Resident Foreigners

A Philosophy of Migration

Donatella Di Cesare

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509533572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

From the shores of Europe to the Mexican-US border, mass migration is one of the most pressing issues we face today. Yet at the same time, calls to defend national sovereignty are becoming ever more vitriolic, with those fleeing war, persecution, and famine vilified as a threat to our security as well as our social and economic order. In this book, written amidst the dark resurgence of appeals to defend 'blood and soil', Donatella Di Cesare challenges the idea of the exclusionary state, arguing that migration is a fundamental human right. She develops an original philosophy of migration that places the migrants themselves, rather than states and their borders, at the centre. Through an analysis of three historic cities, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, Di Cesare shows how we should conceive of migrants not as an other but rather as resident foreigners. This means recognising that citizenship cannot be based on any supposed connection to the land or an exclusive claim to ownership that would deny the rights of those who arrive as migrants. Instead, citizenship must be disconnected from the possession of territory altogether and founded on the principle of cohabitation – and on the ultimate reality that we are all temporary guests and tenants of the earth. Di Cesare'sargument for a new ethics of hospitality will be of great interest to all those concerned with the challenges posed by migration and with the increasingly hostile attitudes towards migrants, as well as students and scholars of philosophy and political theory.

1
MIGRANTS AND THE STATE

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

H. Melville, Moby Dick

1 Ellis Island

They journeyed for weeks across the ocean waves, in the depths of the hold, almost under the waterline, massed in dark dormitories of ever shabbier aspect, squeezed onto old straw mattresses – men, women and children, as many as 2,000 passengers. Only the third-class ones disembarked at Ellis Island. For those who had enough money to afford first or second class, there were but a few quick checks carried out on board the ship by a doctor and a civil registrar.

Imperious steamers and mighty transatlantic liners set out from Hamburg and Liverpool, Naples and Marseilles, Riga and Antwerp, Thessaloniki and Copenhagen, heading towards one same destination: the Golden Door of a fairy-tale America. After an exhausting crossing, when the ship finally entered the waters of the Hudson River, and the shore of New Jersey could be made out at a distance, the passengers headed up onto the bridge so that they could see the Statue of Liberty. It was the welcome that they had dreamed of. Emotion won out over their strains, their worries and their tiredness. Kafka describes in near-epic tones the arrival of Karl Rossmann, protagonist of his novel Amerika:

As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.¹

The Statue of Liberty has a unique history. Brought to the New Continent as a French donation and a token of European values, over time it became a symbol of welcome for the damned of the Old Continent, the exploited and enslaved, decimated by famine, wars, misery and the hatred to which they had fallen victim. The Jewish poet Emma Lazarus called the statue the ‘Mother of Exiles’ in her 1883 sonnet, which was engraved on the pedestal of the statue. ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp’, the statue shouts with her mute lips: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

Until 1875, there was open entry onto US soil. Here these outcasts could find redemption by becoming pioneers in a virgin territory, the builders of a just society, and citizens of the New World. In this early period, Castle Garden, the old fort in Battery Park in south Manhattan, was designated as a sorting centre. Then restrictive measures began to be applied, leading to the establishment of the Ellis Island centre on 1 January 1892. Having first been unlimited, immigration became institutionalized. Nonetheless, a large influx was still allowed, and between 1892 and 1924 over 16 million people passed through Ellis Island. From 5,000 to 10,000 a day. Few of them, around 2 per cent, were turned away – almost nothing compared to today’s figures. But still around 250,000 people. There were more than 3,000 suicides.

Ellis Island emerged, through the haze, from behind the Statue of Liberty. New York, the promised land, was right there, just a short stretch across the sea. But the third-class passengers knew that their journey was not over. They were separated from the New World by that small island, almost a relict of the Old World, a transit site where everything was still in play, where those who had set off had not yet arrived, and those who had left everything behind still had nothing.

The Mohegans called it Seagull Island; the Dutch rebaptized it Oyster Island, before the merchant Samuel Ellis bought it and imposed his own name, a marker of his possession of this narrow sandbank in the Hudson. The name remained, whereas ownership passed to the city of New York, which expanded the island thanks to the landfill created with ships’ ballast and the earth removed from the tunnels for the subway.²

For the migrants, it was simply the Island of Tears – indeed, in the languages of all the peoples who passed through it: isola delle lacrime, île des larmes, isla de las lágrimas, ostrov slez and so on. The lucky ones would spend just a few hours in the Federal Bureau of Immigration. Enough time, that is, to be subjected to medical checks. The symptoms of possible illnesses, or the parts of the body to be checked, were denoted by letters of the alphabet: C for chest, or tuberculosis; E for the eyes; F for the face; H for the heart; K for hernia; L for lameness; SC for scalp; TC for trachoma; and X for ‘mental disease’. Making a chalk mark, the sanitary officials would draw a letter on the shoulders of these passengers, who, having been assigned for closer medical examination, were held on the island for days, weeks or months. But when they diagnosed either a contagious disease, tuberculosis, trachoma or ringworm or ‘mental disease’, there followed immediate repatriation.

In their testimonies, the passengers recount their long and anguished wait, the confused noise, the painful uncertainty, and the shame felt over the marks chalked on their shoulders. Those who had passed the medical checks joined the line for the legal desk. It was here, with an interpreter’s aid, that they had to answer the twenty-nine questions that were fired point-blank by the inspector on duty: ‘What is your name? What country are you from? What is your final destination in America? How much money do you have with you? And where? Show it me. Who paid for your passage? Are you meeting a relative here in America? Who? Can they provide a guarantee for you? Are you coming to America for a job? Where will you work? Are you an anarchist?’ If the inspector was satisfied, he then stamped the migrant’s visa and bid them ‘Welcome to America!’ If that was not the case and he instead had doubts, he wrote two letters on a piece of paper – ‘SI’, meaning Special Inquiry. The passenger was then sent on to a commission made up of three inspectors, a typist and an interpreter. The interrogation resumed – this time more exacting and detailed.

Those who had passed all the inspections and questions hurried along to the ship that would take them to New York. Thus, in the course of a few hours, having gone through a couple of checks and a few vaccinations, a Lithuanian Jew, a Sicilian or an Irishman could become an American. For them, the Golden Door, the Eldorado of modernity, was open. Each of them could make a fresh start, leaving behind the past, their own history and that of their ancestors, the country to which they owed their birth, but which had denied them life. Soon, however, many must have had second thoughts. America was not the land of freedom of which they had dreamt, and nor were the streets paved with gold. Those who had arrived first had already appropriated everything and very little remained to be shared out, except for jobs in the factories of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side where workers toiled for fifteen hours a day. As for the streets, at this point they were largely yet to be built, together with the railroads and the skyscrapers.

Those who entered the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century nonetheless ought to have considered themselves privileged. Those were the years in which the peak of migrant numbers was reached. In 1907 alone, 1,004,756 migrants passed through Ellis Island. The First World War would soon contribute to reducing the great influx, but what slowed immigration were above all the measures that the federal government took to restrict it. The Chinese and other Asians had already been barred since 1870. The ban was, however, only made official in 1917 with the Immigration Act – or Asiatic Barred Zone Act – which extended the ‘undesirable’ label also to anarchists, homosexuals, the insane, vagrants and so on. This was also called the Literacy Act, because it stipulated that immigrants would have to prove that they could read and write in their own language, as well as be subjected to intelligence tests. A few years later, the number of entrants was further reduced, first with the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and then the 1924 National Origin Act, which imposed an annual limit of 150,000 entrants. This latter, particularly, was a self-evidently racist measure, for it sought to put up barriers to immigration from the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe. The Italian quota, at first as much as a quarter of the total, was then reduced to 4 per cent. It is hardly surprising that, in the 1930s, these laws could also inspire Nazi politics.³

Ellis Island, where a psychiatric hospital and a prison had been built, ended up becoming a detention centre for irregular immigrants, and, in the interwar period, was transformed into a prison for suspected anti-US activists. In 1954, the government closed the sorting centre on the island.⁴ The island and its name remained inscribed in the autobiographies of many of the children and grandchildren of this great migration. At least 40 per cent of US citizens today have an ancestor who disembarked on Ellis Island.

The America that had in little more than a century increased its population from 188 million to 258 million inhabitants – in large part of European origin – without too many scruples, then chose drastically to reduce the numbers of new entrants and to close its borders.

But how could immigration laws be reconciled with the ideals of the US Constitution, which were meant to be universal? How come some people could be rejected as ‘undesirables’ if the Declaration of Independence itself asserted that all men are created equal?

This conflict was at the heart of Ellis Island, a crossing to hope yet also a centre of discrimination. Between its lights and shadows, the island – this unique non-place of exile – reflects the contradiction of all US policy. The initial openness of the frontiers, which could rely on widespread consensus, was followed by the introduction of restrictive criteria when the first ‘native’ Americans born on the soil of the New Continent imagined that, with their birth, they had thus acquired the right to decide whom they would grant the title of ‘American citizen’. Not everyone in the world seemed suitable – despite the words, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which Emma Lazarus had directed to the outcast and the lowliest. It was then that the nation that had emerged from Ellis Island forgot about its own exile and preferred to exercise its ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Introduction: In Short
• 1 Migrants and the State
• 2 The End of Hospitality?
• 3 Resident Foreigners
• 4 Living Together in the New Millennium
• End User License Agreement