The Fight to Reappear.

• Date: 22 June 2000
• Author: Ruggiero, Vincenzo
• Published date: 22 June 2000
• Author: Ruggiero, Vincenzo

PESSIMISM OVER GLOBALIZATION POSITS A NUMBER OF PRINCIPLES THAT OFTEN amount to dogmas. The first is that, with the international integration of production, finance, and trade, little scope is left for national economies to escape the destructive effects of unpredictable market forces. The second, related, principle is that governments are impotent in tempering such effects, since public expenditure is constrained by higher economic interests and international corporate actors. Such pessimism views all dominance as pursuing an essentially similar strategy: "to leave as much leeway and freedom of manoeuvre to the dominant, while imposing the strictest possible constraints on the decisional freedom of the dominated side" (Bauman, 1998: 69).

Although it is difficult to dispel such pessimism, recent debate has attempted to identify ways in which globalization can avoid taking a neoliberal form and national governments can provide social protection for the more vulnerable (Mitchie and Smith, 1999; Baker et al., 1999; Weiss, 1999). Similarly, the view that globalization destroys public agoras in which social issues can translate into collective action has been challenged, though tentatively, by the debacle of the free-trade meeting in Seattle (St. Clair, 1999). The birth of new, global agoras of collective action also shows that the evolution of social movements is not necessarily, and totally, doomed to either integration or localism (Castells, 1997).

This article focuses on a specific social movement known in France as the movement of the sans-papiers -- namely, unregistered immigrants fighting for official recognition of their existence. The first part analyzes how strategies adopted against new settlers in Europe revolve around the necessity that settlers hide their origin, their condition, and their very body: in brief, that they disappear from public sight. In the second part, the response of the sans-papiers is discussed, and their attempt to reappear described.

Work Without Workers

Europe needs migrant work, but has the problem of getting rid of migrant workers. This paradox is pursued by lowering their expectations, abolishing their dignity, and making them invisible. Let us examine how these processes are intertwined.

During the postwar period, the rebuilding of European economies required unskilled labor, particularly in the mass production of durables, but also in the building and service sectors. As masses of workers were attracted to the major industrial cities, the relative development of services and care provided them with an incentive to stay. Migration from the former colonies to countries such as France and Britain, from southern Europe to Germany, and internal migration in countries such as Italy offered the reborn economies an indispensable asset (Modood and Werbner, 1997). In Britain, for example, the Nationality Act of 1948, which conferred British citizenship on workers from the colonies and the Commonwealth, "made sure that postwar Britain laid its hands on all the workers it could get -- and if they came as settlers to the mother country, so much surer was Britain of their continued labor" (Sivanandan, 1982: 131).

At issue was the mobility of the inhabitants of the former colonies, of those who, as Faulkner puts it, "endured." Faulkner relates the "immobility" of black people, and their resilience, to the relationships they established with the land. Having "endured," they were an element of stability: how to separate them from that land and lure them abroad was the challenge faced by the postwar economy. The land itself was cursed by slavery, and the only way to escape the curse was to relinquish it (Faulkner, 1977). In the writings of Faulkner, blacks endure because they are "immobile" and "as we say for cats, with their immobility they have ended up defeating eternity" (Glissant, 1996).

A price had to be paid for the mobility of labor required by European economies: minimal guarantees had to be offered to migrants in terms of occupation and social security. This did not imply an "elevation" of migrant workers to the rank of their indigenous counterparts, as a variety of ideological devices were in place aimed at keeping a distance between them. In the recollection of C.L.R. James (1994:30), this distance, and consequently the relatively low expectations of migrants moving to Britain, was constructed on the basis of the following imagery:

Everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of light and leading, and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant ideal -- to attain it was, of course, impossible.

Over the last decades, as this ideal increasingly crumbled, new devices were mobilized, in the economic and ideological realms, to shape the expectations of migrant workers.

With the development of post-Fordist productive models, and the consequent need for flexible and casual work, western European countries aimed at saving on social costs for long-term immigrants and settlers. They started to replace them with temporary labor, more suitable for a post-industrial economy, "thereby retaining the economic benefit of migrant labor while divesting itself of its social cost -- in housing, health care, welfare, education" (Fekete, 1997: 1).

This process, which is still under way, entails both an increase in the mobility of investments in developing countries and the virtual abolition of benefits for temporary, flexible, migrant workers. The mobility of investments, in sum, is aimed at reducing the mobility of migrant workers, and simultaneously at charging the developing countries with the cost of reproducing their own workforce. The benefits for the "fortunate" developing countries in which investments are made mainly consist of the meager salaries earned by some of their workers. Often, these investments are primarily made in countries where authoritarian regimes are able to guarantee social discipline. However, as soon as labor conflicts arise, capitals may always move elsewhere. "Authoritarian regimes, because they can better control their migratory flow from their countries, are natural allies with those international political forces which call for stricter migration policies" (Gambino, 1996: 139).

In brief, the developed countries, by becoming less attractive to migrant workers, assure that a severe selection is made so that only those who are prepared to endure the worst possible social conditions are granted entry. In quantitative terms, migratory flows have remained virtually unchanged for the last three decades (Ibid.: 130); what has changed is the social cost of the reproduction of migrants.

This lowering of expectations is, in turn, the result of the increasing polarization of the world economy. "The gap is yawning between North and South and shows every sign of widening still further in the next several decades" (Wallerstein, 1995: 160). The opening of such a gap can be described as the development of "global less-eligibility," whereby the more acute the relative poverty of the developing countries, the more limited the demands of those individuals who escape poverty and seek work abroad. Migration, therefore, becomes an option, in the form of individual resistance, for those who are prepared to forgo most of the rights enjoyed by the migrant workers who preceded them. Among these rights is the right to move legally across borders. Interestingly, the selection of migrant workers is also undertaken through the establishment of a "fee," namely a sum that grants the privilege of migrating (Salt, 1997; Duvell, 1998). I have in mind the growth of illegal physical relocation in which it is no longer the developed countries that pay for the cost of the mobility of migrants, but the migrants themselves. By doing so, they display, in advance, their low expectations as potential workers. The trafficking in human beings, within and to Europe, describes more than metaphorically the condition of invisibility that many migrants are forced to accept (Ruggiero, 1997).

Acceptance of the status of illegality in the country of destination is a nonwritten requirement that allows for the selection of the most desperate among migrant workers -- those who are prepared to "disappear." In this sense, it could be argued that the strengthening of border controls is not meant to reduce migration, but rather to lower the overall economic and social expectations of migrants. Those who finally make it to Europe will endure the racial politics of its cities and the segregation often found in its spacial divisions. These divisions, these "racialised geographies of disadvantage" (Gilroy, 1987), are also apparent in countries that seem to have ridded themselves of the imagery surrounding their colonial and imperial past, and where race relations are believed to be finely regulated by advanced legislation.

London may well be the city of the metropolitan core of a now dismantled British empire, but there is much to suggest that the foundational ideologies of imperialism live on in this...