Placeless Proletariat

‘It is the rule of the border in general that the refugee challenges … it is the justice of national sovereignty itself that the body of the asylum seeker refutes.’[1]

The poor often find themselves at society’s boundaries, borders and margins. Their bodies hover at the edges of society’s consciousness: in our peripheral vision as we avert our gaze in the street; on the outskirts of the world’s megacities; knocking on the walls that surround the first world.

In his preface to Anthony Burke’s 2001 book In Fear of Security, McKenzie Wark argues that the “still, silent bodies of the ‘illegals’ in ships, trucks or car boots, passing through borders” – those he calls “the placeless proletariat” – are the most telling critique of globalisation that exists.[2] ‘Unauthorised’ migrant bodies are the physical manifestations of ‘globalisation from below’:[3] at once the underside, the product and the critique of neoliberal economic globalisation. The simple action of everyday ‘irregular’ movement is itself the most powerful possible denial of the border’s legitimacy and these bodies enact a silent protest every time a border is crossed. The increased securitisation of national borders to exclude poor bodies may seem at odds with the spirit and power of contemporary globalisation. But this fortification is mostly in fact a reaction to forces unleashed by the increased integration and neoliberalisation of economic and financial systems.

In the way we think and advocate about migration, there are perhaps ways we could shift our emphasis. We should certainly continue to demand that governments allow the free movement of people, especially that they protect those who are fleeing war and persecution. But we should begin by questioning the moral right of governments to inhibit movement, and recognise that people are ignoring borders and refuting their fiction on a daily basis. This is the silent, constant protest and the slow but sure critique of neoliberal globalisation that should inform our advocacy.

Globalisation from Below

The term ‘globalisation’, which could refer to any type of integration of global economies, societies and cultures, has been co-opted by corporate capitalism to make it synonymous with the liberalisation of trade and capital according to neoliberal economic ideology. While I will use it in this way for the purposes of the essay, in order to critique this particular form of globalisation, I will understand it as only one possible and non-inevitable form. This qualification is important because the misappropriation of the word by corporations and governments has allowed the demonisation of activists who highlight the inequalities caused by globalised neoliberal ideology. The movement is subsequently labelled as ‘anti-globalisation’ which (falsely) positions it as opposed to all forms of global integration.

Neoliberal economic globalisation, a program and ideology forced largely by Western corporations and governments on the rest of the world, has overseen a rapid dissolution of borders when it comes to the movement of goods, services, capital, communications and some people. In many ways, the neoliberalisation of the global economy has destabilised communities in the majority world and forced people to move both towards urban centres and across borders. Majority world economies have been forced through international pressures to reduce tariffs on agricultural imports from richer countries with which local producers cannot compete. This forces small-scale/local farmers off the land towards the outskirts of cities where they compete for low-wage jobs. According to Anne McNevin, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in many cases ‘radically transformed the social and economic fabrics of highly indebted countries when debt relief was tied to cutbacks in public expenditure and the liberalisation of trade’. This process has pushed many people to urban migration and also emigration.[4] The imposition of such policies has even been shown to increase the likelihood of violent conflict, with Yanyu Ke contending that ‘spending a lot of time under an IMF program is associated with a higher level of state collapse … [and a higher] probability of armed civil conflicts.’[5]

The startlingly un-free nature of ‘free trade’ is a major source of global inequality, and the various double standards of global trade policy are another significant factor in the increased movement of people. The government subsidies granted to European farmers, which is set to amount to over € 363 billion in the period from 2014 – 2020,[6] is one striking example of this. The subsidies are not available to most farmers in the majority world either because governments cannot afford subsidies or are not allowed to provide them under international trade rules. These farmers’ products are therefore not only unable to compete in European markets, but often they cannot compete with the cheaper European imports in their own domestic markets. Wark argues that ‘if the overdeveloped world refuses to trade with the underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt, to extend loans, to lift trade barriers against food and basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an increase in the flow of people seeking to get inside of the barriers the overdeveloped world erects to protect its interests.’[7]

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada and the United States came into force in January 1994 and had devastating effects on the Mexican economy. Under the auspices of ‘trade liberalisation’, the deal obliged Mexico to eliminate tariffs on agricultural imports, previously protected its domestic agricultural production. The United States, on the other hand, was able to continue to heavily subsidise its own agricultural industries. Mexican producers could not compete with the resulting flood of cheap corn and other staples into the Mexican economy, and so many were forced off the land and into the cities or across the northern border, as economic refugees. There they would be employed clandestinely, in many cases by the very agribusinesses that drove them out of business in the first place, under poor conditions and with no legal rights.

In these and many other ways, both the liberalisation of global trade and the globalisation of neoliberalism have increased inequality both within and between countries. This inevitably leads to increased movement of people – the ‘losers’ of globalisation – trying to access even a tiny fraction of globalisation’s spoils. This is not the only way the West is making the ‘rest’ of the world a more difficult place to live. Western governments and corporations are implicated in armed conflicts, the backing of repressive regimes, the exploitation of resources in the majority world and the polluting of the earth’s atmosphere. Forces of top-down globalisation, therefore, have a complementary bottom-up force: the movement of people displaced by these rapid global changes.

A Wall Around the West

As the West is making the ‘rest’ of the world a harder place to live, it is simultaneously building higher and higher walls around itself. The performative exclusion of ‘unauthorised’ people attempting to migrate from the majority world to the minority world might seem paradoxical in this increasingly ‘globalised’ world. But behind this paradox is a straightforward logic. The increased anxiety felt by many in the West as a result of globalisation’s economic disruptions – jobs moving offshore, cheap imports putting pressure on domestic production – is offset by the performance of border closure and securitisation against the least ‘desirable’ products of a globalised world. The opening up of borders in financial terms, which is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage in the global economic system, creates an existential threat to the state as an entity. Therefore, the emphatic exclusion of the majority world’s ‘flotsam and jetsam’[8] is a powerful and easy way of reifying the border and therefore reaffirming the relevance of that border and the national group it protects. In this construction of a ‘wall around the West’,[9] politicians seek to ease and mitigate the social and economic insecurity of Western populations by performing border closure and by fostering exclusionary nationalism and xenophobia.

It is also often inferred in racist scapegoating that migrants within wealthy countries are somehow responsible for economic insecurity. This works to absolve states of their responsibility to protect and provide for their citizens, shifting the blame onto an external ‘other’. Peter Dutton, the current minister for Immigration and Border Protection, made use of a timeless, tried-and-true method from the scapegoating playbook when he resorted recently to the clichéd ‘they’ll take our jobs’ line in relation to asylum seekers. The trend of blaming migrants for economic insecurity has seen the rise of racist right-wing parties and candidates across the global North – from Trump in the United States, to Golden Dawn in Greece, from UKIP in Britain, to the Rise Up Australia party. These movements gained significant traction in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) due to their compelling narrative that migrants are to blame for the economic problems caused by the crisis. All of these groups and leaders advocate a closing of national boundaries to migrants, none more famously than Donald Trump. Trump has built his presidential campaign on his promise to build a ‘great, great wall’ along the US/Mexico border, to keep out Mexican ‘criminals’ who cross the border ‘illegally, only to go on to commit horrific crimes against Americans’.’[10] This vitriol of course obscures the fact that it is corporate American interests which have driven so many to become ‘illegal’ (as in the case of NAFTA), and that the US economy – and its billionaires – rely heavily on cheap, exploited migrant labour.

Bodies as Protest

The No BordersNo Borders network in the UK defines movement not as a right that can be granted or denied, but as a ‘living force’: ‘despite the barriers … of barbed wire, laws, surveillance and so on, millions cross borders every day.’[11] This statement highlights the fact that it is the bodies who ignore the constructed boundaries between nations that are the strongest possible refutation of the boundaries themselves. Giorgio Agamben has theorised the stateless person as someone reduced to what he calls ‘bare life’, an existence without political status and without the rights that flow from membership of a political community.[12] Bare life describes humans who have been reduced to a naked depoliticised condition and who are left with only their bodies as their source of power. This highlights both the vulnerability and the strength of the migrant body – it conceptualises movement across borders as an expression of agency and a form of bodily protest. Agamben argues that refugees ‘put the original fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis’ and that the refugee ‘radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state.’[13] And it is not only in the crossing of borders that refugees use their bodies as sites of protest. Hunger strikes, lip-sewing and other acts of self-harm including suicide and self-immolation, which are alarmingly common among asylum seekers in Australian immigration detention, can be characterised as expressions of political will which ‘deploy body and breath as the final resources with which to struggle.’[14] Despite the fact that such a desperate and tragic act as self-immolation can be quite quickly dismissed by Australia’s political elites, the political potency of this act requires attention and recognition.

In Australia, philosophical arguments about border-crossing-as-protest might seem less applicable, since Australia’s strictly patrolled sea borders make unauthorised crossings practically impossible. But beginning with the migrant body as a site of protest holds the possibility of renewing our appreciation for the agency and determination of ‘boat people’ in their defiance of Australia’s austere border policy. It also helps us to recognise the political agency expressed through desperate acts of bodily protest (self-harm and suicide) that we see in Australian detention centres. Grounding our analysis in this acknowledgement frames the issue less in terms of the government’s obligation to accept asylum seekers, and more in terms of the asylum seeker’s refusal to adhere to the very logic of borders. And with mounting criticism from all corners of Australian society, consistent international condemnation, and now even legal rulings against the offshore policy, it is clear Australia’s exceptionally cruel border control regime is growing ever more tenuous by the day.

No Borders claims:

‘For every migrant stopped or deported, many more get through and stay, whether legally or clandestinely. Don’t overestimate the strength of the state and its borders. Don’t underestimate the strength of everyday resistance.’[15]

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and interdependent, the world’s ‘flotsam and jetsam’ are being locked out. As some walls go down, other walls are fortified and symbolically performed. This is to reassure frightened minority world citizens that national borders still have relevance, even as jobs bleed out across those borders in the other direction. The paradox of borders in an age of global integration is making the entire border regime increasingly precarious. And it is the bodies of migrants crossing those borders that are the ultimate destabilising force.

Perhaps rather than thinking of increased irregular migration as a ‘refugee crisis’, we could conceptualise the refusal of migrants to obey the logic of borders as a starting point for a radical rethink of borders themselves. This new critique could go beyond the current, hegemonic conceptualisation of the border, in the process highlighting and protesting the inequities and injustices of neoliberal globalisation.