Questioning Crisis: Forced Migration in Theory and Practice
2017 Annual Conference of the Institute for the Study of International Development McGill University
15-16 March 2017
Keynote address - Governing Migration under the Global Compacts: Towards an Agenda for Facilitating Mobility
Professor François Crépeau, Hans and Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, McGill University and UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants
Following on from the September 2016 UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants, states, international organizations and other key actors are presently negotiating two Global Compacts, to be concluded in 2018, to respond to the current, unprecedented numbers of people on the move, often in contexts of crisis and severe human rights violations. The first compact will address safe, orderly and regular migration, while the second will tackle responsibility for refugees. Drawing on his work as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Professor Crépeau’s keynote address will reflect on the challenges surrounding the negotiation of the Global Compacts, and the opportunity to use the compacts to facilitate mobility and advance human rights.
Re-Theorizing the Ethics of Forced Migration Beyond the State
Kiran Banerjee, Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia Global Policy Initiative and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
This project examines the contemporary politics and ethics of forced migration from both a conceptual and normative perspective. The project begins with the pragmatic observation that while the current ‘migration crisis’ undeniably raises profound moral concerns, there is a clear lack of political motivation among states to reform their legal responsibilities toward refugees. Moreover, some scholars have warned that attempting to entirely remake the refugee system anew under current circumstances would, if anything, likely weaken extant obligations and standards of protection. This poses a fundamental dilemma for political theorists of forced migration: How can we practically address the ethical claims of refugees, given the unwillingness of states to act as agents of moral change? To address this impasse, I propose an alternative strategy that relies on expanding our analytic focus by moving ‘beyond’ an exclusive concern with the state. I do so by drawing attention to non-state actors and agents operating outside, inside, and across states, that are frequently neglected in accounts of the ethics of forced migration, emphasizing the potential normative power of international and transnational organizations as well as the role of domestic social movements in generating support for refugee assistance. In developing this account, this project draws on interdisciplinary research to demonstrate how global institutions and domestic political actors represent potentially significant sites of normative transformation and can play a fundamental role in developing more effective responses to the moral claims of refugees.
The Architecture of “Crisis”: Housing Refugees in Germany and Turkey
Nell Gabiam, Assistant Professor, Department of World Languages and Cultures and Department of Political Science, Iowa State University
This paper examines the experiences of refugees from Syria who are currently living in Germany and Turkey from the perspective of the built environment. It is a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases: while in Germany, most refugees are expected to initially experience encampment in mass shelters, in Turkey, 80 percent of refugees have skipped the step of encampment, settling directly in urban environments. This contrast reveals a different approach from the two countries in terms of how they have apprehended the mass migration of refugees from Syria across their borders. A comparative analysis of Germany and Turkey’s housing policies toward refugees from Syria points to the contextual and changing meaning of “crisis,” a term that is generally associated with the ongoing mass-displacement from Syria. Furthermore, by privileging refugees’ own views of their housing options rather than focusing solely on the official justifications given by government authorities for their housing policies, my analysis widens the frame for thinking about what constitutes “crisis” and how the built environment can contribute to alleviating or exacerbating it.
The Refugee Surge in Europe
Antonio Spilimbergo, International Monetary Fund
The dislocation of large parts of the population in Syria and other conflict zones is, first and foremost, a humanitarian catastrophe with important ramifications across many countries in the Middle East, Europe, and beyond. This paper focuses only on the economic aspects of the surge in asylum seekers in the European Union (EU), where asylum applications in 2015 have surpassed those in any of the last thirty years. In the short term, the macroeconomic effect from the refugee surge is likely to be a modest increase in GDP growth, reflecting the fiscal expansion associated with support to the asylum seekers, as well as the expansion in labor supply as the newcomers begin to enter the labor force. The impact of the refugees on medium and long-term growth depends on how they will be integrated in the labor market. International experience with economic immigrants suggests that migrants have lower employment rates and wages than natives, though these differences diminish over time. The paper discusses various policies which have been tried in different countries to enhance integration.
Reading Crisis: Race and the Politics of Deportation in 1960s Australia
Laura Madokoro, Assistant Professor, Department of History, McGill University
Over the course of a few short weeks in April-May 1962, sixty thousand migrants sought entry in the British colony of Hong Kong from the People’s Republic of China. Coming at a particularly tense moment in the global cold war, the migrants’ movements captured the imagination of many western political leaders who attributed their actions to economic strife and political oppression of the sort that, in their minds, typified life in “Red China.” In the United States and Canada authorities developed refugee resettlement schemes that were intended to demonstrate the superiority of liberal, democratic governments over their communist counterparts. The government of Australia, under Prime Minister Robert Menzies, regularly participated in similar rhetoric and strategic positioning throughout the cold war however a very different dynamic attended the response of Australian authorities to events in Hong Kong in the spring of 1962. Instead of exploiting the movement of migrants for political purposes, the Menzies government avoided almost any mention of the “exodus” for it coincided almost precisely with a domestic controversy over the deportation of Chinese migrants from Australia to the People’s Republic of China. Using the notion of crisis as a framing device for historical inquiry, this paper explores the language used by the Menzies government to describe the deportation of Willie Wong and contrasts it with the historian’s assessment of the situation in Australia as a crisis as a result of the events unfolding in Hong Kong. In doing so, it interrogates the implications of using the language of crisis to describe a historical event when contemporaries did not, theorizing about the power of language to reshape understandings of what was at stake in terms of refugee assistance and the politics of deportation.
Syria beyond “Refugee Crisis”
Wendy Pearlman, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
In the past years, headlines on the Syrian “refugee crisis” have understandably focused on the horrific violence that individuals are escaping, their perilous journeys across land and sea, and the sheer scope of need generated by mass forced migration. Yet alongside these developments of humanitarian urgency, quieter developments are also remaking the lives of Syrians in exile. One such development relates to transformations in social-class and in class differentiation among the displaced.
Academic and popular examinations of refugees often analyze them abstractly as victims of violence, legally as rights-holders under international statutes, demographically as a distinct population, or individually as agents carving paths of resilience or resistance despite severe constraints. These perspectives are useful for examining an array of important questions, but obscure many factors that both signal salient differences among refugees and vitally shape the lived experience of exile. One such factor is refugees’ own socio-economic backgrounds. The wealth, education level, and class identity that individuals had before fleeing their homelands affects many dimensions of their post-flight lives, including their future expectations, their sense of what they have lost, and the personal resources that they bring to the challenge of integration and starting anew. At the same time, refugees’ prior class status does not have an unmediated impact on their subsequent socio-economic trajectories. Rather, like other aspects of refugees’ new worlds, they are filtered though the particular circumstances that they encounter in their new lands of exile, and thus vary with those circumstances themselves.
I explore how host state contexts shape refugees’ experiences of socioeconomic class through comparative analysis of Syrian refugee communities in Turkey and Germany, pulling upon nine months of field research in either country between 2013 and 2016. In Turkey, the state has relatively been slow in issuing and enforcing regulations and thus, at least during the first years of the Syrian conflict, largely left Syrians to “go it alone.” I argue that this weak state intervention in the realms of absorption and integration compounds the socio-economic differences that Syrians carry with them. Refugees with greater personal resources carve pathways to comfort and success, while those with fewer resources meet with little protection from impoverishment or exploitation. In Germany, by contrast, the state and its bureaucracy impose their overpowering presence upon the lives of refugees as upon citizens themselves. Such strong intervention has a leveling effect on refugees’ pre-existing class differences. At least during the first years of the asylum process, asylum seekers’ housing, work prospects, and everyday experiences are heavily structured by law and integration programs, which affect the richer and poorer among them without distinction and thereby lessen the significance of those differences.
Maritime Legal Black Holes: Migration and Extra-Legality
Itamar Mann, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa
The notion of a "legal black hole," coined in the post 9/11 moment in the context of detention in Guantanamo Bay, illuminates the role of law in the construction of certain categories of migrants as rightless populations. The British judge Lord Steyn, who originally labeled detention in Guantanamo as occurring in a legal black hole, meant to highlight how certain spaces become lawless. Emerging from his view is a spatial version of Carl Schmitt's temporal notion of a state of exception. Australian legal theorist Fleur Johns, on the other hand, has characterized this "black hole" as a space saturated with legality, administrative and martial. In her view, its cruelty relates precisely to how it annihilates personal political judgement, or in other words, the exception. Since the beginning of the so-called migration crisis, the Mediterranean space has embodied a third type of legal black hole, which this paper aims to theorize. This is a space in which migrants trade the false promise of enforceable human rights with a simple appeal, bare and extreme, to be rescued. This process, I will argue, sheds light on the true scope and nature of the so-called "migration crisis."
