THINGS MEDIA WOULDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT MIGRATION AND BORDERS

I had the opportunity to chat with Professor Kenneth Harrow, Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University and the Fulbright Scholar and Professor in Cameroon and Senegal, about a much-debated issue—migration and borders in contemporary times.  Below is our conversation for your reading pleasure and enlightenment:

M.I: What is immigration and migration?

K. H: When I think of putting those two terms together, immigration implies coming into a country, whereas migration implies a movement without necessarily coming in and going out. In my field, the humanities, migration gets linked to notions of migrancy or, of moving which is a positive term in theory. The idea of motion is theoretically, more valuable and interesting. Migration is associated with the idea of being a nomad, which in post-structural term is validated. Whereas in immigration, there are a lot of connotations which involve poor people wanting to migrate to where they will be better off, and negative connotations get attached.

Those two terms are really tremendously different.  In the west, the term immigration, recently, has become linked to notions of legality—so it is legal immigrant versus illegal immigrant—now a political term used to induce fear in the population.

M. I: How does the definition of these terms affect how nations use borders?

K.H: The richer countries use it to put up a fence, to keep the immigrants from coming in. The poorer countries, to a certain extent, do the same thing in reprisal. But mostly, it is a one-way street.

For example, as a U.S. citizen, if I wanted to visit a country in Europe I don’t need a visa. If I wanted to visit some countries in Africa, for example South Africa, I don’t need a visa. I recently went to Burkina Faso for FESPACO and I got a visa, which was easy enough to get, lasted five years and had multiple entries, though I requested only for two weeks visa for the duration of the festival. But if a Burkinababe wanted a visa to the US, it would be very difficult. So, it is an unequal distribution of the right to migrate; it is relatively easy for me to migrate because I come from a richer country. And even if I have to apply for a visa, and pay—and it can be expensive for visa to Mauretania or Nigeria, it can be enormously expensive to get all the inoculations—the only real barrier is paying the fees (the cost of visas is often commensurate, so a high US fee will be matched commensurately in Mauretania). I remember in Senegal, when we lived there in 2005-7, I was told one in ten Senegalese applicants actually got the visas to the U.S., you had to have a high school education, it cost $100 to apply and if you were turned down you didn’t get the money back. I admitted Nigerian grad students to my program, in past years, and still getting the visa for them was an almost impossible feat, even though they had been awarded Teaching Assistantships that paid their living expenses and tuition.

M.I: Talking about migration, what do you have to say about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa? Mcdonald, an authority in xenophobia in South Africa, defines xenophobia as “the hatred or fear of foreigners or strangers based on a discreet set of beliefs that may be expressed verbally or manifest in the behaviours of governments, the media and the general public.”  The question then is what motivates the “fear of foreigners”?

K.H: Why do we have fear of foreigners? I prefer to think about this through Amselle's Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere where he states “we” don't come to form a notion of “us” until we are defined against “them.” There is no prior sense of an identity until terms are constructed against those who are other, not us, outside our camp, our community.

Our community is a community only to the extent that it excludes those who are not members of it. You can't have fear of foreigners until you define "them" as foreigners, as the other. So maybe you can celebrate your nation, love it and sing its national anthem. Maybe you can say, thank God we are not “them”. I grew up in NY, and everyone had jokes about New Jersey drivers. I am sure I believed people in New Jersey inherently drove badly compared with us who were "normal" drivers. In fact there is no difference, yet as children we learn to discriminate against others as if it were natural. If we think of Others as a dangerous menace, a “red menace” or a “black menace” or floods crossing the border from Mexico, and not as people, simply people like our relatives, then we buy into the fortress mentality and accept treating them like animals or not caring about their deaths. If you want to know how Europeans or Americans feel about this, read the comments on stories like the ones about the terrible drownings of people whose boats go down in the Mediterranean—or read Farage’s comments where he says they would take a few Christians, and let the rest go back and die. He is simply voicing what many think.

 M. I: Is it safe to say the creation of labels like “black and white” adds to the problems of “us” and “them”?

K: H: Absolutely. The important thing is to come to realize that colonialism is over, but ex-colonialists’ thinking is not. The idea that there are innate traits in different people, that you can measure their skulls to figure out exactly who those creatures are, is not only bad, dumb, and evil, but, more importantly, essentializing ideas about race are in the service of an ideology that normalizes the disparities in power and wealth attached to one community over another. It is, in fact, the new de facto colonialist mentality, and like all ideologies works by what is not overtly stated more than by what is directly stated. It is embedded in globalization where the new Giants of the Earth are shifting around, and more and more Asian (read Chinese now) are occupying those places in the sites of privilege—the expensive tourist shops on the Champs Elysees or Fifth Avenue—the University slots for students who can afford to pay out of state, out of country fees, the owners of the expensive cars, the travellers filling international airlines and replacing European workers in Africa. The price of globalization doesn’t come without its accompanying ideologies; if the material base is not a determinant factor, if the superstructure is relatively autonomous, it is still not completely autonomous. You can’t have disparities in wealth without accompanying ideological rationalizations. Think about the shocking shift in attitudes in South Africa where the newly wealthy black ruling classes accommodate a Cyril Ramaphosa who not only accepted the repression and punishment of the striking miners, but who had shares in the very mining company against which they were striking. Who is “us” and who is “them” there? These terms change with the changes in wealth and power. I would love to know more about how the wealthier Chinese now think about those who used to lord it over them.

An easy way to define Otherness is by applying a physical characteristic to a difference grounded in differences in wealth or class. So "they" have bad blood, and if their blood mixes with ours, we will be polluted; the Nazis tried to eliminate Jews on that ground. I don’t doubt many Europeans think of the Roma (Gypsies) in similarly ugly terms.

African societies have also sought to establish those differences, sometimes along ethnic lines, like Hutu or Tutsi. Sometimes, often, on religious grounds: a Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim woman, but not vice versa. Sometimes race has been used in the same way. Every one of these cases involves identity politics used to establish difference.

In Nigeria, where acerbic arguments between Yoruba and Igbo continue unabated, there is a continual set of assertions about what Igbo or Yoruba or sometimes Hausa are like, and some of these claims are linked back to Biafra so as to assign blame for the war. It is hard to imagine a society where difference doesn’t accompany essentializing: think of Berber vs. Arab in Morocco, or Copt vs. Muslim in Egypt, or Sunni vs. Shia in Iraq or Syria, or Persian vs. Arab in Iran, or Indian vs. Spanish in Mexico, or Native American vs. European Canadian in Canada, or Hispanic, Black, vs. White in the U.S.  Where is this model of thinking not in place?

Imagine a world in which we finally recognize human beings as the product of centuries of various kinds of mixing. And that claims to be pure white or black or Zulu or Jew or Arab or anything only occludes the fact that there is no such thing as a pure anyone. Not even our babies. We are all hybrid, mixed. We are still waiting, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, for your dreams to come full.

M.I: The UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, says migrants should be turned back and even went as far as blaming the death of Libyan leader, Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, as the cause of the upsurge of migrants flooding the Mediterranean Sea. What do you have to say about this?

K.H: The idea of turning back immigrants to where they came from is not only illegal, because they all have the right to apply for asylum, but is racist and Islamophobic, since Farage stated he'd accept Christian refugees. It is a bit astounding how right-wingers can be so open publicly about their biases. Imagine stating, well, if they are Christian Nigerians or Christian Ethiopians, we can take them, but not Muslims. It is really a reduction to a vulgar view of human beings. More importantly it demonstrates how hateful the attitudes in Europe are toward both Muslims and Africans.

The notion that Gaddafi's death is linked to this flow of immigrants is also a sign of ignorance. Politically, Farage, is arguing for the United Kingdom to separate itself from Europe, so any European project, either to give sustenance to refugees, to give asylum to those qualified, to aid people on the high seas, to treat people as people, gets trumped by playing to xenophobia. More to the point, it isn't Libyan refugees that are flooding poor Europe or poor old United Kingdom, but refugees from the east, like Syria, or south, like Yemen, or sub-Saharan Africa, and if the coastline of Libya were shut down, there is a vast coastline that would be used elsewhere as jumping off points anyway.

I knew boats left from Dakar to go all the way to Spain; there are jumping off points all the way up from there, from Mauretania to any place along the Moroccan coast, and then all along the southern Mediterranean to people going through East Europe.

It was bad enough to have had a wall in Berlin, to have a wall in the West Bank, but now to imagine a wall between all of Europe and all of Africa is to cede to monstrous fears of black people, of Muslims, of foreigners.

Every time we hear these fears articulated, we have to ask, what about those other articles, on page 2 of The Times, The Guardian, where Europeans say, we don't have enough babies being born in our country to replace the loss in population by the deaths of the old people—that they need to encourage young people to have more babies.

How can anyone read that alongside the reports of thousands dying in the Mediterranean, and many many more tens of thousands being denied entry or turned away, without thinking, here is the true face of racism.

M. I: Finally, what really is the way out of migration and immigration in our contemporary times? Should we destroy borders and allow humans the freedom to exercise their “freedom of movement”? 

K.H: In short, yes, we should destroy borders. If that can't be done in our lifetimes, we should work to create more egalitarian communities around the world, including within nations and between nations; all children should be taught that everyone has a right to a decent life; that we have an obligation to work to satisfy that right, for others or ourselves.

The west is very much divided on this issue: probably one sixth of all Europeans, and probably Americans, are deeply xenophobic. These are the supporters of UKIP in the U.K. or the Front National in France, or the other right-wing parties that exist in every European country, including those with a reputation for liberalism like Scandinavia or the Low Countries. In the U.S. it is the backbone of the Tea Party, and a high percentage of Republicans, although the latter are not all neo-fascists like the FN or UKIP. Sadly neofascism has become normalized in a Europe that had been inoculated against it by WWII.

Only a small fraction of people around the world might agree with me about borders, or maybe a tiny percentage. But most of us feel a humanitarian impulse not to let those less privileged than ourselves suffer. Most Americans would probably agree on the principle of food stamps for those too poor to buy food. Most probably agree on soup kitchens in churches; most would give to a charity if they had enough money to do so, and those charities would no doubt include helping others with medicine or food or disaster relief. Most would be happy to help those in bad straits. Very few, however, would want to see their own lifestyles diminished by this impulse to help.

How many of us have taken vows of poverty in life?

So the rest is a negotiation between the impulse to chip in, and the desire not to see one's lifestyle impinged. Most people can help at least a bit, and probably are not opposed to it. But, with the direct threat of having foreigners come and compete for jobs or admissions to universities, then comes the crunch. And with it, the “us” versus “them” and eventually xenophobia.

I wouldn't focus too much on migration here as the key issue. It is rather the factors that generate inequalities in wealth in the world, between classes and nations, which need to be addressed. Neoliberalism, neoliberal capitalism knows no borders. One can be rich in Senegal, and live next to people who live in the street. Either we work to ameliorate the greater community, or shut our doors.

Unimaginable as a world without borders is, it actually existed in most of Africa for other Africans after independence; it actually existed when great floods of migrants were sought in Europe after WWII to rebuild; it actually existed when migrants were openly accepted in the US between 1880 and 1920. And it improved life for those societies immensely. Half the American population is now descended from those immigrants of 1880-1920, and many more now from the more recent Hispanic immigration. Look closely at any of us on earth, and our ancestors came from elsewhere. We are all, first nations, we are all immigrants. What we don’t see is that we all belong to the same family.

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