Can We Solve the Migration Crisis?

Jacqueline Bhabha

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509519439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Every minute 24 people are forced to leave their homes and over 65 million are currently displaced world-wide. Small wonder that tackling the refugee and migration crisis has become a global political priority. But can this crisis be resolved and if so, how? In this compelling essay, renowned human rights lawyer and scholar Jacqueline Bhabha explains why forced migration demands compassion, generosity and a more vigorous acknowledgement of our shared dependence on human mobility as a key element of global collaboration. Unless we develop humane 'win-win' strategies for tackling the inequalities and conflicts driving migration and for addressing the fears fuelling xenophobia, she argues, both innocent lives and cardinal human rights principles will be squandered in the service of futile nationalism and oppressive border control.

1
A Crisis Like No Other?

In Chinese, the word “crisis” is formed with the characters for danger and opportunity. This captures some of the duality at stake in use of the word – a moment of threat that introduces pressure to innovate. Crisis discourse features in many contexts – political, economic, organizational, personal. Among the different glosses on “crisis,” two are particularly relevant to migration. Laura Henderson suggests that the purpose of crisis discourse is to dislocate existing narratives, substituting a new narrative that offers solutions: tackle danger by discarding current remedies in favor of new ones.¹ A second approach analyzes crisis-driven rhetoric by reference to three key actors: a responsible villain, an affected victim, and a resolving savior. While the villain causes a crisis for the victim, the savior intervenes to resolve the situation, taking advantage of the need for action to generate the consensus needed to drive change.²

Reactions to recent migratory events have deployed some of these narrative strategies. The notion of “crisis” has become ubiquitous, a shorthand for marking the unique features of the present and the legitimacy of radical measures to address them. I will argue that current circumstances are not unique, and that instead of quick fixes focused on migration (essential though some such measures are), we need to develop an integrated approach to the factors that propel large-scale distress migration. A historical perspective on human mobility contextualizes current pressures within the long-standing ebb and flow of complex human migration patterns. This perspective offers precedents for anticipating and addressing the multiple ripple effects of movements of people that we are seeing today.

Lessons from History: A Brief Overview of Migration’s Longue Durée

By contrast with dominant contemporary accounts of the refugee and migration crisis, migration history encourages us to think of human movement as being separate from the act of border crossing.³ This history demonstrates, across a broad canvas of time and space, that the factors affecting human mobility have been remarkably constant over centuries (indeed, over millennia). Equally constant is the range of mechanisms for responding to this mobility, mechanisms characterized by power asymmetries and self-interest. Historical, linguistic, and archeological evidence suggest that only where migrating populations have brought with them superior technical abilities or unknown germs have their arrivals posed fatal threats or long-term security challenges to the settled population.⁴ This is a useful corrective to the inflated rhetoric of civilizational crisis often invoked in connection with contemporary migration.

To point out that “people have always moved” is to state the obvious. In a well-known book, Benedict Anderson noted more than 30 years ago that nations are “imagined communities,” cultural products of individual human endeavor and collective organizing rather than facts about any inherent or permanent link between place and people.⁵ They are also recent inventions, as are the borders that define them.

Our species, Homo sapiens, first emerged from Africa about 150–200,000 years ago. Genetic and archeological scholarship now confirms that an “African Eve” was “the mother of all humanity.”⁶ The movements of early human groups were determined by the evolving ability to exploit two large clusters of natural resources, those generated by water (lakes, rivers, seas, oceans) and those generated by soil. The imperative to secure means of survival and to adapt to changes and opportunities in one’s environment has always been a fundamental driver of human mobility. From the earliest traces of history, human migration and its interaction with increasingly diverse physical and climatic environments, at the water’s edge and inland, contributed to dramatic breakthroughs and the diffusion of new animal and plant breeding techniques. Survival, innovation, and ambition continue to be drivers of human mobility.

The impact of early resource-expansion advances on migration was complex. On the one hand, the move away from hunting and gathering toward an agrarian economy associated with the obligation to till the land and tend to herds of animals encouraged a sedentary lifestyle. Then, as now, the overwhelming majority lived out their lives in one place (even today, only 3 percent of the world’s population are international immigrants). On the other hand, then, as now, the destruction of traditional agrarian livelihoods prompted out-migration of communities.

By 3000 BC, crop cultivation had expanded rapidly to cover previously uncultivated areas, generating a growth in population size and, with it, the potential for conquest, commerce, and exploration. Pack animals facilitated transport of people and of substantial goods for purposes of commerce. So too did the development of new forms of aquatic transport, including sail- and oar-propelled vessels. By 2000 BC, human migration had extended to all inhabitable spaces.

Archeological and historical evidence suggests that, as now, young travelers were mainly those forging links with new communities, absorbing previously unknown techniques, languages, and habits as they expanded their spheres of operation. Fascinating DNA-related archeological research illustrates the complex human movements now encoded in skeletal remains, food from different regions leaving an indelible trace of migration trajectories.⁷ It generates a detailed picture of the syncretic products of multiple migration-facilitated interconnections over time.

One can think of these movements as evidence of growing global exchange or of progressive regional or continental division. The conclusion depends on the baseline against which human mobility is measured.⁸ Historically, as now, long-distance migration separated families and led to economic, social, and cultural divergence from the original community and changes within the new society. But it also generated new connections, and did not always interrupt old ones. Economic, military, and political factors combined in different ways to generate connection or separation, integration or division, just as they do today.

Four Broad Drivers of Migration Across the Ages

A helpful typology identifies four broad and nonexclusive drivers of human migration over a very large historical canvas. These provide a simplified and schematic backdrop for contextualizing present-day challenges and assessing whether our current migration situation is one of exceptional “crisis.”

Historian Patrick Manning points out: “Migration of whole communities was usually a migration of desperation rather than hope … refugees driven by drought or conquest.” The 20th century, as we will see, provides numerous examples of this first driver, a form of desperation-driven migration, where only those too old or too sick are left behind. Throughout human history, people have fled their homes to survive.

In the absence of such desperation, populations tended to be more selective. When sufficiently confident, they used a second strategy, migration to colonize, a process that included both temporary and permanent migrations, and flows in multiple directions. By the first millennium BC, Indo-European and Semitic speakers began domesticating horses and using them to draw chariots and carry warriors. These developments led to a significant innovation in military conquest capability with radical political implications across Eurasia and south to the Indian peninsula. Civilizational consolidation led to massive construction projects – of pyramids, temples, roads, and waterways – which in turn fueled the mobilization of large numbers of laborers, many of them enslaved. Over 10 centuries, from the 5th century BC to the 5th century AD, conquest-fueled migration gave rise to empires, from the Han Dynasty in China to the Roman Empire across the Mediterranean and into North Africa. With construction came fortification – and the first walls used as early devices for excluding outsiders from cities or other settlements, a technology still in favor today.

In the Americas, Peru developed a highly centralized empire in the Andes in the 9th century AD, dominating neighboring peoples, forcibly resettling some and importing others as seasonal workers for major construction projects such as the building of Cuzco, which employed 40,000 laborers for a span of 10 years. From the 15th century onwards, British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and Japanese colonization remodeled continents for generations, leading to the extraction of raw materials, to devastating epidemics that decimated native populations, and to ruthless local exploitation; it also led to new trade routes, new forms of production and commerce, and rich and complex variants of social and cultural exchange between colonizer and colonized, patterns that shaped and still shape contemporary migration flows.

These were large-scale migrations for the times. For example, close to half a million Spaniards traveled to the Americas between 1500 and 1650. Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas led to dramatic population changes – disease and conquest reduced the population of the Mexican peninsula from approximately 25 million to 2 million over the period of one century, a “near genocidal” impact that dwarfs any contemporary consequences of migration. Centuries later, in the 19th century, with the move toward agrarian capitalism in Latin America primarily fueled by coffee and banana production and the development of railways, large-scale intra-continental migration took place, compounding the forced dislocation of native peoples. In these contexts, migration-fueled “crises” or harms were the consequence of domination and exploitation by powerful over less powerful groups, not the reverse.

Similar processes of contact-induced illness, brutal conquest, and forced relocation decimated North America’s native peoples. Agricultural developments and the need for exploitable labor fueled further violent forced migration, of brutally enslaved African populations. Concurrently, further south, silver mines in the Andes became the site of violent relocation of native peoples as labor fodder for a burgeoning global trade. Chinese migrants also participated in this trade, bringing Asian laborers and traders into this intensely globalized picture, a forerunner of vast Asian expatriate communities today.

The colonial migrations, even when the numbers of recorded colonizer expatriates were small (according to the 1891 Census of India, only 100,000 Britons were estimated to be living in India), generated enduring legacies, not only for the natives and the migrants, but also for future links between colonizing and colonized populations.

Well into the 20th century, large-scale recruitment brought millions of colonial laborers to distant territories. Following the abolition of slavery in 1833, Britain began exporting South Asian workers across its empire – to Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, and Fiji. By 1916, more than 1.5 million Indians had been shipped out to the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Over the next 20 years, a further 6 million Indians were recruited to work in plantations in Malaya and Ceylon, seeding one of the largest and most extensive global diasporas of all time.

Whether these migrations were “coerced” or “voluntary” is contested. What is clear is that the migrants, many of them temporary workers, were often severely exploited, generating the backbone of imperial accumulation rather than personal wealth. This historical legacy is relevant both to the ethics of modern migration control and to the impact of global inequality, issues discussed in later chapters. Although the era of imperialism is largely over by the 21st century, economic and cultural domination associated with extraction of raw materials, control of markets, inequitable trade agreements, and unsustainable debt persist.

Large-scale migration between colonizer and colonized did not stop with the end of empire. The reverse migrations of formerly colonized populations to the metropolitan homes of their erstwh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 A Crisis Like No Other?
• 2 A Duty of Care
• 3 The System at Breaking Point
• 4 Finding Workable and Humane Solutions
• Further Reading
• End User License Agreement