International migration has always been a field of suffering as much as one of hope for those who undertake the tortuous journey of leaving home to find a new one. At the same time, it is a terrain on which democracies have again and again been called to battle for the purpose of preserving their moral core and maintaining the civil ideals by which open societies have traditionally managed to uphold human dignityâreasonableness, autonomy, truthfulness, openness, criticism, trust, honorability, deliberation, transparency, accountability, rule of law, and inclusion. Today, democracies around the world are fiercely in the midst of such a battle. Recent debates concerning US, EU, and Australian migrant detention centers provide clear proof, as observers on all sides of the political spectrum have reacted to reports about children being separated from their parents, âdeprived of soap, clean water, toilets, toothbrushes, adequate nutrition and sleepâ (Montero 2019), of babies fed from the same unwashed bottle for days (Malik 2019), of migrants banging on cells and pressing notes onto windows begging for help, crammed in overcrowded spaces (Pitzer 2019), without fresh water, and standing on toilets for the purpose of catching a breath of air (Katz 2019), or, thousands of miles away, of young children engaging in self-harm (Harrison 2018), attempting suicide (Zhou 2018), or simply withdrawing from life (Harrison 2018), and of adults going on hunger strikes and sewing their mouth shut in protest (Liljas 2018), or falling victim to sexual abuse and torture (Malik 2019).
On the one end of the debate spectrum, some have sought to justify and normalize such institutional realities by diminishing the humanity of the detainees, labeling them a priori as âanimalsâ (Hirschfeld Davis 2018), âwild ass shitbags,â and âsubhumansâ (Thompson 2019), or treating them like pests (Simon 2018) for which shooting âmay be the only effective means of keeping them outâ (Levitz 2019). âRacist and xenophobic anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner rhetoricâ has then been matched with âsmear campaignsâ against migrant rescuers to infuse society with a âclimate of hatred and discriminationâ (Sharman 2018), which might then support the plausibility of such degrading labels and the sanitization of cruelty by euphemization. Others, instead, have sought to justify such realities by attaching anticivil attributes to migrants or to their modes of entry into the receiving countries and by stressing the urgency of realistically tackling the challenge of international migration without letting emotion come in the way of rational policy. After all, they stress, the moral need to limit human suffering cannot do away by fiat with the harsh reality of resource scarcity. And yet others, within the opposite camp, have rejected on principle racist and xenophobic justifications of such cruel modes of containment and objected, as well, to their rationalization on civil grounds, claiming that these regularly fail the test of authenticity each time they come short of accounting for the inevitability of cruelty in policy responses.
Such intense cultural work constitutes an important dimension of the civil process by which societies go about determining who is worthy of inclusion and who is not. Alexander (2006) has shed light over the mechanics of such dynamics in his foundational book about the âcivil sphere.â As he puts it, the civil sphere is a distinctively democratic field of solidarity that sustains universalizing cultural aspirations vis-Ă -vis other noncivil spheres of society such as the economy, religion, science, primordial associations, and states. As such, those who people the civil sphere recognize each other as bearers of civil attributes and feel bound to one another by obligations of civil solidarity. When the universalistic idealizations of the civil sphere are instantiated in time and place, though, they become compromised and, as Alexander and Tognato (2018: 2) explain, âclasses, races, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, and regions may become the signified for pejorative anti-civil signifiers.â As a consequence, in real civil spheres, the members of a civil community end up demarcating âusâ from âthemâ by engaging in symbolic boundary work geared toward bestowing insiders with pure civil attributes and outsiders with polluting anticivil ones. This, in turn, often entails the mobilization of powerful icons of purity and pollution.
In many Western countries, Holocaust memory provides a rich reservoir of such icons and, over the years, it has been again and again invoked for the purpose of catalyzing humanitarian responses on a variety of civil issues of public interest (Alexander 2003). It is therefore not surprising to witness references to Holocaust memory also in relation to international migration.
In the recent back and forth of public arguments over the civility of US migrant detention centers, for example, some observers have ventured to link them with Nazi concentration camps in an effort at projecting pollution over them, at sensitizing public officials and citizens on the condition of the detainees, and at snapping them out of their perceived self-complacency or indifference (Katz 2019; Levitz 2019; Pitzer 2019). As US Member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it in a tweet, âif that doesnât bother you ⊠I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ânever againâ means somethingâ (Montero 2019).
Holocaust memory has also been evoked to draw public attention to those upstanders who take risks and may even pay a personal price to relieve the suffering of migrants. For example, the sacred icon of the Righteous Among the Nations, that is, those righteous gentiles who during the Shoah risked their lives to hide, protect, and sometimes save the lives of Jews from Nazi extermination, has recently surfaced in religious discourse in relation to the story of a migrant rescuer, Scott Warren, from the Arizona organization âNo More Deathsâ (Harvey 2019). In 2018, Warren, a 36-year-old geography teacher, was arrested and charged by US authorities with three felonies for helping two undocumented Central American migrants as they were crossing the Arizona Desert, which might land him in jail for over a decade (Jordan 2019).1 Warrenâs case has drawn public attention across the United States and beyond. About 125,000 people signed an online petition demanding the dismissal of the case, and in a statement about the case, the United Nationâs Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that âhumanitarian aid is not a crimeâ (Harvey 2019).
Thousands of miles away, Carola Rackete, captain of Sea-Watch III, a migrant rescue ship operated in the Mediterranean Sea by a German NGO, was arrested after docking without authorization in the Italian island of Lampedusa and disembarking 41 African migrants , whom she refused to return to their port of origin in Libya, as she deemed it unsafe for them. Her story, as well, inspired an association with Holocaust memory, though this time via a passage from âLetter from the Birmingham Jailâ by Martin Luther King: âWe should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was âlegalâ andâŠIt was âillegalâ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitlerâs Germanyâ (Russo Bullaro 2019).
The use of powerful icons of purity and pollution in the symbolic boundary work over civil incorporation is generally a highly contentious matter. And indeed, recent references to Holocaust memory in relation to the treatment of migrants are no exception. With particular reference to the association of US migrant detention camps with Nazi concentration camps, for example, while some Holocaust scholars, such as Waitman Wade Beorn (Montero 2019) and Timothy Snyder (Malik 2019), have backed it, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum rejected any âanalogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporaryâ (Montero 2019). Within the community of survivors of the Shoah and their families, in turn, some distanced themselves from the analogy, insisting that in Nazi extermination camps, captives lived âin daily fear of being killedâ (Montero 2019), while others have noted th...