Refugee Watch
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REFUGEE WATCH A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration Migration and Borders of Citizenship 49 Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group http://www.mcrg.ac.in Editor Paula Banerjee Guest Editors: Ravi Palat & Shalini Randeria Book Review Editor: Anita Sengupta Editorial Assistant: Priya Singh Editorial Board Editorial Advisory Board Sanjay Barbora (India) Mahendra P Lama (India) Meghna Guhathakurta (Bangladesh) P. Saravanamuttu (Sri Lanka) Atig Ghosh (India) Ranabir Samaddar (India) Nasreen Chowdhary (India) Jason Miller (Myanmar) Jeevan Thiagarajah (Sri Lanka) Rubina Saigol (Pakistan) Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (UK) Alice Bloch (UK) Publisher Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group GC-45, Sector-III, First Floor Salt Lake, Kolkata-700106 INDIA Tel: +91 33 2337 0408 Email: [email protected] Printed at : Graphic Image New Market, New Complex, West Block 2nd Floor, Room No. 115, Kolkata-700 087 REFUGEE WATCH A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration Migration and Borders of Citizenship 49 Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group REFUGEE WATCH CONTENTS Mahua Sarkar The Flipside of the Integration Question: Guest Worker Regimes and Temporary Circular/Managed Migration in History 1 Simon Behrman On the Creation and Accommodation of the Misery of the World: The Case of the Sans-Papiers 26 Manish Jha & The Marginal Refugee in the ‘Migrant Crisis’: Crisis, M. Ibrahim Wani Othering and Border Walls in Mainstream Western Media Discourse 42 Anita Sengupta The Migrant as a Political Object: “Guests” in Turkey, EU Debates and the Middle Eastern Conundrum 62 Debarati Bagchi The Shifting Logics of Reorganisation: Defining Identities and their Borders in Colonial Sylhet 78 Anuradha Sen Mookerjee Changes in Border Policy and Border Identities: Post LBA Transitions in the Former Bangladeshi Enclaves in Cooch Behar, India 95 Pamela Philipose Book Review 109 The Flipside of the Integration Question: Guestworker Regimes and Temporary Circular/Managed Migration in History 1 By Mahua Sarkar * Since the 2005 banlieues riots in France, and in the context of the on-going debates over migrant rights in a politically polarised U.S., the proliferation of so-called “terror attacks” in many parts of the world, and now, more urgently, the current refugee ‘crisis’, the politics of integration has once again come to the forefront of discussions on transnational migration in the global North. 2 What seems to have all but disappeared from public debates about migration in this post 9/11 world filled with wars and counter-wars is what William E. Connolly once called the “ethos of pluralisation”. 3 Today, the option of integration or assimilation —as it used to be called in mainstream migration studies in the US a few decades earlier—seems to be the best that is on offer to migrants crossing international borders. While it is hard to miss this growing salience of the ‘integration’ discourse and its various policy implications for vast numbers of migrants seeking — and more importantly, being considered for—refuge from war, natural disasters, or economic hardship in the global North, this paper focuses on the (re)emergence in the late twentieth century of a specific form of cross- border labour migration that is designed to keep migrants from settling in receiving countries. Such work-mobility arrangements constitute one of the fastest growing trends within the field of transnational migration and are referred to variously as temporary worker programs, guest worker programs, managed migration, and now, increasingly, as circular migration within the migration studies literature.4 According to latest global estimates, there were 244 million international migrants in the world in 2015, of which nearly three quarters were of working age, i.e. between 20 and 64 years old. 5 In a recent report entitled ILO Global Estimates of Migrant Workers (2015), the International *Associate Professor of Sociology, and Asian & Asian-American Studies at Binghamton University, New York Refugee Watch, 49, June 2017. 2 The Flipside of the Integration Question Labour Organization meanwhile contends that labour migrants constitute nearly 73% of the world’s working age migrant population. 6 In other words, more than half of the entire migrant population in the world are in fact labour migrants of one form or another. Of these migrant workers, roughly 18% work in industry (including construction), 11% in agriculture, while the vast majority (over 70%) are employed in the service sector, which includes domestic work. 7 Information culled from other studies reveal that at present there are about fifty countries with some form of guest worker programmes and approximately 20% of labour migrants worldwide involved in such temporary overseas work programmes. 8 For this significant and growing body of transnational migrant workers, permanent residence in the host societies is simply not on the horizon of possibilities. And, thus, even the vastly less generous notion of integration/assimilation that dominates so much of the current debates over migration to the global North is largely irrelevant to them. Defined often as “a…fluid pattern of human mobility among countries”, 9 contemporary circular migration involves repeat movements of migrant workers between ‘home’ and often a number of different destination countries. Requiring long periods of separation from families, this kind of potentially life-long sojourner mobility is fundamentally different from the permanent emigration that resulted from earlier mass movements of peoples across international borders—be it through enslavement, indenture, or voluntary migration. 10 Instead, circular/managed migrants are perhaps best understood as guest workers—a term that succinctly captures the ambivalent status of migrants who move legally, but are not welcome to stay on in the host society beyond the period of contract. 11 Some scholars wish to differentiate between circular migrations— understood as relatively fluid, repeat movements of labour across international borders—from other kinds of temporary migration that involves “more or less forced and managed forms of temporary residence”.12 Others, however, point out that as long as such programmes deny migrants the option of permanent settlement in host societies, exclude them from fundamental labour rights such as choice of employer and jobs and access to healthcare, and compel them to leave periodically, they are essentially of the same ilk, irrespective of the relative ease or difficulty of movement. As Stephen Castles and Deriya Ozkul have argued, all such programmes are rooted in a neo- classical understanding of labour as a kind of “financial asset” rather than a socially embedded category. 13 The current paper works with this latter understanding of circular migration as a form of temporary and managed migrant work regime. 14 It is part of a larger project that situates circular/managed migration within the larger, historical question about the status of labour, and especially in terms of the debates within labour history over the slippery line between free labour and forced labour. Here, I will trace the genealogy of these labour-migration schemes, and make some preliminary observations about the specificity of contemporary circular/managed migration as it becomes incrementally normalised as a desirable policy tool. The Flipside of the Integration Question 3 What is Specific about Guest-Work? Immigrants are rarely welcome in receiving societies. They are often greeted with suspicion, resentment, and fear, and are also typically obliged to accept poorly remunerated, undesirable, even unsafe work. What, then, distinguishes circular/managed migration and guest-work from other forms of exploitable labour arrangements—migrant or otherwise? Two features seem to stand out: the temporariness of guest workers and their forced dependence on a single sponsor or employer in the receiving society—both underwritten by the intervention of the receiving state. It is “the state that creates” guest workers by simultaneously allowing them to access its territory, and underscoring “the transience of their stay”, 15 and by preventing them from accessing local labour markets. Guest worker regimes is a mechanism through which the state balances the contradictory needs for cheap and flexible labour for the domestic economy, and the need to appease nativist demands for the protection of an imagined ethnic or cultural purity of the national community, marking out “clear distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, insiders and outsiders, [and often also between] whites and non- whites.” 16 What is more, since guest worker programmes usually do not allow migrants to bring family with them, they are “prevented from forming ‘active communities,’” and denied access to certain kinds of social life. 17 All these factors together can produce excessive exploitation and abuse of the workers that some observers have referred to as state-sponsored “structural violence”, 18 a kind of “internal apartheid”, 19 even slavery. 20 And yet, as scholars have pointed out, this kind of conceptual slippage obscures rather than clarifies the specificity of transnational temporary worker schemes. For notwithstanding the myriad forms of constraints that such workers are obliged to negotiate, they are in the end voluntary workers who earn wages. 21 Indeed, in recent years, many labour-sending countries in the global South have seen remittance-levels that are higher than or on par with foreign exchange earnings through their most profitable industries. The World