Intimate entanglements
Race, Migration, and Urban Space
In this four-part miniseries, we spoke with six scholars whose research addresses different aspects, geographies, and approaches to analyzing and understanding the relationship between migration and urban politics and culture. This episode delves into recent debates in critical geography that explore the relationships between racism, migration, borders, and labor.
We could have created an entire show focused on this topic! But instead, we’re taking a wide-angled and ecumenical approach to general topics in urban studies. We hope to expose scholars, students, and practitioners of urban studies to diverse research methods and approaches to these themes. Each episode will be accompanied by a suggested reading list based on our discussions, and we welcome suggestions for future guests and topics!
Guests
Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Yale University
Nancy Hiemstra, Stony Brook University (SUNY)
David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich
Domenic Vitiello, University of Pennsylvania
Reading List
Andrew Baldwin. 2022. The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism. Rowman and Littlefield.
Andrew Baldwin and Bruce Erickson. 2020. Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 3-11.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe (guest editors). 2019. Anthropocene mobilities. Mobilities 14(3), special issue.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe. 2019. From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate. Mobilities 14(3): 289-297.
Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini. 2017. Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration. Critique.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. How subcontracting key services leads to the entrenchment of urban immigration detention in many us communities. American Politics and Policy Blog.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. ‘Unpleasant’but ‘helpful’: Immigration detention and urban entanglements in New Jersey, USA. Urban Studies 59(11): 2179-2198.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2023. ‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies. The Journal of North African Studies 28(3): 635-665.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen & Zineb Rachdi El Yacoubi. 2022. Externalizing otherness: The racialization of belonging in the Morocco-EU Border. Geoforum.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2020. Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(5): 887-904.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2018. Intimate economies of immigration detention: critical perspectives. Gender, Place & Culture 25(9): 1399-1401.
Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon. 2021. Reading between the (redacted) lines: muddling through absent presences in public information requests on US Immigration detention. ACME 20(6): 666-686.
Nancy Hiemstra. 2019. Detain and Deport: The chaotic US immigration enforcement regime. University of Georgia Press.
David Kaufmann, Nora Räss, Dominique Strebel and Fritz Sager. 2022. Sanctuary Cities in Europe? A Policy Survey of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants. British Journal of Political Science 52(4):1954–1963.
David Kaufmann and Dominique Strebel. 2021. Urbanizing Migration Policy-Making: Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Geneva and Zürich. Urban Studies 58(4): 2991-3008.
David Kaufmann. 2019. Comparing urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations, Public Administration Review 79(3): 443–446.
Domenic Vitiello. 2022. The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia. Cornell University Press. [open access]
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Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
All of that is, I guess you could say, a bottom-up negotiation of these larger terrains of inequality that have existed for a long time, and are also constantly being reproduced, so I think it's kind of, there's a lot of complexity. My students don't like it when I say this, but it's all complex. It's hard to untangle and tease out these threads, but I think a lot about these entanglements as intimacies and at these various scales that come to play in the encounters that migrant people have with others, with the border with each other, and so on.
Emily Holloway
You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. That’s Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, a lecturer with the Council on African Studies and Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University. Leslie’s research, as you might recall from our last episode, explores the dynamics of African migration through the contested border space of Morocco and Moroccan cities. Leslie’s work draws on a diverse set of intellectual traditions to understand how race and racism play critical roles in debates over citizenship, belonging, and mobility. In this episode, we’ll start delving into these questions. Leslie, maybe we can start with how you found yourself studying these issues.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So I am from South Texas. I'm from San Antonio and grew up kind of on the edge of what might be the border land region between the US and Mexico. And as an adult, I lived for six years in Morocco after 9/11/2001. And so during that period going back and forth between Texas to see family and returning to Morocco, where I was teaching, I saw how borders and the politics of migration became increasingly important in both of those areas and at the same time, discourses about migration became increasingly racialized. And so I would I've been thinking through and kind of wrestling with that idea and trying to make sense of that across these spaces for a while, and that drove actually my decision to pursue a PhD in geography because I had previously been doing something different. And you know, yeah, I just really wanted to make sense of how these really to my mind in a lot of ways, different spaces actually had a lot of commonalities and a lot of the processes that were taking place. You know, were unfolding simultaneously actually, and really what got me to thinking with black geographies, which is a major source of inspiration, an analytical framework and a political project that I engage with a lot of my work comes from toward the end of my time in course work at Clark in the geography department.
And as I've started kind of revising my dissertation for the book manuscript that I'm working on right now, I've been thinking really seriously with black geographies as part of this black radical tradition that is both sort of an analytical framework grounded in internationalism, grounded in a materialist explanation, and also very much grounded in the histories of race and racism, both particularly in the new world, but also in the in the colonized old world, if we can use those terms and also you know part of the black radical tradition is it is an activist political project.
And so it felt really appropriate, given that my research takes place in northern and West Africa, to think with this framework that is making sense of the legacies of enslavement, of colonialism, of racism, of capitalism, and also taking a real activist stance, which I do in my own work.
And then I guess if I'll add one more sort of base or foundational orientation I guess would be in postcolonial and feminist studies, which is something I've really engaged with since my undergraduate years in college, really trying to understand the way that places now signified as the global South operate on their own terms, not in a vacuum, not unrelated to things that are happening in Euro America or the so-called global North, but also trying to understand things that are happening in these global locations on their own terms, without imposing these analytical categories that come from somewhere else and the feminist part of that postcolonial project is really thinking in terms of multiplicity and relation relationality instead of some sort of universal that that race operates this way all the time or migration operates this way all the time or gender operates this way all the time.
So I think, yeah, another part I get some more recent part of this intellectual trajectory has been about my engagement with this idea of the urban, which really comes again from ethnography for me. I was following migrants. I was meeting migrant communities where they were in Morocco and these were in cities and cities became these places where I saw borders and bordering really unfold far away from the fences, far away from the Mediterranean Sea that we, you know, see on the news with the boats crossing. But a lot of these active processes of bordering and of exclusion making was happening in urban space and at the same time, a lot of resistance to borders, a lot of the ways that migrants collaborated together against the border in order to keep going had to do with being together in urban spaces and asserting certain kinds of claims on that space, and also claims and in terms of their belonging that had both to do with the spaces they were in, in these cities and also this sort of transnational network of people in, you know, in in urban spaces, everywhere from West Africa to northern Africa to various places in Europe and beyond.
Emily Holloway
Can you give us a little bit of context on Morocco’s role in these regimes of migration and borders?
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So Morocco is a huge sending country of their own people to Europe, far larger population of Moroccans in Europe than other countries that I look at or that I work with in west and central Africa. But being this buffer state enables Moroccans to look at this, quote unquote, problem of illegal immigration as a problem of another place and of another kind of migrant, and race becomes really important. And I have friends that work on this in Mexico. And they're seeing that same discourse happen among Mexican nationals who are looking at Central American migrants and seeing their Central Americanness, and particularly their indigeneity, as this racialized marker of unauthorizedness and of illegality. So it creates sort of these hierarchies of otherness. And these competitions, among marginalized migrant groups as a result of these broader transcontinental processes. I think I think it's all of those. I've written about this before as entanglements and thinking about these sort of racialized and identity entanglements that are continental, that are local, and that are embodied. And so, you have these ways in which Morocco, for example, is sort of caught as a state, you know, with the European Union wanting it to keep migration from coming and the rest of the African Union wanting Morocco to be a good member of the African Union and support African people.
And so you have these intimate entanglements where Morocco is and also to defend its own people and its need for remittances from migrants, from its own people that go to Europe and need money and send money back to Morocco, which is a huge -- it's like, maybe 9% of the GDP right now in Morocco is from Moroccans living abroad that send money home. So that's a huge part of this. And so Morocco sort of navigating all of these pressures and then on a you know on a local level -- and we see this particularly in dense urban spaces, right, you have Moroccans who have family, who are perhaps Illegalized living in Europe, who are feel precarious, or they have been deported, or they have returned from Europe because their visa was denied, or they lived in Europe and couldn't hack it anymore because of the racism that exists against the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab racism that exists in Europe and is really rampant. So, they're in Morocco in these urban spaces. Looking at these other sub-Saharan migrant people and seeing a way to really recuperate some sense of belonging, some sense of subjectivity, some sense of claim in their city, in their country, a claim as a global citizen or as a citizen of modernity.
Emily Holloway
Leslie started to touch on these networks and chains of labor that are really important and significant sources of income for sending nations like Morocco, in terms of remittances. But the jobs that many migrants end up in, which are typically quite precarious and poorly compensated, also become attached to perceptions of racial identity and citizenship. In the United States, these relationships are all around us, with farmworkers, restaurant workers, in construction, and in more intimate spheres of social reproduction, like child and elder care. Domenic Vitiello, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, recently published the award-winning book Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia. Sanctuary City explores the concept of sanctuary and belonging through case studies of six different immigrant communities in Philadelphia, which we talk about at greater length in later episodes of the podcast. But Domenic made some more general points during our conversation about what migration is, in a really fundamental sense, and it brought us back around to these intimacies of race, identity, labor, and immigration.
Domenic Vitiello
I like to, in conversations about costs and benefits, you know, when dragged into them, I like to point out what many of us talk about as a variety of subsidies that immigrants, especially immigrants who lack legal status, contribute, not necessarily willingly, but contribute tremendously right to the wealth of places of people in the United States, who overall pay the lowest share of our household budgets in in the industrialized world, by far the lowest share of our household budgets for food. And it's because all along the food chain, from you know the farms to packaging and preparing and even in many cases delivering food to us, whether you're eating at home, or a restaurant, or wherever right? The exceptionally low wages and lack of benefits that immigrants either lack legal status in the US or who have a very tenuous status including a temporary status right for temporary work provide an in immense subsidy, right? but also, you know, within the sorts of you know again, low wages and lack of benefits, that people who clean other people's houses, often who clean hotels or who work in usually smaller scale construction, right? Or providing the rest of us, you know, let's say middle class Americans, making it cheaper for us to have essential services.
One way that some scholars talk about migration and really conceptualize those connections between people, both right making decisions to leave their countries of origin and you know, ultimately the relationships that they maintain with them, and sort of, you know in in in a much broader sense. How do we even conceive of what migration is, and the relationships it produces, including to places right between people and places. The sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, and her colleagues have written about care chains as a way to conceive of things that most people put in somewhat more economic terms. Right? But understanding particularly women's migration for work in the broad and growing, you know care sectors, whether you're working as a nurse, or in child or so, or other forms of elder care. In many ways what you know people are doing is sort of displacing love. A woman from the Philippines is the in many ways, you know, archetypical example partly because the Philippines, as a nation has explicit policies of training and exporting. And then trying to draw the remittance investments back of nurses around the world. And certainly, there are many Filipina maids around the world. But the Philippines would much rather export nurses to somewhat higher paid work and often usually less exploitative work you know, exploitative work than certainly domestic service. But you know what relationships right in a care chain if you will, essentially become as someone in the Philippines. In this example. An extended family member is taking, you know, care of the migrants’ kids, right? And sort of while you know, migrant nurse or maid, right is, is taking care of other people's family, right? And in a sense, right, we're sort of displacing love along a chain. While migrants step in for people in the United States who are largely going to work, including other women who go to work in, you know, occupations, you know, in which women are highly overrepresented also have a lot of care, right? Including, you know, your HR department down the down the hall right, which is dominated by women. They’re taking care of men trying to figure out, you know, essentially support them along there, majority men in corporate America, along their career pathways, if you will.
I can go on about this. I'm certainly not as articulate as Arlie Hochschild is about care chains, but I find it another really powerful and important way to think in much more humanistic terms, right? Or much more humane terms than thinking about migrants as units of labor, if you will, moving around.
Emily Holloway
It is a really pernicious but also revealing slippage when immigrant communities and individuals end up being reduced to economic benefits in these ways, and these tropes can serve all kinds of political agendas, both liberal and conservative. Migration is deeply political for multiple reasons, but its political utility is not interpreted or leveraged to get at some of these really deep and longstanding structural problems. We’ll discuss this more in the next episode that deals really explicitly with migration politics and policy.
So we’ve heard from Leslie about the relationship between borders, space, and racism, and from Domenic about the intimacies between labor occupations and racial categories, but another important area for understanding the connections between racial formation, racism, and global migration is climate change. I spoke with Andrew Baldwin, a professor of geography at Durham University in the UK. He and his collaborators, Christiane Froehlich and Delf Rothe, organized a special issue in the journal Mobilities back in 2019 that raised a lot of important questions about climate change, mobilities, and migration.
Andrew Baldwin
And yet, when I look at the climate mobility special issue, again, it's really interesting, but that history, you know, it's basically deracinated, right? Like there is no, there is no reference to that important literature. So as a kind of reflection on the last four years, I would say that you know the job of surfacing race as a term of reference, as a category foundational to political and social thought Is just an unending one and is requires a sort of continuous effort to expose and reveal because race is pernicious, you know, as Stuart Hall so nicely puts it. You know send it out the front door, b ut it will always find a way of sneaking in through the back door. So, keeping an eye on the back door, I think is really important.
Emily Holloway
You also recently published a book, The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism, that works to map the figure of the “climate refugee.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you started thinking through these questions, and maybe explain how racism configures these kinds of political categories?
Andrew Baldwin
It began this work for me at least began in sort of the 2010 period with the kind of latent, unstated sensibility that within this space of climate change and migration, political discourse, there was a kind of silent racism. There was a kind of, you know, reference to the category of race that was unstated. And so, a lot of the work that I've been doing over the last several years has been to try and expose and bring tease out the way that race operates as a key term of reference within the wider debate about climate change and migration.
And in that book I try and make the argument that the notion of the climate migrant stroke, climate refugee and I tend to treat those terms interchangeably is a figuration of otherness that is specific to climate change and so part of the argument, then, is that within this wider sort of political debate about climate change and human migration, really this discourse is about the kind of a kind of recuperation of Western Euro, Western humanism at exactly the moment climate change, the Anthropocene.
Whatever you want to call it, you know, threatens to extinguish the human altogether, so this discourse of climate change and migration emerges as a mechanism for recuperating a kind of lost and waning humanisms. And then throughout the book there's a strong sort of anti-racist tenor which is that when we scratch the surface of the category of the climate migrant, what we find is that it is a racial category, and the figure of the human is itself also a racial figure. It is the figure of Euro-Western whiteness.
So, the figure of the climate migrant is a fully naturalized form of other, which is to say that it's dead historicized it doesn't have a kind of its unique history. Movement and mobility are a function of climate, which in this case is sort of, you know, code for nature, the figure of the climate refugee stroke climate migrant is often displaced from the category of the political, it is a figure without political agency.
So, it's really I think ultimately, this whole question about climate change and migration is about the reassertion of whiteness in a in a moment of deep anxiety. I mean, for me, my sort of intellectual commitment is around thinking about race and climate change; race and the Anthropocene. The sort of the -- for example, the context of the Trump presidency and the rise of the far right, this sort of the circulation of particular forms of white supremacy and popular discourse nowadays, you know these things, these developments really do condition the context in which we should be doing our critical thinking. And I think I remain steadfast in my commitment to continue to talk about race in the context of climate change to think about the way that it operates as a key term of reference in debates about climate change and the Anthropocene. Because there is, I think the very real risk that with the emergence of the far right a kind of, you know, an explicit white supremacy, the temptation is to come to associate racism with the far right and with the kinds of white supremacists that attach to the far right.
And in debates around climate change and migration, you know what gets lost is the way that you know, race and racism are built into climate change epistemology, right? There it's inescapable. So, the risk I think is a similar one, similar to what happened in the 1930s, where racism came to be defined in terms of a kind of ignorance and anti-scientific ignorance attributable to elites working with the populist discourse? On the one hand, and, you know, a kind of you know a working-class subject that, you know, happily indulged in these, you know, with these ideas. And the effect of that is that it kind of gets liberalism off the hook, and yet we know from the history of liberalism that it is intimately bound up with the category of race. Right. You know, the freedom, the proclaimed freedom of the liberal is historically always subtended by the unfreedom of the black or the racialized or you know, whatever the category is that you want to use.
Emily Holloway
In the next episode, we’ll be digging further into these questions of belonging, citizenship, and difference by looking at the sanctuary city as an idea and a political strategy. How do different governments at different scales – municipalities, cities, nations, or supranational institutions like the EU – adjudicate citizenship? David Kaufmann shares some insights on how multilevel governing structures and policy narratives have major impacts on the reception and incorporation of refugee populations in Western Europe.
David Kaufmann
They make a line between real and fake refugees where there is not no such line to make or very hard to hold such a line or distinction. And what we see then, so when we talk with all the major political actors there, what kind of framework narrative, what kind of narrative they used in the direct democratic campaigns and we saw that the more the right ideology, the political ideology the actors have, or I mean in the US, it would be more the more conservative ideologies, the more you're using this this narrative, but also more in context where it's or it's about a potential tightening or more restrictive asylum policy. So, in this context, political context about more tightening actors or actually use. I think this asylum abuse narrative and they say yes, we make it tighter, but only to also to the protection of the real refugees. And so this is a very strategic narrative that is being used.
Emily Holloway
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.