09 July 2020
Migration scholar Bridget Anderson examines how and why politicians can declare that 'Black Lives Matter' whilst ignoring how racism and contemporary migration policies intersect.
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"On 19th June 2020 the European Parliament voted to declare ‘Black Lives Matter’. The same European Parliament that last October voted AGAINST supporting more search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean; the same European Parliament that has voted through Economic Partnership Agreements that have ruined Black small-scale producers through exposing them to multinational corporation competition, reduced market access to European member states and taken away tariff revenue to poor states. Black Lives Matter – so long as they are not lived in Niger or Libya or pushing at the borders of Europe.
Even when they are lived on the territory of European member states Black Lives are easily discarded. Luke de Noronha (2018) has detailed the devastating impact of the deportation of long-term British residents to Jamaica, people who came to the UK when they were children, who have built lives and communities that have simply been disregarded. Recent evidence from Detention Action has found that immigration detention is systemically racist – 90% of Australian nationals were released after spending less than 28 days in immigration detention, compared with 60% of Nigerian nationals. Black Lives do not seem to matter either when they are requesting family reunion or fighting deportation.
In the past 30 years migration studies has drifted apart from race and ethnic studies. Until the late 1980s anti-deportation campaigns were usually explicitly grounded in anti-racist activism but migration activism too has drifted apart from anti-racism. It is vital that we re-connect them if we are to affect systemic change. There are scholars, activists and scholar activists who have been developing work that explores the relation between migration and ‘race’ (Lentin and Karakayali 2016; Bhattacharya 2018; Yuval Davis et al. 2019; and work by Statewatch and work showcased by the Institute of Race Relations, for example). But so far little attention has been paid to the role of ‘nationality’. Nationality can be read as both a legal status, consonant with citizenship, AND as signifying belonging to the nation of the nation-state. Furthermore, national membership is traced through ancestry and nationality is sutured to race (Sharma 2020).
This ambivalence is not simply happenstance."
Full article: Black Lives Matter – whatever their nationality (Migration Mobilities Bristol, link)
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