Eithne Luibhéid and Bridget Anderson – Gendering borders: An exchange

In this exchange, Eithne Luibhéid and Bridget Anderson are invited to discuss the rising interest on the issue of gender and migration in academic and policy circles, the increasing association of women’s migration with sex trafficking, and the significance of domestic workers and sex workers movements.

Helen Kambouri: It seems to me that although we are used to thinking that there is not enough research and writing on gender and migration, the relevant literature is flourishing. How would you explain the rising interest and what do you think are the pitfalls of mainstream analyses of gender and migration?

Eithne Luibhéid: By some measures, we have come a long way from the time when Mirjana Morokvasic had to argue what now seems obvious: that migratory “birds of passage” are also women; and to challenge the reduction of migrant women to “traditional” beings whose lives become desirably “modern” only through paid employment (no matter how exploitative or miserable) and the use of contraceptives (which were presumed to be entirely new for migrant women). It’s wonderful to find the flourishing of research on gender and migration. Furthermore, it’s clear that we have moved well beyond an approach where migrant women are simply “added on” to existing scholarship, toward a moment when gender analysis (that conceives gender not just as a “special” property of women, but as a relational category anchored in a male/female binary) has transformed fundamental theories and methodologies across the disciplines that address migration.

When we look at any edited collection, book length study, or individual article on gender and migration, the editors and authors almost always discuss why they felt compelled to undertake the work. As they describe, the works often emerge in response to specific crises or emergencies; they may cohere collective responses to the crises; they often identify gaps or problems; they may both look back and look ahead; they call for readers to take action. Reading what authors say about their motivations, then, suggests that although research on gender and migration may be flourishing in a general sense, there are areas where it is not flourishing—and therefore, people continue to seek ways to raise questions about the linkage between gender and migration in relation to the specific contexts, histories, and problems with which they are engaged.

A useful question may be, then, how do we evaluate the politics and consequences of the scholarship on gender and migration, while understanding that these works are not all the same, and emerge from different contexts and historical urgencies? The question require us to consider larger issues about power and knowledge—including who is authorized to produce knowledge, who has a venue for their work, and how do these works get taken up and circulated (or not)? Moreover, is this a top-down or grassroots analysis, how was the research conducted, whose voices are included or not, is the work reflexive, and how do the demands of specific disciplines shape what can and cannot be said? We must also critically consider the links between, on one hand, universities, NGOs, think-tanks, and other sites that produce such research, and, on the other hand, the state, capital, and structures of global governance. In all works on gender and migration, these issues have already—explicitly or by default—shaped what is produced. And the questions provide bases on which we can differentiate among the works on gender and migration.

Which brings me to three points. First, I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where the scholarship on gender and migration has “flourished” enough that we can just move on. This is because even the most basic questions about gender and migration need to be continually asked, as contexts and historical moments change. If a question prompted a particular response at one moment, it may require a different response in the present or future. For this reason, I believe we will always need to ask questions about gender and migration, including the fundamental bread-and-butter questions, and I consider that to be positive.

Second, alongside the bread-and-butter questions, important new areas of research are emerging. For example, research is emerging about what Joe Nevins calls “the rise of the ‘illegal immigrant’.” That research examines how state immigration controls have expanded and diversified the means through which migrants become designated as unauthorized, “illegal,” or undocumented. It also suggests that unauthorized status, which is popularly understood as reflecting the undesirable qualities of individual migrants, is in fact a structural relation of dispossession to the state and to capital. According to this scholarship, histories of empire, racialization, and global capitalism significantly shape who is likely to become designated as “illegal” (or, conversely, as legal). I think that there is a pressing need for further research about and activism based on understanding how gender—and sexuality—are axes through which “illegality” is produced and differentially distributed. My recent work has focused on these questions, and Bridget has importantly contributed to the re-theorization of legality and “illegality,” but much more needs to be done.

Third, your question asks about “the pitfalls of mainstream analyses of gender and migration.” We have all encountered analyses that troubled—or outraged—us. I am not sure if they should necessarily be described as “mainstream,” or what counts as mainstream. But maybe we could reframe the question to ask, which analyses get taken up, and in what ways? Because there is often a difference between the analyses, and how government or other bodies take up and use them. Similarly, we can ask what kinds of analyses tend to never be taken up, and what can we do about that? One troubling example of how analyses of gender have been translated into immigration controls concerns workplace raids in the US that result in undocumented immigrants being rounded up, and often shipped thousands of miles away for detention and eventual deportation. Criticisms have focused on the fact that when parents are rounded up in that way, children and babies are left to fend for themselves or even to disappear. A recent immigration service response to public criticism has been to code women as primary caregivers, and to release detained women workers to care for their children if the women acknowledge that they have children (which they don’t always do, for various reasons) and if the children are U.S. citizens. Yet these women will still be deported, just in a manner that some may find “kinder,” “gentler,” “more humane.” So the immigration service’s response to criticisms about workplace raids has deployed a troubling logic about gender that has not appreciably altered the broader, violent logic of immigration control (including as manifested in workplace raids, detentions, and deportations). But their response has nonetheless muted public criticism. This example perhaps speaks to your implicit question about how can we produce analyses of gender and migration that are not simply recuperated by the state and capital, but instead, may enable social transformation? It may be worthwhile to systematically explore the question–to evaluate when research on gender and migration is taken up, by who, and with what impact? Such a project might help us to keep asking, in sharper ways, about how research can produced and circulated in ways that contribute to social transformation, rather than furthering subordination.

Finally, in terms of “pitfalls,” there is still a widely held, often unshakable belief that migration invariably improves women’s lives. In other words, people presume that women are coming from “backwards” and “repressive” societies, to enjoy the dreamscape and wonders of the global north, and therefore, migration represents a movement from repression to liberation, or from oppression to freedom. These ideas stem from and recirculate ideological claims that do not stand up to scrutiny—for instance, how is exploitative labor for low or no pay a form of liberation? Yet, this story about migrant women never seems to lose popularity. So I wonder whether and how research might help us to impact on media and popular cultural images of gender and migration. For instance, the last year, a video game was released that invited US citizens to put themselves in the shoes of migrants who run into trouble with the US immigration officials, and to experience the US from that perspective. I wonder if the game has been able to alter mainstream perceptions of migrants. If so, might we design a game that could do that kind of work in terms of gender issues? Certainly there is evidence that video games have prepared young men and women to participate in war making for the state. But maybe video games can do other kinds of work too.

Bridget Anderson: I agree that the relevant literature is flourishing, but in mainstream migration studies there continues to be an emphasis on understanding gender and migration as being about making women visible rather than in gendering migration. In some ways this is a result of the policy focus of some of migration studies. Immigration regimes are infamously gender insensitive – the gendered nature of points based systems for example and the multiple ways in which they make migration difficult for women is an important topic for both research and policy work; national statistics are often not even gender disaggregated. Simply putting women into the picture is necessary work. However, such an approach, if focused, is limited in its ambitions and brings with it some serious risks.

Firstly that it risks taking as a starting point the state categorization of migration. Women have always moved. In his famous article in the Journal of the Statistical Society in 1885 Ravenstein stated that “Females are more migratory than males”. So we have to ask ourselves how much of the literature on female migration is a rediscovery rather than a “feminization”. After all, just because women are categorized by the state as “wives” does not mean that they do not work outside the home for example. Or indeed that the unpaid reproductive labour performed by women has not been shaping economies, societies and indeed polities. So it’s important to recognise how women (and men) are constructed by immigration controls (which of course is related to much wider social, cultural and economic processes).

Secondly of course this does not constitute a gendered approach. Far more work has been done from the perspective of gender studies in this regard than in migration studies (and the lack of attention to the intersection of gender and race – masculinities that are imagined by receiving states and societies as more feminized and the affect this has on labour market opportunities for example). Eithne’s observations about the dangers of the re-inscription of heteronormativity are highly relevant.

Eithne Luibheid: Bridget, you importantly identify the frequent disconnect between research and policy. Your two examples of disconnection are the points system and immigration statistics. Statistics always seem to me to involve a dilemma–on the one hand, if the state collects gendered statistics, then there’s a basis for action, but on the other hand, state statistical systems are part of a larger regime of governance that’s very problematic, so one hesitates to recommend the collection of any statistics.

Bridget Anderson: In a sense there is bound to be a disconnect between research and policy, because while the call is for “evidence based policy”, sound and theoretically challenging research (rather than the gathering of data) can only make policymaking more difficult. Because so quickly one gets down to the kinds of issues you’ve raised – the ideological nature of borders. What is this category “migrant” in the first place? Who are the groups that research and policy are interested in? Certain people (gendered, racialised, of the “right” sexuality, classed etc) are “goodies” and others are “baddies”. For instance, a recent Home Office document called “Enforcing the Rules” (fascinating reading) talks about how overstaying students from countries with a high GDP are not a problem, but those from poorer countries might claim asylum. More broadly you have the hard working foreigner necessary for the economy, or the thief of jobs and opportunities. This type of framing is often prevalent in policy orientated academic work as well as policy and the media. Those who support migrant rights want to cram more and more people into the “good category”. What are the proportions of refugees to economic migrants? Of legals to illegals? Of hardworkers to welfare scroungers? In many ways this mirrors the government strategy of “making migration work for Britain” emphasising the benefits that migrants bring. For activist researchers this goodie/baddie paradigm is extremely unhelpful. Perhaps it is best to be more limited in our objectives – and set ourselves to making the politics of policy more obvious, in itself no small task given the ways in which immigration controls are so naturalized.

I think you raise an absolutely key point when you draw attention to the tension between the short term and the long term, between individual cases and collective gains. This is an endless dilemma. I remember when we were beginning to organize with migrant domestic workers for regularization and for changing immigration rules around domestic work, some groups severely criticized us for “selling out” – for focusing on a particular group and thereby allowing the ideological framework underpinning immigration controls. I could understand their criticisms, but we really felt that this change was possible and, though small, would make a big difference to people’s lives. And we did win the campaign, and it did make a difference. At the time I thought supporting the self organising of undocumented migrants was, in itself a useful process. Again, I would stand by that, but in our case, once the legal status struggled for was achieved, many people’s energies went into reuniting with friends and family, and building a life in the UK (getting a mortgage, bringing relatives etc). Of course there were long term gains in that domestic workers no longer have the name of their employer written into their passport, but the immigration system grinds on. Do you have any further thoughts on this? I suppose one key issue is whether the short term/individual gains actually make the long term goals harder to achieve.

Helen Kambouri: Increasingly governments, international organizations and NGOs adopt and implement policies aiming on gender and migration. However, there is a tendency in those policies to associate gender with women and women’s migration with trafficking. What are the political implications of these associations?

Eithne Luibheid: I’m not sure if, by trafficking, you are referring to sex trafficking, or trafficking for other kinds of labor, or both. But if you are speaking of sex trafficking (which itself covers a wide range of issues and situations), there have been important criticisms about the conflations that you describe. For instance, Inderpal Grewal points out that a colonialist image of “the third world woman” continues to be constructed through narratives of sexual victimization of migrant women, which imply that the women need to be “rescued” by benevolent global northerners (even as the role of the global north in generating violence and uprootedness is conveniently glossed over). At the same time, this dominant narrative authorizes women with relative privilege to position themselves as moral and ethical subjects of “modernity” by advocating for “the” (mythic) third world woman’s rescue—while failing to address the ways that diverse categories of women are relationally constructed, and therefore, bourgeois feminism literally could not exist without subaltern women. The result has been some deeply troubling alliances between bourgeois feminism and the right-wing, leading to or further entrenching lethal politics—for example, the U.S.’s so-called Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which was sponsored by conservative, anti-feminist, racist Republicans and supported by the National Organization of Women. We know that the Act, while claiming to “protect” women, in fact does the opposite: it fails to address the global economic disparities, unjust immigration policies, and exploitative employment practices that sustain the abuse of migrant women; it differentiates women into “deserving” victims and “guilty sex workers” (p. 57); and it criminalizes the latter in ways that places them at further risk. In this sense, the Act reflect a larger problem, which is that state-centered immigration control regimes do little or nothing to address the root causes of migration, including nation-states’ own complicity in generating migration through trade, economic, military, and other policies; instead, they criminalize and illegalize millions of people, turning them into disposable beings who can be exploited, abused, or even killed with impunity. Yet, this literally murderous regime blames migrants for their own exploitation, abuse and/or death—saying that they broke immigration rules, but never asking who sets the rules, why do we have these rules, and who benefits?

At the same time, even while sex trafficking has been taken up in these troubling ways, there has been a continuing failure to respond to the pervasive problem of women who are sexually assaulted or raped by bandits, smugglers, or others when crossing the border without authorization. In Arizona, where I live now, women’s undergarments are regularly found hanging in the bushes in the border zone between Mexico and the US; they’re “trophies” from sexual assaults. Some immigration officials also coerce undocumented migrant women into providing sex in return for their freedom; migrant women (and some men too) have been sexually assaulted and raped in US detention facilities, including by staff; and they also risk sexual coercion or assault in workplaces. But there has been little will to respond to this pervasive problem, which I find telling.

Sex trafficking and rape make clear that questions of sexuality are economically, socially and politically implicated in struggles over border control, immigration policy, and justice. So sexuality must be addressed. In my work, I’ve sought to foreground sexuality as an arena of struggle in immigration politics, while circumventing some of the gendered and colonialist stereotypes, by insisting that sexuality and gender are not the same thing. They’re deeply interconnected, but they’re not the same. Moreover, sexuality has to be conceived within a radical, critical, historical framework, such as that provided by queer of color and feminist of color theories. This means treating sexuality not as “natural” or fundamentally biological, but instead, as something that is shaped by multiple relations of power and struggle. Queer of color theorists identify normative heterosexuality as a regime of power that creates not just a gay/straight binary, although this is very important, but that also anchors white supremacy and imperial projects. In my work, then, I am interested less in what we might call varied “cultural norms” around sexuality than in identifying sexuality as a site for struggle over immigration control.

I’m particularly interested in how the state enforces (and at the same time continually remakes) a normative sexual order through its immigration controls. These processes are reflected, for example, in rules governing family reunification, which, in the US, mandate normative heterosexuality. The rules render other forms of familial and affective ties as illegitimate bases on which to seek legal entry to the US; at the same time, even those who can muster up an adequately normative heterosexual family find that US immigration rules make them eligible for legal entry only if they also attain a certain income level, and abide by state mandated forms of domesticity and dependency. In effect, immigration rules mandate patriarchy and homophobia for which migrant communities themselves are often “blamed” (patriarchy and homophobia become seen simply as timeless “cultural” characteristics without reference to the structural conditions of migrants’ uneven incorporation into the US). At the same time, heteronormative immigration controls creates variously subalternized, marginalized, dispossessed, and criminalized peoples, including same-sex and/or transgender people, non-normative families, sex workers, and so on, whose entry is, shall we say, not facilitated. Allowing select “family” migration is often presented as an example of the beneficence and humanitarianism of the state. Yet, heteronormative family provides the logic through which the governance and discipline of many legally admitted migrants is organized, their surveillance and punishment (including deportation) is legitimized, and social support is denied—which means that poorer immigrant families are forced to join the new lowest wage labor tier that capital requires. Nonetheless, those who enter through “family” migration are supposed to be enormously grateful. When will we move from a logic of “gratitude” (which requires ignoring abuse and histories of systemic inequality) to a logic of justice?

Sexuality, as distinct from gender, therefore offers a critical lens through which to challenge, rethink, and organize against immigration politics in many areas. It makes possible a critique of sexual exploitation and violence—while at the time situating these in relation to larger systems of violence in a neocolonialist world. It calls into being what Angela Davis describes as “unexpected alliances” around issues that certainly include policies that criminalize and render trafficked women more vulnerable, and the unsanctioned sexual abuse of migrant workers. But the issues may also include sexuality as a site for racializing and constructing “difference” within and among migrant communities, and between migrants and the mainstream. Or as one of the struggles facing migrant kids in school. Or as a crucial issue to address in terms of the prison industrial complex that’s growing fat. Or as a benchmark for assessing healthcare. These sorts of concerns not only connect sexuality and migration issues, but also invite coalitions with non-migrants.

The final thing I want to mention about the conflation of gender with women and then with sex trafficking is that this formulation equates “women” with a certain biological form. But “biologically born” women are not the only women in the world. What happens when we introduce the term transgender into the equation? This is a contested term, but wikipedia’s definition seems to capture key elements:

…The precise definition for transgender remains in flux, but includes: “Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these.” “People who were assigned a gender, usually at birth and based on their genitals, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.” “Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the gender one was assigned at birth.” A transgender individual may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular gender, identify elsewhere on the traditional gender continuum, or exist outside of it as “other,” “agender,” “intergender,” or “third gender”. Transgender people may also identify as bigender, or along several places on either the traditional transgender continuum, or the more encompassing continuums which have been developed in response to the significantly more detailed studies done in recent years.

In raising the question of transgender migration, I am not trying to add a new migrant figure around which to cohere competing ideologies. Nor do I intend to reify individual transgender migrants. Nor to minimize the significant tensions that often exist between work defined as feminist and trans projects (though we should note that there are examples of trans and feminist activists working very effectively together). Here’s what I do want to suggest: First, transgender people are also migrants, and their presence forces us to rethink migration models based on naturalized binary forms of gender, and that’s valuable. Second, transgender migrants often bring gender issues into particular relief. In the US, trans migration has been the subject of litigation and administrative policy-making, yet, in everyday practices, trans migrants continue to experience multiple marginalization, exclusion, derision, and even threats to their lives. (Which is not to construct trans migrants as the new “victims,” either.) Organizing around trans migration issues offers opportunities to improve conditions for everyone. For instance, in July 2007, trans migrant Victoria Arellano died while in immigration detention in the US. Arellano was HIV positive, but was denied appropriate medications, even though she repeatedly asked for them and her fellow detainees advocated for her. Her case raised urgent issues about the treatment of trans migrants in detention in particular, and about the lack of medical care for those who have been scooped up by the immigration system in general. It generated a significant outcry from queer, human rights, trans, and migrant rights individuals and organizations. So trans migrants are one of the groups from whom I have begun to learn a lot about how the governance and oppression of migrants is structured and legitimated using gendered logics—and about who might be allies in trying to change this. While there are tensions, there are also important moments of alliance between feminist, anti-racist and trans struggles in the arena of immigration. Trans migrants are also important in the struggle for sex workers’ rights.

Bridget Anderson: The confusion between female (and child) migration and trafficking has some very dangerous political implication. Wendy Brown says that a “sure sign of a depoliticising trope or discourse is the easy and politically crosscutting embrace of a political project bearing its name”. “Trafficking” is one such project. Perhaps a further sign of its depoliticised/ing nature is that it is very difficult to get agreement on what is meant by the term. The trumpeted UN protocol does not in practise help very much as it contains words like “consent” and “exploitation” whose meaning is also contested. While tens or hundreds of thousands of people are imagined as “trafficked” every year, the actual numbers who are “helped” are very small. In the UK, for example, we were told that three quarters of so-called illegal immigrants are trafficked, and yet there has not been a single conviction of trafficking for forced labour. In general there is a significant difference between trafficking as a rhetorical device as used by states and some NGOs and other organisations, and trafficking as an administrative category.

“Trafficking” depoliticises in that it renders migrants victims, not political subjects. It is part of a more general attempt, at least in the UK, to depoliticise and managerialise migration into questions of what makes economic sense, rather than struggle with one of the most political of questions, who constitutes the polity – and what are the functions of borders. It also sets up a hierarchy of suffering with horror stories as a staple. There can be a perverse race to the bottom in which only the most abused and victimised count, and this risks enshrining a special set of horrors for migrants. So those who have “only” not been paid a wage for example, shouldn’t complain too much because at least they haven’t been beaten. In turn this compounds an emphasis on immigration controls and migrants as a “special case” rather than situating them within the same frame as citizens.

Eithne Luibheid: What you are arguing is that there is a connection between strategies to depoliticize migration through tropes of trafficking, and managerialisation efforts. I would be very interested to learn more about how you see that connection playing out. You mention the obvious gap between, on the one hand, the scare rhetoric about how many women are supposedly trafficked, and on the other hand, the tiny numbers who are ever actually assisted by the state. That might be something you’d like to expand on. I’m also interested in learning more about what you mean by “there is a significant difference between trafficking as a rhetorical device as used by states and some NGOs and other organisations, and trafficking as an administrative category.” Then you begin to suggest a larger, radical agenda (reframing migration in political rather than economic terms; challenging the tendency to situate migrants and citizens in separate frameworks). I’d be really interested to hear more about this, too.

Bridget Anderson: Trafficking is set up as being somehow beyond politics. Everybody agrees that it is wrong. Indeed interestingly, in this context everyone also seems to agree that “exploitation” is wrong. But of course once one examines the different meanings of these terms the consensus tends to fall apart. For the “Victim of Trafficking” is not at all an apolitical figure. She is one of a whole cast of figures that are used in the spectacle of immigration control -the “illegal immigrant”, the “benefit scrounger”, the “bogus asylum seeker” – we had the “one legged roofer” here recently. These spectacular figures epitomize challenges to immigration controls. They are the subjects of targeting, but equally signify deeper contradictions and anxieties around immigration control. In the same way as you described how detained women who are coded “primary care givers” can be released from detention but not from the possibility of deportation because of an unease with liberal democracy’s ideas about how women and children ought to be treated at the same time as a concern to allow for the ineluctable logic of immigration controls.

The trafficking victim seems to offer more opportunities than most of these figures to get a sympathetic hearing from government: at last they are recognizing that migrants are “exploited” that they need to be “protected” etc. While it is true there is a strain of thought that represents migrant women’s mobility as a movement from repression to liberation, equally it can be presented as a dangerous move, a move from home, imagined as a place of safety, to danger and unfamiliarity. The language of trafficking much more fits into this model I think: moving from innocent to fallen woman. But in practice those who will be identified as a genuine trafficking victim are few. NGOs can end up getting caught in spending a lot of time disaggregating the people that are likely to get some hearing, and those that are not, and moreover allow in a framework in which only the most victimized and the most silent “deserve” status. And one where the state gets the moral high ground on immigration – more or less the only way now, (before it was through refugee recognition, but that time has passed). When of course the state constructs groups of people vulnerable to abuse and over whom others have particular mechanisms of control and spaces where that control can be operated with impunity, through its immigration legislation. And not only immigration and citizenship, but many other types of legislation. So while seemingly above politics, the victim of trafficking demands that the politics (of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, labour, etc) are rendered transparent. Particularly since so many people are genuinely concerned about “trafficking”, which for some is a manifestation I think/hope of genuine and deep unease at inequality and injustice that so clearly structures our world. The question must be how to harness this and move beyond the victim/villain approach, how to use this as an opportunity to “talk politics” (in the broadest sense). So while the language of trafficking can be useful for demonstrating the discrepancy between the language of “rights” and state’s actual practice, and potentially for harnessing concerns, do you think that there are other ways in which it can helpfully be put to use? I’m afraid I’m quite skeptical.

I was really interested in what you said about the state’s enforcement and remaking of a normative sexual order through immigration controls. (I’m not sure about the new system, but previously the only visa it was possible for au pairs to switch to in the UK was a spousal visa). How do you think that “trafficking” fits here? I was wondering about the way in which normative sexuality is so very publicly confined to the private. And your remarks about the ways in which patriarchy and homophobia are seen as cultural characteristics – you can see that clearly with reference to race too. This has become very evident in the UK with EU Enlargement, where nationals from new EU member states are competing for low wage, insecure work, with non-EEA nationals and Black UK nationals. The ways in which these groups are incorporated into the labour market is helping to produce deep racialised antagonisms, cast as being “natural” results of people coming from “homogenous” societies. Quite extraordinary!

Helen Kambouri: Today there are numerous social movements globally that address issues of gender and migration, most notably the domestic workers and sex workers movements. These movements tend to cross national boundaries, but also gendered boundaries. It seems, however, that such crossings are not always at ease with feminist and anti-racist practices. What are your views and personal experience of such movements?

Eithne Luibheid: Domestic workers and sex workers movements are very significant. I am more familiar, however, with movements to address concerns about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) migration. So I’d like to comment on that.

By definition, movements to address sex worker, domestic worker, and/or LGBTQ migrant issues must juggle multiple concerns, constituencies, and struggles. What might constitute feminist or anti-racist—or anti-homophobic or anti-capitalist—practice is not necessarily clear in advance, especially when you’re dealing with those terms not one by one but at they converge in different people’s lives. Moreover, what those terms mean is not self-evident or universal, but to some extent situational. They are continually redefined under the pressures of long histories and immediate contexts. This is not to suggest, though, that just anything can pass as feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, or anti-capitalist. For instance, feminism cannot mean George Bush invading Afghanistan to “liberate oppressed women.” It is to say, though, that movements that negotiate multiple boundaries and constituencies are rarely easy or at ease. Movements for LGBTQ migrants certainly are not.

Organizing to address LGBTQ migrant issues is now a global phenomenon. In the US, such organizing has been enabled by the fact that in 1990, the government finally rescinded its ban on legal immigration by people who were lesbian or gay. 1994 was another important year, when Attorney General Janet Reno ruled that lesbians and gay men could be considered as a “social group” (rather than as individual “deviants”) for purposes of seeking asylum from persecution.

On one hand, LGBTQ migrants present difficulties as a constituency around which to organize. For instance, many people do not think of their LGBTQ identities and migrant statuses together in the same breath, but as something to address separately. Moreover, LGBTQ migrants are a very diverse group—from highly educated migrant LGBTQs who hold managerial and professional positions (and maybe vote Republican and no longer identify as migrants), to undocumented transgender farmworkers picking lettuce in the fields of California.

On the other hand, there has been a clear need to organize around LGBTQ migrant issues, which are often not addressed within immigrant rights, ethnic/racial justice, or mainstream LGBTQ movements. In fact, there has been a marked tension between, on one hand, immigrants’ rights and racial/ethnic justice movements, which have often organized around demands for the state and capital to value immigrant and racial/ethnic families to the same degree as white middle class families, and, on the other hand, mainstream LGBTQ movements, which have focused on the normative family as a site of serious oppression. Yet, LGBTQ migrants make clear the limitations of each approach and the need to forge a common ground that connects activism around racism, sexism, and heterosexism as interlocking rather than competing issues. Indeed, after groundbreaking struggles, such activisms are becoming evident.

Thus, an infrastructure focused on LGBTQ migrant issues has begun to emerge at both local and national levels. As one might expect, there have been struggles over what issues to prioritize. Directly related to this have been struggles over which oppression to address. For instance, in a national publication, an African American lesbian called for efforts to win LGBTQ rights before addressing immigrant issues, which ignited a difficult but productive debate that reframed issues along less polarizing lines. There are also struggles about the need to be strategic when seeking to win political gains, yet concerns that these strategies entail compromises that effectively leave the existing system intact. For example, Alice Miller describes that the very real dilemmas of trying to secure asylum for people who have been persecuted based on their sexual orientation or gender identity (pp. 137-87). On one hand, from a legal point of view, the cases most likely to succeed are those in which information has become simplified—where applicants can be presented as victims needing rescue by the benevolent US state, and as people whose sexual and gender identities are easily legible within US constructs about the nation-states from which migrants come. Yet, such information stems from and reinforces neocolonial relationships and ideologies that are deeply, materially harmful. So how does one balance these two outcomes? These are also questions about the trade-off between short versus long term and individual versus collective gains. LGBTQ migrant organizations and advocates continually confront these sorts of dilemmas. Thus, an anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-colonialist, feminist approach is not easily determined nor permanently settled.

Having said that, it does seem possible to make a distinction between, on one hand, LGBTQ migrant rights organizations that are seeking complete, comprehensive transformation of all aspects of the immigration control system, versus those seeking to reform the existing system just enough to accommodate select LGBTQ people within a logic of neo-liberal multiculturalism that’s disturbing.

One of the areas where this distinction plays out concerns the campaign to secure recognition for same-sex partners under immigration law. This campaign responds to a very obvious injustice, which is that US immigration law admits about a quarter of a million people a year on the basis that they are the heterosexual spouses of US citizens or legal residents. Why should same-sex couples be excluded from, and transgender couples only uneasily included in, this avenue for accessing legal immigration? The campaign wants to redress this blatant privileging of normative heterosexuality.

But the situation is complicated by the fact that a visible global trend entails reconfiguring immigration laws so as to privilege select heterosexual and select same-sex couples who conform to a neoliberal model of intimacy that involves privatized domesticity and consumption, and is detached from larger political community. Under this sexist, racist, anti-poor model, significant numbers of same-sex couples are unlikely to qualify for immigration access. At the same time, male-female couples that are low income, for instance, are disqualified too. So should we seek recognition for these select, privileged same sex couples within the existing system—or comprehensive immigration reform that includes recognition for same-sex and transgender couples, but also an end to militarization, criminalization, incarceration, racism, heterosexism, and pro-big business as the logic of immigration control LGBTQ migrant groups are responding to these possibilities in different ways.

In some cases, the differences seem to stem from their understanding about the place of the nation-state in a neo-imperial world. Some groups are uncomfortable with critiquing dominant nationalism, or discussing the ways that US nationalism plays a central role in organizing neo-colonial hierarchies. Or they have made a strategic choice that their best chance for winning recognition for same-sex couples is to work through, rather than against, dominant nationalism. Thus, they often frame the struggle through reference to the US citizen partner who is affected by the current policies. They suggest that all US citizens’ families should be valued equally, rather than differentially depending on their sexuality. They may suggest that less discriminatory family policies will enable the US to attract the best and brightest workers, which will enhance competitiveness. Some of the arguments make sense. Discriminatory family policies are unjust and must be changed.

The struggles facing migrants with US citizen partners have to be addressed. Yet, is there a way to frame these issues so that we also challenge admission policies that exclude less economically privileged couples, whether same-sex or male-female, not to mention that the policies fail to legitimize other kinds of families, intimacies, and affiliations? Is there a way to challenge the use of ‘family” logics as a mechanism to govern and discipline migrants—and to legitimize their deportation when they don’t “measure up”? Can we at the same time challenge nationalist policies that generate migration, but then illegalize significant numbers of migrants who move as a result? This is an approach that has expanded processes of militarization, incarceration, and what Timothy Dunn describes as “low intensity conflict” waged against predominantly minority communities. Can we frame the problem in ways that don’t silence the voices of migrants (except when they get used to reinforce the views of their US citizen partners)?

Some organizations have taken on these difficult questions, in their search for recognition for same-sex partners under immigration law, and they’re the ones that I find inspirational.

Bridget Anderson: Most of my experience comes from working with migrant domestic workers – who are often excluded from more “mainstream” migrant organising because of gender and the stigma associated with working in the sector. There has been some success in challenging national boundaries both internally in the UK through multinational organising, and in the EU working across borders through the respect network (though the logistics of visas and immigration status make this very time consuming). I’m more sanguine about gendered boundaries in that male domestic workers are hardly visible.

I must learn more about the work that is done organising to address LGBTQ migrant issues. It sounds really exciting and inspiring. It made me think about the domestic workers organising, and the central role that LGBTQ migrants play in this, but, as far as I know, with this never being reflected on. Perhaps partly because of my starting point being working with domestic workers, I’ve always concentrated on the importance of equality as workers, and this is useful I think, but fundamentally limited. Have you seen the film “Here to Stay”? It’s about a Filipino nurse in Ireland, his life and relationships with colleagues and partner and its integration with his political activism and organising work. The depiction of his public performances, his role as participant and organiser in “The Alternative Miss Philippines” and how these are also used as opportunities to encourage others to collective action for better working conditions and against immigration injustice is really inspiring.

Eithne Luibheid: Bridget, your question about how state responses to sexual trafficking may contribute to enforcing a normative sexual order is really interesting. I’d need to research it, but I wonder if part of the answer might include thinking about what kinds of sexual “exchanges” do—and do not—get defined as instances of trafficking on which the state should act? The troubling distinction between an “innocent victim” versus a “willing participant” certainly repeats heterosexist logic that works through blatantly colonialist and capitalist hierarchies. Furthermore, questions about the men who pay for sex with trafficked migrants continually disappear from public discussion. Similarly, questions about those who profit from trafficking—unless they can be constructed as “evil foreign men,” but never as the local landlord who rents you an apartment or the local policeman who patrols your street—also seem to lack urgency. Inattention to these questions, combined with the general lack of will to act in a constructive manner, suggests to me that trafficking finds significant support from the existing social order (including in the realm of normative sexuality). Historically, prostitution has supported rather than challenged bourgeois marriage; could we say the same thing about trafficking? The introduction of a distinction between “innocent victims” and “willing participants” seems to mirror a historical discourse about prostitution—although it offers a small number of women who can meet the state’s definition of “innocent victim” a slender window of opportunity to not be deported. What are the connections, if any, between the state’s codification of the “innocent victim” of trafficking and the battered immigrant spouse? In each case, legal and administrative changes promise to assist them, but in actual fact, are often inaccessible. How does all of this sustain the normative sexual order?

Bridget Anderson: Eithne, your comments about sex trafficking struck a chord with me, as they parallel my interest in what kinds of exchanges of labour are classified as “forced” – and therefore count as “trafficked”. Robert Steinfeld discusses how in the cases of both the slave and the free wage worker, the parties may be said to have been coerced or to have chosen the lesser evil. What does this tell us about how “free labour” is imagined, who is and isn’t imagined as having a choice (as well as being capable of consent) and under what circumstances? And how much does this need to be seen within the context of relations between states and markets, including labour markets? When it comes to sex trafficking the public debate (perhaps unsurprisingly) often takes an uncritical abolitionist line which helps avoid some of these questions through a sort of sleight of hand. While I agree that the questions of who profits from trafficking never includes local landlords, policemen, (academics, bureaucrats and anti-trafficking organizations don’t do badly out of it either!) I would say that the men who pay for sex with trafficked migrants are increasingly put at the forefront of the discussion – though I believe clients are more likely to require “compliant foreigners” rather than “trafficked migrants” through this whole emphasis on demand. Here is another way in which concern at the inequality of migrant labour is distorted through an emphasis on trafficking. Because when trafficking is framed around thinking about sex work – which is an unusual sector – and then applied to all sorts of other sectors it can be very confusing. Stamping out demand and eliminating the sector may be presented by some as a suitable response for commercial sex, but are we going to stamp out demand for say strawberries to deal with abuse of migrant agricultural workers?

I was thinking about the remarks about collective and individual gains with reference to civil partnerships, and how in some respects some states are prepared to endorse gay partnerships, but what is not allowed is the possibilities of new kinds of affective lives and relations. The model of the couple, with friends cast in a very secondary role, remains intact. I was trying to imagine an immigration policy that would allow the entry of friends (however understood), and the systematic disregard of any relation that does not reflect the nuclear family became very clear to me – not just with reference to immigration, but more generally. All very obvious to you I’m sure, but for me it was another example of how impoverished our imagination has become. It made me think that your idea of the video game would be a good start in helping us re-imagine our world. I’ve written a bit about labour migration and how borders are imagined as taps or sifting mechanisms, but that they are better seen as moulds, as constructing certain types of workers, with certain types of relations to the labour market. And I realized how of course they also construct/reinforce/endorse certain types of affective relations (not to say that these are “real” in the same way that people are not “really” au pairs or work permit holders etc). As usual, one is left with the problem of focus – these social constructions not being real, but having very real implications.

I wonder whether it is helpful to turn to some of the literature on citizenship when thinking about this. Thinking about citizenship as forged from below, rather than simply a legal status that is bestowed from above, as comprising the creation and engagement with polity and constructed through action. Is it a practical political project to wrest citizenship from the state?

Eithne Luibheid: Your comments about which affective ties are valued, versus disregarded, by the immigration system, are really important. I believe some countries do allow for migration based on “inter-dependency,” which recognizes ties beyond the nuclear family. Yet, one still encounters a problem, which is that the overall objective of immigration policy remains to restrict admissions, and carefully mould those who do enter. So on one hand, I celebrate that a wider range of affective ties might become the basis for migration. On the other hand, what does it mean that the state gets to evaluate your affective ties? That’s pretty sobering. Such evaluation stems from the fact that the state wants to organize and channel affect, including in migrant communities, toward political and economic ends that need to be deeply questioned. Another concern is that even when the state recognizes a range of ties beyond the nuclear family, the ties will not do you any good unless you can also meet certain income thresholds and other requirements. Which means that those who have financial opportunities, and have not been targeted by their government because of their politics or their health, for example, will remain the priority for admission. What has been gained—and what is lost—when a wider range of affective ties are recognized for purposes of immigration, but recognition remains conditional on financial and other privileges, and on allowing the state to direct one’s affect toward certain ends? This question presents huge dilemmas, but maybe also opportunities for coalition between, say, same-sex couples whose ties are not recognized and male-female couples whose ties are recognized but whose income does not meet the required threshold. It also marks that migration scholarship is now entering into conversation with the important scholarship on affect, public feelings, witnessing, historical memory, and trauma, and the political possibilities they may present. The question of how affective ties—and affective labour—shape migration policies and histories is an important one.

Bridget Anderson: In fact the danger or challenge of working on a particular immigration “issue” is that, in arguing for opening up on a particular basis one implicitly accepts the disciplinary, punitive nature of immigration controls for “Others”. It’s part of that “good migrant/bad migrant” paradigm: however many people one might cram into the “good migrant” category, by working to do so, one allows that the “bad migrant” be excluded. In fact it’s often the case that the “bad migrant” is constructed as actively making life more difficult for the “good migrant” (benefit scroungers causing problems for hardworkers, illegals for legal residents, bogus asylum seekers for genuine refugees etc) which further legitimizes the punitive nature of control. Which is I think where we get back to the place of research in upsetting these paradigms. And the question about state regulation is also very pertinent. And clearly the “private” is only private for some people – while the state does not interfere in the running of middle class private households, it enters the homes of migrants and the poor (and increasingly in the UK, people of colour) with impunity. Similarly the intimate lives of migrants and those who want to claim benefit are subject to intense scrutiny. So where does that leave the value of “regulation” that I’m always calling for when it comes to domestic work in private households?

Special issue: sexing borders
Tags: borders, Bridget Anderson, Eithne Luibhéid, gender, LGBT, migrants, race, trafficking, victimisation