Liz Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which antiterrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and dehumanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.
At the heart of the book is an examination of xenoracism - a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism - where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.
Liz Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which antiterrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and dehumanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.
At the heart of the book is an examination of xenoracism - a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism - where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.
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Overview
Liz Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which antiterrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and dehumanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.
At the heart of the book is an examination of xenoracism - a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism - where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783713929 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Liz Fekete is Executive Director of the Institute of Race Relations and has written and lectured widely on issues of migration, race and security in Europe. She edits the European Race Bulletin. She is a consultant on refugee and immigration issues to a number of organisations, including the Refugee Council, and was an expert witness at the Basso Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and the World Tribunal on Iraq. She is the author of A Suitable Enemy (Pluto, 2009).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE EMERGENCE OF XENORACISM
Once, the West saw its 'superior' civilisation and economic system as under threat from the communist world. That was the ideological enemy as seen from the US; that was the hostile, intransigent neighbour as seen from western Europe. Today, the threat posed by 37.4 million displaced people, living either temporarily or permanently outside their countries of origin has replaced that posed by communism. For, in this brave new post-Cold War world, the enemy is not so much marked out by ideology as by poverty. As western security agencies, supranational global bodies, intergovernmental organisations and national governments mobilise against migratory movements from 'over-populated' and 'socially insecure countries with weaker economies', a whole new anti-refugee discourse has emerged in popular culture. Those seeking asylum are demonised as bogus, as illegal immigrants and economic migrants scrounging at capital's gate and threatening capital's culture. And it is this demonisation of the people that the capitalist western world seeks to exclude – in the name of the preservation of economic prosperity and national identity – that signals the emergence of a new racism. As Sivanandan has argued:
It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe's doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a 'natural' fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but 'xeno' in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism.
In the UK, it was after the election of the New Labour government in 1998, that xeno-racism became fully incorporated into domestic asylum policy. By making 'deterrence' (of 'economic migrants'), not human rights (the protection of refugees), the guiding principle of its asylum policy, a government committed to dismantling institutionalised racism has erected new structures of discrimination and, in the process, provided the ideological space in which racism towards asylum seekers became culturally acceptable.
'Managed Migration': the New Socio-economic Darwinism
Over the last two decades, the EU, while encouraging member states to harmonise asylum policies, has slowly been introducing measures to control 'migratory movements'. But more recently the EU's approach coalesced into an overall philosophy of 'global migration management'. Since the UN warned of the growing demographic crisis in Europe, brought on by an ageing workforce and declining birth rates, there has been a growing recognition within western Europe that immigration is necessary and that refugees might even provide an important source of skilled labour. Indeed, since the European Commission indicated in November 2000 that the EU should open up legal routes for migration, and national governments within Europe followed its lead by adopting skills-based recruitment programmes for foreign workers, European governments have been openly supporting 'managed migration'.
But while 'managed migration' may well be a means of opening up avenues for skilled immigrants (including refugees) to enter Europe as guestworkers, it is simultaneously leading throughout Europe to moves to abolish the right to claim asylum, as guaranteed by the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. For global migration management is not just a philosophy within which skills shortages are addressed; it has emerged as part of the strategic response of the powerful nations of the First World to the economic and social dislocation engendered, first, by the break-up of the former communist zone of influence and, second, by the impact of 'globalism's insatiable demand' on the Second and Third Worlds 'for free markets and unfettered conditions of trade'. It is a strategy that arises, ironically enough, from the recognition that the global market-induced displacement of people cannot be left to market forces but must be managed for the First World's benefit. If global capitalists are concerned with 'building a stable and regional environment for global accumulation' and 'a new legal and economic superstructure for the world economy', they are equally concerned with building a new global structure of immigration controls to decide which people can move freely around the world, and which people will have their movement restricted. One result of this is that the Fortress Europe 'zero immigration' approach, which characterised the end of the twentieth century, is not so much abandoned as refined.
But to understand how such a strategy of global migration management leads to xeno-racism, it is necessary first to outline the scale of international cooperation on migration issues and to detail specific, internationally agreed measures through which seeking asylum came to be regarded as an illegal, criminal act. Although the targets of global migration management may differ in terms of North American, Australian and European concerns, these power blocs share a common interest, as demonstrated by their cooperation in supranational bodies and intergovernmental agencies in pooling information on migratory movement. Such cooperation then informs regional policy, at the EU level, for instance.
The industrialised nations liaise through bodies like the International Centre for Migration Policy and Development (ICMPD), founded in 1993, which developed out of the Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia. It was originally set up to coordinate refugee and migration policies following the break-up of the former Soviet Union and saw its role as 'advising governments on the prevention of migratory movements from East to West and South to North'. Other mechanisms include regular meetings of the secretariat of the Budapest Process, a conference of ministers from some 34 states and representatives from inter-governmental organisations, which deals with the prevention of illegal migration and recommends action on issues like trafficking, smuggling and pre-entry and entry controls. By the late 1990s, there were at least 30 other networks and fora of activity set up by European states and intergovernmental organisations to predict migratory flows and to advise on border controls. On many of these, international and national security agencies were represented, as well as the governments of the US, Australia and Canada, either as fully fledged members or as observers. More recently, the focus of these fora has shifted from predicting migratory flows to combating smuggling and trafficking. The year 2000 was designated by the EU, the Group of Eight industrialised nations (G8) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which includes Canada and the US) as the year of the 'anti-trafficking plan'.
Criminalising Irregular Migration
The overwhelming focus of supranational bodies and intergovernmental fora on trafficking networks (termed by the G8 as the 'dark side of globalisation'), coupled with a complete absence of concern for refugee protection, has led Migrant Rights International to warn that 'in national and international fora, the dominant considerations regarding displacement of people have deteriorated from assistance and hospitality to rejection and hostility'. In effect, that aspect of international law that once upheld the right of all migrants to claim asylum in another country, regardless of their means of entry, and placed on all governments the obligation not to return refugees, either directly or indirectly, to a country where they faced a real risk of persecution (non-refoulement), has been progressively negated.
While no one can deny the exploitative nature of the smuggling networks that control so many of the routes through which asylum seekers reach Europe, Australia and the US, what these international fora have blatantly failed to address is that it is the regimes that governments have instigated (carriers' liability, visa requirements, readmission treaties and electronically fortified borders) that have blocked legal routes for those seeking asylum and thrown them into the arms of smugglers and traffickers. Western governments refuse to countenance this. Instead, asylum seekers trafficked into Europe are described, for example by the UK Home Office, as people who seek illegal entry 'after receiving daily images of the potential economic and ... social benefits available in richer countries across the globe'. Informed by such blinkered views, international bodies, hardening themselves against the plight of millions of displaced people across the world, adopt anti-trafficking measures that elide the difference between the traffickers and the trafficked so as to treat both as points on the same shadowy continuum. Indeed, the Smuggling Protocol of the 2000 UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime states unequivocally that the 'migrant' should not be viewed as a blameless victim but, rather, as partly complicit in the act of 'illegal migration'. It is now an offence all over Europe to assist any person in an illegal border crossing, regardless of whether she or he is a refugee in need of protection or not. And, at an EU level, the November 2002 Directive and Framework Decision on 'Strengthening the Penal Framework to Prevent the Facilitation of Unauthorised Entry, Transit and Residence' is being interpreted in such a way that those providing humanitarian-grounded assistance are being penalised.
Governments admit, when it suits them, that traffickers trade in human misery. The women and children thrown overboard in the Atlantic by traffickers desperate to avoid detection and the 58 Chinese who suffocated in a refrigerated lorry on its way to Dover were cited by UK prime minister Blair as vulnerable victims of the trafficking trade when he launched the joint Anglo-Italian initiative to clamp down on trafficking via the so-called Sarajevo route. But when former home secretary Jack Straw implied that trafficking was carried out on such a large international scale that it threatens national sovereignty over immigration issues, then he linked trafficked and traffickers in a criminal conspiracy.
The 'war against trafficking' serves, in effect, both as the means of and justification for states to recast asylum seekers in the public mind as 'illegal immigrants'. To break domestic immigration laws (through, for instance, entering a country as a stowaway) is now treated as a criminal act, even though the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees upholds the right of refugees to break domestic immigration laws in order to seek asylum. Thus the EU succeeded in shifting the terms of the refugee debate so as to treat asylum seekers not as people from many different countries, with many different experiences and each with an individual story to tell, but as a homogenous and undifferentiated mass. Hence the fascination among its politicians and press with flat statistical projections of asylum flows; hence the offensive language in which migratory movements of displaced people are described in terms of environmental catastrophe; hence the dehumanisation of asylum seekers as a 'mass', 'horde', 'influx', 'swarm'. In this, xenoracism against asylum seekers resonates with the past. Jews under Nazism, blacks under slavery, 'natives' under colonialism, were similarly dehumanised, held to possess mass characteristics that justified exploitation, victimisation and, at the last, genocide.
Imposing Western Immigration Controls
But there is another aspect to the 'war against trafficking' and the criminalisation of asylum seekers. For, if asylum seekers who break domestic immigration laws are treated as having carried out an illegal act that links them to an international criminal conspiracy, then the EU is justified in imposing its own immigration policies on states that tolerate illegal migratory movements or fail to control the movements of internally displaced people.
How does this work in practice? It was at the Tampere European Council summit in October 1999 that the processes were formalised under which the EU instituted policies that turned Third World governments into immigration police for western Europe. (Such structures already existed for the so-called 'buffer states' of central and eastern Europe.) Prior to this, in late 1997, the EU (borrowing from the Canadian practice of posting immigration officers at airports across the globe) substantially increased the number of airline liaison officers posted at airports and other ports to stop suspected illegal immigrants from travelling. Such officers, who had no training in refugee protection, also acted as immigration staff at embassies and consulates throughout the world. The EU High Level Working Group on Asylum and Immigration, which had already drawn up draft action plans to stop refugee movements from Afghanistan, Albania (and Kosovo), Morocco, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Iraq, also started to seek ways in which trade and development arrangements could be used as levers with which to achieve the EU aim of refugee reduction. The new policies instituted at Tampere, in essence, formalised arrangements that had been ad hoc and piecemeal. It ensured that the policy of 'refugee reduction' would be achieved not at the point of arrival but at the point of departure, via pre-embarkation checks. Responsibility for the prevention of refugee movements would be passed to the asylum seeker's country of origin or the countries through which asylum seekers passed on their way to Europe. This was to be encouraged by measures tying trade and humanitarian aid to the prevention of 'refugee flows' and the return of rejected asylum seekers. The Lomé convention, for instance, was redrawn in February 2000 in order to tie £8.5 billion in aid and trade agreements between the EU, Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific region (ACP) to specific rules guaranteeing the repatriation and expulsion of people deemed to be 'illegal' within the EU. But concerns within the donor community internationally regarding the linkage between migration policy and development aid forced the EU to take a more nuanced approach. Hence, in December 2007 at the EU-Africa Summit in Lisbon, a Strategic Partnership to 'foster the linkages between migration and development', through returns and readmission programmes aimed at 'jointly combating irregular immigration', was adopted.
In this way, the discourse around global migration management – of opening avenues to skilled migrants – camouflages the First World's true approach to immigration controls. Effectively, it takes control of migration strategy and policy, a basic state function, from those nations that have no sway on the supranational bodies that set out the stall of global migration policy. And the EU's North African neighbour countries, anxious to enjoy good trade relations with Europe, are, likewise, co-opted through the 'Euro-Mediterranean Partnership' (otherwise known as the Barcelona Process). Just as a Third World country has to accept World Bank and IMF austerity measures imposed through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) to survive in the era of globalism, it also has to accept the imposition of migration controls. And, just as poverty reduction programmes mean pauperisation and the erosion of education, social and welfare provision, western-imposed immigration controls lessen the life chances of globalism's victims still further, by denying them freedom of movement, confining them to camps in their own countries and removing the hope of obtaining sanctuary from the persecution of authoritarian regimes.
To put it another way, whereas European nation states are prepared to pool sovereignty on immigration and asylum issues in order to stop asylum seekers from getting into the EU, the poorer nations of the world lose their sovereignty over immigration controls in order to stop their citizens getting out. Unless, that is, these citizens are part of the chosen few: highly skilled computer wizards, doctors and nurses trained at Third World expense and sought after by the West. Global migration management strategy saps the countries of the Third World and the former Soviet bloc of their economic lifeblood, by creaming off their most skilled and educated workforces. Since the Tampere summit, the thrust of EU refugee policy has shifted to include integratory measures for officially recognised refugees (henceforth 'genuine refugees'), while moving towards the total exclusion of asylum seekers (henceforth 'bogus claimants' and 'economic migrants'), preferably through pre-embarkation controls. The ultimate aim is to create an entirely different model of 'refugee protection' based, not on individual rights, but on a system of warehousing the displaced in large camps in their region of origin until a conflict has been resolved to the satisfaction of the western powers. From such camps, a chosen few will be selected for resettlement in Europe under an Australian-style quota system.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Suitable Enemy"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Liz Fekete.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsForeword by A. Sivanandan
Introduction
Xeno-Racism and the Security State
1. The Emergence of Xeno-racism
2. Anti-Muslim Racism and the Security State
Islamophobia and Accusatory Processes
3. Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right
4. The New McCarthyism
Detention and Deportation
5. The Deportation Machine
6. 'Speech Crime' and Deportation
The fight for Civil Rights
7. They Are Children Too
8. Islamophobia, Youth Resistance and the Meaning of Liberty
Notes to the text
Index