Lecture and Workshop: Prof. Dr. Bridget Anderson
Course description:
Citizens may be broadly in agreement with government immigration policy and acknowledge the consequent logic of illegality and deportation, but its actual practice can be deeply unsettling. The lack of access to rights of undocumented migrants, detention, and deportation (particularly of children) are often seen as violating their human rights. One of the ways of managing the discomfort of immigration enforcement is to invert these kinds of arguments and posit immigration controls and enforcement as a response to human rights violations. In the same way as asylum processes supported human rights, so too it is claimed can immigration controls. This is the language of trafficking which is now firmly on the political agenda. This lecture will unpack some of the implications of this move and will consider the issues raised by such an attempt to reconcile immigration controls with a universalist idea of human rights. It will focus particularly on how the role of the state in creating vulnerability is overlooked by an emphasis on individual morality rather than institutional structures. It will also examine the implications and limitations of the usage of the language of ‘modern day slavery’ to contemporary migration. In particular I will consider how the invocation of the language of transatlantic slavery posits the contractual selling of labour as ‘free labour’, the tensions within this concept of ‘free labour’ as applied to migrants, and the broader implications for the labour market.Responses to ‘trafficking’ present liberal democracies as sites of free labour and equality but they also reveal anxieties about the nature of the market, its relation to society and more particularly its compatibility with ideas of the nation. Trafficking depoliticises these concerns and introduces the ‘humanitarian border’ into the heart of political space.
Recommended literature
- Anderson, B. (2013) Us and Them? The dangerous politics of immigration controls OUP: Oxford.
- Bales, K. (2005) Understanding Global Slavery, Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Cheng, (2010) On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the US Military in South Korea, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Doezma, J. (2010) Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The construction of Trafficking London: Zed Books.
- GLOBAL ALLIANCE AGAINST FORCED LABOUR, (GAAFL) 2005 Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work International labour conference 93rd Session, report 1B Geneva: International Labour Office.
- O’CONNELL DAVIDSON, JULIA: New slavery, old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of ‘freedom’, Global Networks 10, 2 (2010) 244–261. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2010.
- WEITZER, R. 2007. The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology ad Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade. Politics and society, 35 (3), 447-475.
Task for participants:
In preparation for this workshop I would like you to read the case study booklet on the web. You are a caseworker who is aware of your superiors’ concerns about abuse of the system. You feel under considerable pressure to reduce the number of successful claims as a result. You have a case file on which you must make some decisions. You must select one as a victim of trafficking and reject the others. Please draft letters of acceptance and rejection to the claimants, outlining the reasons for your choice. The workshop will be organised as an appeal hearing and subsequent discussion. (this task as doc-file).
Case study booklet (as doc-file)
Text to read: