If Migration was Boring
A friend sends a link to CNN’s website, another report on the Italian coast guard racing to save 400 migrants adrift on a boat, somewhere in the Central Mediterranean, and another boat with 800 persons also stranded in the vast expanse of the sea. But the headline and the actual text of the report are contradicting each other as to who it is that is racing to provide help, the headline claims it is ‘rescue workers,’ not the coast guard. We notice the embedded video clip, the familiar banner reads ‘Migrant Crisis: Italy launches multiple rescues to save hundreds of refugees.’
Our minds keep stumbling over the use of the term ‘rescue workers.’ It lets us readers imagine people in hard hats and neon vests, digging in the rubble after an earthquake, or coordinating deliveries of basic necessities such as water and medicine after a severe natural disaster or some other unpredictable and unpreventable catastrophic event. To us, this characterises rescue workers: they are indispensable because catastrophic events will occur and will call for a rapid response.
But the use of the term ‘rescue workers’ in conjunction with migration across the Mediterranean feels oddly wrong. It suggests that the boats, full of people in search of shelter and protection, stranded on the high sea between the continents, cannot be avoided. That boats capsizing and people drowning cannot be prevented at all? Are these tragedies of human making inevitable catastrophes that routinely occur? Are these events that cannot be averted, whose only response is to send out ‘rescue workers’ after the fact? And if these tragedies occur routinely and predictably like clockwork, what does it mean to speak of a ’migrant crisis’ – is it a crisis or a permanent condition? Is this attitude paradigmatic and adequate for the present? A time in which politics still refuses, more often than not, to take decisive steps to avert the looming, human-made, planetary catastrophe that is global warming. A time in which politics is unable to formulate visions and to reach for utopias, rather than merely responding to unfolding events.
Crisis. Migrant Crisis. Migration Crisis. The spectacle of ‘irregular migration,’ to borrow from Nicolas de Genova (2013), is a double instance of the ‘catastrophic thinking’ these dispatches engage with. Double, because firstly, tragedies and disasters like the one cited above have become part of everyday reality. This is due to the problematic tendency to frame migration in naturalist terms, i.e. to speak of migration as a natural phenomenon of ‘flows’ and ‘waves’ and ‘influxes.’ This obfuscates that the practices of migration as we know them today are the consequence of deliberate political projects of migration control. To speak of migration in naturalist terms obscures the violence of these projects, and legitimises ever harsher measures to thwart this ostensible threat.
The second aspect of catastrophic thinking as it relates to migration is much more sinister and distorted. For the violence of migration control is routinely legitimised with apocalyptic projections of what will happen if this boat of 400 people is not stopped. Many more will come, goes the familiar yet false lore, and in the end, the continent will be overrun and will not be recognisable any more, like after an earthquake of enormous scale. This is the catastrophic thinking that is at the heart of contemporary migration control projects. It seemingly legitimises the demolition and dismantling of any infrastructures that could also support migration projects, that could reach across the Mediterranean, or any other border, in a spirit of solidarity. It favours infrastructures of enmity over infrastructures of solidarity. And it allows for the mischaracterization of migration as seemingly inevitable catastrophes.
Transforming Solidarities
Clearly, we need to reinvent and rebuild these infrastructures of solidarities. Yet, the path from concrete practices of solidarity to their consolidation as infrastructure is not a simple one. For the last three years, our explorative project Transforming Solidarities. Practices and Infrastructures in Migration Society has engaged with different and diverse practices of solidarity in the urban space of Berlin. We began by exploring these practices in three central sectors of social (re)production, i.e. labour, housing and health care, and we did so by following different grassroots initiatives. Some are already strongly institutionalised, some are much more ephemeral. Yet all of them struggle to create sustainable and long-lasting relations of solidarity for the city and its inhabitants.
We have found that practices of solidarity play an indispensable role in filling the ever occurring gaps opened up by the official support systems provided either by the state or civil society. Often, these practices go unnoticed, since those engaging in practices of solidarity seldom have the time to also promote their activities. This is even more true when practices of solidarity answer to concrete and urgent situations of need, when they are literally stop-gap measures.
In this sense, solidarity as a principle is often quicker and more versatile to address situations of need. We attribute this trait to the fact that solidarity can reach across differences and establish relations that have not existed hitherto. It is what sets solidarity apart from concepts such as kinship, family, or even nation that are often also used to explain why people stand in for each other. Unlike solidarity, they build on pre-established, possibly imagined, commonalities. Solidarity is not constrained by such categories. Indeed, the most inspiring historical instances of solidarity have always been when dynamics of ‘solidarisation’ crossed borders and preconceived categories to create new mutual recognitions of connectedness. The transatlantic, centuries-long struggles for the abolition of slavery contain some of the most striking examples of new relationships of mutual support and recognition that were instrumental. In a very different vein, trade union movements could reach across categories of origin, religion, and profession in order to forge what only retrospectively we recognise as the working class.
In our explorations, too, we have found many such instances of practices of solidarity that allow for new social relations. For example, the movement of delivery riders employed by different platforms that came together despite different origins, languages, experience of social struggles and knowledge about their rights under German labour law. Together, they overcame these obstacles, e.g. by paying close attention to issues of translation and provisioning of information. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of time and energy, a lot of labour that goes into the creation of these bonds and the (re)production of the conditions for these bonds to flourish. Which raises the question: is it at all possible to institutionalise, or even to infrastructure, the amazing versatility of practices of solidarity in order to overcome their inherent fragility and brittleness? To us, this is the question of infrastructures of solidarity.
Infrastructures of Solidarity and Welcome
One such dynamic of solidarity in which practices were transformed and infrastructures emerged was the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees of war from Ukraine since February 2022. Unlike what we are witnessing daily at the borders of Europe, it was decidedly not an instance of catastrophic thinking. Even though the unexpected return of war to Europe qualifies as a veritable catastrophe, the arrival of people in search of peace and shelter was neither perceived nor painted as one. No state of emergency emerged, no crisis was proclaimed.
At the train stations and bus terminals, spontaneous initiatives, civil society and state institutions were quick to set up ad-hoc infrastructures of welcome that catered to those arriving and organised access to housing. The activation of the legal regime of the European temporary protection directive allowed for unobstructed access to further social goods, such as residence permits, access to the labour market and social support systems for those in need. And this was not just a Berlin story; all over Europe, practices of solidarity soon coalesced into networks and infrastructures of solidarity.
Granted, the process was not as smooth as these few lines may make it seem. Time and again, the specific perspective of state support systems created exclusions and hardship. But these gaps were then again filled by grassroots initiatives that engaged in practices of solidarity. Often, people active in these initiatives had already been active during the previous arrival of refugees during the Summer of Migration in 2015 and 2016 and were able to draw on their experiences and knowledge gained at that time. It is worth highlighting, however, that the reaction of refugees in 2015 was guided by catastrophic thinking in line with what we have described in the introduction to this post. Solidarity efforts at that time were much more confronted with infrastructures of enmity that often obstructed an adequate welcome like the one we witnessed in 2022. Even if we ascribe a certain autonomy and versatility to practices of solidarity, their flourishing is nevertheless also shaped if they take place within infrastructures of solidarity, or of enmity. The temporary protection directive unlocked and made available many of the former.
Which raises the question: what was different between 2015 and the first months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Why were Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees treated so differently, even if all of them sought to escape a war? Two explanations commonly raised have been that it was either geopolitical expediency or imagined ‘racial’ commonalities. We do not have the space here to expand on these questions. However, we would like to point out that there is a long history of Ukrainian migration into the European Union. This history is entangled with an even older, anti-Slavic racism against Ukrainians that was used to legitimise their exclusion. If there is thus one conclusion to be drawn, it is how fungible and malleable racial categories are, and how careful we have to be if we do not want to unwittingly reify them.
The important take-away then is what kind of practices of solidarity are possible if they do not constantly need to overcome racist divisions. We would like to see in the example of the first months’ infrastructure of welcome a tacit development of solidarity. Perhaps these infrastructures are not yet hard physical infrastructures. Perhaps, they are still largely confined to the imaginary, perhaps they are still putative and aspirational and largely carried by the repetition of practices. But practice, and the knowledge of what is needed for practices to flourish, is already a first step towards dragging the notion of an infrastructure of solidarity from the realm of the utopian towards the territory of feasibility.
Despite the recent academic excitement for infrastructures – the often proclaimed infrastructural turn – infrastructures are fundamentally boring. Infrastructures are often taken for granted and are often only noticed when they fail or when the exclusion they produce becomes a bone of contention (Star 1999). But confronted with the permanent narrative of the perpetual ‘migration crisis’ as a precursor to an imminent catastrophe, we wish for boring infrastructures of solidarity and welcome that render migration what it really is, namely just one facet of human life on this planet that we are to finally become accustomed to, no matter where the people migrating come from and no matter what the initial cause of the migration is. Clearly: these infrastructures will not spring into existence on their own. They will have to be fought for and asserted against vested interests and powers that thrive from catastrophic thinking.
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