Migration and the Contested Politics of Justice

Europe and the Global Dimension

Giorgio Grappi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000392760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses the politics of justice in relation to migration addressing both the controversies of governance and the active role of migrants' struggles in shaping the materiality of justice.

Considering justice and migration as globally contested fields, the book questions received wisdoms of European migration politics, including images of a migratory 'crises', the reconfiguration of the borders of justice, and the spurious pretensions of controlling and governing mobility. Gathering global scholars from migration studies, international relations and critical theory, as well as social activists, it advances an extended concept of contestation that goes beyond the simple clash of interests between national and international political actors. As such the book expands the discourse to a wider politics of justice and advances different angles and methodological perspectives from which to question purely normative conceptions of justice. Looking beyond the simple transformations in laws and regulations, the book updates the debate on migration adopting a global perspective.

This book is of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, European studies, global justice, and labour, gender and EU studies.

1Migration and the contested politics of justice

An introduction

Giorgio Grappi

Introduction

This book adds its voice to the collective effort against the bordering of the question of justice. It does so by discussing the contested politics of justice in relation to migration in the European context. In doing this exercise, it aims to bring migrants to the centre of the scene. The focus of mainstream discussions on justice and migration is in fact slowly slipping from migrants to states, and from migrants’ subjectivity to states’ rights to stop and exclude them – and to the moral circumstances that justify exclusion. And at the centre of the debate, we often find normative discussions on open or closed borders, and on the rights of migrants as opposed to the rights of citizens, which tend to naturalize a subject considered as “the hosting community” and the role of the state and the nation as basic units (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002; Velasco and La Barbera, 2019: 5; Blake, 2020; Lucarelli, 2020). In this discussion, the materiality of the issue of justice, which includes the way migrants negotiate and challenge borders and state policies, the violence and suffering produced by these policies, and the fact that migrants constitute an increasingly essential component of a global working population, tends to disappear.

This bordering of the question of justice has been challenged in many ways: from the angle of globalization theories, stressing the fact that global interdependence and inequality in the distribution of wealth questions the right of states, particularly rich states, to exclude others; from the perspective of critical migration scholars, who have argued for the need to link the discussion on justice to the subjectivity of migrants; and by the analysis that links migration with the global dimension of contemporary capitalism (Velasco and La Barbera, 2019; Balibar, Mezzadra and Samaddar, 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). This book takes stock of these contributions to argue for the need to overcome a purely normative approach, in order to consider and pay attention to the points “in which the ‘battle of words’ takes on the contours of physical and concrete confrontation within and against a given legal or conceptual framework”, and to the subjects that, with their behaviours, enact this confrontation (Samaddar, 2007; Grappi, 2020: 4).

The question of justice is in this way understood as related “to the different concrete dimensions produced by the encounter between legal and institutional settings, and the way in which justice-seeking subjects mobilise justice as a contentious claim” (Grappi, 2020: 6). The book thus considers the contentiousness of justice and migration primarily as the result of migrants’ movements and struggles, more than the content of theoretical and normative debates. As discussed within the GLOBUS Project, a conception of justice as mutual recognition, which recognizes individuals and groups as political subjects and the existence of structural injustices that operate beyond and below formal mechanisms, can “open a door towards discussions of global justice that are not confined to the limits of institutional actors such as states, international organizations and legal systems” (Ibid., p. 3). When applied to migration, this implies the possibility of considering the politics of migration “as a complex field where contestation constantly redraws subjects’ positions and the very nature of the actors that claim to govern migration” (Ibid.).

Several contributions in this book suggest directions to further develop this discussion. As argued by Bernd Kasparek and Lena Karamanidou in Chapter 5, in fact, while the “causal character” of the movements of migration is often underexposed in the analysis of policy changes, migrants are “the first movers” in the process of formulating legislation, policies and institutional reform. The issue is thus not just that of recognizing migrants in discussing what justice is, but also acknowledging that migrants are a central component in defining the field of tensions and power relations that shape migration policies, constantly redrawing the meaning of justice and forcing its boundaries. This point must be complemented with the way contemporary migrant struggles, together with past struggles, form a sedimented memory of self-organization and infrastructures of solidarity which are often forgotten in the analysis of institutional change and policy development (see Stierl and Tazzioli in the Afterword). One can add that migrants are the first movers also in the process of revealing how the politics of mobility intertwines with capitalist production and what Apostolova and Hristova in Chapter 8 call “the geography of class struggle”.

By inquiring these elements, this book widens the discussion on justice and migration beyond the clash of interests between national and international political actors and the realm of governance, considering both justice and migration as globally contested fields, shaping what we call “the politics of justice”. Consequently, various chapters in the book explore different societal issues as well as transformation of laws and regulations. Distancing itself from an understanding of migration as related mainly to displacement caused by objective factors, the book emphasizes the ways in which migration challenges the notions of politics and justice. While most of the chapters focalize their gaze on Europe, this approach has a consequence in the way the book adopts a global perspective. In fact, the global assumes a double meaning: first, it entails that the relationship between justice and migration cannot be considered from the perspective of a single political entity as an isolated unit. Instead, what the set of chapters in the book propose is to consider the European Union as a political entity enmeshed in a matrix of transnational power relations, historic ties and practices. Second, by refusing to consider migrants only as objects of governance, the global is the background against which migrants’ claims for justice can emerge and be observed, going beyond issues of scale or comparative politics. The inclusion of chapters dealing with a non-European context, namely the Central-North American region, aims in this sense to add insights from one of the most relevant experiences of collective migrant struggles in contemporary times, in order to find resonances and transnational elements of political communication.

The book also makes a contribution to methodology: instead of considering the epistemological turmoil that migration produces in political and social sciences as simply an example of crisis in the social sciences themselves, the suggestion we can draw from the book's chapters is to consider how we can challenge the way migration scholarship is intertwined with the forma mentis of migration management. This means to make explicit that this book is not concerned with migration as a problem to be solved or governed, and it is aware that the nexus between migration scholarship and the policies on migration needs to be critically scrutinized, particularly where research is increasingly funded by schemes that respond to policy priorities (Stierl, 2020a). It is against this background that, within this book, migrants’ movements are considered not much as objects of study but as political facts that constitute crucial elements of the global dimension and redefine the stakes of justice. In this regard, the book deals with different political “crises”, considering them as multi-layered and multi-scalar: situations where governance patterns produce bottlenecks, directions produced by migrants’ movements, but also as a result of the turmoil that migration produces in political and social sciences, constantly creating tension in terms of categories, frameworks and geographical scales (regional, national and global). Moreover, the book includes approaches and contributions that expand and develop different critical perspectives in the study of migration: from policy analysis to aerial geography, from class struggle to anti-colonial conflicts and from ethics to the emerging concept of “logistification”.

A tale of two crises and the values of Europe

When this book was planned and discussed, the so-called refugee crisis of the summer 2015 and its aftermath was still the biggest event as far as analyzing migration within the EU. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Besides the heavy toll in terms of the number of people who are infected and those who continue to die from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the pandemic has been a shock for global mobility. Fear of the collapse of national healthcare systems performed like a political force majeure clause, prompting containment measures and lockdowns, enacted one after the other by national governments like dominoes, rapidly impacting border policies. This happened globally, but for the EU, where both external and internal borders were affected, the shock has been double. Less than five years from the summer of 2015, the image of a world at a halt become the face of a new crisis.

But as the pandemic crisis deepened its costs in terms of lost and diseased lives, another image emerged: the world at a halt wasn’t entirely a still world. Even where all were asked to stay home, not everybody could stay home. Protests, walkouts and wildcat strikes brought to the fore the fact that even with the strictest containment measures, such as the ones seen first in China and shortly after in Italy, millions of workers, particularly those dealing with healthcare, cleaning, transportation, delivery, food processing and farming – defined as essential workers – continued to perform their duties. Even where working from home has become the image of labour in public debates, for many workers home was neither the workplace nor a safe place, and staying home wasn’t an option. Among those workers, migrants constitute a large portion.

In a tract written on the situation of migrant workers in India, the Indian philosopher Ranabir Samaddar asks who bears the burden of the epidemic, and who pays the costs of containment in terms of life and livelihood. Samaddar argues that this question takes us to the heart of the issue of justice because the measures enacted during lockdowns “actually shed light on the appalling policies and practices with regard to labour in general and migrant labour in particular” (Samaddar, 2020: 19). The pandemic crisis demonstrated, he adds, that an agenda of justice should go beyond rights and entitlements and needs to recognize the fabricated vulnerabilities and the daily struggles of migrant workers.

While we look at Europe in a world shaken by the pandemic crisis, we then ask: what if we consider the issue of migration and contested justice in retrospective, from the angle of who bears the burdens of the epidemic? What if we ask what the pandemic has revealed about trends already in place? What kind of relationship between migration and justice can be articulated in post-pandemic Europe, once general lockdowns are flexibly lifted and borders are selectively reopened? In this introduction, we can only begin this exercise by considering how the epidemic highlights the structural relevance of the elements in the politics of migration analyzed in this book, and exposes the way so-called European values are a component of a contested politics of justice, rather than an answer to it. In particular, the pandemic, although is a global fact, has brought about a radical re-bordering of politics and has dramatically narrowed the conditions under which justice can be debated and discussed, widening even further the distance between the formal and institutional conditions of justice and justice claims emerging from the materiality of everyday struggles. This holds particularly true if we look at migration.

At the early stages of the pandemic in the EU, there were moments in which border crossings and migrant labour became subjects of fast-track decisions, merging together the tale of two crises and leading Europe to display its vision. These moments made evident how the process of Europeanization of migration governance does not correspond simply to a transfer of competence to the EU institutions as separated and largely opposed to the Member States, in a zero-sum game of sovereignty. Maurice Stierl effectively observes that the European level continues to be largely considered as corresponding to a supra-national dimension, with a focus on freedom of movement inside the Schengen space, as opposed to the state dimension, where border protection remains the main goal. But, he adds, “this partition between national and supranational (or postnational) or value-driven and sovereignty-driven governance, hides more than it reveals, as it obscures the myriad ways in which the European border regime entangles levels of governance, even to an extent that speaking of distinct levels appears misleading” (Stierl, 2020b: 10). Migration policy is, in fact, “the result of a complex system of governance which includes EU institutions and the states’ part of the Schengen area” (Lucarelli, 2020; Fassi and Lucarelli, 2017).

This was publicly displayed in the first of these revealing moments in early March, when thousands of migrants attempted to reach Greece from Turkey, fostering a violent reaction from the Greek border police. The tension at the border has largely been considered a result of the Erdogan government's decision to use the migrants stranded in Turkey after the EU-Turkey agreement of 2016 (see Ceccorulli, Buckel and Kopp in Chapters 3 and 4) to put political pressure on the EU. This analysis is correct in geopolitical terms, but from a different perspective, we can observe how the EU institutions and its Member States have also considered migrants as bargaining pawns rather than subjects of justice. The Greek border police pushed back the migrants with all means including tear gas and live ammunition. Meanwhile, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, visited the border area, together with Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, Andrek Plenković, Prime Minister of Croatia, President Sassoli and President Michel, and thanked Greece for being “the European shield”, arguing that the Greek border “is also a European border” (von der Leyen, 2020).

Von der Leyen then listed the features of European support to Greece: 1 offshore patrol vessel, 6 coastal patrol vessels, 2 helicopters, 1 aircraft, 3 thermo-vision vehicles, and 100 Frontex border guards in addition to the 530 border guards already present for a total of EUR 700 million for “migration management in general”. The occasion saw the first deployment of the Rapid Border Intervention Team, the first active and genuinely “European” police, formed after the reform of Frontex. Von der Leyen added that the “extraordinary circumstances” would be managed “in an orderly way, with unity, solidarity and determination”, and that “those who seek to test Europe's unity will be disappointed”, as “we will hold the line” and “act based on our values”. She expressed her “compassion” for the migrants but argued that they have been “lured through false promises into this desperate situation”. In shifting the political responsibility to the “false promises” of unnamed political actors, implicitly referring to Turkey, von der Leyen obscured the question of whether European “values” means that migrants should be welcomed with armed police and, when they manage to cross the border, become stranded in inhuman detention centres. Compassion left untouched the fact that the first priority of EU institutions “is making sure that order is maintained at the Greek external border, which is also a European border”. Far from being just the result of exceptional circumstances, these events and remarks can be seen as the outcome of a long process of formation of the European border apparatus, analyzed by Sonja Buckel and Judith Kopp in this book (Chapter 3), and of the way crises are used in the EU to push forward political processes, otherwise difficult to fix, due to the EU's complicated decision-making mechanism and internal tensions between Member States. The “new” EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, advanced by the commission in September 2020 has not changed this trend. Moreover, it has conflated the very notion of solidarity to a project of borders control and mass deportation that has been largely criticized as a “fresh start” for human right violations (EuroMed Rights, 2020). As part of these processes, the principle of justice has ended up embroiled in the meshes of the European border regime and its migration governance policies.

Essential mobility, essential struggles: on logistics and justice

A second revealing moment came when the quick spread of the pandemic nearly brought the Schengen system to a halt. With Member States once again introducing border restrictions inside the EU in an uncoordinated manner, as occurred in 2011 after the “Arab springs” and in 2015, people's mobility was virtually. The European Commission stepped in with a proposal to close the EU's external borders to non-EU citizens. In this way, “the Commission had hoped to convince EU leaders to retract border closures between EU members and limit the damage to the EU's internal market” (Koerner and Boettcher, 2020: 2). Once again, reinforcing external borders has been a move to “save Schengen” (Ceccorulli, 2019). But while in 2015, the focus was how to make internal borde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Migration and the contested politics of justice: An introduction
• PART 1 Controversies of Governance and Justice
• PART 2 Confronting the border and the governance of migration
• PART 3 Restructuring the social
• Afterword
• Index