Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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of Europe lies at temperate latitudes, meaning it could constitute one such refuge. Yet, even before such a likelihood we are told that Europe is experiencing a “migrant crisis.” Rising numbers of displaced people seeking entry are coming up against increasingly fervent antimigrant populism, which denies their personhood in the name of xenocidal people.12 One result of this crisis was the scaling back of search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in order to deter attempts to cross. The Italian-led Operation Mare Nostrum was cancelled in 2014 and replaced with the far less extensive EU-led Operation Triton. Such moves are explicitly designed to stymie a politics of refuge. The switch from Mare Nostrum to Operation Triton resulted in a predictable and intended increase in deaths at sea. Indeed, even with relatively small numbers of attempts to migrate to Europe we see awful numbers of victims. 32,000 dead or missing between January 2000 and January 2016. And these are not simply deaths. Migrants are being murdered by the EU’s border regime. The “migrant crisis” is, in fact, a border crisis whose underlying spirit is a barely concealed racial revanchism which says that every stranger is an enemy.
In his 1974 essay “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” ecologist Garrett Hardin proposed the metaphor of rich nations as lifeboats with a small amount of spare capacity surrounded by more swimmers than could safely be accommodated in the boats, “begging for admission”. With no criteria to choose who to admit to the nation-boat, Hardin suggests the inhabitants should admit no-one. Just as the boat would sink so, he argues, would the nation be destroyed by the “fast-reproducing poor” as they overwhelm the “slow-reproducing” rich.13 Hardin called this “lifeboat ethics,” and it provides a ready rationale for the wholesale murder of migrants as a morally imperative act of racial-national self-defense. Not only is this morally repugnant, the supposed ecological theory underpinning it is incorrect.14 However, these arguments remain ideologically useful to those looking for environmentalist justifications for border violence in an era of mass displacement.
To avert a future of lifeboat states, a solid understanding of existing border regimes is needed. An excellent place to start is with the concept of “border imperialism” developed by activists in the No One Is Illegal (NOII) network and fleshed out in Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). “Border imperialism,” Walia writes, “can be understood as creating and reproducing global mass displacements and the conditions necessary for legalized precarity of migrants, which are inscribed by the racialized and gendered violence of empire as well as capitalist segregation and differential segmentation of labor.”15 Displacement has typically come through economic shocks, IMF structural adjustment programs, wars, and as we are seeing now, climate change will increasingly become a factor along with other aspects of ecological crisis. For example, the mining of raw materials not only produces carbon dioxide in the process of mining, through the uses to which industry subsequently puts those materials it causes all manner of pollution in the colonized, poorer regions where this generally takes place.
On paper, if not in practice, refugees have a legal right to refuge. States have enacted border imperialism by resisting and delegitimizing the category “environmental refugee.” Border imperialism is predicated on a distinction between worthy and unworthy migrants. If “environmental refugee” comes to be legitimized by policy changes, we must attend to how states might use the category to further entrench distinctions between “good” and “bad” migrants. Rather than clinging to the rearguard issue of the right to asylum, perhaps we should be orienting our struggles towards the all-embracing demands raised by migrants: “freedom of movement for all,” “everyone deserves a safe home,” and “no more wall[s].”16
The notion of border imperialism calls our attention to the fact that the border is not just about lines on a map, it is something much more pervasive: the immigration raid on the workplace; surveillance in universities; nationality checks for school-age children, healthcare seekers, renters, and passport checks at train stations and bus stops. It is the riot police marauding through migrant camps and the activities of the EU border agency Frontex, for example, which “increasingly polices the EU’s borders by taking its bordering practices directly to the populations it deems to pose the greatest threat,” such as interdiction off the West African coast.17 The border is a relation. Bordering practices produce conditions for the exploitation of precarious labor and “death-worlds” for those racialized as not fully human, not deserving of life.
Two quotes serve to illustrate this argument. The first is from philosopher Achille Mbembe:
I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.18
The second is from Abu Jana, a Syrian migrant:
Let me tell you something. Even if there was a [European] decision to drown the migrant boats, there will still be people going by boat because the individual considers himself dead already. Right now Syrians consider themselves dead. Maybe not physically, but psychologically and socially, [a Syrian] is a destroyed human being, he’s reached the point of death. So I don’t think that even if they decided to bomb migrant boats it would change people’s decision to go.19
Levi’s warning—that the “end of the chain” of the logic that renders these strangers, these walking dead, enemies—haunts us. Lifeboat ethics are readymade refrains to rationalize and naturalize these horrors, to beget lifeboat states and the death-worlds of their border regimes. The latent infection diagnosed by Levi demands antifascist inoculation.
1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce (London: Abacus, 2003), 15. If we take Aimé Césaire’s point that the Holocaust had its roots in colonial genocides, then we should not be surprised that non-Europeans are more readily treated as enemies.
2. By xenocide, we reference the deliberate extermination of foreign entities. This term has roots in the practice of the intentional eradication of foreign plant or animal species.
3. For more on the role of “the people” in populism, see “Climate Populism and the People’s Climate March” in Section IV of this volume.
4. George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 133.
5. UNHCR, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017” (Geneva: UNHCR, 2018), 2. Available at https://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547.pdf.
6. UNISDR, “Ten-Year Review Finds 87 Percent of Disasters Climate-Related,” accessed April 25, 2019, https://www.unisdr.org/archive/42862.
7. The terms of the resettlement plan are very much contested. See Julie Dermansky, “Critics Say Louisiana ‘Highjacked’ Climate Resettlement Plan for Isle de Jean Charles Tribe,” DeSmogBlog (blog), April 20, 2019, https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/20/critics-louisiana-highjacked-climate-resettlement-plan-isle-de-jean-charles-tribe.
8. Max Planck Society, “Climate-Exodus Expected in the Middle East and North Africa,” Phys.org, May 2, 2016, https://phys.org/news/2016-05-climate-exodus-middle-east-north-africa.html.
9. David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan Khan, “The Politics of International Climate Adaptation Funding: Justice and Divisions in the Greenhouse,” Global Environmental Politics 13, no. 1 (2013): 49–68.
10. Joel Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, “Climate change: The 2015 Paris Agreement Thresholds and Mediterranean Basin Ecosystems,” Science, 354 (2016): 465-468.
11. Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, DC: National Geographic Books, 2008),