are now going up again. It provides a provocative answer: I suggest that these separation barriers are a logical response of states to the way in which human rights law has been enforced in cases bearing on immigration. In other words, and counter-intuitively, the recent boom in border wall construction signals the success of the human rights tradition, rather than its failure to establish an alternative to territorial sovereignty.Next, I use the case study of walls to make a larger point on the intractability of the human rights regime that bears on immigration. Building on a systematic analysis of jurisprudence, the paper argues that human rights courts and quasi-judicial bodies utilize an arbitrary category – territory – to balance the policy interests of the individual non-national and the state. The result is essentially random from the perspective of both these stake holders. Walls make concrete a perverse side effect of this compromise: because the regime conflates access with territory, it disproportionately rewards strong young men who already have sufficient capacity (in age, gender, or resources) to scale the barrier, even if their predicament may not actually call for protection. But it privileges them only after they have risked themselves, and if they survive that risk. And so, at least when it comes to immigration, the human rights regime operates in effect as a natural selection mechanism. This is fundamentally unstable and unjust.

When Can Liberal States Avoid Unwanted Immigration? Self-Limited Sovereignty and Guest Worker Recruitment in Switzerland and Germany

Advanced democracies, it is commonly argued, are unable to prevent unwanted immigration because their sovereignty is “self-limited” by virtue of their normative, legal, and economic liberalism. This article challenges this claim by examining a critical test case that is at the heart of self-limited sovereignty arguments: guest worker recruitment in postwar Switzerland and West Germany. The author shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the unintended settlement of guest workers was not a universal given but instead was far less extensive in Switzerland than in West Germany. This difference in exposure to unwanted immigration, she argues, was the result of path-dependent processes that can be traced back to the inception of each country’s recruitment program. Whereas West German officials made no concerted effort to control settlement until the program’s termination, Swiss policy from its beginning was marked by state-enforced worker rotation and the prevention of family unification. To account for these critical differences in policy design, the article argues that each guest worker system was fundamentally shaped by two sets of factors. First, program design varied depending on whether or not political elites could draw policy lessons from past experience with temporary worker programs. Where past recruitment had resulted in unwanted settlement, as had been the case in Switzerland, political elites sought to adopt policy provisions designed to prevent the past from repeating itself. Where past policy failure was absent, as was the case in West Germany, policymakers were less concerned with preempting settlement. Second, recruitment policy reflected the degree to which policymakers were able to operate autonomously from cross-cutting interests. Whereas the West German government could pursue recruitment relatively insulated from both business and popular pressure, Swiss policymakers had to repeatedly accommodate both sets of actors, in the process devising a recruitment system firmly premised on the principle of worker rotation.

Reproduction, Eugenics and Immigration Law

Policies designed to exclude the children of unwanted immigrants from citizenship have insidious roots in the eugenics movement. Today’s anti-immigrant agenda is no different than the one that animated the eugenicists into enacting the restrictive 1924 legislation. Nor is there a difference in the latent racism inherent in such views. While immigration restrictionists may not subscribe to eugenics theory, they fear immigrants and their descendants on the same basis as eugenicists in the past, namely that the children of immigrants deemed undesirable are inherently less American, unassimilable and could lead to the demise of the white majority. The goals of the eugenics movement of yesteryears are carried out by behaviors that are much more retrograde than sterilization. These behaviors include maintaining restrictive immigration laws, keeping national origin quotas, targeting undocumented immigrants through law enforcement efforts, and viewing immigrants as a public health problem that needs to be purged. The aim of all three of these innovations is to deny any governmental subsidy for reproduction or maintenance of the foreign-born workforce and their dependents, even if their reproduction and maintenance now is occurring in the United States. The point is to discourage these processes, and re-separate productive and reproductive activities, such that America remains majority white.

Making people criminal: The role of the criminal law in immigration enforcement

This article analyses the recent expansion of immigration offences in Britain. Drawing on criminal law scholarship, it considers the reasons for relying on the criminal law in immigration enforcement. On the one hand, criminal law is used symbolically. In this view, the creation of criminal offences may be read as an attempt to appease a sector of the electorate, the media and the Opposition about the ‘immigration problem.’ By introducing these offences, the government sent a message that the situation is under control. On the other hand, the criminal law serves regulatory functions, offering the UK Border Agency a range of options for dealing with unwanted immigrants. In practice, most immigration offences are rarely enforced. Instead, the criminal law often seems to primarily work as a threat, relied on to enforce compliance with immigration rules. A criminal prosecution is reserved for those foreigners for whom the primary sanction –expulsion- cannot be carried out. In these cases, a criminal prosecution and conviction facilitate administrative proceedings leading to removal. Given that the criminalization of immigration breaches is in stark contrast with a number of criminal law principles, this paper argues that the normative justification of criminal law in immigration matters is weak and it should have no role to play in the enforcement of immigration rules.

French Laïcité and British Multiculturalism: A Convergence in Progress?

This paper compares the ‘laïque’ and ‘multiculturalist’ conceptions of ethnic minorities’ ‘integration’, which prevail in France, for the former, and in the UK, for the latter. It is argued that beyond their surface antagonism there is a clear convergence between the two approaches. Indeed, the British have given up on multiculturalism whose shortcomings have been well documented and publicised. Moreover, they have reactivated the much criticised notion of ‘integration’ through the use of the expression ‘interculturalism’, which has become the new buzz word. Conversely, the French have understood that it is useless and counterproductive to keep on denying the strength of community feelings and bonds, and open up tentatively to the expression and the recognition of individual and group specificities. This is exemplified by their frequent use of the phrase ‘open laïcité’ which describes this new trend. For both nations, it is now essential to reinforce ‘social cohesion’ said to have unravelled dangerously in recent years. The strict regulation of unwanted immigration is also advocated at European level by both countries to control the rise of ‘hyper-diversity’ which is often blamed for the failure of the integration process.

Transnational Migration and the Emergence of the European Border Regime: An Ethnographic Analysis

Most critical discussions of European immigration policies are centered around the concept of Fortress Europe and understand the concept of the border as a way of sealing off unwanted immigration movements. However, ethnographic studies such as our own multi-sited field research in South-east Europe clearly show that borders are daily being crossed by migrants. These findings point to the shortcomings of the Fortress metaphor. By bringing to the fore the agency of migrants in the conceptualization of borders, we propose to understand how borders are being shaped by taking as a starting point the struggles of mobility. Against the background of our two-year transdisciplinary research project TRANSIT MIGRATION European migration and border policies cannot be longer conceptualized as being simply oriented towards the prevention of migration. Since migrants cross the borders daily, what happens if the borders’ permeability is part of the way they work? If so, we have to investigate the mechanisms of border policies and practices anew. One is the concept of the border or migration regime. The other is the concept of the autonomy of migration. Our concept of ethnographic regime analyses is based on a transdisciplinary approach, comprising political studies, anthropology and sociology.

Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice Mark Jurdjevic Horodowich, Elizabeth — Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 258. In Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice, Elizabeth Horodowich examines numerous connections between language — and more often the spoken word — and Venetian political culture in the sixteenth century. She demonstrates that Venetian political anxiety, whether caused by sharply rising numbers of recent immigrants to the city, the presence of marauding foreign armies, or more purely internal tensions between aristocrats at the top of the social ladder and those further down, always manifested itself, among other ways, in attempts to regulate, control, and thereby dominate language and speech. The Venetian government was particularly sensitive to the ways in which mastery of the rules of language and a monopoly over the terms and boundaries of its proper use were a particularly effective political tool for shoring up elite hegemony in a contestatory republican setting. Her analysis considers the intersection of language and politics from several perspectives. The first chapter surveys the linguistic component of the broader pan-Italian genre of Renaissance conduct literature. Books such as Castiglione's Il Libro del Cortegiano and Giovanni della Casa's Il Galateo laid out detailed and widely influential rules governing aristocratic and courtly speech. Horodowich interprets such texts less in terms of a literary preoccupation with the rhetorical theories of classical antiquity, or literary debates over the relative merits of Latin and the volgare, and more as a fundamentally social and political attempt by Italian elites to define themselves in the midst of the Italian Wars and their related growing sense of powerlessness. By complicating and then mastering elaborate rules of linguistic etiquette, Italian elites, whose elevated position lacked the legal and military foundation typical elsewhere in Europe, both defined themselves as a group and attempted to demonstrate their superiority (if only to themselves). The second chapter turns to Venice, looking in particular at the Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia, the magistracy established in 1537 to investigate and punish blasphemy. Horodowich provides abundant evidence to support David Lawton's argument that blasphemy emerges as a controversial issue in direct proportion to the degree to which its surrounding society is internally divided. She concludes that the Venetian government established the blasphemy magistracy as a response to a sudden escalation in the immigrant population in Venice, the result of shifts in the city's domestic economy and Venetian military defeats on the mainland. The magistracy's records reveal an unsurprisingly distinct tendency to identify blasphemy with the city's most recent and unwanted immigrants (and a tendency not to punish noble blasphemers). In addition, and somewhat more surprisingly, the magistracy occasionally expanded its jurisdiction to include the punishment of purely secular verbal insults made by non-nobles to nobles. The fourth chapter looks in more detail at the legal punishment of insults. Horodowich considers examples from several additional archival sources — the Council of Ten, Avogaria di Comun, Signori di Notte al Criminal, and Provveditori sopra le Pompe. The records of these magistracies reveal the [End Page 263] government's aggressive patrolling of servants' speech, coarse talk by gondoliers, and other members of Venice's labouring classes. The government concentrated the vast majority of its coercive power on the prosecution of insults against nobles. Horodowich plausibly connects this development with the increasing monopolization of the government by an ever smaller aristocratic oligarchy. The government defined itself in terms of its noble class and hence viewed insults towards individual nobles as conceptually synonymous with assaults on the government itself. Chapters 5 and 6 shift the focus from law to culture by considering the role of gossip in Venetian public life and the speech of Venice's famously eloquent courtesans. Both chapters are good examples of the anxieties and contradictions that accompanied Venetian awareness of the political implications of speech. While gossip was generally condemned as a frivolous and potentially destructive form of distinctly female speech, it nevertheless was an essential method of political deal-making and intelligence-gathering in the ostensibly masculine culture of republican politics. Similarly, Venetian courtesans, who sold verbal companionship as well as sex, were clearly in fundamental...

The Dialectics of “Oriental” Images in American Trade Cards

A late nineteenth-century trade card, or a color-printed circulating advertisement, touts Shepherd and Doyle's new “Celluloid” waterproof collars, cuffs and shirt bosoms (Fig. 1).1 These “economical, durable, and handsome” clothing items require less starching and washing, and so remove the need for Chinese laundries. The text on the reverse side includes directions on how “to remove yellow stains,” and the image enacts a kind of literal version of this removal. The slovenly laundryshop (the clothes overflowing the basket, the linens hung up askew, the steaming basins), the mix-and-match, gender-ambiguous garments of the workers, and their thin, slouching bodies all participate in the racist stereotype of Asians as dirty, effeminate and alien others. The caption proclaims the product to be “The Last Invention”; the “last” indicates finality, both in terms of modernity as the final stage of history and of a solution to the problem of unwanted immigrants. A group of Chinese male laundry-workers are so taken aback by this product that their pigtails stand in erect consternation. Their reaction stems both from the realization that they must return to China because their services have become unnecessary as well as from pure awe at the invention itself; in both cases, the scenario and its appeal apparently rely on these acts of recognition by the Chinese characters. Furthermore, the advertisement's status as such - merely advertisement - hides the illogicality of the celluloid salesman's presence in the laundry at all. The salesman, wearing a garish plaid suit and a bowler hat, appears to be one of those traveling salesmen who might peddle patent medicines, yet he bears the product eliciting such awe and consternation. Rather than selling the product to the Chinese workers, he appears simply to be taking gratuitous pleasure in introducing the workers to the agent of their impending misfortunes.

The “other” EU Security: Social Protection

This paper focuses on the issue of social security in the EU as a different kind of security. It addresses four topics: the reluctance of the Member States to give up their legislative power to harmonise their social security systems within the European Union; the use of social security as a means of excluding unwanted immigrants; the social security protection of TCNs in EU legislation; and the possibilities of Article 14 European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination, securing the entitlement to social security rights of TCNs. It concludes that the state's duty to provide security is no longer an exclusive privilege for own citizens and that the changing legal framework of citizenship in the European Union, the European Convention of Human Rights and the acquisition of EU residence rights by TCNs all challenge the sovereignty argument used by the individual states.

Migration, Crime and Victimhood

This article explores the other side of European-wide concerns regarding unwanted immigration, associated crime and threats to national security; namely marginalized migrants' experiences of victimization. With the mainstay of criminological attention focused on transnational crime and criminals, this article examines criminal justice responses to women who are trafficked, primarily from central and eastern Europe, to work in the EU's sex industry. The nature and extent of sex trafficking is explored by characterizing both offenders and victims, and with reference to current criminal justice responses to the problem. The article promotes a three-pronged criminal justice response to sex trafficking, resting with prevention, prosecution and protection. This comprehensive approach is forwarded with a view to recognizing and responding to women's experiences as victims of trafficking. The promotion of women's needs, as victims, is also considered alongside what is currently on offer, and practical, for other victim categories in the EU.

The Leviathan of Competitiveness: How and why do liberal states (not) accept unwanted immigration?

The article deals with issues of migration and migrant rights in Germany. Even if many scholars have elucidated with convincing clarity that Western nation-states can improve migrants' rights due to the autonomy of the legal system, this paper's focus is to point out the vulnerability of that legal process. The political and judicial regulation of migration in Germany over the last forty years shows that the discretionary power of the authorities regarding non-nationals is much stronger than for nationals. And because of the transformation of the former welfare states into 'competition states', migration policies are now likely to be subsumed under the principle of competitive advantage. In this study I reaffirm that the judicial improvement of migrant rights should be primarily understood in terms of the nation-state, and refer to general political and economic conditions that the courts can not (or will not) disregard in their decision-making process.

Jewish Agricultural Experiment, Wellington, Nevada, 1896-1902: Epilogue to a Communal Failure

Two major population shifts toward the end of the nineteenth century catalyzed the Jewish colonization of Wellington, Nevada. The first of these was the forced emigration of millions of Russian Jews following a wave of anti-Semitism during the reign of Czar Alexander III beginning in 1881. The second was the desperate attempt by the state of Nevada to offset the effect of its eroding mining economy and the precipitous decline in its population. One of the proposed solutions to the problems created by an inundation of unwanted new immigrants to American eastern cities was the relocation of Jews to rural sites throughout North America. The philanthropic Baron de Hirsch Fund provided transportation assistance from Europe to New York City, where the wealthy Jewish banker and entrepreneur, Jacob Schiff, helped to deploy clusters of Jews to remote agricultural sites. Nevada's prescription for its malaise was to advertise for immigrants. One group responding to the call included the family of Joseph Nudelman, whose experience mirrored the idealism, struggles, and failure of the late-nineteenth-century Jewish agricul? tural colonizing movement. The Wellington agricultural experiment is significant for a number of rea? sons. First, abundant land partly under cultivation, an adjacent river water

The Social Construction of Illegality and Criminality

In this article illegal immigrants, a relatively new group of immigrants living at the margins of society, are discussed. The question of the significance of crime for groups that are officially excluded from the formal labour market and public provisions, is presented within the framework of the Unknown City research project, conducted in the four largest Dutch cities (interviews with illegal immigrants; an ethnographic study to determine the extent of support by various ethnic communities; and an examination of the ways in which the restrictive policies towards illegal immigrants were implemented by the police, the Aliens Departments, and by professionals within public or semi-public institutions in the fields of education, healthcare and housing). Both the relatively limited involvement in crime in general and the differences between groups can be explained by the embeddedness of illegal immigrants in the labour sphere and the support by ethnic communities. Attention is paid to the social and legal construction of the illegal immigrant through new legislation and to the observation that illegality is increasingly linked to crime. The majority of illegal immigrants are not criminally active. One exception is the category that is active in the lower levels of the hard drug trade. The authors' analysis suggests that the perception of the ‘criminal illegal immigrant’ first and foremost reflects the division between wanted and unwanted immigrants, which is the result of the shift towards a restrictive policy.

Migration and the EU's new eastern border: between realism and liberalism

European Union (EU) asylum and immigration policies are characterized by a competition between two partly conflicting policy frames: the realist frame of internal security, which emphasizes the need to tighten up territorial borders and to fight illegal immigration, and the liberal frame of humanitarianism, which incorporates the human rights-based notions of freedom of movement and refugee protection. Whereas recent developments under the Amsterdam Treaty point at the attempt to revalidate liberal elements against a realist drift, this article shows that the extension of asylum and immigration policies to the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) is dominated by the imperative to secure the new border against unwanted immigration. In the light of the new priority given to these policy fields in the Union, these conflicting requirements are likely to form major obstacles in the process of eastern enlargement.

Encouraging unwanted immigration: A political economy of Europe's efforts to discourage North African immigration

It is often asserted that pressures for North African migration to Europe would be reduced if the European Union encouraged economic development on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Such arguments prompt questions about the efficacy of past and present endeavours by Europe to support economic development in North Africa. This article argues that the European Union's efforts have ironically encouraged a form of economic development in its southern neighbours that abets, rather than discourages, migration. Deeper economic reform is necessary by the European Union itself-within the economic space that Europe dominates-if genuine progress is to be made on North African migration pressures.

The changing character of national borders

At the end of the twentieth century, the pace of change in the international system is increasing. New actors and even new categories of actors are emerging. Some have a strong impact on international relations, thus competing with the traditional type of international actor, the sovereign nation‐state. One salient feature of the nation‐state is its power to control its borders. In the process of globalization, this power is being disintegrated. In some respects, national borders have completely lost their relevance, owing to certain adverse ecological developments like the degradation of the ozone layer and other virtually global threats. They are equally of limited use in influencing the speed and content of some trade operations concerning goods or currencies or the free flow of media information. They however continue to function in a rather efficient way for people. Immigration laws and certain other procedures of the ‘rich’ countries tend to distinguish between wanted and unwanted immigrants. Due to various catastrophies and disasters, wide‐spread violence and the anticipation of a bleak economic future, the number of migrants continues to grow rapidly, as does the pressure from migrants from the ‘poor’ and densely populated countries of the world on the borders of the ‘rich’ countries. This is a multi‐dimensional development with political, economic, but also moral aspects.