Tag Archives: Migration

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Veronika Nagy: Surveilling Sentiments: When Emotion Becomes Evidence

Image 1: Illustration of AI by Champ Panupong Techawongthawon on Unsplash.

In 2024, the German cabinet approved a draft law that expanded deportation criteria to include public expressions that “approve” or “promote” terrorism on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Although the Ministry of the Interior subsequently clarified that a single “like” would not automatically suffice, the proposal nevertheless made newly visible a broader development in migration governance and the growing relevance of digital activities, including its affective and often highly ambiguous dimensions, to questions of risk, legitimacy, and deportability. By early 2025, deportation orders were already being issued under these expanded provisions, especially in cases involving protest speech and accusations of antisemitism or incitement. While these cases did not in fact hinge on isolated reactions alone, they made clear that nonverbal expressions on social media had acquired a distinct evidentiary potential within migration casework.

In this blog, I will not primarily analyse the legal status of migrants and the use of likes itself, nor will I argue that online expressions have straightforwardly replaced older forms of migration control. Passports, interviews, case files, and biometric checks remain central to contemporary migration control. Rather, I am interested in how the field of bordering has expanded, so that digital traces such as posts, comments, emojis, reactions, affiliations, and other small residues of everyday online life become increasingly available for institutional interpretation, and in doing so, alter the conditions under which migrants become legible to authorities. Migration scholars, like Petra Molnar (2024) and Annaliese Pelizza (2021), have long shown that the border is no longer confined to the territorial edge, but is distributed across administrative routines, infrastructures of data collection, and dispersed spaces through which mobile lives are rendered knowable. What my Virtual Asylum project showed is that this process is now extending more deeply into the affective textures of digital life, where sentiments, moods, and symbolic gestures may be re-read as indicators of disposition, alignment, or credibility (Nagy 2024).

The argument I want to develop is relatively simple. Across Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Greece, and the Netherlands, migrants who arrived during the so-called migration crisis rarely described dramatic encounters with surveillance. Instead, they recounted more subtle and routine changes in their social media practices, shaped by expectations of bureaucratic monitoring.. These adjustments were often framed as routine preparations for asylum or residency procedures, comparable to gathering documents or organising interview notes. Yet they reveal something significant about the present conjuncture, a securitisation of sentiments, where affective traces do not become politically relevant only at the moment they are expressed, but at the moment they are evaluated. In what follows, I first examine these everyday adjustments, which clustered around practices such as precautionary deletion, affective neutralisation, account stratification, and anticipatory compliance. I then show how these practices illuminate a broader shift in migration governance, in which digital traces are increasingly integrated into administrative assessments not only as information, but as cues through which people are sensed and interpreted. I end by reflecting on what it means when emotion becomes evidence and when digital life, once valued primarily as a resource for mobility, communication, and support, also becomes a site of affective bordering.

Everyday Adjustments to Digital Surveillance

During my fieldwork, people didn’t talk about their online practices regarding data sharing and polymedia use as a break with their past networks or a social performance conducted by constant fear. Instead, they described small, practical routines they use to deal with migration bureaucracy in an increasingly data-driven system. Participants from conflict countries along the Western Balkan route – the primary land pathway for irregular migration from the Middle East and Asia into the European Union via the Balkan Peninsula did not usually present these practices as resistance, nor even necessarily as responses to confirmed surveillance. More often, they spoke of them as forms of preparation, actions taken because digital traces had become relevant enough to matter, even if the exact criteria by which they might later be interpreted remained unclear. In that sense, what emerged across interviews was not a common social response to avoid migration authorities, but a series of recurring coping strategies through which migrants sought to manage how they might appear once their digital traces entered administrative circulation.

One of these strategies is what I call precautionary deletion. Several respondents described reviewing and removing older posts before interviews or appointments, not because those materials were overtly political or obviously incriminating, but because they had become too ambiguous once digital histories were understood to have potential relevance for casework. An Afghan respondent in the Netherlands explained that before a scheduled interview, he went through years of older posts and deleted jokes, emojis, and anything that might look disrespectful. The phrase is telling, because the issue was not prohibited content, but interpretive vulnerability. Humour, irony, and casual sociability felt safe within their original context, but not once imagined through the evaluative frame of a bureaucracy concerned with credibility and risk. In that sense, the practice was shaped less by the certainty of monitoring than by the possibility that routine and context-dependent expression might later be read within a framework of risk.

The majority crossing Schengen borders employed practices that I describe as affective neutralisation. Participants, especially those who were hoping to settle in Germany, spoke of refraining from reacting publicly to posts during politically charged periods, not because they lacked anger, grief, or solidarity, but because they wished to avoid generating visible emotional signals that might later be interpreted without context. One respondent explained that she had stopped reacting to public content altogether because “you never know how they read it,” a statement that captures well the uncertainty of these adjustments. The issue was not simply self-censorship in a classical sense, but the effort to minimise expressive traces in an environment where affective gestures, even a heart, an angry emoji, or a supportive comment were taken not only as momentary reactions but as indications of deeper ideological or social orientation. What was being managed here was less the content of speech than the risk of misalignment between intention and institutional interpretation.

The most impressive practice, mainly described by Syrian refugees in Europe, was the maintenance of multiple digital identities for different audiences and purposes. Across Greece and Hungary, respondents described keeping one relatively sparse and predictable account that appeared neutral and ordinary, especially where visibility to institutions was thought possible, while reserving other accounts or channels for more intimate, familial, communal, or politically expressive forms of communication. This was not usually framed as concealment in a dramatic sense, but as a practical way of organising visibility across different social and institutional settings. It reflected an understanding that not all digital spaces are encountered equally, and that emotional expression may be acceptable in one setting while framed as problematic in another. The segmentation of accounts thus worked as a way of separating audiences, obligations, and vulnerabilities, allowing migrants to maintain social connectedness while also managing the risks of being made legible to institutions through the wrong kind of digital exposure.

Running through these different practices in various stages of the mobility paths along the Balkan route, refugees emphasised a broader pattern that can be understood as a form of anticipatory compliance. Participants did not present themselves as reacting to explicit instructions from authorities. Rather, they adjusted in advance, in response to the uncertain but real possibility that online traces might be mobilised during interviews, assessments, or decisions. They had heard of posts being referenced in asylum interviews, or of online material being used to question credibility and some participants had even encountered this directly, while others knew of it through wider migrant networks. Their concern, then, was not abstract surveillance in the general sense, but the concrete and selective use of digital traces in decision-making. This anticipatory dimension is important because it shows that border effects do not only arise when digital content is formally used as evidence, but also when the possibility of such use becomes embedded in the practical reasoning of those subject to migration governance.

According to these narratives there was a clear polymedia culture of affective legibility explained by mobile user refugees as an administrative requirement on the road. Beyond documents and narrative coherence, digital histories and emotional tone are increasingly perceived as relevant to how a person is assessed. Respondents did not usually describe this through legal or policy language. Instead, they spoke through familiar routines of deleting, withholding, separating, cleaning, and simplifying personal responses via online platforms on smart phone devices. Yet these routines indicate that digital platform use has become incorporated into the labour of preparing oneself for bureaucratic encounters. They do not suggest fear-driven withdrawal from digital life, nor do they point to an all-encompassing regime of surveillance. Contextually speaking, these routines show how emotional and digital self-presentation have become part of navigating institutions whose evaluative frames now reach further into the small and often ambiguous traces of everyday online life.

Affective Governance Expands Migration Control

The incorporation of digital activity into migration casework is not occurring in isolation. It reflects a broader administrative shift in which risk-oriented governance increasingly relies on pre-emptive assessments rather than solely on past actions, and in which online expressions, such as comments, reactions, symbolic gestures, and visible affiliations become supplemental indicators of disposition, credibility, or possible alignment. During my fieldwork, I observed how this expansion of scrutiny operates through three interconnected mechanisms. First, the datafication of everyday interaction flattens the thick context of social life into discrete, legible data points, turning fleeting gestures into permanent “traces” for administrative review. Next, affective inference allows officials to judge a person’s character based on their emojis and comments. Finally, through the administrative integration of these traces, these digital fragments are woven into formal evidentiary procedures, transforming the messiness of lived experience into a solidified legal fact used to support legal decision-making processes.

With the rapidly increasing datafication of everyday interactions, the refugees from my research did not describe elaborate intelligence operations or systematic monitoring in a strong sense. Surprisingly, they normalised encounters in which officials referred to digital behaviour, public posts, or content that remained visible online, sometimes from years earlier digital data that were regularly investigated without consent. These instances indicate that digital traces are gradually moving into existing evidentiary frameworks, not necessarily as primary evidence, but as contextual material that can support or complicate judgments about coherence, sincerity, or trustworthiness. What began as a resource for maintaining social ties and accessing information during migration has gradually evolved into a source of administrative data, extending social media’s role into governance and surveillance practices. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are no longer just for connection but also provide persistent, accessible data that is easily tied to an individual’s identity. Consequently, these digital footprints have become key indicators in migration casework. In this sense, digital interaction becomes not only socially but archivally useful. This practice also relies on a newly digitized affective inference as an assessment logic. This does not always depend on advanced emotional AI or formalised algorithmic analysis, even if those developments form part of the wider landscape discussed in contemporary scholarship on migration control. More immediately, affective inference (Hesp et al 2021) often occurs through modest but consequential acts of interpretation of officers, deciding whether an online expression appears hostile, sympathetic, supportive, provocative, or politically aligned. Respondents repeatedly described uncertainty about how reactions, comments, or expressive symbols might be understood, especially during periods of heightened political tension. The key issue here is that affect is not judged only for what it says, and how language and semantics could matter, but for what it is presumed to reveal about the person who produced it. A reaction becomes legible not only as emotion, but as a possible sign of disposition. This aligns with broader work on emotional AI and soft biometrics, which shows how affective cues are increasingly turned into actionable information. Yet in my fieldwork, I identified how this appeared as a mundane process of making interiority legible by translating private affects into bureaucratic facts, where institutions read the ‘vibe’ of digital traces as a way to fix a person’s character.

Most importantly, these easy-access personal digital traces become administratively integrated into existing procedures of border control practices. The significance of this step lies in the fact that online material does not necessarily need to stand on its own as decisive proof to matter. Participants described religious and politically sensitive posts being discussed during interviews, public profiles being checked for discrepancies, and older content becoming newly relevant because of developments elsewhere. In this way, digital material enters what anthropologists might call an administrative archive (Stoler 2008, Zeitlyn 2012), a digitized cumulative repository of heterogeneous materials used to build an image of a person’s background, reliability, and orientation. Once digital affect enters this archive, its interpretation gains institutional weight, even if selectively and contingently. This is why the distinction between expression and evidence becomes increasingly unstable. A post does not have to be conclusive to become consequential. It only needs to be legible enough to support an inference.

As my research exposed, these digital administrative screening processes do not unfold uniformly across national contexts. In Germany, the expanded deportation framework made people particularly attentive to the possibility that online expressions of political sympathy, anger, or protest might be scrutinised. In the Netherlands, respondents were more likely to describe the removal or cleaning of older posts reflecting their social networks as part of preparing for credibility interviews, reflecting the centrality of coherence within Dutch asylum procedures. In Hungary, concerns often focused on the misreading of multilingual expressions or non-standard dialects, especially where linguistic opacity could heighten the risk of interpretive error associated with terrorism or radicalisation. In Greece, participants more frequently described separating accounts and managing visibility across different social worlds including gender sensitive content. These differences matter because they show that affective governance is not a single coherent apparatus, but a differentiated set of practices shaped by national asylum systems, local bureaucratic cultures, and recent political developments. What ties them together is the techsolutionist perception grounded in concrete encounters that digital affect is relevant to institutional decision-making. Accordingly, what this amounts to is a shift from the evaluation of discrete behaviours to the assessment of affective legibility of the foreigner. Migrants from authoritarian conflict countries quickly understood that their digital presence is not assessed only for explicit wrongdoing, but for what it may signal about them more broadly. Managing visibility, then, becomes part of navigating asylum and residency procedures and daily safety measures, not because digital life has become wholly securitised in an abstract sense, but because expressive traces now travel more easily into evaluative settings where they can acquire new meanings. The border thus expands not only through more data, but through new ways of reading the atmospheres and dispositions that digital life leaves behind.

Experience of Bordering

One of the most striking features of these practices is that they are experienced not as dramatic political acts, but as ordinary forms of maintenance. Migrants described reviewing posts, withholding reactions, simplifying profiles, or dividing accounts much as they described collecting documents or preparing narratives before interviews. This ordinariness matters because it shows how affective bordering does not only take place at moments of enforcement. It becomes woven into the temporalities of everyday life, into habits of checking, editing, pausing, and anticipating. What changes is not simply what people say online, but how they sense themselves being potentially read. This is why it may be useful to think not only in terms of surveillance, but in terms of perception and legibility. The issue is not just that online traces can be seen. According to their testimonies, these can be sensed as clues, referring to fragments of tone, mood, sympathy, irritation, grief, or alignment that may later be folded into judgments about credibility or risk. Participants did not often articulate this through explicit theoretical language, but their practices visualised a shift in the sensory politics of migration governance. Administratively, they were not simply managing information, but the possible feelings and impressions their digital presence might evoke once translated into a bureaucratic setting, considering the risk of misidentification and therefore rejection of authorization of any kind, healthcare, visa, jobs or social housing.

The border, in this sense, is not only encountered at the territorial edge or across an interview desk. It also lingers in the feed, in the archived post, in the hesitation before pressing “like,” and in the late-night work of deciding what to keep and what to delete. This also helps clarify why the effects are often subtle yet consequential. Humour becomes risky because it depends on shared context. Solidarity becomes risky because it may be detached from the event that gave rise to it and reclassified as ideological alignment. Multilingual or culturally specific forms of expression become risky because they do not travel easily into standardised interpretive frames. Under these conditions, neutrality often appears safer than nuance, predictability safer than irony, and sparse self-presentation safer than emotionally layered visibility. The cumulative effect is not necessarily silence in an absolute sense, but a narrowing of the expressive range that feels administratively safe.

The smartphone, long recognised in migration research as indispensable for communication, navigation, and support, therefore appears here in an increasingly ambivalent light. It remains a vital infrastructure of mobility and connection, but it also stores the emotional residue of everyday life in forms that may later become administratively consequential. It contains routes, documents, and contacts, but also jokes, affiliations, grief, humour, and fragments of ordinary sociability. For people in precarious legal positions, this means that the border can no longer be encountered only as a physical line or an institutional procedure but transgressed through the possibility that one’s own digital history may be re-opened and re-read.

When Emotion Becomes Evidence

What began in public debate as a question about whether a single “like” could support deportation, actually points to a broader transformation in how migration control is enacted. Online expressions, including reactions, comments, emojis, affiliations, and other small affective traces increasingly acquire evidentiary potential once they enter administrative circulation. Digital activity now matters not only for what it explicitly says, but for what it may be taken to reveal about a person’s disposition, credibility, or alignment. Precautionary deletion, neutralisation and other forms of anticipatory compliance are not signs of radical withdrawal from digital life, but practical ways of managing how one becomes legible to institutions under conditions of uncertainty. People delete older jokes and emojis not because these are incriminating in themselves, but because they have become too ambiguous once digital traces are folded into case files. They maintain separate accounts not simply to hide, but to organise visibility according to different audiences, obligations, and vulnerabilities. Seen in this light, what is at stake is not only the datafication of migrant lives, a process already documented in digital migration scholarship, but the growing incorporation of emotional tone and online affect into the conditions of administrative legibility. Beyond documents and narrative coherence, the emotional residue of digital interaction is becoming part of how migrants are sensed and assessed. They show that affective traces become consequential at the moment of evaluation, when they are drawn into an administrative archive and made to support wider judgments about sincerity, risk, or political orientation. In that sense, this development resonates with broader discussions of the deep border, emotional AI, and digital migration infrastructures, even if, in practice, what participants encountered was often more ordinary: the selective and contingent use of visible online content in interviews and procedures.

The people I spoke with were above all, trying to avoid being misread. Their accounts suggest that contemporary border regimes increasingly operate not only by verifying facts or documents, but by interpreting atmospheres, dispositions, and expressive cues that are difficult to stabilise once removed from their social context. To recognise this shift is important because it clarifies how bordering expands into everyday digital life without always appearing as a dramatic new regime. The new border security regime lingers in the evaluation of moods, gestures, and sentiments, asking not only where someone comes from or whether they may stay, but what their digital life seems to say about who they are.

Veronika Nagy is a scholar of digital criminology, migration, and security whose work examines how data-driven systems reshape bordering, surveillance, and everyday experiences of institutional scrutiny. Her research focuses on the social and political consequences of digital governance for people in precarious positions.

References

Hesp, C., Smith, R., Parr, T., Allen, M., Friston, K. J., & Ramstead, M. J. D. (2021). ‘Deeply felt affect: The emergence of valence in deep active inference’. Neural Computation, 33(2), 398–446.

Molnar, P. (2024). The walls have eyes: Surviving migration in the age of artificial intelligence. The New Press.

Nagy, V. (2024). ‘Social sorting in Europe: Self-censorship in a digital asylum.’ Archiwum Kryminologii/Archives of Criminology, 46(1), 149-179.

Pelizza, A. (2021). Identification as translation: The art of choosing the right spokespersons at the securitized border. Social Studies of Science, 51(4), 487-511. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720983932

Stoler, A. L. (2008). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

Zeitlyn, D. (2012). ‘Anthropology in and of the archives: Possible futures and contingent pasts. Archives as anthropological surrogates.’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 461-480.

Cite as: Nagy, V. 2026. “Surveilling Sentiments: When Emotion Becomes Evidence” Focaalblog October 16. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/10/16/veronika-nagy-surveilling-sentiments-when-emotion-becomes-evidence/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

David Kwok Kwan Tsoi: ‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?

Image 1: Photo taken by author in 2019 at one of the Anti-Extradition Law Bill demonstrations

Since 2021, along with the British and Australian governments, the Canadian government has relaxed immigration policy for Hong Kong immigrants. This policy offers an unconventional path with lowered barriers for Hong Kongers to apply for permanent residency in Canada. Popularly framed as ‘lifeboat’ campaigns, these immigration policies directly respond to the post-2019 political situation in Hong Kong. This political contingency was instigated by the tumultuous 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Law Bill Movement, and the subsequent implementation of National Security Law in June 2020. Against this background, the Canadian government has combined an economic narrative, i.e., Hong Kongers being economically productive, with a political narrative, i.e., human rights concern, to legitimise this ‘lifeboat’ scheme.

The Canadian ‘lifeboat’ scheme includes two pathways: Stream A and Stream B. Stream B requires candidates to have post-secondary education qualifications and one year of work experience within Canada before they apply for permanent resident status. Interestingly, the government cancelled the requirement on education qualifications on 15 August 2023, further lowering the barrier. Following Canadian activist Harsha Walia’s writing about borders (2021), I illuminate the way a democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility under the state’s purview. I seek to problematise this naturalised connection. Under the benevolent notion of democratic intervention, how does the state deploy the notions of human rights and humanitarian care to serve an economic purpose? Why do these migrants have to be first taxonomised as productive labouring subjects in order to be considered “worthy” of democratic intervention? Further, what does democracy mean within this existing liberal democratic regime?

Under the “lifeboat” policy, it is stated that “Canada shares longstanding ties with the people of Hong Kong and is concerned with the deteriorating human rights situation there. […] Canada has put in place a number of facilitative measures to help Hong Kong residents come to Canada” (Government of Canada 2021b). Clearly, human rights concern is identified as a key component to this policy. Paradoxically, it considers economic contribution rather than political risks at home as a legitimizing clause for permanent residency. In the policy, under the section “Public policy considerations”, it is stated that: “[The policy] recognises the contributions made by Hong Kong residents to Canada’s economy and social-cultural landscape through human capital, while also promoting democratic values” (Government of Canada 2021b). In another government press release issued on 4 February 2021, similar language was adopted: “The first Hong Kong residents arrived here over 150 years ago, contributing immensely to Canada’s economic, social and political life” (Government of Canada 2021a).

Border regimes serve to create differentiated entry of migrants in order to protect public interests within the border, such as job availability and welfare system. As Walia (2021, 19) suggests, borders ‘buffer against the retrenchment of universal social programs.’ In a liberal democratic regime with strict border control, citizenship is granted based on one’s expected contribution to the national economy. It is therefore not surprising that a neoliberal state rationalises immigration policies under the premise of economic calculations (Xiang 2007). Still, in this case, the economic logic is weaved into a democratic intervention in a language that renders this intersection rational, natural, and reasonable. In other words, democratic intervention is about human rights concerns—so long as it is also generative of economic benefits. To do so, the Canadian government racialises a history of Hong Kong diaspora; this taxonomises incoming Hong Kong migrants as productive labour, which becomes a strange but also naturalised prerequisite for democratic intervention.

Scholars have examined the way the global north extracts labour from the global south while imposing militarised border regimes to deter immigrants (Besteman 2019), resulting in ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Nevertheless, the emigration of East Asia migrants, particularly the middle-class and the upper-middle-class, has complicated the way coloniality of migration is configured. In the case of Canadian ‘lifeboat’ campaign, I suggest that the Canadian government uses a democratic narrative to add moral fervour as they extract both skilled and unskilled labour from Hong Kong. There are two sets of repercussions. First, the democratic intervention is only enjoyed by those who are considered economically productive. Borders continue to facilitate accumulation of capital within a sovereign state. At the same time, borders preclude universal access to political refuge. Second, the democratic intervention becomes a rationalised labour extraction from East Asia to the global North.

In sum, political discourses about human rights and democracy are instrumentalised and repackaged by the West (by which I refer to as anglophone-speaking countries) to solidify their image as the global protector of human rights, while benefiting materially from westward movement of labour and capital from the global East, which sustain their roles as the civilised Man and a civilizing force in the unfinished project of modernity (Wynter 2003).

David Kwok Kwan Tsoi is a DPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His research examines the relationship between housing, class, and migration amid political changes in Hong Kong. He also writes about informal economy and queer politics in Hong Kong.

References

Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarised Global Apartheid.” Current Anthropology 60 (19): 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/699280.

Government of Canada. 2021a. “Canada Launches Hong Kong Pathway that will Attract Recent Graduates and Skilled Workers with Faster Permanent Residency.” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. 4 February 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2021/02/canada-launches-hong-kong-pathway-that-will-attract-recent-graduates-and-skilled-workers-with-faster-permanent-residency.html

Government of Canada. 2021b. “Temporary public policy creating two pathways to permanent residence to facilitate the immigration of certain Hong Kong residents.” Public Policies. 8 June 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/public-policies/hong-kong-residents-permanent-residence.html

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2018. “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Canada’s Journal on Refugees 34 (1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050851ar.

Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Tsoi, David Kwok Kwan 2024. “‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?” Focaalblog 6 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/06/david-kwok-kwan-tsoi-lifeboat-campaign-for-hong-kongers-why-is-capitalistic-agenda-a-mandate-for-democratic-intervention/

Blog, Conversations on the Left

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.

Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border. 

The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.

If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?

Roundtable on War

Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine

Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022

Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war

Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine

– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

Roundtable on Migration

Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,

Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,

Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”

 Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject?  Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities

 – moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I

Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update

Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration

Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance

Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe

– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II

Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison

Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States

Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary

Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen

– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)

Roundtable on Our Futures

David Harvey (The City University of New York)

Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)

Ida Susser (The City University of New York)

Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

 – moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)

Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not. 

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement? 

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16th and 17th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/  

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/

Blog

Khin Thazin and Stephen Campbell: How the Myanmar coup has impacted migrant workers abroad

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar put an end to the country’s ten-year period of quasi-civilian electoral rule—the so-called democratic transition, as it was optimistically called. Since then, nation-wide anti-coup protests, a violent military/police crackdown, and the emergence of a decentralised armed resistance movement have garnered extensive international and domestic media coverage. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the detrimental impact of the coup on the livelihoods of millions of ordinary Myanmar workers within the country and abroad.

It was to better understand the coup’s impact on Myanmar migrant workers that we began a collaborative research project in late 2021—specifically, on how the coup, coupled with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has impacted Myanmar migrant domestic workers in Singapore. While a more detailed presentation of our findings awaits future academic publication, we offer here a brief account of the post-coup experiences of some of the women we interviewed between late 2021 and early 2022.

Image 1: Myanmar migrant workers at Peninsula Plaza (Singapore’s “Little Burma”) in June 2022 (photo by Khin Thazin).

Post-coup precarity

Following the coup, mass workers’ strikes and violent military/police repression prompted widespread workplace closures across public and private sectors in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands of factory workers fled the industrial zones around Yangon for the relative safety of their home villages. And many foreign brands ceased sourcing products from Myanmar-based factories. Due to these combined factors, 250,000 garment sector jobs were lost in Myanmar by July 2021, while 1.6 million jobs were lost over 2021 as a whole, according to the International Labour Organisation. By September 2021, the Asian Development Bank projected that Myanmar’s annual GDP growth rate would be -18.4% (see Figure 1). Under these conditions, employers in Myanmar leveraged post-coup precarity to lower wages and undermine workplace organising.

Figure 1: Asian Development Bank’s 2021 growth forecasts for Southeast Asian countries

Even before the coup, workers in the industrial zones around Yangon were labouring under highly precarious conditions—conditions that COVID-19-related economic contraction greatly exacerbated. Since the coup, heightened economic precarity and enduring military repression have significantly increased the number of people attempting to leave the country for work abroad. Under renewed military rule and pandemic-related travel restrictions, many individuals trying to leave the country have encountered bureaucratic delays, state-imposed barriers and unscrupulous brokers seeking to exploit the current crisis. Some aspiring migrants have sought to reach foreign countries through perilous irregular channels. Meanwhile, the 4.25 million Myanmar migrants residing abroad face added pressures to increase remittances to family back home, and to postpone plans to return permanently to Myanmar.

These restrictive conditions formed the context of our research. In what follows, we present some of the narratives of Myanmar migrant domestic workers in Singapore to show how post-coup precarity in Myanmar has negatively impacted their migration experiences abroad.

Migrant domestic workers in the post-coup moment

After ten years of labouring in Singapore, 43-year-old Ma Khaing felt she had had enough. The two-year contract she had signed at the start of 2020 was supposed to have been her last. “I had decided that I’d return to Myanmar in February of this year,” she told us in early 2022. Her plan, however, had been thwarted. First it was the COVID-19 pandemic. “When COVID started, the economy constricted a lot,” Ma Khaing explained. But also, her widowed mother contracted the virus, as did all seven of her siblings in Myanmar. “My mother had to close her betel stall… And since she closed it, I obviously had to send back more [money].” Eventually the pandemic “calmed down,” said Ma Khaing, and her mother was able to reopen her stall. “But now,” she added, “the [post-coup] unrest has happened. So, she’s had to close her stall again.” All of these developments impinged on Ma Khaing’s decision making: “I’d been planning to return—to go back home to stay when the two years [of the contract] finished. But now, because of the turmoil in Myanmar, I’m no longer going back. I’m going to continue [working in Singapore]. I’ve got to stay on, obviously.”

As a Myanmar migrant domestic worker in Singapore, Ma Khaing’s experiences were far from unique. Indeed, her life course paralleled that of tens of thousands of her compatriots who labour as domestic workers in Singapore. Of course, Myanmar migrants in Singapore faced difficulties even before the coup, and before the pandemic. Yet, with the onset of the pandemic, conditions for migrants deteriorated further.

In late 2020, the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, a Singaporean migrant worker advocacy and support organisation, reported the following trends in migrant domestic worker employment conditions due to pandemic-related restrictions and pressures: increased workload, imposed work on rest days, heightened surveillance by employers, increased restrictions on communication and mobile phone usage, loss of employment, substantial wage decreases, increased verbal abuse by employers, and increased workplace stress due to prolonged isolation with employers.

Notwithstanding the effects of pandemic-related restrictions in Singapore, our research focused specifically on how recent developments in Myanmar have impacted migrants abroad. On this matter, the domestic workers we interviewed highlighted two main issues–both related to the worsening economic situation back home. These were: needing to send more remittances to family members and needing to remain working longer in Singapore. Thus recounted Ma Sein, a 36-year-old woman from Yangon:

“After Covid started, I had to send back more remittances, obviously. For example, I’d been sending 350 to 400 [Singaporean dollars] per month. But then I had to send over 500, or up to 600 per month because prices increased and all my family members became unemployed. When Covid started, they could have continued selling in the market, but I didn’t want them to go outside. It was better for them to stay at home.”

Ma Shwe, a 33-year-old woman who supported her three school-age siblings and whose widowed mother sold rice at a market, felt similarly pressured. “When Covid started, some businesses had to close,” she recalled. “My plan had been to just work two years in Singapore. But then Covid happened, and it wasn’t possible to return to Myanmar.”

Such were the added challenges for migrant domestic workers in Singapore during the pandemic. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar has compounded these difficulties. Alongside intensified post-coup violence and repression, the ensuing insecurity and economic fallout have reduced livelihood options in the country and have heightened pressures on family members abroad to increase their financial support. The coup and ensuing humanitarian crisis have thus exacerbated what were, under the pandemic, already difficult conditions for Myanmar migrants in Singapore.

After the coup, recounted Ma Shwe, “The economic situation [in Myanmar] got worse, of course. Some people had to pawn their belongings just to eat, because they had no work.” Responding to these conditions, many migrants increased their remittances. “I’d been sending money each month—three lakhs [S$219] for one month,” explained Ma Ni. However, “since the coup, I’ve been sending about four to five lakhs [S$292 – 365].”

Meanwhile, most migrant domestic workers in Singapore are seeking to renew their contracts, and many have set aside prior aspirations for future livelihoods in Myanmar. “I had planned to save and buy a home [in Myanmar],” recounted Ma Sein. “Now, because of the political situation and the Covid situation, my plan isn’t feasible anymore. Given the current situation, I’m going to continue staying [in Singapore]. Will I stay for one year, two years, or four or five years? I can’t say.” Ma Yadana reflected similarly: “I’d thought about opening up a restaurant [in Myanmar], or something like that. But now, I have to continue on here [in Singapore].”

Understandably, these conditions are also motivating individuals in Myanmar to seek work abroad in larger numbers. “Now, everyone wants to leave, since there isn’t work in Myanmar,” said Ma Sandar. “Especially since the coup,” she added, “there are those with passports waiting to leave for Singapore.” Confirming Ma Sandar’s observation, Mizzima News reported at the end of 2021 that the Yangon passport office had seen a near ten-fold increase in applicants despite a doubling of the passport fee.

Ruth, an employment agent we interviewed, offered further detail. “Now, since the coup, there are so many people who want to come [to Singapore],” she said. “There are many people who want to leave [Myanmar]. In the past, I’d have about 50 maid profiles to advertise. Now, I have 200 to 300. There are so many. There are so many people who want to come. There is so much supply.” The reason, Ruth explained, is that since the coup, “There’s no work anymore. There’s no office work. There’s no work for school teachers. Workplaces are closed. Factories are closed. That’s why there are so many young women who want to come [to Singapore].”

One of the more pernicious outcomes of this situation, added Ruth, is that certain agents are leveraging post-coup precarity to reduce salaries for new migrant domestic workers below the previous standard of S$480 per month. “Some agents,” she explained, “they’ve got so many helpers [waiting in Yangon]. So, they negotiate with the helper. They say, ‘You’ll have to wait here for however many more months. So, why don’t you accept 460 or 450 [Singaporean dollars]. Then you can go faster [to Singapore].’ So, maybe some of them want to go faster [and therefore accept a lower salary].” Ruth would never do this, she assured us. But “some agents,” she acknowledged, “are unethical.”

Stressing the impact of home-country conditions on migrant domestic workers in Singapore risks conveying a rather deterministic analysis. It is thus important to note, as well, that many of the women we interviewed expressed a sense of political awareness and agency, in which they saw themselves as active participants in the post-coup struggle against renewed military rule in Myanmar. Ma Sein, for example, said, “Now I send [money] to support my family. I send whatever is left to support the revolution.” Similarly, Ma Yadana explained,

“At first, I thought I’d gone abroad to work for my family. Later, beyond my own family’s financial status, I realised that it’s actually because of my country’s poor conditions that I had to migrate, and it’s not because of my family… That’s why I haven’t returned. Because even if I do have the financial means, while people around me are struggling, it can’t be like that. That’s why I can’t return just yet… Even if we win the revolution, there’s a lot of work to be done in rebuilding.”

Conclusion

The narratives of the women we interviewed reveal the intimate linkages between deteriorating home-country conditions and the financial and psychological stresses that migrants face abroad. A related analytical implication is that migrant labour regimes in countries of arrival cannot be disentangled from home-country conditions and larger geopolitical shifts. Our inquiry into migrant domestic workers’ experiences in Singapore thus advances a global-relational analysis of migrant labour arrangements.

Drawing on the personal accounts of migrant women in Singapore, we also write this piece to inform ongoing discussions of Myanmar’s post-coup landscape. The enduring effects of the pandemic, compounded by post-coup insecurity and economic contraction in Myanmar, means that more and more migrants are likely to leave the country for work abroad in the coming years. The experiences of migrants abroad are also an important aspect of current social-political dynamics within Myanmar. Whatever the outcome of the ongoing revolution in Myanmar, the current crisis will continue to significantly impact the lives of Myanmar migrants abroad in the years to come. Despite, however, the evident difficulties that Myanmar migrants face in the post-coup moment, the narratives of the women we interviewed reveal political critiques and personal aspirations expressive of the self-emancipatory agency of a nation-in-making.

Khin Thazin is a researcher in the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. She has worked with local NGOs on migrant support programs and has researched migrant labour issues in Singapore. Her recent publications include, “Keeping the Streets: Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement as Public Pedagogy” and “Homespace: The Intimate Precarity and Oppositional Praxis of Migrant Workers in Singapore.”

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (2018), Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement (2022), and numerous articles on labour and migration in Myanmar and Thailand.

Cite as: Thazin, Khin and Campbell, Stephen. 2022. “How the Myanmar coup has impacted migrant workers abroad.” Focaalblog, 7 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/07/khin-thazin-and-stephen-campbell-how-the-myanmar-coup-has-impacted-migrant-workers-abroad/

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH

Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful.

In this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book to David’s earlier work on Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt. My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017, 2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization, mortgage debt, and transnational migration.

My interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial fraud.  

In what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant to my interlocutors and fellow activists. 

It was January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy. Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.

In between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012). The question is: in what way?

So, let me begin with Fragments and its relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several “invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011, 96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy, communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by David in his anarchist anthropology.

Now I want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate David’s theorizing. 

Hector was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw as its intended purpose: to house people.

Image 1: La PAH’s Obra Social, © Maka Suarez

La PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option and a marker of success.  

Why did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations in Debt is to move away from an omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.

In The Dawn of Everything, David along with David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise (something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy. Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom, freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly) to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate this with another ethnographic vignette.

“The thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina, and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room. Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for bringing families to Spain.

Juan wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan. To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.

Reading David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist, I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt. It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing availability.

Although the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee, which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade, La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain, and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can change.

La PAH is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor, scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do that.

Image 2: Alpa Shah, Maka Suarez and David Graeber, © Maka Suarez

I’d like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!

Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.

References

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.

Suarez, Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.

Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539

Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/

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