Migration (March 2024)
“Migration crisis.” It is rare lately to hear the word migration without it being used as an adjective attached to the noun crisis. In the last two years (or is it thirty?), those of us living in the United States have seen human mobility increasingly framed as an emergency. People from across the political spectrum are expressing alarm at the pace of new arrivals, even as most of those arriving are entering with inspection at ports of entry, visas in hand or requesting asylum, as is their legal right. The total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007 and has declined since. But images of a “porous border” and panic that a “flood” of migrants is invading the United States predominate our use of the term migration and shape our politics.
In the eight years since I wrote my keyword essay on “Migration”, the word has become hotter and more tendentious. Five years ago, we could have intellectual discussions distinguishing migration and immigration. It was possible for me to argue in my essay that “migration” was a more neutral term since it didn’t assume the nation-centrism of “immigration” and that it offered a way to think about movement without also having to think about the legitimacy, permissibility, legibility, desirability, visibility, surveillance, or control of that movement and those who move. Immigration and emigration, I would regularly say to my students in class, are words that imply the vision of the nation-state, “im” for “in”, incoming, invasion, input: im-migration is migration that is coming “in” to me, to us, to the nation and “em-” signifies out, emigration, movement that is moving away, out; while migration is just movement. It could be movement towards or movement away, but it is, grammatically, agnostic and nonjudgmental. The word migration simply observes: there is movement.
But, strangely, the increasing popularity of dropping the prefix im- and using migration by itself has been a mark not of neutrality, but of rising xenophobia. Daniel Trilling in a Guardian piece traced more frequent use of the term migrant, rather than immigrant or refugee, alongside rising anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment in Europe, and warned that media professionals should do better to avoid dehumanizing migrants as a problem somehow separate those of “us” who live in migrant-receiving nations: “The more those of us who work in media can help develop the connections that already exist between us, the more I think we can break down the idea of irreconcilable conflict over migration. Because, really, there is no ‘over there’ – just where we are.”
Rhetorically, migrants are increasingly portrayed as a threat, hordes of unworthy or unsavory strangers overcoming border control, wreaking havoc, breaking budgets, and even causing mayhem in our streets. This capture of the term migration for xenophobic nationalist projects dehumanizes and criminalizes migrants; rejection, detention, expulsion, battery and abuse are increasingly seen as logical responses on the part of everyday people and government agencies to the “migration crisis.” Rather than seen as proto-citizens whose (smooth or bumpy) assimilation is the responsibility of the liberal state governing a “nation of immigrants,” migrants are increasingly presented as a surplus population, betwixt and between, in movement between states but not owed anything from them in terms of long-term belonging.
In a mutual aid project my New York City neighbors and I have been involved in to receive, support, and welcome newly-arrived migrants in our community, we call them “new neighbors”. Historically, New York City called them “The Newest New Yorkers.” Yet these terms seem oddly nostalgic today. It is difficult these days to find mainstream discourse that frames “migrants” as legitimate future citizens rather than as recent arrivals whose legitimacy as holders of rights is in question and whose very existence may threaten the well-being of “citizens.” It is as if citizenship and rights, goods that liberalism represents as potentially universal, are actually limited resources, and any rights granted to “migrants” will take away from those possessed by current “citizens.” The swing toward understanding migrants as posing a threat accentuates the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion that is at the core of the liberal nation-state.
Even though (as I pointed out in my original keyword essay) migration is older than human history and all species move when they need to access the necessities of life, nationalist ideology portrays the defense of borders and sovereignty as somehow more important than the individual or collective right to survival. At the same time, the full realization of that ideology is impossible. No military or security apparatus has succeeded in fully constraining human mobility. As Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona and Secretary of Homeland Security, remarked, acknowledging the futility of barriers to migration “show me a fifteen foot wall and I’ll show you a sixteen foot ladder,” Her point is that the nationalist dream of a fully secured nation-state is, in reality, little more than a dystopian fantasy.
A better approach would be to come to terms with the fact that there is no way to stop migration. But there is migration that is safe, or migration that is unsafe. The United States has increasingly opted for the latter: forcing people-on-the-move into the underground economy, leaving their transportation to a shady and extortionist cadre of cartels and smugglers. Those of us who do not have to migrate out of necessity too often criticize those who do for leaving conditions that most of us would find equally intolerable, while pretending that the answer to the “migration crisis” is the creation and policing of more impermeable borders.
Taking a step back, if we consider the most recently arrived group of migrants as the avant garde of a great climate migration, it is worrisome that the United States, even its sanctuary cities and states, has failed the drill miserably. The fragility of our existing safety net, our incapacity to feed, clothe and house a stadium or two worth of people in New York City even temporarily, our failure to respond to rising insecurity in our hemisphere, our rapid downshift to the language of emergency and crisis: all of these factors persuade us of the limits of what we can do. When I wrote a Keyword essay on “migration” I knew that the term migration was important to the framing of this complex and pressing problem, but little could I have imagined the degree to which it would become a bellwether of our humanity and its limits.