Migration and Society

In a recent speech at a London rally that took place on a warm May Saturday, the director of Makan and chair of British Palestinian Committee, Aimee Shalan, spoke about the “monumental limits of language in this moment”.

In their introduction to the special issue, the authors develop the Anti- Refugee Machine (ARM) framework and metaphor to illustrate how interventions intended to address forced migration often reinforce existing power structures. Beginning with an ethnographic case study on Eritrea, the authors draw on Ferguson's Anti-Politics Machine (1994) to argue that rather than alleviating poverty or addressing the root causes of migration, Global North interventions empower elites and bureaucratic institutions, thereby perpetuating the conditions that drive migration. The ARM operates as a complex apparatus rooted in the historical trajectory of capitalist modernity that entangles various actors and interests across the globe while deepening inequalities and undermining the political and legal frameworks designed to protect refugees. Situating the special issue's case studies, the introduction is also a call to action, urging readers to recognize the systemic injustices embedded in the migration control apparatus and to consider strategies for resistance and reform.

Incarnations of humanitarian-development policies linking refugee productivity and self-reliance in the Global South have circulated in the international aid sector for decades, but have reemerged in response to concerns about the refugee “crisis” in the Global North. Proponents have referred to these approaches as “incubation.” Focusing on Jordan, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, we juxtapose the success story told about incubation with the failure of these programs to secure rights and protections. We utilize a temporal analysis to raise questions about whose ends are ultimately achieved through these policies and argue that incubation fails at its stated objectives but succeeds as part of the Anti-Refugee Machine.

While Somali migrants see migration as a response to the deteriorating situation in their country of origin, the European Union (EU) governs irregular migration as an emergency and as a root cause of insecurity. Based on fieldwork among European journalists and staff working with private search and rescue operations, this article explores the human consequences of the Anti-Refugee Machine (ARM) resulting from the emergency discourse of migration governance. The ARM consists of the various ideological and material emergency measures implemented to stem irregular migration, and includes agendas and policies that ignore and obscure the historical context and human aspect of migration. This article explores the different understandings and experiences of irregular migration and contextualizes the fatal encounters between authorities and migrants in Libya and the Mediterranean.

Focusing on the case of Italy and border externalization mechanisms in the Horn of Africa, this article argues that refugeehood has become interpellated with Blackness in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Departing from integration discourse and bringing together the Black Mediterranean and Anti-Refugee Machine frameworks, I demonstrate how the move to elide the refugee category with Blackness has attenuated violence, disenfranchisement, and mechanisms of preemptive detention against Black Africans and other racially marked groups. Moreover, externalization policies have fundamentally altered broader institutional policies, making meaningful integration almost impossible to achieve in either the Global North or South. Refugee integration is a “gift from God” insofar as it maintains the categorical exceptionalism that constitutes the category.

In this article, I bring together the Autonomy of Migration (AOM) approach with the Anti-Refugee Machine (ARM) framework to examine the lived experience of migrants rescued in the Central Mediterranean and disembarked in Lampedusa, an Italian island between Tunisia and Sicily. I contend that the Mediterranean Sea is transformed into a deadly weapon through restrictive immigration policies, militarized policing, and enforcement measures to manage migrant mobilities. However, in this context—where migrants risk death to continue life—I also argue that migrant journeys cannot simply be read through a politics of death. Migrants navigate and challenge their exclusion by activating and utilizing the complex rescue and reception apparatus managed by Italy and the EU, and sometimes effectively steer the ARM for their own benefit.

Deportation and “voluntary return” are controversial issues in the European Union (EU) and The Gambia. Based on ethnographic analysis of the social realities of Gambians “voluntarily” returned from EU member states, this article emphasizes returnees’ emic understanding of return as the production of “human trash.” Following their administrative sorting and their subsequent return, Gambian migrants experience stigmatization and exclusion in The Gambia while also trying to hide their “failure” as irregular migrants. The claim of “reintegration,” according to the EU's perspective, presumes that Gambians are “economic migrants” (i.e., non-refugees). Nevertheless, they are “cared for” through “humanitarian assistance.” Through these mechanisms, the Anti-Refugee Machine makes productive use of those it spat out.

Contemporary discourse on the part of the US State Department and immigration authorities represents informal migration from Central America as a transgression of dubious and potentially criminal subjects who assail the United States. Such a representation relies on a memory that draws a purposeful blind eye to the history of colonial extraction and post-colonial “development” that has marginalized and brutalized Central America's indigenous populations and working poor, as well as US involvement in sustaining and enhancing the root causes of informal migration. This article asks how we can narrate the history of informal migration's root causes in Central America, and how such a narrative illuminates the operations of the Anti-Refugee Machine in this part of the world.

This article demonstrates how the implementation of punitive asylum policies and digital technologies such as the CBP One™ Mobile Application have affected the experiences of waiting and violence for asylum-seeking migrants along the extended Mexico–US borderlands. It situates CBP One™ within the “Anti-Refugee Machine” by theorizing the production of automated border inspections and digital migration deterrence. These external bordering tactics differentially immobilize migrant bodies while their identities flow unfettered across the same borders and data infrastructures facilitate their subsequent in/exclusion. During ethnographic fieldwork, however, migrants hacked CBP One™ through techno-disobedience and critiqued the imposition of border technologies.

This article examines policing and “overdocumentation” in the everyday life of migrants in Russia and within Russian post-Soviet migration regimes. Overdocumentation produces precarity for migrants, while allowing police and authorities who work within the Foucauldian apparatus to capitalize on migrant precarity. Foucauldian apparatus or machines as in Anti-Refugee Machine (ARM) in this special issue, encompasses a multitude of both state and non-state actors, diverse discourses and ideologies, methodologies and principles influenced by Soviet-style control regimes, as well as institutions, concepts, and ideas. The production of vulnerability and dehumanization through the policing of internal and international migrants, stateless people, non-citizens, and citizens without propiska (residence registration), transforms all of them into disposable labor that serves only the interests of employers and state officials. Focusing on the production and capitalization of precarity through overdocumentation and policing of migrants, this article argues that power is manifested in legal, institutional, discursive, and practical contexts, where uncertainty is perpetuated and leveraged. It illustrates a possible endpoint of the ARM, in which all legal status and protection ultimately dissolves into abjection.

This article discusses migrant solidarity projects across the Mexico–US border, considering community organizations and shelters that practice forms of accompaniment, mutuality, and flourishing that seek to transform structural conditions across different struggles that implicate both migrants and the communities that they join. Through interviews, participant observation, and a research practice informed by principles of solidarity and mutual aid learned in the process, this article examines the translocal scales that connect these strategies and principles across three different sites in the two countries: La 72 migrant home-shelter in Tenosique, Tabasco; La Morada mutual aid in The Bronx, New York; and Otros Dreams en Acción (ODA) in Mexico City. How and where is transformative solidarity put in practice within and across these local sites? Through the perspectives of activists and organizers within these spaces, the article examines different everyday practices through which they challenge the border regime and prefigure alternative ways of living.

Based on ethnographic research, this article offers a study of how asylum seekers are governed throughout their stay in asylum camps in Switzerland. It uses street-level narratives to first answer the question of how they are disciplined and why, revealing categories of exclusion, embedded in discriminatory structures. Second, it shows how the highly paradoxical regime of asylum reception has created an architecture of mundane, but no less global and significant violence. Deeply embedded in and facilitated by the material and spatio-temporal infrastructure of arrival, it regulates, orders, controls, disciplines, and seeks to educate individuals “in waiting”, placed in a state of forced paralysis of indeterminate duration, while setting high neoliberal expectations for productivity and integration. Finally, it traces the street-level workers’ perception of the migrant to notice potential changes throughout the procedure. This reveals how social categories are created and structural inequalities reflected in the biopolitical regulation applied.

The article examines epistemic simplification in asylum decision-making. By drawing on literature on epistemic violence and injustice, and on cultural misunderstandings in asylum decision-making, the article provides novel insights by focusing on how the cultural notions of family and violence, as well as intersectionality, travel between asylum documents. The article analyzes absence and abstraction of social events as well as exclusion and generality of social actors in asylum interview records and negative decisions made by the Finnish Immigration Service in the years 2016–2017. Through examining how epistemic simplifications are produced, the article shows how cultural misunderstandings do not simply happen but are produced as part of asylum decision-making, and how epistemic violence and injustice are therefore ingrained in different kinds of asylum cases.

How are mobilities mediated in contexts where the movement of people has a long and central history, and how do we account for their gendered, generational, and classed differentiation? Through the concept of soft infrastructures, we suggest that the facilitation of regional labor mobilities in West Africa rely to a considerable extent not only on personal social networks, but on broadly shared cultural notions of friendship, solidarity, and occupational specialization. We further emphasize the centrality of smaller urban centers as nodes in regional mobility regimes, and offer empirical illustrations of the ways in which migrants make use of, and are restricted by, the sociocultural mediation of mobilities.

The complex intersection of displacement, insecurity, family relations, and gender is a growing field of study. Currently missing is a thorough exploration of single refugee men's conceptualization of their family relationships and the underlying dynamics of masculinity. Based on three in-depth interviews with single men who traveled the Central Mediterranean Route, this article explores how the men discuss their relations with their transnational family during and after their journeys. While initially their journeys were structured by the two themes of worry and safety, after arrival, the four themes of longing and belonging, protection, respect, and money emerged. Furthermore, the article asks how notions of care offer explanatory power for masculinity in this interpretive analysis.

Live-in care work has been historically an exploitative labour niche for migrant women in Spain. Drawing on interviews with domestic care workers in Spain during 2020, we document how the Covid crisis exacerbated existing patterns of labour extraction. The home lockdown amplified time, space and task fuzziness that characterize live-in care work. These workers’ bodies buffered the negative impacts of the crisis at a cost to their own wellbeing. We use a relational understanding of the body, as mindbody, that brings together physical and psycho-emotional experiences, dispositions, availabilities and skills to show how the embodied experiences of live-in domestic workers during lockdown relate to a labor extraction pattern that seeks to enhance the production of domestic workers’ availability. This accumulation strategy stems from a somatic hierarchization that classifies bodies according to class, gender and origin. Domestic migrant women also mobilized the suffering of their bodies to demand less exploitative labor conditions.

This article addresses the transversal dimensions of community-building in the European migration context that are responses to refugees’ inadequate access to rights and resources. The main argument is that women-led community-building underlines how women refugees and women volunteers supporting refugees engage their agency to foster dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity across power imbalances and social differences. We refer to these processes as “transversal community-building.” The article analyzes two empirical examples of this form of community-building in Paphos, Cyprus: Learning Refuge and Women's Arabic Culture Club. It emphasizes how women refugees and volunteers enact solidarity across different legal statuses and different class, ethnic, and national backgrounds and within and beyond the boundaries of civil society organizations. The article contributes to the conceptual understanding of the term community-building from the lens of transversalism and offers an empirically grounded view of the making of transversal community-building in the migration context of Paphos, Cyprus.

Developing a Critical Pedagogy of Migration Studies: Ethics, Politics and Practice in the Classroom. Teresa Piacentini. 2024. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 194 pages. ISBN 9781529227130 (hardback).

The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine. Irit Katz. 2022. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 376 pages. ISBN 9781452960807 (ebook).

Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East. Zeynep Şahin Mencütek. 2019. Routledge. 296 pages. ISBN 9781351170369 (ebook).

Latin America and Refugee Protection: Regimes, Logics, and Challenges. Edited by Liliana Lyra Jubilut, Marcia Vera Espinoza, and Gabriela Mezzanotti. 2021. Volume 41 in the Forced Migration series. Berghahn Books. 434 pages. ISBN 9781800731141 (hardback); ISBN 9781805393191 (paperback).