migrant workers – Working Paper Series

Comment on Violence, Mobility, and the Borders of Bengal

by Jason Cons

3 JUL 2017

Rimple Mehta’s ethnographic exploration of the violence of mobility in “Mobility across Borders and Continuums of Violence: Experiences of Bangladeshi Women in Correctional Homes in Kolkata” is a critical intervention in studies of migration across the India-Bangladesh border and of border crossing more generally. Through a study of Bangladeshi women in correctional homes in Kolkata, she foregrounds the ways that migrants crossing this border are exposed to multiple forms of gendered violence. Moreover, unlike much of the rapidly expanding body of work on the India-Bangladesh, she follows the trajectory of this violence outwards from the border—tracing it from Ready Made Garment factories in Dhaka to correctional homes in Kolkata and back across the border again. Thus, we learn from her work not only about the precariousness of border crossing, but also the violence of detention and return. In recent years, scholarship in the US and Europe has increasingly turned its attention to what Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (2010) have provocatively called “the deportation regime”. Mehta’s study reminds us that we must attend to the particularities of such regimes in other spaces where borders purport to curtail movement between radically unequal states.

Mehta’s work raises questions that scholars of borders, of migration, and of violence need to consider with more care. One of these is the need for a better understanding of violence and its specific articulations with gender. Mehta’s work shows that border crossing is an act fraught with gendered precarity. That said, it remains less clear how we should understand and differentiate these specific forms of violence in the context of the broader violence of borders (Jones 2016). As the Human Rights Watch study on shootings at the India-Bangladesh border that she cites makes clear, the vast majority of those shot-on-sight by India’s Border Security Forces are men. Moreover, in the tragic case of Felani Khatun that Mehta raises at the outset of the paper, there is ample evidence to suggest that she was shot simply because she was seen as a border crosser (moving from India back into Bangladesh). There is less evidence to suggest that she was shot specifically because she was a woman. How then might we better trace and understand the relationship between gender, mobility, and violence at this border?

As the work of Malini Sur (2007), Sahana Ghosh (2014), and Delwar Hussain (2013) has recently shown, gender plays an intimate role in mediating mobility at the India-Bangladesh border. Women crossing this border are certainly exposed to often horrific forms of violence. Yet, gender also plays a critical role in enabling certain kinds of movements even as it restricts others. This suggests that greater attention is needed to the micropolitics of crossing and the ways that bodies of both women and men are exposed to regimes of violent regulation.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Mehta’s paper is that it furthers the project of restoring voice to women who are often systematically reduced to statistics or glossed as abject victims in reporting on human trafficking. In the narratives of women in detention centers in Kolkata, we can begin to glimpse the ways that women who move across this border make difficult choices in conditions very much not of their own choosing. As Diana Tietjens Meyers (2011) has argued, much of the literature on trafficking is trapped in a two-victim paradigm—unable to represent women as anything other than abject victims or heroic resisters of their conditions. Mehta’s paper shows the realities to be much more complicated. It is an ethnographically rich exploration of what Meyers calls “burdened agency.” Through this reading, we begin to understand the often painful decisions that women make that expose them to often horrific forms of violence. Moreover, it forces us to reckon with these decisions as choices. Her work thus demands that we confront the question of agency and humanity in mobility even as it exposes the dehumanizing technologies and techniques of violence in border crossing and detention.

Work Cited

De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz (eds). 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ghosh, Sahana. 2014. “Anti-Trafficking and Its Discontents: Women’s Migrations and Work in an Indian Borderland.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 1220-1235.

Hussain, Delwar. 2013. Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border. London: C. Hurst & Co.

Jones, Reece. 2016. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London and New York: Verso.

Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2011. “Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of ‘Impure’ Victims.” Humanity. 2(2). 255-275.

Sur, Malini. 2007. “Bamboo Baskets and Barricades: Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh Border.” In Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 127-150.

Jason Cons is in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

Oscar Night Winners Bring Human Rights Issues Center Stage

by Briana D. Perez

1 MAR 2017

On a night usually reserved for celebrating Hollywood elites, human rights violations around the world were featured front and center in several winner’s acceptance speeches. Especially in the categories that celebrated international achievement in filmmaking, winners did not hesitate to make strong statements in support of inclusion, tolerance, and peace.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won the Oscar for best foreign language film for “The Salesman.” Farhadi, however, was not in attendance to accept his award. In a statement, read by Iranian-American astronaut Anousheh Ansari, Farhadi denounced President Trump’s immigration executive order, saying, “My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US.” The statement concluded, “Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear.” Before the broadcast, the five directors nominated in the best foreign language film category released a joint statement, where they denounced “the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the US and some many other countries.”

In the best short documentary category, “White Helmets” took home the statue. The 40-minute short focuses on Syria’s civil war and a volunteer rescue group working in rebel-controlled areas of the country. When director Orlando von Einsiedel accepted the award, he called the audience to stand and applaud to show their support for the Syrian people and an end to the six-year long war. A cinematographer who worked on the film, Syrian Khaled Khatib, was barred from entering the U.S. and could not attend the awards ceremony.

These two big winners, however, were not the only ones to discuss politics from the stage. Italian-born Alessandro Bertolazzi dedicated his award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling to “all the immigrants.” Presenter Gael Garcia Bernal specifically addressed President Trump’s proposed border wall, saying, “As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I am against any form of wall that wants to separate us.” In addition, several stars, including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ruth Negga, wore blue ribbons to demonstrate support for the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a statement that encapsulated the overall mood of the evening, Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs pronounced, “Tonight is proof that art has no borders, art has no single language and art does not belong to a single faith.”

Briana D. Perez is a J.D. student at Texas Law, Rapoport Center Fellow, and a member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

Beyond Purely Legal or Economic Analyses of Migrant Laborer Abuses

by Safa Peera

15 NOV 2015

Ryan Jones’ paper, “Beyond Kafala: Remedying Human Rights Abuses of Migrant Workers in the Persian Gulf,” examines the kafala system in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The kafala is a system of laws and customs used to govern migrant workers in these countries. Some of the more egregious laws tie workers to one employer, enabling the confiscation of the workers’ passports during their stay in the country.

The paper is thought-provoking in that it challenges two existing and quite opposite interpretations of kafala, one legal and the other economic. The legal analysis focuses on the laws in the system of kafala, and sees the repeal of those laws as the key to alleviating the human rights abuses. One case study is Bahrain, which reformed some of the most restrictive laws within kafala. As the Bahraini case illustrates, however, the legal system may not be the ultimate cause of the problem, for the legal reform has failed to curb the human rights violations suffered by migrant workers. Jones sees the focus on legal rules within kafala as an instance of what Susan Marks calls “root cause” analysis in international human rights. Despite their objective of unearthing the “root causes” of human rights abuses, human rights institutions halt the investigation into causes too soon; treat effects as causes; and dismiss certain causes without proper consideration. In the case of kafala, NGOs focus on legal rules, ignoring the role of economic inequality in contributing to migration and to workers’ vulnerabilities vis-à-vis their employers.

Jones then turns to an economic analysis of kafala and the use of migrant workers in the Gulf countries. He examines the assertion made by Professors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl that the current system of migrant workers is doing more to reduce global inequality than any other system in the world—that by allowing the high flow of migrants from some of the poorest countries, the GCC nations are increasing the earning power of migrants in an unparalleled manner. Posner and Weyl recognize that empowering the migrants with political, social, and economic rights will dampen the enthusiasm of the GCC countries to welcome migrants. This in turn will reduce the high amount of remittances sent by the migrants back to their poor home countries, which Posner and Weyl claim are critical to reducing inequality. Posner and Weyl’s claim is more attentive than the legal analysis to the economic inequality underlying the migrant workers’ experiences. Yet Jones is also skeptical of their argument. He points out that it excludes important factors in its analysis including the cost of migration for these workers. He also points out that Posner and Weyl seem unconcerned by the inequality the very system of migrant workers is propagating. So long as the poor migrant class and their home countries are getting richer, they seem content to ignore the resulting proportional increase in wealth in the GCC countries through the cheap, migrant labor.

Perhaps one way to integrate legal and economic analysis would be to compare the condition of the migrant workers who are the focus of this article to migrant workers in the Gulf countries who are governed by the same kafala system but are not subject to similar human rights abuses. The kafala system—with all its legal underpinnings—is used to govern any worker within the country who is not a GCC national. While the abuses are rampant amongst migratory workers due to the lack of leverage they wield, the same laws govern Western and other nationals who work the lucrative jobs at Saudi Aramco (the state owned oil company) and elsewhere. Perhaps a comparison with this class of workers can provide clues as to how to best address the abuses against the non-professional, low-income workers. The answer may or may not have to do with the laws in kafala. While Jones’ paper does not go so far as to examine such a claim, perhaps because of the common perception that kafala only affects the powerless migrant workers, his research helps lay the foundation for such an exploration.

Safa Peera is a JD candidate at Texas Law, and a 2015-16 scholar at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.