Refugees – Immigrants – Precarity by Rolf Hepp
L’emergenza dei rifugiati e degli immigrati è destinata ad incrementare in misura notevole il grado già elevato di incertezza e di precarietà diffuse nelle nostre società e nel mondo lavorativo. È questo il tema che sarà affrontato nella conferenza internazionale annuale promossa dalla Rete europea SUPI, di cui Eurispes è membro fondatore, in programma il prossimo ottobre 2017 a Berlino, presso la Freie Universitaet.
Il coordinatore della Rete, prof. Rolf Hepp, membro del Comitato Scientifico di Eurispes, ha elaborato una riflessione che fornisce elementi utili a comprendere meglio la natura del particolare rapporto tra movimenti migratori e diffusione della precarietà sociale e a individuare possibili strategie correttive.
SUPI Conference Berlin, October 2017
Refugees – Immigrants – Precarity
by Rolf Hepp
SUPI Network – Co-ordinator
The refugee problem is not only a global problem. As an elementary, basic component it also determines many facets of everyday social life. Therefore, the refugee and migration problem is not only about their immediate content, but also about the massive effects and impacts that are inherent in them.
Guy Standing emphasizes that the refugee movements take place in the Third World, where they unfold their effects on and across the labor market, which then sweep over to Europe and USA. The major refugee movements do not take place on the way to the EU. The European refugee crisis only signifies a specific focus of the global immigration process. Standing also includes the Chinese migrant workers in the groups of migrants, because their legal status is more like migrants than locals. Thus, migrant workers are also to be regarded as elements of a multifaceted migration movement within the context of domestic spatial restructuring. As an example, according to Standing, 3 million people working in Thailand were mainly “illegal” immigrants, mainly from Burma. (Standing, p. 156). It is precisely the legal standing and position of the immigrants within a states administrative framework that produces forms of legal and social imbalance that characterize the position of migrants and refugees. Standing calls this “sub-citizenship”.
Braudel already pointed out that urbanization is directly linked to migrations and thus has a major influence on the development of “cities”. Simmel emphasizes that the stranger is fundamentally integrated into trade relations and the development of the cities. Michel Serres considers urban migration to be one of the most important restructuring tendencies of the twentieth century, since urban migration has reorganized society and socially individualized it in the sense of Durkheim. (While at the beginning of the twentieth century every second person worked in agriculture, it is now only 2%.) (Serres, p. 28))
The dealing with refugees in German society is currently characterized by a welcome culture as well as by “Pegida” and burning of refugee homes. This expresses lines of separation in the self-understanding of the population in Germany. On the basis of the stranger by Simmel, the ottobian farm worker described by Max Weber, and the integration problems of new arrivals by Elias, where specific patterns of attitudes towards the “stranger” have been worked out. In further steps, colonial experiences and ethnological patterns of interpretation can be analyzed in order to discuss the current refugee problem in a third step about transnational social spaces. Thus it must be asked how our society has changed in Europe since the dissolution of colonialism after the Second World War, and in what areas the current social integration problems are moving and the refugees, and what migration experiences have influenced societies that are organized as national states.
The reforms of the labor market and the social system reinforce reservations about immigrants, since they put the previously applicable allocation mechanisms of the labor market out of force. In flexible labor markets, wages are driven downwards so that only migrants accept them. The dismantling of the social insurance system potentially worsens the situation of the natives, so that a conflict potential is integrated into the society, which can turn into hostility towards migrants. Thus Standing views the need-dependent system (co-) created by the Social Democrats as the main reason for their defeat in the 2010 election (153).
“The connection of a precariat consisting of migrants, with a tax-dependent social welfare system and a tax system which places the greatest emphasis on income tax, exacerbates the hostility towards migrants and “foreigners”. A system that makes taxpayers think that they co-pay the bill of destitute migrants means that the prevailing conflicts cannot be dismissed as racist prejudices. They reflect the abolition of the “universality principle” and the social solidarity. “(Standing 2015, p. 167).
The “immigrant” is at the same time an emigrant of his country of origin. In his analyses, Sayad focused on the immigrant-emigrants and argues that immigration is unilaterally viewed at the economic level as “cost-benefit constructions”.
Sayad perceives migration as a “universal phenomenon [always] within a local unity” (Sayad, 1999, p. 35). The local unity of which he speaks here corresponds to the framework of a national state. In order to understand migration at all, the concept of the state must therefore be discussed. Despite the wide diversity of different migration situations, these generalizable characteristics can be identified, such as social, economic, cultural and ethnic variables that verify social conflict lines. In the minds of the actors, categories are emerging with which they consider this field of tension. Sayad calls these patterns “nationalist categories” (Sayad, 1999). These structures determine the way people perceive the world and thus interactively the way they shape their world – thus also the world itself. Against the background of this understanding, two groups are emerging: “nationals” who are natural within the framework, and “non-nationals” who do not have access to this framework. Thus, migration is defined in relation to the possession of citizenship and elaborates Standing’s concept of a “sub-citizen”.
In the basic substance of the state, therefore, the delineation is foreseen. Thus the national order is disturbed when “non-nationals”, ie immigrants, are present. “Immigration means that people who should not be here (if the national order were perfect, they would not exhibit this weakness, this deficiency), are here (they are as objectification here, as materialization of this weakness, this lack, the failure of the Nation)”. (Sayad, p. 39, 1999).
In the process of assimilation both physical appearance and external behavior are adapted. Thus, in addition to the “old identity”, which as a true form of being has a higher degree of authenticity, there emerges a second, the “new identity”, which protects the immigrant from being continually depreciated and discriminated against to his disadvantage. This forces the immigrants into a form of social hypercorrectness, as they have to prove “by repeated demonstrations of sincerity and goodwill” (Sayad, 1999, p.50) that they do not harm the “host country”. Neither in the old nor in the new identity can an immigrated man be himself as he struggles for recognition in the new society. According to Kristeva (2000.27f.) the work of the immigrant plays the measure of the justification of his existence in the distance, which brings him closer to precarious forms of life.
Nevertheless, the new identity can be compared with an uncertain profit (belonging to society), where the old identity guarantees the certain loss (always the loser). Either, therefore, he accepts the status of the “ruled” with all its negative consequences, or he accepts the risks which the assimilation process entails.
Immigrant children are considered “immigrants who have never emigrated.” Sayad goes even further. He describes them as “products of society and its mechanisms of reproduction and integration, products of language, school products and all other social processes” (Sayad, 1999). They disrupt the image of the state in that they blur the separation between “national” and “not-national” by their mere presence. They are the reason for a third fear, which is spread even wider and more subliminally in society.
Migration is growing and changing its form, which increases and distorts uncertainties and precarious social connections. Cultural and religious distances are used here under criteria which carry enemy images and racism into the social order.