I appreciate Rosenberg’s careful explanation of my argument, its contributions, and his questions about how entrenched the dynamics I illuminate are. Ironically, this was also my biggest question about Undesirable Immigrants, which I think reveals the close association between our two works, and the fundamental challenge of writing a book that tries to point out the impacts of longstanding structural forces without forsaking all hope for the future.
Rosenberg’s first question is about the role of race in perpetuating the migrant/refugee binary. In short, I view the migrant/refugee binary as highly racialized, especially as it relates to the responses of Global North receiving states, but I think the persistence of the binary is about much more than race. Recent public enthusiasm about welcoming Ukrainians as refugees illustrates the point that a lot of the resistance to border crossers from Africa or the Muslim world into Europe and from Central America into the United States is related to the race of the people seeking entry. I talk in the book about how these figures are highly racialized in the imaginations of American and European publics, and how racialization can enhance public disregard for their suffering and deservingness. When and if the binary can be used to define racialized others as migrants, it serves to enable states to keep out people deemed undesirable without seeming overtly racist. This phenomenon can be true even as Global North states do choose to resettle some non-white people as refugees, since a strict adherence to the binary promises to keep those numbers manageably low.
However, in the Global South, the story is more complex. Ambivalent public reactions may include some element of racialization (see Lamis Abdelaaty, Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees, 2021, who found more openness to people from the same ethnic background as the dominant group in the receiving state), but it takes a very different form than the white supremacist racial politics of the Global North. For instance, when Syrians enter Lebanon or Venezuelans enter Colombia or Rohingya enter Bangladesh, receiving state reluctance and the decision to frame arrivals as migrants is about many things besides race, including sending a message to IOs or wealthy donor states about burden sharing.
Rosenberg’s remaining questions are about who I think should change, and how likely I think change is. To be clear: I do not think Global North politicians or even UNHCR will move beyond binary thinking willingly, because it benefits them directly. However, I do have some optimism that the scholarly and advocacy communities can take a more critical look at the language we use and who it is serving. Unsurprisingly, since Crossing was published, I have found scholars of and advocates for people who get classified as migrants to be far more receptive to this point than people who self-identify as refugee advocates. However, I have also seen a critical turn against positivism even within the refugee studies community, especially as more work has engaged with the colonial legacies of the Refugee Convention (Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner, Migration Studies and Colonialism, 2021; Ulrike Krause, “Colonial Roots of the 1951 Refugee Convention and Its Effects on the Global Refugee Regime, Journal of International Relations and Development 24:599–626 [2021]).
Both Undesirable Immigrants and Crossing point to seemingly intractable forces of resistance to any acknowledgement of the deep injustice of colonial history and neo-colonial practices of protecting privilege. All we can do as scholars is to keep pointing out who benefits and who suffers under the status quo.
