Migration without integration and vice versa

Migration und Menschenrechte

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Nacira Guénif-Souilamas

Immigration without integration and vice versa

To understand why the implementation of human rights, when applied to certain categories of human beings, is rarely sufficiently addressed, one has to disentangle the closely entrenched, long lasting relationship between two European continental sovereignty problems: immigration and integration. Always considered a dangerous, cursed but also necessary couple, the two terms must be explored separately. They need to be examined from within and from a distance in order to unearth the invisible motives for resisting a seemingly irresistible move for liberal-democratic societies. An unconventional answer may be that migrants are too easily dehumanized, therefore not acknowledging their rights. Perhaps that causes anxiety about the meaning of their citizenship and sovereignty, since immigrants are not used to viewing themselves as under the protections of human rights accords.

Since the oil crises of the 1970s, which ignited industrial changes in the globalizing economy, immigration has become part of the landscape in many Western European countries. Immigration did not start then. It did, however, become increasingly visible when immigrants were largely marginalized. That was due to the striking effect of the increasing unemployment rate, as well as an influx of illegal immigrants. This is not to say that the receiving societies started to view themselves as immigration countries, bound to be affected and transformed by the growing diversity. Almost simultaneously, immigrants have become an issue for countries that until the late 20th century concentrated on national sovereignty and identity, and managed to contain immigrant populations on the margins of the working class. Such a stance, aimed at avoiding immigration issues, is a longstanding phenomenon, which was strongly held and argued for decades. It is now exhausted by a multifactor turn to late modernity. Postcolonial mobility waves are tightly linked to a morphing capitalist economy which provides a large market of individualization and specialization (Wright Mills 1957, Beck 1989, Appadurai 1996, Haraway, 2003, Bauman, 2005). In order to understand the


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shifting relations between nation states and their changing and demanding population I will propose different equations dealing with the words immigration and integration, which are closely connected if not necessary to one another. I will argue that not taking for granted the willing marriage between immigration and integration, as opposed to forced Muslim marriage, helps unfold unexpected perspectives of combination, disruption and disconnection between the words and their political uses. I will explore ways in which the central topic of human rights in Europe interacts with migrations and I will stress the fact that immigrants’ human rights cannot be acknowledged, especially if they are undocumented, as long as human rights principles are embedded in Western values as a pre-requisite to their recognition. Such an attempt to multiply viewpoints should widen horizons to where we could imagine what would happen if we used and thought about those terms. We could tackle the issues they raise, one without the other, and identify a way to lift the normative pressure that keeps human rights from being more widely implemented at the social periphery and the cultural margins of the European societies.

A submissive relationship

The usual way to lay out the two words is to submit one to the other. Immigration is submitted to integration in order to be acceptable, or even tolerable, and thus governable. What does this mean? It means that the point of view grasping migration as a practical reality (people crossing borders, mainly illegally, and becoming part of a society whether liked or not) and as a general phenomenon, the rate of immigrants in a local, national or regional population, is euro-centric, ethno-centric, as anthropology has shown about the majority of field works on this topic until the decolonization. By forgetting the cultural relativist argument made by anthropologists and ethnologists ranging from Lévi-Strauss or Mary Douglas to Clifford Geertz, current sociology and political science, not to mention political staff and leaders, miss a central point: the immigrant does not (always) live one’s life and experience it under the control of the state and its representatives. Hence the so-called migrant doesn’t experience him or herself as a migrant unless she is reminded of the thick reality of borders, law and practices of order that


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troubles her, whether by trespassing, ignoring or violating them. She only exists as such in the eye of the nation state and its normative lens. This is true for any native citizen but also for any illegal mobile person who has become the focal point of migration reality and immigration policies. Although Foucault built the conceptual domain of individuation-subjectivation to analyze such instances as a power relation submitted to biopolitics and provided researchers with tools to contradict the false image of a freedom of choice and action, one has to observe that such a viewpoint has scarcely been used so far. However, that theoretical frame helps to not elide the actor’s subjectivity, while the other part of Foucault work aims at unfolding it. Hence, in such an instance embracing a Foucaultian perspective to read immigration and integration policies doesn’t imply forgetting the human-centered migrant’s view point, but rather strives to connect both. Yet, the undisputable and long lasting reality of migration, as a human phenomenon, which has always existed and always will, is lost to stress another perspective more valuable when seen from a national viewpoint. This change of focus has to do with the imperative to reduce the disorder implied as a side effect of immigration influxes, which is demanded by a flexible economy and the need to regulate the society so it can absorb the newcomers and their descendants. In this respect, integration, when dealing with immigration, is always about erasing the visible (i. e. anomic) signs of the phenomenon by assimilating its protagonists. In order to fulfill that goal, its agents rely on the conception and promotion of a mainstreaming policy. This is true to the point that Western European countries have invented “a desire to integrate”, “a degree of integration” that can both be measured to establish the compliance to prerequisites.

Cultural assimilation as a prerequisite to accessing the civilized Western world

The criteria of integration to be met by immigrants are defined solely by the nation state, in a unilateral process, underlining its hegemonic position and the subaltern position of the immigrants. Such rules of integration, especially shaped for the migrants, are changing according to time and space, but they are persistently reinforced in a multitude of settings including work, education and family. After having been merely reminded in official


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statements and relying mainly on pragmatic means, such as having appropriate housing or a minimal income in order to complete a family reunification, the immigration rules become more and more explicit in a large range of official documents and contracts, supposedly equally engaging integration and immigration. The agenda of the European Union French presidency in 2008 focuses on convincing its partners to adopt the only immigration and security policy harmonization based on generalized repressive rules of selection, retention and expulsion. From such transnational capitalist (i. e. neo-liberal) perspective human struggle as it appears in the illegal mobility process seems irrelevant and importunate. Even more irrelevant is any claim for human rights raised by the migrants or their spokesmen. As for the first issue, the current European situation is rather unusual and paradoxical. The states or administrations involved in migration policy often use the alibi of a higher sensitivity to human rights issues to justify harsher immigration measures imposed on present or future migrants. Hence, when France decided to raise the number of expelled migrants to 26,000 in 2006, the argument was that they were living in undignified conditions of housing and were exploited by their employers. The former French minister of Interior, and current president of France, even used a series of fires that demolished unsound buildings a few months sooner than need be and killed many African immigrants in the process. He argued in favor of a massive deportation policy as if it was meant to protect them from such risks. Furthermore, the current minister of integration, immigration, national identity and co-development explains, without a blink, that reversing the influx of illegal immigrants is a way to discourage and, thus, fight and dismantle underground human trafficking networks, which massively import female immigrants as sexual workers and exploit migrants hopes of reaching the “promised land”. Interestingly, the apparent human rightist tone of such declarations and policy inflexions highlight how a human rights stance, when used superficially, has been turned against those that are supposed to be protected by them in an effort to, if not convince them, keep them from considering any mobility plan, whether legal or not. For the ones who already trespassed the limits, the states complaining of invasion have retorted by focusing on the behavior and the manners of immigrants upon their arrival. Once again arguing that human rights are a universal goal that should be achieved for new migrants as well,


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governments imply that for their own sake, immigrants should show willingness by learning the country’s language and adhering to the values of equality between men and women. One hardly seeks any consistency between the two requirements so strongly demanded by states’ administrations to new migrants when they apply. Yet, such consistency should be found in the way a civilization mission can still be a state domain of sovereignty while the economy is not. Thus, the civilizing scene and the theatrical drama that is staged on it distract from the ongoing purpose of integration policies, which are to regulate the labor market and direct human resources for private firms and corporations involved in a global economy battle.

The national administrations worked and still do in a close understanding, if not in a close connection, with the firms that require such a workforce. An expression such as “under tension sector” used by state agencies to organize and dispatch importation of workforces, illustrates the goal of a large range of policies dealing with legal status (resident or refugee) and eligibility for welfare, including housing and health care, education and training. All those policies, when applied to migrants, have shifted from a universal right definition, including any human being since the 1948 declaration of the United Nations, to a privilege right definition based on a national exceptionalism that sets conditions to the access to human rights standards, especially for migrants and minorities even when legal (The Roma example is to be thoroughly explored in such perspective). This shift can be traced in the terminology changes: Gastarbeiter in Germany have become “ausländische Mitbürger” (guest workers vs. fellow citizens) “travailleurs immigrés” are now “immigration choisie” (migrant labor force vs. chosen immigration) in France. In the Netherlands carefully chosen words underline a strong local shift from pillarization (Dutch version of multiculturalism) to a normative integration and a reinvented Dutch autochtony based on “cultural erasure”1. The rhetoric of an economic cooperation was effective when the economy was regulated at a local level. Since that is no longer possible in a delocalized global economy, regulations apply to what is still under the state’s control: how to import immigrants and closely control their workers’

1 Peter Geschiere, Perils of belonging, autochtony in a global time, Chicago,

Chicago UP, Forthcoming 2008.


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status – let’s think of illegal work and its marginal acceptability – and how make them adapt and comply to cultural and ideological norms, not upon their arrival, but even before moving to the host country. In France the “contrat d’intégration” (integration contract) recently included features such as speaking or learning to speak French and displaying cultural and behavioral signs of assimilation. Hence, administrations implementing a conformation policy use categories and adaptation tools dealing with the level of language understanding and practice, as well as the willingness to comply with the principle of gender equality. Such criteria, which used to apply to candidates for citizenship, are now requested from any emigration visa applicant coming from certain countries.

Yet, illegal migrants already undergoing a hearing process to qualify for legalization in France, who show a good French language level may nevertheless be expelled regardless of their expressed willingness to stay and to display the “proofs of integration” provided by witnesses and French citizens testifying in their favor. Such occurrences show, that despite what is said by policy makers and political staff, that those contracts do not ensure any access to human rights, but will most probably appear as the deceptive image of human rights it actually is, from which very little is to be expected. Each member of the administration of the host society as a whole thus becomes an instance of normative rules control and, to a certain extent, a fighter for Western values threatened by the increasing number of immigrants coming from former colonies and/or Muslim societies. What have become known as “Western values” is the core topic of migrant’s evaluations. Muslims, especially when visible and/or polygamist, undocumented people or cultural and religious minorities in the making are framed and instrumentalized as part of an immigrant problem.

In this first configuration, the subordination of immigration to integration is simultaneously a strong enhancer of ideological intentions sustained by nation states and a deceptive image of what happens in so far as individuals and firms are involved. On the one hand migrants do not include constraints they will encounter in their plans if they ever make it to a northern country, but rather they include in their calculations constraints undergone where they live when considering to leave. In such instances, being a migrant is imposed by the nation state’s agenda rather than by their own intimate and often


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solitary experience. On the other hand, migrations are an ongoing phenomenon, and integration, whether as a national, regional policy or as a public discourse, is a temporary, often flawed and inadequate response to this much wider and enduring phenomenon. The reason why it is not effective in making migrants’ lives easier is because integration policies are always designed to fit the labor market and not the life struggle of individuals deprived of any protection and consideration. As long as a policy tries to keep a hand on the number and the “nature” of immigrants and limits the side effects of a phenomenon that is primarily regulated and used by global economies, there is no way to consider migration as an object of polity and policy and is, therefore, a challenge for implementing human rights. Policy is more likely to be submitted to economic and state order goals. Since the workforce influxes are useful to a liquid economy using outsourcing as a human resource management, there is no way, as long as governments agree with the capitalist agenda, that integration will be focused on acclimating the migrants to a host country. Hence, when it comes to what really matters in cultural negotiation and contact at stake in all migrations, which is mutual adaptation, the nation state level has become the weakest link of the chain, turning down its sovereignty to the regional level of European governance. The current French presidency gives an accurate view of that repressive path. Indeed, what is at stake in the European negotiations on a common immigration policy is that the linked questions of refugees and migrants’ local statuses and living conditions, on the one hand, and of the anti-discrimination policies implemented in favor of minorities on the other, especially from migrant backgrounds, must be subordinated to the main issue of limited and controlled influxes. On the whole, such policies are caught in tension between serving the production of richness that conditions the Western standard of living and protecting the so-called threatened values of Western countries which happen to include human rights since they were recently lifted to the highest level in the hierarchy of the democratic system components.

Introducing race, gender and body control in the European protected zone

The increasing depiction of threats on liberties, especially on women’s rights, gives the migration framed debate a gender coloration and provides a


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justification for politics of fear, requesting to raise the level of security even at the cost of reducing freedom rights. It comes as no surprise then that the recent trends of national and regional integration policies makes it harder for individuals, especially when married, whether with a local spouse or a Western spouse, to come to Europe or to stay there if illegal2. All kinds of barriers, boundaries, fences and defenses are raised to discourage the potential migrants whilst they are or will be used and exploited in the local economy. The barriers are partly about skills, since they are put to the test and narrowly controlled before leaving the home country, but increasingly about civilized behavior, the only domain in which the reduced nation state sovereignty can be maintained. The DNA tests stand as a good example of how bioscience is used in biopolitics. Far from being widely permitted, the DNA procedure was strictly restricted by the French authorities until the last immigration law passed in 2007. Since then, it has included the case of mothers who could not establish their kinship with the children they intend to emigrate within a reunification procedure. The recent extension of such bio-tests institutes the differences in defining parenthood between Western citizens, entitled to experience multiple definitions between biological and social, and aliens applying for immigration who are reduced to prove biological kinship although it is proved to be less valuable, thus symbolically prescribed in African or Asian countries.

Interestingly, when discussed in France, the introduction of such a test was justified by its already widespread use in many European countries, including Belgium and Italy, where the number of tests rose suddenly in the past years as they became compulsory for specific immigration applications, mostly submitted by Africans. Each host country invents a local version of the test, which includes besides bioscience tools civilization measurements, such as the one created in the Netherlands. In order to check the openness or resistance to Western practices and manners, a DVD shows the applicant pictures and short clips of gays kissing or a topless woman. Such a slip in integration conception, to be achieved before arriving in the host country, by accepting the sight of so-called Western ways of life, and the means chosen

2 For a further discussion of the French case: Guénif-Souilamas N., “The other

French exception; Virtuous racism and the war of the sexes in postcolonial France”, French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol 24, N°3, Winter 2006.


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to put it to the test, as a visual or technical assimilative process, is more telling about Western societies trying to prevent any cultural contamination than it is about migrants’ patterns of behavior and migrants themselves. Like any traditional catholic French or austere protestant Dutch or German, some immigrants may not accept certain sights. Should that be considered “not integrated” in their own country if they showed any reluctance to these pictures? Or does the privilege of being “here first” exempt one from complying with what has become framed as the core component of a “Modern lifestyle”3?

Under current circumstances, more so than in the past, integration is mainly about normative conformation and almost never about mutual adaptation. As one of the German Muslim leaders put it when explaining why he decided to stop attending the meetings of the federal integration council, mainly dealing with accommodation of Islam in Germany: “We are not masochist to the extent to give bail to an integration process that leaves no space to our claims”. Such a restrictive definition of belonging may explain why it is so infrequently accepted on both sides. The French, the Germans or the Dutch maintain that the newcomers or old residents who become minorities do not meet the behavioral standards expected from them. Symmetrically, the migrants and minorities feel that they never can adjust because the standards rise or move away as they move toward it. Similar to what Judith Butler argues about gender, that always fails any individual or group under control or suspicion, integration fails all migrants since they will never be able to meet all the expandable requirements enforced by many normative programs. Hence, as the national political situation tightens and moves to binary visions, migrants become harder to welcome, not to mention understand, in the local landscape. The immigrants are condemned to be bad pupils of integration models because integration policies, supposedly conceived for them, voluntarily or not produce evidence of insufficient adjustment and make them appear as a preoccupying sign of disorder to be handled in a harsher way. Intended exploration programs such as intercultural governance, anti-bias programs or gender and migration cued

3 On the French way to deal with the clash between the so-called Western way of

life and alternative ones, see Nilüfer Göle’s Interpénétration (Paris, Galaade, 2005).


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policies are so far deceptive in regards to what is actually implemented in Europe and to a large extent, in Western countries. However generous they seem to be they end up in the wall of so called realistic or pragmatic (good) practices that reinforce the usual suspect image. One could conclude that a politically liberal integration policy is an oxymoron. So far, integration policies are meant to be framed, compulsory and normative. They are meant against immigration and not in favor of immigration, as shown by the dropping rates of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants who legally entered Western European countries, including a negative balance of migration in the Netherlands that mirrors the rising rates of retained and expelled undocumented migrants. While civil servants reinforce such stereotypes and disorder imaginary without facing strong human rights-based protest, one easily loses sight that such policies are meant to assert the restrictive counter-liberal social and cultural practices that liberal economy increasingly requests from immigration policy agents and decision makers, whether at the national or regional level. Such a scheme hardly allows any disconnection between immigration and integration but rather strengthens their ties and confirms the submission of the former to the latter.

A longstanding and widespread mobility

What if we now try to explore another equation: immigration as the precondition, the predicate of integration? Reversing the terms brings into light an unusual question: If it wasn’t about immigration, what would the integration rhetoric and policy stand for? The usual assumption shared since the mid-seventies is that integration is the compulsory answer to immigration, as if what is defined as an ultimate goal preceded what it depends upon and applies to: the migration phenomenon. As a normative process, integration, in its most frequent meaning would become useless if it wasn’t sustained by ongoing migrations. Furthermore, the increased application of integration policies as the most powerful protection against disorders provoked by migration reverses a long term causality. Integration seems to determine immigration whilst history shows the contrary. Immigration does determine integration when considering the wide influxes of population movement. Regarding the long lasting migration trends,


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integration remains a limited political and normative phenomenon, in space and time. On the one hand, what is called integration when applied to the Roman Empire or the Greek polis, is an anachronism if one considers the political and cosmological rules under which such social formations were governed4. On the other hand, the majority of countries receiving the largest segments of mobile poor populations do not have any official immigration/integration policy. Such states are usually called refugee receiving countries and fall under the category of humanitarianism. In these countries state of emergency international policies are enforced by Western nation states, NGOs and the United Nation. In both cases the integration standard is projected onto forced mobility that has no part in its scope.

An accountable transnational intimate experience: mobility/migration

Let us operate according to the opposite of what is expected. Let’s seriously consider migration as a mobility phenomenon of its own and follow the tracks through which its protagonists occur and move in the late modern landscape. One of the last “scopes” of Said’s “Culture and imperialism,” also translated as an “escape” in Appadurai’s “Modernity at large,” is precisely mobility and migrants. In different ways, but following the same intuition that strikes a regular anthropologist brought to shift ones gaze so to encounter the world from the observed subject’s point of view, both authors understand the tremendous role played by mobile poor individuals and groups surveyed in the postcolonial world. Furthermore, rather than to estimate such weight according to economic currencies and outcomes, they invite us to focus on culture and polity as the main currency put into play by migrants, and above all by illegal migrants. This may basically be the argument in favor of considering immigration without integration. Once we 4 Many attempts to read with the same strangers/integration lens different

periods of history, whether Western or Eastern, may appear as a way to concatenate, telescope or anachronically legitimize a supposedly scientific category without mentioning its equivalence in the local lexicon. Thus, I recently read in an exhibition dedicated to Babylon at the Louvre a mention about the “integration of foreigners or protected minorities such as the Jews in the city of Babylon”.


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lose sight of the interstate, European and Euro-Mediterranean as well as state and local integration policies aiming at organizing and controlling migrants, it is possible to unfold the complex and inventive paths and passages that map migration, i.e. vulnerable mobility, as a singular relation to existence and survival. Far from being anecdotal, vulnerable mobility epitomizes the salient features of the risky late modern path everybody is bound to borrow at some point of one’s existence. So is its description and its power to evocate a widespread experience, sometimes intimate if not unconscious, of being displaced inadequate. Thus migration does not stand for a remote, reduced and dismissible group in the world but rather names the largest fragment of populations experience that are bound to endorse the costume of the “stranger”. Looking closer at such experiences and their performability allows analysts and policy makers to acknowledge the common grounds and the deep differences that all individuals share with the double process of otherness and othering.

Routes and paths have always existed and spread, following explorers and preceding plagues. For billions of human beings and an innumerable number of organisms, whether hybridized or morphing, mobility has become a rather common experience, viewed alternately as a routine or a risk (Latour, 2001, 2005, Haraway, 2007). For them crossing boundaries is not merely a metaphoric expression or a virtual experiment. For millions of men, women, children in today’s global capitalist world, it is a tangible and yet problematic experience, since some are entitled and often expected to be mobile business travelers, “expats” or tourists, whereas others are not (Appadurai, 2006). Before becoming the object of interest and analysis of geographers, population movements, whether large or small, have always been a matter of metaphorical or political questioning and thought.

A close reading of the Western canonical body of texts, on which were built past and present mythologies, highlights the central role played in its cosmology by the character of the traveler, the stranger, the foreigner and the prodigal son who returns unrecognizable. Any reader may easily relate to such figure and draw on one’s memory and personal pantheon to identify one or more after giving them flesh and blood. A wider lens, including larger narratives of exile and lost homeland provides another understanding of phenomenon than that which is currently reduced to anomic behavior and


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disorder causes. Yesterday’s reasons to leave and undergo exile are probably the same as today’s. Fleeing wars, hunger, boredom and despair, migrants once broke the growing rule of sedentariness, while segments of southern populations are today forced to migrate. The move toward rooted existence has legitimized a way of belonging, based on the unique place one lived in and the construction of its opposite figure: the stranger (Simmel). Leaving one’s birthplace and traveling was imposed by external circumstances such as war, famines, persecutions, or in better and scarcer cases, boundless adventurers and explorers, initiation journeys reserved to educated and protected people. This long lasting process of becoming increasingly sedentary has gradually been dismissed by the industrial growth and, finally, by the last wave of global capitalism. The contemporary central character of traveler is the businessperson who pushes back borders of action and interaction while remaining in secured corridors, in which they mainly encounter their peers in “virtual ghettos”. When facing environmental, economic and/or physical threats, poor people are compelled to steal from upper middle class mobile businesspeople („expats”) and tourists, who legitimately own them, the tools of mobility conceived for protected groups (let’s think of the profusion of insurances surrounding business and tourist travels) and use them in a scarcity regime while facing the risk of aggravating their poor protections if not losing their lives. This second category of mobility is defined at the nation state level as well as at the United Nations or NGO level as migrations. Those who fall under this category are migrants. As they are scarcely entitled to move from one state to another, they strive to achieve their journey against erected walls, physical obstacles such as oceans and deserts, and bodies of laws that intend to control and limit, if not criminalize, their steps and progression. Although one might consider that there is a difference between borders and boundaries, one could also say that they both impose scars and wounds on individuals. Each passage leaves traces in the minds and souls of individuals but also on their bodies. These traces can be spotted on the skin of often unnoticed migrants as long as they remain invisible, beyond social and cultural boundaries meant for them in the common space. These traces also run deeper internally, giving birth to illness and sufferings that remain subtle to outsiders unfamiliar with such an odd experience (Sayad, 2004). Theses traces also occur at the surface of the land, wounding landscapes and


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horizons, marking anonymous progresses with garbage, lost garments, remains of urgent meals and insecure sleep, ephemeral indices of fights and struggles to escape from the tight web of containment deployed by all means to protect the internal nation space (Dizon, 2006, Mac Cormack, 2007). These traces are recurrently spotted on both sides of recently erected walls and swallowed by oceans and tides, but they are scarcely spit from the deep waters as random and unrecognizable traces of lost persons.

Yet, despite the asymmetrical means detained by protagonists on this unusual stage where security and insurance stand against transformation, movement, and fulfillment (Bauman, 2005, Fraser, 2007), boundaries are crossed and remapped. The mobility experience morphs migrant bodies into complex connectors between invisible and distant networks. In these ages of unexpected encounters, migrants, and above all their bodies, convey unknown signs of belonging, unheard words of existing and inappropriate ways of invention and change. When they appear, the mere potentiality or threat they embody creates echoes of troubled order and pervades the feeling of lost reminiscences. Hence, migrants, as an embodiment of the subaltern mobility, become the boundary as well as the network that connects both sides of a divided world that, without such a media, would hardly meet. They are simultaneously the border and the interface that crosses it, materializes it and yet shows its vulnerability, its porosity. Here again, such an image is not merely metaphoric since migrants actually experience the border crossing and therefore further the social, cultural, flesh and bones network to which they belong. Beyond the reality of the national states, illegitimate mobile individuals embody the very border and its trespassing by creating transnational modes of existence when they eventually gain the legal status of migrants (Lewitt, 2001, Tarrius, 200).

The process of “bodybordering” and “selfnetworking” is not just on the surface. It is rooted in past remnants and future designs. It feeds itself through the constant movement from the past and into the future. They bring with them samples of the past as well as the remote spaces they come from and also promises of futures, often undesirable. In the case of migrants arriving to the southern United States, the samples are those of a former America that had other boundaries and included segments of spaces, Mexico, now excluded from its national sovereignty but included in its


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economic survival (see the negotiation about on the Alena). In the case of the current European citadel, illegal migrants, constructed as a threat to be contained by all means, survive a journey from the former exotic lands of colonial empires. At the end of the journey, their body appears to be the token and the decoy of the former sovereignty of the Empire (Balibar, 2005). Moreover, although migrations converge to Europe from all over the planet, only African migration is viewed and framed as a danger for Frenchness, Germanness, Dutchness and more widely Europeanness and its survival in ages of postcolonial melancholy (Gilroy, 2006, Smouts, 2007). This threat is visualized and ascribed not only to all immigrant groups that should be circumscribed, but above all to those who must be colonized (Elias, 1979) by means of domestication (Guénif-Souilamas, 2006). Precisely those who travel from the former colonies to the former mainland, but also all those who unlawfully come form all parts of the world to become the new migrants. In the same way, the recent public attacks on Roma people in Italy brings back the sedentary/nomad opposition by giving it a dramatic contemporary civilizing translation, exacerbated by the feeling of uncertainty raised by overlapping identities of how to remain Italian while becoming European. Reading an Italian document recently released by the Lombardi region dealing with the teenage delinquency, one could find in the long list motivating the appointment of an observatory of youngsters, a mention regarding the prevention of genital mutilation as the only occurrence of a sexual and/or cultural (probably including a religious component in such an instance) related problem. The local translation of an otherness imported by migrants growingly covers various terms and issues that intricate gender and ethnicity (including religion, culture and race).

To use Honneth’s notion, the reification of individuals by reducing them to migrants, i. e. illegitimate mobile persons, or any adjacent figures such as nomads, i. e. unable to settle, is not random in contemporary Western societies. It has become a tool of repression and suppression of exceeding, excessive visibilities whenever they raise the level of anxiety among the dominant group. It is backed up by the strong feeling that nation states under siege, for example in Europe, should separate from dispersed and yet strong centrifuge forces embodied notably by a growing number of illegal (i. e. unwelcome) immigrants. The metaphor of migration as a threat refers not so much to brain drain, capital escape or economic outsourcing, tendencies hard


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to argue against in a global capitalism; rather it refers to the energetic and troubling growing presence of strangers in the homeland, a stance easier sustained in times of politics of fear. Or maybe one could hear, behind complaints of the low growth rate in Western economies, the growing sound of southern countries responsibility in letting things go when they should be withholding their emigration candidates by all means. Such a fantasy misses the paradoxical locus of capitalism, which consists precisely in spreading the good news of a wide open game in which everyone is likely to gain something with such a gamble, including one’s life, on the world market, starting with the right to be relocated on the map of increasing income and on the ladder of success … or to die trying.

Another side effect of such a global ideology is that democratization, supposedly the next gain on the capitalist market once the economic program completed, starts with loosening the control on bodies and individuals by increasing human rights. On the whole, whichever way is considered, social promotion as a right to have rights, becoming part of the new world depends for the majority of mankind on the possibility of moving, departing or exiling oneself, leaving the place once cherished and finally detested because it eventually became an obstacle to fulfilling one’s dreams. Either the pursuit of financial happiness or the search for golden freedom, both goals lead to the box “emigration” … But if both goals imply different prerequisites when filling the box, whether the penholder is a civil servant or a poor dweller of the global margins, they both forget to afford human rights. Hence, the policy-maker or the civil servant both assume the frame in which he operates naturally, dwelling in human rights philosophy and thus eliding the inherent injures to elementary rights to circulate, bound to occur because of the enforcement of a protective if not prohibitive law. At the other end of the world or on the other side of the interaction, the optional migrant (not to mention the case of illegal migrants caught at any border) cannot ignore that he has basically no rights to claim when applying for emigration and is thus not entitled to denounce a denial or restrict to his fundamental rights in that instance, if not in all instances. The only exception is when acting as small capitalists, many vulnerable mobile persons do not spontaneously consider legal or normative rules as much as life issues in making decisions about where to go and how to get there, and once arrived, about how to stay and move safely. This way of thinking and interacting between the local and


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global (the “glocal”) does not accommodate much of the dominant discourse about trespassing borders, or breaking laws, or even owning personal rights. Although it is known and encountered in either virtual or narrowly bodied and controlled ways, laws against migrations and their counterpart, human rights claims, are not the migrants’ milestones. Rather, the level of resources, the means to get a job and henceforth some money to first survive and gradually improve one’s life be a matter of daily concern and a motive to exploit all kinds of repertoires and layers available with or without authorization.

Only after having completed these multiple and long lasting steps, may a migrant (i. e. vulnerable mobile person) realize she is not just a variable of adjustment to oneself and to the wider environment. She may then widen her horizon of possibilities by including the claim for rights and equality of access to them. Only such circumstances raise the level of consciousness toward the respect of one’s rights. Should the occasion arise, the claim for equality of rights and opportunity is then uttered leading to the hot topic of discrimination and the proper way to tackle it. Hence, that sometimes lasts too long before escaping certain regions of vulnerability that go along with migrant’s subaltern status, should concerns about migrant’s dignity and decency condition be upheld by administrations, decision makers or organizations as a subsidiary sphere of decision arise. Such subsidiary instances are usually present in all Western democratic societies but, lately, organizations that have become too offensive in their criticism of the state’s policy may encounter official stigmatization and/or restrictions to their activities, as may be observed at the level of litigation dealt with by the European court of human rights. Such tensions happen precisely when migration is considered regardless of integration policies by emphasizing the human rights perspective instead of the law enforced by a country. Thus, a too close encounter of human rights procedure with migrants’ situations, seen as vulnerable mobile persons, may trouble the legitimacy of any integration policy. To a certain extent, a migration-centered policy also becomes an oxymoron as it implies the ability of a state and its administration to subordinate its local interests, including economic ones, to the rights of people that either are imported as a labor force or encountered as illegally living under its sovereignty. So far, such framework is hardly available as it is unconceivable for many political actors, government


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personnel and the citizens they administrate. A viable version of such a radical scheme has yet to be imagined.

In the meantime, because they stand at the crossroads between the absence of (or in the way to) rights and their lawful implementation, migrants have become the witness of the collision between the past and the future, between the inside and the outside, since for Westerners their appearance on the border embodies a remnant of the past and represents a promise of a possible internal demographic survival and future regeneration. For both reasons, Western views reduce migrants to their body and the remote origins it is supposed to entrench as it cannot utter any political claim. It once justified their native status and today imposes on them the mark of backwardness and extra-modernity as expressed by the French president addressing the African youth in Dakar (Mbembe, 2007). The techniques of reification that disconnect the individual from his subjectivity are intensively used in the biopolitics of identities when asserting that migrants, especially Muslim, Black and Arab ones, are neither adapted nor adaptable to the Western world. Such a stance contributes to dehumanizing him and reducing them to “strange” bodies, unable to utter a word and speak for themselves. The multiple figures of the embodied other helps dismiss the migrant from any of his rights, unless granted by selective procedures, as well as declare some minorities unworthy to access certain rights because they do not honor the ones which they already enjoy. Echoing such a scheme, some official comments during the 2005 fall riots insisted on the inability of the French suburban underclass youth to express any political claim but rough and useless violence.

Thus, the proliferation of such statements and opinions cover the other rea-lity of creative and subversive embodied subjects in constant transformation (Butler, 2003). It underlines one of the main attributes of the over exposure of internal human otherness: it’s obscenity and the disruption it may cause for segments lacking cultural contact and mixing, which are neither prescribed nor predictable. Step by step the shift from mobility to migration and from migration to otherness brings into light the reason why migration is always put under the control of integration: so that they won’t exceed the specified territory assigned to them. The overwhelming and overly rich experience of movement subsumed by the usual notion of migration is to be


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domesticated and accommodated to local purposes and constraints. The proper way to fulfill that goal is to apply the normative integration pattern of thought to any occurrence of this phenomenon. But this is precisely what the other way of looking at things, from the actor’s perspective, prevents one from doing. Once on the other side, the observer is brought to see the vivid profusion of details of so-called migrants’ experiences, and to raise a doubt about the adequacy of integration tools forged by a mislead craftsman.

Disconnecting movements/reconnecting human rights

Finally the couple immigration/integration may be disconnected as a last attempt to underline the other meanings overshadowed by the overwhelming thickness of such an inseparable couple. Today, integration without immigration is about Europeanization and European integration, seen as a structure and a system. Here again, the normative process of standardization is still enforced. It is often referred to in the economic press as “merging” and “vertical processes of production,” “dispatching” and “distribution”. But in other fields of thinking and description, integration may also be seen as a way to renew the empire narrative through a postcolonial scheme, endeavoring to increase the metropolitan center domination on the margins and outskirts. Just as a constantly expanding market is a prerequisite to economic integration strategies, a thicker location of boundaries is necessary to sustain any integration rhetoric. The integration, whether as a capitalist tool or a nation state model, needs a market of consumers to legitimize it. Border consumers, as one may call poor and illegal mobile persons, are the basic food of any current integration policy. Indeed, any integration policy would fall short if each state didn’t produce and provide a certain number of migrants, horrific numbers of drowned clandestine migrants and of their smugglers, but also preoccupying numbers of illegal migrants settled in all Western countries (Appadurai, 2006). Such a state is reached today in Europe and it is likely be instated as a stable orientation of governance for decades to come and in the second part of 2008, when France takes on the presidency of the European Union and promotes its plan for chosen immigration as the effective pattern to be adopted by all partners. It seems to be difficult to disconnect integration from its sustainable layers of migration.


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Yet, considering migration, or even more loosely, human mobility, does not imply that the local ways of dealing with those who cross border, countries and here and there stay for various times is included in the analytical framing. There is an analytical as well as a political, if not ethical, reason for ignoring local adjustments to human mobility. That is the human rights perspective. As a matter of fact, if one strictly considers the rights attached to individuals on the move, there shouldn’t be any account taken of integration as a way to operate from a nation state point of view, unless such a body of text increases or decreases the implementation of such rights recognized by the international declaration of 1948 and often acknowledged by national fundamental laws. Conversely, the perception of migrant human rights through the lens of national or regional integration (such as the notion of “extra-communitarian immigrantes” used in Italy) is likely to be subordinated to other purposes than their defense. Unless it is put in balance with the sovereignty of local citizens and their legal state, so to oppose them for the sake of a unilateral position, migrants’ rights wouldn’t be so weak and poorly considered. In other words, it is likely that the choice to put integration in front of immigration, thus refusing any kind of disconnection between the two, may inevitably lead to the denial of human rights to individuals or groups that are not included in the circle of the protected citizens belonging to powerful nations or entities such as Europe. Hence, human rights remain the privilege of a minority living in a hegemonic state entitled to see the majority of clandestine faceless migrants as a threat to their sovereignty and their security. Rights once generously distributed have become a highly valuable currency that will be less and less dividable with subaltern populations and affordable by vulnerable mobile humans.

Once faced, such a matter leaves the question of what may be the content and extent of a viable and universal human rights doctrine untouched.

Note: The editors would like to thank Nick Mendler for editing this manuscript.


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Migration without integration and vice versa

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