The lectures are divided into part 1 and part 2. This article, part 2, contains three out of five lectures.

[3] Contestations over Migration

Manuela Bojadzijev

The title of my lecture is ‘Contestation over Migration’. Migration is a highly controversial topic. If you followed the German federal election campaign, the title may not come as a surprise. The migration debate strongly influenced the election campaign. Furthermore, the rise of authoritarianism and the strengthening of right-wing extremist forces — not only at the parliamentary level and not only in Germany, but also in other European countries — seems to be closely linked to the issue of migration. In recent years, right-wing discourse on migration has taken on a quasi-centripetal function, pulling broad sections of previously moderate parties and movements in an anti-migration direction and bringing them closer to what many regard as fascism.

As migration researchers, we tend to adopt a more relaxed approach. On the one hand, our findings show that migration is often given too much prominence in election campaigns. On the other hand, migration is happening anyway. Nevertheless, debates on migration take place in a highly politicised field, so a reliable compass is essential if we want to stop the current forces and regain ground. It is therefore crucial that we shape our concepts and research in such a way that we understand how, in the context of current structural crises and geopolitical shifts, the migration debate has become a terrain on which the far right has succeeded in redefining the points of contention.

To understand and potentially counteract the current challenges posed by the authoritarian turn, we must renew our critical perspectives. To this end, I will briefly review the key concepts that have been developed in critical migration research over the past 25 years, which have also gained traction within social movements.

1. The limits of methodological nationalism and the concept of citizenship

A fundamental problem in migration research has always been ‘methodological nationalism’, also known as ‘container thinking’, which is currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity. When nationalism is criticised as a methodology, our understanding of social action and our political horizon are limited to the nation state. This has been described by Immanuel Wallerstein, among many others, as the ‘disciplining of thought in national categories’. This has long prevented us from understanding migration properly.

Wallerstein and others also sharply criticised the concept of citizenship. He noted that citizenship is ‘by its very nature both inclusive and exclusive’. The term ‘citizen’ refers to a combination of duties and inalienable, inherited rights. However, the problem with the concept of citizenship is that it is meaningless unless some are excluded, and these ‘some’ must ultimately be an arbitrarily selected group.

The national construction of the concept of citizenship is therefore always a central arena of ‘contestation over migration’, precisely because ‘migrants’ are associated with different civilisations, religions, cultures, ethnicities and races.

The difficulties in dealing with migration therefore lie in the concept of citizenship itself. However, the debates surrounding this issue remain largely unresolved.

2. Autonomy of migration and resistance

The concept of ‘autonomy of migration’ highlights the inherent capacity and potential of migrants to traverse borders and pursue a better life, despite efforts to isolate them. Migration can also be viewed as a social movement that shapes the world. However, this concept does not romanticise the exercise of freedom of movement as a purely subversive or emancipatory act. Rather, it recognises historically specific social formations of human mobility as a constitutive force in the relationship between capital, labour, and the nation state. Throughout history, attempts to close borders have largely been unsuccessful, as human mobility can never be completely stopped. Nevertheless, attempts at border control naturally lead to terrible human and social costs. They have also given rise to a new logic of migration management.

3. Migration in the context of logistics: the control mechanisms of the authoritarian turn

The authoritarian turn is currently manifesting itself in a different way of management and control of migration. Anthropologist Xiang Biao has observed that the government’s focus on migration has shifted from considering ‘how migrants move and explore’ to ‘how they can be moved’.

The language of contemporary migration management is logistical. This reorients the border regime, turning roads into corridors and creating platforms and hotspots for the swift identification, registration, and processing of migrants. The control architecture increasingly reveals the intention to organise people’s mobility according to the logic of goods (‘just in time and to the point’). The concept of the logistification of migration enables a more nuanced understanding of contemporary migration management, which is based on innovations in media technology (digital surveillance and the use of AI), as well as staggered transport and data infrastructures. This includes software for geomatching and automated decision-making, as well as sophisticated forecasting tools, which are already being promoted in research.

This development has far-reaching epistemological consequences as it alters the categories and classification systems of migration. Previous distinctions, such as between sedentary and mobile population groups, voluntary and forced migration, and reasons for entry (asylum, work or family reunification), are being called into question and adapted to the needs of host countries and their labour markets.

These changes manifest in campaigns that are often racist and sexist, fuelling social conflict around migration while systematically and discursively undermining previously valid legal structures such as the Geneva Refugee Convention and global support organisations such as the UNHCR. A recent example of this is the debate about ‘essential workers’ during the pandemic, in which migrants were disproportionately represented in systemically important professions such as care, logistics and agriculture. This demonstrates the selective nature of migration: those who are economically useful and culturally assimilable are desirable, while all others are to be kept away and removed.

The increasingly precise logic of logistics is becoming the dominant factor in making this distinction and in decision-making, as well as in the associated path dependencies.

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This brief review of critical concepts suggests that social debates on migration are a heuristic tool that enables us to understand a wide range of social conflicts, including those in which migration does not play a direct role. The aforementioned concepts have been shaped by a variety of influences. Anti-racist and migration policy work, artistic and activist forms of expression, and interdisciplinary research have developed them. These influences have taught us to constantly reanalyse migration in the context of the interplay between economic, political and cultural dynamics.

One could say that many conflicts related to migration revolve around the infamous concept of integration. But integration means nothing more than the ability of society to reproduce itself as it is. We are all familiar with discussions about the inability of migrants to integrate. They have become so widespread, so intrusive and so stereotyped that they have become a litany of recurring variations on the sexism of migrant men, their homophobia, youth violence, the democratic path of integration, the limited educational skills and cultural distance of migrants, and so on.

However, we continue to fall into the trap of questioning the ability of new arrivals to integrate, rather than questioning why states are unable to integrate them and accept new arrivals, and how they can organise this acceptance.

In view of the ‘mortal crisis’ of our modern world system and the rise of figures such as Trump, who are exploiting centuries-old ethnic, linguistic, cultural and political affiliations to create a ‘new monstrous mix’, we must take the current rearticulation of the nation seriously.

Speaking in terms of migration, 2015 and what was called the ‘summer of migration’ has been blamed for this development. As a sort of retaliation of older forces. Today, ten years later, we are faced with this scenario. It is becoming increasingly clear that the number of refugees in the world is growing every year. We have now passed the 100 million mark. Migrants are categorised and counted in many different ways. Their origins are processed, predictive tools for future mobility are developed, and social questions are answered with demographic platitudes. Walls and prisons are built, tools and weapons are programmed, databases are organised and networked, and the military and police are armed to control migration. People are killed, taken to waters and countries from which they never came. Billions are spent and ‘invested’ to keep migration out of Europe.

Given the extent to which the nation, or better: the form of the nation of states, determines our thinking and our understanding of the world, it is important to argue that the rearticulation we are currently experiencing, in the midst of the mortal crisis, cannot be taken lightly. I think that the election of Trump, with all the consequences of a coup d’état, has made this clear even to those who did not want to see it before.

Within these politics, they are appropriating the centuries-old history in which ethnic, linguistic, cultural, racial and political affiliations were interwoven in the form of the nation, and creating a new monstrous mix out of them.

The terms and concepts used in the migration debate do not ‘originate’ from migration theory alone. Conceptualising migration in order to intervene into contestations over migration involves to not simply discuss their own normative content and then wait for the world to act accordingly.

They cannot be reduced to purely descriptive, empirically verifiable categories.

Instead, conceptual work on migration navigates the intersection of the normative and the descriptive, the ‘should’ and the ‘is’, drawing its vision for improvement from the existing struggles, tensions, and possibilities of the present.

In my opinion, we must bring this controversy to the debates about migration.

Image: Syrians and Iraq refugees arrive at Skala Sykamias Lesvos Greece, Wikimedia Commons, 2015

[4] Tactical Resistance of Minority Gig Workers

Lisa Leung

My presentation will speak about the added precarities facing migrant/minority gig workers in the face of encroaching surveillances in neoliberalist contexts, but also their tactical yet liminal agencies to resist and navigate the exploitative platform management. The struggles and precarities facing migrant gig workers have been much researched in recent years, because their increasing precariousness exposes how platformed economy induces structural inequalities on migrant workers worldwide. In Hong Kong, 3 south Asian ethnic groups, the Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalese, have had a long history in Hong Kong since British colonisation. Despite generations of settlement, South Asian descendants still remain in the lower ebb of society, being confined in ‘menial jobs’ such as construction, logistics, cleaning, and are subject to low employment opportunities. The rise of platformed businesses such as food delivery lured many into working as deliverer, especially during COVID. The South Asian ‘gig’ workers were not only subjected to the harsh and exploitative management of food platforms, but also racist behaviour from restauranteurs, food servers, customers or even passersby on the lock-downed streets. The Hong Kong case could shed light on how the various forms and layers of racial discrimination against minority gig workers could be deeply entrenched in areas with a colonial past and are contemporized through platformed management and labour. Furthermore, Hong Kong shares with certain Asian polities in terms of having a dominant ethnic majority (ethnic Chinese in the case of Hong Kong). While conditions of migrant gig workers vary across the many job types within the wide spectrum, they also vary across different political, economic and cultural, AND demographic contexts. Hence, this calls for thicker qualitative and more longitudinal methods to delve into more nuanced forms of racialized aggression in the workplace and in the everyday, and how they interplay in the lives of migrant worker-selves. It also calls for more historical, and intersectional perspectives, especially in Asian economies, in order to unravel the layers of micro-aggression against minority gig workers that are afforded, manipulated, and induced, by algorithmic platform management.

Second, racial minority migrant workers are capable of engaging in forms and layers of tactical and organized resistance against platform hegemony and state surveillance, albeit temporary. in Hong Kong, the successful strikes that managed to paralyse food delivery platform service on November 13 and 14, 2021, were organized by Pakistani migrant workers. In an article, I argued that the migrant gig workers’ agencies for the tactical ‘visibilization’/ resistance come down to the following: i) social media affordances to coordinate online mobilization with offline, cross-district organization; ii) role of local Chinese NGO, who played the essential role of liaising with local media, strategic organization and logistics. Perhaps more importantly, it could also be the ethno-cultural and political ‘capital’, from kinship fraternal bonding to a belief in protests as proper democratic expression. As the ‘foreignized’ other, these migrant workers assumed they would somehow be ‘beyond’ police surveillance, both online and offline.

Third, the role of organized labour unions is worth re-examining, which also necessitates a rethinking of forms and extent of ‘solidarity’ employer and commercial surveillance through algorithmic manipulation. The example of the Foodpanda strike already signalled the gradual decentralization of formal labour unions, in place for spontaneous, self-organized, ‘amateur’ labour solidarity.

Fast forward to what’s happening recently, there are still sporadic, spontaneous and localised ‘strikes’ organized by a dozen of food runners, mostly migrant/ minority workers, which are confined to particular districts, and in any case far from causing significant threats to the platform’s business in general. One reason why migrant/minority workers are again the strike leaders is of course that they have higher stakes in the gig labourforce. As global economy continues to worsen and becoming more unpredictable, gig workers are increasingly at the mercy of even more extreme forms of neoliberalist platform exploitation, and new layers of precarity. Here the algorithmic management of platform business enables further hoarding of data, lowering workers’ wages without notice, and further disintegrating any possibility of clear wage calculation. Workers have no way of knowing how much they actually earn each month, not to mention compare monthly income. On the other hand, workers’ life is increasingly data-fied, turned into commodity for the food platforms.

Under these circumstances, individual migrant workers resorted to tactical ‘visibilisation’ by making use of social media platforms. For example, some Pakistani descendant workers produce and release videos on Youtube, in which they discuss job related problems, relevant labour laws, and even offer information about visa applications to their compatriots who are considering seeking employment in Hong Kong. Another prominent case involves an Indonesian domestic helper, who ‘rose to fame’ by making YouTube videos complaining about employers’ exploitative practices. These youtubers suffice as ‘migrant worker advocate’ as they also benefit fellow workers with information about labour laws in Hong Kong. They also serve to raise public awareness towards racial discrimination in Hong Kong. The business of asserting this role also incurs a set of risks which the advocate entrepreneur must negotiate. For the migrant worker advocate, the perceived risks and costs are higher given her migration status (as a domestic helper). Migrant helpers may also become the target of surveillance from their home governments. Yet, as James Scott deems as ‘weapons of the weak’ of subjugated groups which might undermine the power of both conservative and progressive orders at work, through ‘everyday resistance’. 

Fourth, in the AI and plaformized era, human labour value – and virtually footprints of all aspects of our life – will be datafied and turned into commodities for further commercial exploitation and political surveillance. The hoarding of these data creates double ‘firewalls’ that would also cripple different means and effort of intervention and activism, including research. Their intersection, in the meantime, is bound to oppress human agency, except through consumerism. In the face of mounting technological surveillance (eg. Biotechnological metrics, policing social media content criticizing delivery platforms for exploitative practices or revealing algorithmic loopholes) by the government and neoliberalist capitalist economy, The Ethno-Cultural / Technological Affordances Of Migrant Workers, albeit micro- and fragmented, may offer Insights on, and outlet for, Ressentiment of our times. Our tasks as researchers and advocates are to devise more creative tactics to combat platform injustices by collecting alternative and nuanced ‘data’ through qualitative and longitudinal (n)ethnographic methods through working with workers across job sectors. With these collaborative efforts, we need to trace and network with initiatives at different levels of micro-solidarity, including groups of disgruntled workers who stage guerrilla protests in local areas to voice out and shame platform businesses. Or, individual migrant workers who adopt micro-resistances in everyday interactions, with whom we share resources to raise public awareness of platform evils, and more importantly, in a bid to shake the public off their overriding consumerist values.