The Politics of Compassion

Immigration and Asylum Policy

Sirriyeh, Ala, Ala Sirriyeh

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781529200454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Whether addressing questions of loss, (be)longing, fears of an immigration 'invasion' or perceived injustices in immigration policies, immigration debates are infused with strong emotions.

Emotion is often presented as a factor that complicates and hinders rational discussion. This book explores how emotion is, in fact, central to understanding how and why we have the immigration policies we do, and what kinds of policies may be beneficial for various groups of people in society.

The author looks beyond the 'negative' emotions of fear and hostility to examine on the politics of compassion and empathy. Using case studies from Australia, Europe and the US, the book offers a new and original analysis of immigration policy and immigration debates.

1

A Crisis of Compassion

A compassionate refusal

Several years ago, I was put in touch with Grace,1 a Nigerian woman whose asylum claim in the UK had been refused. She was being detained with her toddler in the notorious Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre where they faced imminent deportation from the UK. While she was detained I spoke with a member of staff in her local member of parliament’s office to ask for support for her case. This person was not hostile, aggressive or unkind. They listened to me and they expressed some sympathy for Grace’s circumstances, but then reflected that it would be better for her and her small child if they were deported rather than living in limbo and hardship in the UK as refused asylum seekers. This person suggested that in trying to help Grace and her child to remain in the UK, their allies were possibly doing them a disservice and causing them further harm and suffering.

There has been extensive discussion of the now all-too-familiar hostile attitudes expressed towards undesired migrants and refugees in many societies that receive them (Wazana, 2004; Anderson, 2013; Chavez, 2013; Jones et al, 2017). In this instance, however, I was struck by the way that deportation was justified not simply as an enforcement of immigration restrictions against an undeserving migrant, but also as an act of compassion and care. Through this logic, deportation was presented as a means of alleviating suffering – in effect, this was a ‘compassionate’ refusal.

Introduction

During the 1880s and onwards, following the exclusion of Chinese migrants during the gold rushes in California (United States [US]) and Victoria (Australia), the US and self-governing colonies in Australia began legislating ‘to regulate the entry of “undesirable immigrants”’ (Bashford and McAdam, 2014:309). Although relatively late on the scene, Britain joined this legislative trend set by territories of its former Empire by introducing the Aliens Act 1905. It was passed in response to the arrival of Eastern European Jews in Britain who had escaped the pogroms in the Russian Empire (Solomos, 2003). Since this period at the turn of the 20th century, the discursive category of the ‘undesirable’ migrant has endured and become embedded at the heart of political debates and policy making on immigration, citizenship and national identity in the minority world.2 As the term ‘undesirable’ suggests, these policies, which are designed to exclude, have often been justified through recourse to hostile and negative emotions such as fear, anxiety and hate. However, while sentiments of hostility have been a defining feature of immigration discourses, the emotional landscape and discourses of contemporary immigration controls and the resistance to these controls are more complex and nuanced.

In this book, it is maintained that in the context of the rise of a cultural and political script of humanitarianism (Berlant, 2004; Fassin, 2005; Ticktin, 2014) a discourse of compassion has also been present in political debates about ‘undesired immigrants’. ‘Compassion’ has been called for and enacted by those who resist punitive immigration policies, but also by those who seek to enforce these policies. It is argued that the discourse of compassion has been used by both implementers and opponents of immigration policies, often building on the colonial origins of the use of this discourse in reference to racialised others. In doing so, these voices on both sides of the debate have grounded compassion within a relationship of power disparity, control and subjugation. However, there is also evidence of possibilities for alternative engagements with compassion that are grounded in solidarity, and which offer more promising modes of responding to and resisting suffering and social injustice.

This book explores the role of compassion and its relationship to other emotions in asylum and immigration policy discourses in Australia, the UK and the US, and examines how these manifest in compassionate refusals (justifying deterrence through compassion), compassionate resistance (resisting immigration controls), and resistance to compassion (excluding people from being recognised as deserving subjects of compassion). It reflects on the ways in which immigration policies have been expressed and justified in public debates in these states; it also considers the responses they elicit. Policy cases from the Anglophone states of Australia, the UK and the US are used as examples of the response of societies receiving immigrants and refugees in the minority world, but also to investigate the specific experiences of discourses on migration and compassion in the Anglo-colonial context.

#CompassionCrisis

In the summer of 2015, the world watched in horror as death washed ashore on Europe’s southern borders. Migrants and refugees had been drowning in the Mediterranean Sea for years in their attempts to reach Europe, but in 2015 there was an unprecedented escalation in the numbers of people undertaking this journey. It was then that these tragedies came to prominence and played a central role in stimulating political and media interest in the region and across the globe. While numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean had remained constant on the deadly Central route (Libya to Italy), there had been a substantial rise in crossings on the Eastern route (Turkey to Greece); almost half of the people travelling on this route were refugees escaping the war in Syria (Crawley et al, 2016). Thus, while numbers of deaths per thousand were lower in 2015 than in 2014, greater numbers of people were making the journey and the numbers of dead continued to rise. This, at the time, made 2015 the deadliest year on record for deaths of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean (IOM, 2016). It had been anticipated that the peak season for refugee and migrant sea crossings would end as summer moved into autumn and the conditions at sea became more treacherous. However, people continued to attempt the crossing and the number of dead continued to rise. By December 2015, 990,671 people had survived their journeys and arrived into Europe by land and sea routes; this was nearly five times the total for 2014 (IOM, 2015).

In this context, there was a proliferation of ‘crisis’ talk, with several different terms emerging to categorise and represent these events over the time of ‘the crisis’ – ‘Mediterranean migrant crisis’, ‘European migrant crisis’, ‘refugee crisis’ (De Genova and Tazzioli, 2016; Goodman et al, 2017). These different and evolving categories reflected the debates that ensued over the identities of the people making these journeys and how Europe should respond to these events. It was debated whether the very nature of the response was itself part of the crisis; that is a crisis in the fundamental values and policies of the European Union (EU) (a project which originated in the aftermath of the earlier genocide and mass displacement of peoples in the 1930s). The crisis discourse surrounding this movement of people coincided and intersected with crisis talk around the economy and austerity in Europe, particularly in its southern states, and the political project of the EU (Heller et al, 2016).

It has become well established that the governments, media and electorate in many societies receiving migrants and refugees are in favour of restrictive immigration and asylum policies. However, over the course of the summer of 2015, and most dramatically after the drowning of the three-year old child, Alan Kurdi, on a Turkish beach on 2 September, it seemed that perhaps this was changing as there were increasing invocations of compassion and a sense of disquiet and unease about Europe’s responses to refugees. In addition to the usual critiques of a politics of hostility, scapegoating and exclusion, there was increased focus not just on the presence of inappropriate emotions, but on the absence of ones deemed more appropriate (compassion, care) in a civilised society. European governments (some more than others), the EU and other political actors were condemned for their lack of compassion for refugees (Amnesty International, 2015; Townsend, 2015; Head, 2016). To fill the compassion gap in government responses, there was an outpouring of expressions of compassion among the people of Europe who began to act directly to welcome refugees by mobilising through campaigns such as Refugees Welcome and engaging in other forms of volunteering and campaigning (Graham-Harrison and Davies, 2015; Anthony, 2016). A shift in the tone of media reporting was also notable during this period as ‘migrants’ became ‘refugees’ and hostility was, briefly, replaced with expressions of concern and care (European Journalism Observatory, 2015). Indeed, compassion became a buzzword of the crisis, reflected in the Twitter hashtag #CompassionCrisis. In response, there were some shifts in government policy, most notably seen in German Chancellor Angela Merkel opening the door to one million refugees who crossed over the border into Germany (Connolly, 2015; Agencies in Budapest and Vienna, 2015). Even in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron, under pressure to respond, introduced an expansion to the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme (SVPRP) in September 2015.3 Such shifts, however, were eclipsed by a continuing overriding drive to keep these people out of Europe. This could be seen in the reluctance of many governments (the UK included) to receive what had been calculated as a ‘fair share’ of refugees arriving into Europe (BBC, 2015); the EU–Turkey deal through which refugees arriving by boat to Greece from Turkey were to be returned to Turkey (Crawley et al, 2016); the scaling back of rescue operations at sea (Follis, 2017; Stierl, 2017); and the (re)institution of borders within Europe, including the UK-funded border wall in Calais (Head, 2016; Travis and Chrisafis, 2016).

In Australia, there have been similar expressions of public dismay at an absence of compassion in government policy towards refugees, most notably around the use of offshore detention centres on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) to intern and warehouse people seeking asylum (Gleeson, 2016). In 2015, people came out on to the streets and online as part of the ‘Let Them Stay’ campaign, to protest plans to return 267 people (including 37 babies) to Nauru following medical treatment in Australia (Doherty, 2016a). It was the death of a child, Alan Kurdi, that was a catalyst for protests in Europe. In Australia, a baby girl known as ‘Baby Asha’ who was being treated hospital in Brisbane and 37 other babies facing deportation to Nauru became the faces of Let Them Stay. In August 2016, following the leak of the Nauru Files by The Guardian newspaper, there were further protests against offshore detention as thousands of people rallied in cities across the country. The Nauru Files had revealed widespread and endemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse and harm reported by staff working in the detention centre on the island, over half of the cases being against children (Farrell et al, 2016).

Despite the surge in numbers of refugees fleeing conflicts and violence in the Central American states of Honduras and Guatemala in recent years, there has been no equivalent public outcry at the deportations and pushbacks taking place at the US–Mexico and Mexico–Guatemala borders (Tuckman, 2015; Canizales, 2015). However, following the rise in immigrant deportations since the 1990s (Golash-Boza, 2012), there has been a growth in immigrant-led protests against detentions and deportations, amid a wider campaign for the recognition of the rights of undocumented immigrants (Patler, 2017). Within this broader campaign, since the early 2000s the undocumented youth movement has attempted to secure a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people through their campaign for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act. The movement has seen some success, most notably in the introduction of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) administrative relief by President Obama in 2012, which granted a temporary, renewable deferral on the deportation of some eligible young people4 (Obama, 2012). Compassion for the plight of innocent and deserving undocumented young ‘Dreamers’ held in limbo was a central theme in the campaign for the DREAM Act, and later for DACA when the DREAM Act failed to pass (Nicholls, 2013).

In denouncing the absence of compassion in the actions of governments, some people protesting government policies have argued that there is a crisis in the heart and the moral and political values that supposedly define these regions and their peoples – a crisis in Western civilisation. Engaging with the perceived crisis of the European heart, in June 2015 art activists from the Center for Political Beauty in Berlin announced their plans to exhume the bodies of some people who had died trying to reach Europe from the inhumane graves or storage in which they lay at Europe’s external borders. The activists stated they would rebury them with dignity in Berlin, at the heart of Europe, explaining that the aim of this intervention was ‘to tear down the walls surrounding Europe’s sense of compassion’ (Center for Political Beauty, 2015). As part of this action, Europe’s civil society was invited to participate in a ‘March of the Determined’ in which they would accompany the dead to the Federal Chancery to create a graveyard in the forecourt dedicated to the ‘Unknown Immigrants’. Here the German cabinet and visitors would have to literally walk over the dead bodies of migrants.

Their aim ‘to tear down the walls surrounding Europe’s sense of compassion’ suggests not simply an absence of compassion, but that this emotion was in fact present, only dormant and buried under the weight of the cold rationality of European political bureaucracy, or confined behind the wall of hostile emotions and responses from the people of Europe that had been raised against those who attempted to reach her shores. There was a sense that Europe had lost its way and public commentators made references to the lessons that were supposed to have been learned in the aftermath of the Holocaust (Chu, 2015). However, the refugee crisis in Europe and the response to it was not a complete break with history, or an exceptional moment in time. The longer history of this crisis was present in the ideas and practices that were produced through European modernity and that formed its very foundations. Modern Europe has been walking on the dead bodies of the subaltern since its conception. Indeed, it was given birth through this violence. There was no golden age of compassion in Europe’s relationship with its former colonial subjects, ready to be reawakened. Similarly, claims in Australia and the US that the treatment of refugees and undocumented migrants was out of character with the core principles, national character and values of those nations also rested on shaky foundations. In the case of these two settler colonial states, these claims overlooked their founding race regimes and migration histories. This book considers how the colonial and settler colonial histories and structures of the racial states of Australia, the UK and the US have shaped some of the contemporary immigration and asylum policies explored in this book. It considers how they have operated in the withholding of compassion, but also in the use of a discourse of compassion in repression, and how other emotions present in debates on immigration and asylum come into play in these contexts. The focus in this book is not on all migrants (some of whom travel freely and are among the most privileged people on the planet). Instead, it focuses on undocumented immigrants and refugees who have been at the centre of policy debates on immigration and asylum because they have been deemed as undesirable in the receiving nation-states. An overview of this population and the historical context is provided in greater detail in Chapter Three.

An outline of the argument

Hostility and compassion

This book examines the role of compassion in immigration and asylum policy discourses through exploring the ways in which policies are expressed, justified and responded to in public debates. In a context of increasingly restrictive and exclusionary immigration and asylum policies towards undesired migrants and refugees across the minority world, we are now acutely aware of, and used to, the blatant discourses of hostility engaged with by some politicians, media and other public commentators. There is a long history to these discourses, but at certain periods of time they have become more visible and pernicious. In each of the three nation-states there are localised political and social contexts, histories and significant events that have led to differentiated versions of this broad discourse of hostility. However, since the 1990s each of these states has seen the passing of immigration legislation that has imposed increasing restrictions on entry into, and settlement in, these societies (Solomos, 2003; Golash-Boza, 2012; Vickers and Isaac, 2012). There has been rapid growth in the use of detention and deportation to manage those who have been deemed to be unwanted in this new regime (Golash-Boza, 2012; Bosworth, 2014; Gleeson, 2016). Alongside these policy developments, media and public hostility has grown towards certain populations of migrants and refugees, although the precise relationships and direction of cause and effect between government, media and public attitudes are contested (Gilligan, 2015; Morales et al, 2015). In response to the perceived reduction of state sovereignty in the age of globalisation and the challenges this and neoliberal economics have delivered for some citizens, it has been argued that governments have used stronger immigration border controls to placate aggrieved citizens. They have scapegoated immigrants to demonstrate some sense of retaining state sovereignty (Bauman, 2004).

Those who advocate restricting and excluding immigrants and refugees have been described as mobilising emotional discourses of hate, fear and disgust towards them (Chavez, 2013; Tyler, 2013; Jones et al 2017). Meanwhile the actions of those who oppose such measures are characterised by emotions of grief, empathy and compassion (Stierl, 2017). However, the emotional politics of immigration and asylum is also complex and nuanced. It is unsurprising that, in an environment of increased border controls and restrictive reception conditions, academic literature examining the role of emotion in immigration and asylum policy has focused predominantly on ‘negative’ hostile emotions and on the exclusionary and repressive practices with which they are linked. In this book, it is argued that this predominant focus, while offering valuable and necessary insights, can obscure the more mundane or seemingly humanising emotions that are used to enforce and justify repression, and how these intersect with the negative emotions discussed. Meanwhile, with reference to Australia, the UK and the US, it can also overlook the Anglo-colonial legacies which they build on, particularly the racialised manifestations of these emotions. Nor, on a more optimistic note, does it assess how those attempting to counter and resist restrictive immigration and asylum policies and practices engage with humanising emotions, and the challenges and paradoxes that have emerged con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Global Migration and Social Change
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• 1. A Crisis of Compassion
• 2. The Emotional Politics of Immigration and Asylum
• 3. Emotion, Colonialism and Immigration Policy
• 4. The Intolerable Death of Alan Kurdi
• 5. Victims, Villains and Saviours
• 6. Withholding Compassion
• 7. Outrage, Responsibility and Accountability
• 8. Self-Care and Solidarity: The Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement
• 9. Conclusion
• References