Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration

Human Smuggling from Pakistan to Europe

Ali Nobil Ahmad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409409755
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317099727
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration makes use of extensive new empirical material to explore the phenomena of migration, human smuggling and illegal work, in order to develop a compelling account of international migration, linking it with irrational, risky economic behaviour and male sexual desire. Interviews conducted with successive waves of Pakistani immigrants in the UK and Italy, together with ethnographic fieldwork amongst local journalists, immigration officials and smugglers in Pakistan, serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary comparative analysis of illegal migration across time and space. Challenging the received idea that labour migration is driven purely by rational economic forces, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration draws upon psychoanalytic social theory to examine the roles of masculinity and irrationality in the decision to migrate, thus stimulating a more complex debate about migration's causes and consequences. The arguments it makes raise wider questions about the folly of thinking about economic concerns in isolation from other aspects of human experience. As such, this book will appeal to those with research interests in economics, social theory, migration, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

PART I Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315594200-1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315594200-2

There’s a curious complicity between researchers of migration and its protagonists. Both parties share an interest in representing migrants as asexual accumulators of capital, driven by little other than a narrowly defined, rational commitment to the material betterment of their kin and household.

Receiving societies propound this myth for its obvious ideological benefit of justifying the appropriation of migrant labour on favourable terms (the very term ‘labour migrant’ reduces the body in question to a pair of hands whose sole purpose is to work). It surfaces most obviously when this assumption is challenged by changing demographic realities – for instance, by the arrival of women and the settlement of families which often triggers a chorus of Malthusian concern about high rates of immigrant reproduction. The frequent association of immigration with housing shortages and strains on the welfare system amounts to balking at the idea that migrants themselves have emotional and sexual lives and aspirations which extend beyond the productive sphere: that they dare rise above their station to covet things we regard as normal for ourselves such as home ownership, domestic pleasures, family lives and, by implication, sex.

Thinking of migrants this way – as scrimpers and savers, embodiments of puritanical patience governed solely by the ‘reality principle’ – is comforting for societies which view themselves as progressive and tolerant, post-racial and democratic: sleep easy in the knowledge that the migrant who works nightshifts has no interest in pleasure; no raison d’être beyond survival and the material betterment of kinfolk.

Governments and communities in migrant-sending societies like Pakistan, for their part, are keen to project an image of their citizens and family members as pious and patriotic labourers whose sole objective is to serve their communities and countries with remittances that raise living standards and boost economic development. Migrants themselves, who play an important role in obfuscating matters, have little interest in challenging this image of themselves as martyrs. Nor indeed do their families, whose knowledge about the realities of life abroad is based on secondary reports rather than firsthand experience.

Then there is social science. Academic representations of labour migrancy, liberal and Marxist, have tended to carve up the migrant’s social world into two distinct spheres. Economics and economic sociology, which dominate migration studies, foreground ‘hard’, quantitatively measurable causes and consequences. ‘Cultural’ drives, experiences and processes such as sexuality, supposedly less tangible, are relegated to the humanities and effectively ignored (for a discussion see Mai and King 2009). If anything, the emergence of a supposedly fresh set of concerns in the new millennium with paradigms such as ‘transnationalism’ and ‘network theory’ reflects the ongoing economism that pervades mainstream migration studies, a field in which the protagonists are only rarely discussed as complex, multidimensional social beings, willing and able to experience the full range of human emotions the rest of us take for granted.

There is, I reckon, a need for research that focuses upon the subjective nature of decision-making. The manner in which analysis is conducted in most sociological studies of migration networks and transnational economic practices effectively bypasses the individual; it assumes all actors within the ‘migration network’ to be objective rational actors and net beneficiaries of (labour) supply meeting demand in host countries. Very few, if any works produced in either of these fields question seriously whether migration is a profitable course to embark upon, and most do not address the question of motivation in sending contexts at all. This neglect is all the more perplexing given the growing importance of illegal migration and the rising death toll resulting from failed attempts to penetrate western borders. The difficult and sometimes terrible fate that awaits many of Pakistan’s international labour migrants is one they engineer themselves at considerable cost, a fact which points to the need for a counter-intuitive explanation for why migration happens.

Gender and ideologies of migration

The novelty of this study lies in its specific focus on the driving dynamics of masculinity. The behaviour of men is placed at the heart of my explanation of why migration happens, in tension with the dominant paradigm that tends to take kinship’s primacy for granted. Following Werbner’s (2002: xxi) call for greater attentiveness to the dynamics of friendship, the research presented here demonstrates that decisions to migrate are forged amongst inner and outer circles of male friends, not the migrant’s immediate family. Often they are mired in controversy, conflict, disharmony and discord between and across genders and generations within households, suggesting important tensions between friendship and kinship. The latter’s primacy as a driving force of migration cannot be presumed; competing, colliding tussles between individual actors and their families suggest we need to think more carefully about who gets to migrate and what impels them to do so.

One important factor is the increasingly pervasive reach of consumerism in a country reputed for the purity of its religiosity (like the East more generally for its supposed spirituality). Commodity fetishism and lust for worldly status are intertwined with locally entrenched ‘hegemonic masculinities’ (Cornwall 1997: 11) and interpolated through advertising and television, driving large and diverse constellations of men to fixate obsessively upon seeing or making a career of the West in a manner that is, in some ways, a curious inversion of several European antecedents and equivalents – colonial adventure, the Hippy Trail and now the ‘Gap Year’ – each of which has successively institutionalised youthful intrepid exploration for middle-class Occidentals who continue to depart all year round in countless numbers on sensuous journeys to Asia and elsewhere where they wander, gaze upon and experience exotic cultural difference.

Such comparisons should not be, and are not pushed too far: what distinguishes Pakistani labour migrants most clearly from western travellers (and indeed the other great labour migrations of the 20th and previous centuries) is their subordination in travel, transit and destination to a structural edifice of state surveillance, discipline and control unprecedented in human history (the implications of which are examined in Parts III and IV). The sending context, moreover, is a violent, tormented society in which money equals power in ways that can have brutal implications: corruption, disintegrating institutions and corroding social fabric have taken a heavy psychological toll on the Pakistani middle-classes, for whom emigration holds the promise of purchasing – in some cases restoring – damaged masculine self-esteem in communities distorted by competition for status and power.

Sexuality

This book argues for an interdisciplinary understanding of labour migration’s driving dynamics and consequences – one that considers its entanglements with disavowed and unconscious currents of sexual and erotic energy. >Part II of this book explores the relationship between risk and fantasy in some detail, drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to underline the importance of libidinal investments and sublimated desire in shaping the decision to migrate.

Recent writing on the psychology behind insurance suggests that even the most seemingly conservative, apparently risk-averse acts of spending (purchasing indemnity) entails creative speculation about what one’s future might resemble after incurring some loss that may or may not happen at an unknown point in the future (Patel 2007: 100, 102-3). It surely follows that human smuggling – a spectacular gamble that yields nothing but misery for some (injury or death for others) – must be embedded in imaginative processes worth understanding. What sorts of futures and pleasures are imagined before a person climbs into a small container of a truck or ferry in the hope of reaching Europe? The tragic circumstances under which these capsules of hope can become coffins are a reminder that, as with insurance, people don’t always examine the details of their policies (what is paid for when someone buys insurance is not exact [Ibid: 102-3]). So too are the labour market outcomes of migrants who successfully reach intended destinations only to spend years trying to eradicate debts incurred in the process of trying to regularise their status.

The erotic energies that generate the drive to emigrate (>Part II) must be seen in relation to the actual experiences and outcomes in transit, travel and work in receiving countries (Parts III and IV). Some bodies matter more than others under the present world order of capital, which has proved itself adept at appropriating and transforming the desires and energies of peripheral and marginal populations into useful production – labour power to be siphoned off, wasted and diverted elsewhere as deemed fit by core, rich countries as diverse as Britain and Italy. The former I call Afro-Eurasia which, following Georges Bataille, is conceptualised as part of capitalism’s ‘general economy’ that includes, but is by no means restricted to Pakistan; the latter zones are synonymous with North Western and Southern Europe, conceptualised, again following Bataille, as the ‘restrictive economy’.

Far from reflecting a loss of state control, human smuggling networks mediate the supply of Afro-Eurasian labour to demand in Europe’s restrictive core. Their emergence is traced from colonial times to the present in a historical process of brokerage and commodification that has deepened as a result of restrictionist state policies since the early decades of the 20th century, culminating in the emergence of what is increasingly referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. The latter’s relationship with immigrants who penetrate its borders is defined by labour regimes and laws that combine to thwart permanent settlement and work-life-balance for migrants who struggle to exist beyond the productive sphere; sexual desire (>Part II) turns into sexual deprivation and deep-felt loss (Part IV). Corpses of those who die trying –the thousands drowned, suffocated and deported in the process of smuggling – are evidence of the gap in solidarity that confronts humanity in the 21st century. Part III ends by situating their lives and deaths in Afro-Eurasian history over the longue durée through connection with an older, universal spirit of travel, endurance and desirous, risky adventure dating back to ancient and medieval times: Xenophon’s march and the Muslim invasion of Spain, like most of today’s illegal migrations, are part of a Mediterranean history that elides the exclusionary notions of belonging which dominate contemporary myth-making and teleological histories of Europe based on its supposedly Christian, Greco-Roman heritage.

Conceptualising smuggling and illegality

Academic research on human smuggling is descriptive and dominated by high-flying technocratic, criminological and legal scholarship (important exceptions include Anderson 2007 and Andrijasevic 2009). Conferences, articles and books focus for the most part on the strategic concerns of policy-makers and officialdom in transit and destination states. Historical perspectives on smuggling are rare (for a notable exception see Schrover et al. 2008) and like the media, politicians and interior ministries to whom they tend to address themselves, case studies tend to treat smuggling as an unprecedented activity perpetrated by ‘criminal networks’ and ‘trafficking rings’ (a 2006 issue of International Migration contains no less than four articles on human smuggling, each of which focuses on the organisational structure of its operations: Bilger et al; Liempt and Doomernik 2006; Pastore et al. 2006; Neske 2006). The state and its role in producing illegality with restrictive policies is hardly anywhere to be seen in this work – predictably, perhaps, given its political coordinates and sympathies.

Theorisation of smuggling is sparse and premised on liberal and neoliberal assumptions – one-dimensional portraits of human behaviour dictated by narrow agendas of economic utility. Following Salt and Stein’s (1997: 467-94) influential conception of smuggling as a business regulated by supply and demand, Bilger et al. (2006: 66-7) and Koser (2008) assume the existence of a trust-based symbiosis between smuggler and migrant, arguing, respectively that smuggling is a ‘transnational service industry’ which ‘pays’ – i.e. delivers in terms of net benefits to migrants, their families and agents. This book takes a somewhat different tack: if brokerage is a business, its ‘customers’, like all human agents, make decisions in political contexts – relations of power that shape transactions between migrants and smugglers in ways that are highly pronounced in travel and transit. Often there is very little meaningful ‘trust’ in smuggling networks: migrants are largely at the mercy of agents, who may or may not provide them with the service they require successfully.

Smuggling outcomes are uneven and erratic; networks do not necessarily deliver win-win-win scenarios for migrants, their families and agents. They are not nearly as uniformly profitable as the business analogy seems to imply because networks, like the human beings linked within the webs that compose them, behave irrationally. Even where they do thrive, net benefits are distributed unequally among their members. Leaving aside the mortal risks involved in border crossings and other perilous moments during the migration process which frequently lead to apprehension, imprisonment, extortion by corrupt officials, smuggling networks are subject to fraud and coercion: co-ordinating agents can disappear after payments are made up front, or abandon migrants in the course of the journey, dumping them in obscure locations without food and water.

Fixing responsibility on individuals and groups overlooks the fact that smuggling seldom involves a single ‘agent’, and distracts us from the policies and contexts that produce it. Historically, migrants and smugglers have always been permeable and organically linked categories; today they are more blurred than ever thanks to unparalleled restrictionism periodically punctuated by amnesties which create vast scope for profiteering among ordinary migrants who charge for ‘help’ in organising documents: extortion, blackmail, coercion, aggressive and blatant profiteering are rife in migration networks since the expansion of the migration business into regularisation in inhospitable host countries. The very term ‘smuggler’, as understood in media and policy circles, can thus be misleading: differentiating categorically between migrants and smugglers too neatly ignores the fact that many ‘smugglers’ are in fact migrants who facilitate illegal travel, entry and/or regularisation upon arrival of family members, friends, acquaintances and fee-paying strangers.

Boom-bust: cycles of prosperity and recession

Why and how do migration networks appear to benefit some migrants while having ambivalent and even negative consequences for others? To what can we attribute the success and failure of any given ethnic economy to provide a minimum of security for most of its participants? Part IV of this book makes the argument that ethnic economies, when analysed over time, reveal their vulnerability to cyclical fluctuations which are themselves the result of the dialectical relationship between the pull and push forces that generate migration networks, a fact that has important implications for individual migrants whose labour market and housing outcomes – more than class background and educational capital – are determined by timing. The point at which they are inserted into the enclave has fundamental implications for their position in relation to the broader migratory network and prospects in the context of reception. The ebb and flow of prosperity and recession can vary dramatically, abruptly altering newcomers’ odds for achieving successful incorporation.

Economists might describe such fluctuations as markets correcting themselves thr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Preface Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II DRIVES
• PART III DEATH
• PART IV LOSS
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices
• Index