What if Refugees Designed Asylum?

Polish soldiers met the people seeking asylum at the Poland-Belarus border with water cannons. As refugees froze to death in the woods, Poland declared the area an emergency zone and banned journalists and activists. Rather than an unambiguous condemnation of Poland and the European Union for their failure to uphold asylum, pundits focused their accusations on Belarus’s authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko for  “weaponizing immigration”, drawing on a morally fraught trope from the international relations literature. This manufactured crisis took a turn to the bizarre with a concert to raise the morale of Polish troops, featuring Lou Bega and Las Ketchup.

Lukashenko’s geopolitical maneuvering is effective because European politicians are committed to the militarization of border control. The rhetoric of humanitarianism treats refugees as a security problem to be intercepted, offshored, and detained. Poland’s response is not exceptional. On the Greek island of Lesvos, the pretext of COVID-19 exacerbates refugee’s inadequate access to food, sanitation, and medical care and amplifies Islamophobic harassment from police and locals. In the United States, Haitian refugees are suing the Biden administration for racial discrimination, physical and verbal abuse, and denial of due process after border patrol agents on horseback breaking up their camp whipped and corralled them.

The treatment of refugees is not merely cynical realpolitik or the result culmination of racist, far right propaganda filtering into mainstream politics. It’s shaped by a way of seeing the world in which it is too easy to dehumanize and demonize people depicted as outsiders. Perhaps this is unsurprising in politics, but it also shapes the questions and categories that philosophers use to inform our thinking about forced movement and refuge. As a result, philosophers reinforce a way of seeing the world, with disturbing implications.

Philosophers writing on refugees have focused on two central questions: “who is a refugee?” and “what do we owe refugees?” It may seem perverse to criticize anyone asking these seemingly urgent questions. The definition of the legal and moral category of “refugee” has life and death implications; for example, determining whether people fleeing civil war, gangs, or domestic abuse should have legal rights to asylum and residence. Similarly, if we are not fulfilling our obligations to displaced people, we can use this failure to criticize states and international organizations for not doing their part.

I do not want to dismiss these questions, but they are unlikely to be the questions that refugees themselves would ask. Both questions are state-oriented questions. The question “who is a refugee?” emerges from the 1951 Refugee Convention, which limited itself to addressing the plight of European refugees displaced by the second world war. Political philosophers explicitly take the “we” in “what do we owe refugees?” to be liberal, democratic states, which they blithely consider coextensive with Western states, unaware of their Eurocentrism. The obligations mirror refugee law and policy—states have obligations to non-refoulement (to not send people back to their persecutors) and to grant asylum. They also have limited obligations to resettle refugees who often spend years or decades in camps, unable to integrate into the local community or return to the country they fled. Here philosophers debate the ethics of resettlement with the dehumanizing language of “burden sharing” to determine the “fair share” of refugees that liberal, democratic states must resettle.

These debates are marred by epistemic injustice with refugee voices absent, ignored, or silenced. Moreover, the ethics of migration—and political philosophy more broadly—has been shaped by a “Sedentarist Contract”, analogous to Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract and Charles W. Mills’ Racial Contract. Mills describes the Racial Contract as a contract between people categorized as “white” over people categorized as “nonwhite”. The “white” subjects of the Racial Contract assign the “nonwhite” object of the contract lower civil and moral status that enables the exploitation of their bodies and the denial of social-economic opportunities.

In similar fashion, the Sedentarist Contract is a contract that citizens or their representatives exercise over migrants, granting selective inclusion for the purposes of exploitation. This is accomplished by denying migrants full legal status, making their continued residence precarious, and illegalizing people who do not have the official state sanction to be present on the territory. It is enforced by a legal regime grounded on the surveillance of immigrants and upheld through detention and deportation.

The Sedentarist Contract and the Racial and Sexual Contracts intersect—the history of immigration is closely tied to the history of racism and the construction of whiteness, which in turn are gendered. The ethics of migration needs to give closer attention to the complex ways in which mobile people are racialized, and the ways in which racist animus and institutional and structural racism affect immigrants. As is usually the case, people’s intersecting identities, particularly along lines of race, gender, and class, enable and intensify domination and oppression.

The Sedentarist Contract has ideological and normative functions, reinforcing a state-centered view of the world. In particular, it promotes the biases of methodological nationalism in which each individual is imagined to belong to a culturally homogeneous, sedentary national community, defined by territorial borders. Under this state-dominated world view, immigrants are a problem, when not a threat, and need to be contained and regulated. For political philosophy, the issue becomes how to reconcile the moral claims of refugees with the demands of Sedentarist Contract.

A more morally adequate approach would be to overturn the Sedentarist Contract and reimagine institutions so that they take mobility as a human universal and embrace the fluidity of political and cultural membership. We can use heuristic devices to help us break free of this model. Just as “seeing like a state” can reveal to us the often perverse logic of statism, scholars have attempted to see like an algorithm or see like an oil company to gain insight into how artificial intelligence or corporations intervene in the world. A way out of the Sedentarist Contract is to attempt to “think like a migrant”.

What if we rethought questions of refuge and belonging from the perspective of the most vulnerable migrants? While migrants are not a unified group and have many perspectives, most vulnerable migrants are likely to take issue with the question “what do we owe refugees?” and accompanying debates about the legitimate limits to Western states’ “generosity”. Instead, they would draw attention to the role of these states in forced displacement and how Eurocentric assumptions about their “liberal democratic” character effaces the ongoing history of foreign military intervention and colonialism.

Instead of asking who is a refugee, people escaping persecution, violence, and destitution would likely repudiate the category altogether. “Refugee” is a state-centered category that mobile people must conform to if they wish to receive protection. It creates hierarchies of deservingness, which allows limited protections for those who qualify, while justifying the deportation and detention of those states deem unworthy. Furthermore, it is easily co-opted by anti-immigrant rhetoric about “genuine refugees” and “economic migrants”. Abolishing the category of refugee would shift protection from an entitlement of people with a particular identity (refugee) to a response to human need.

“Thinking like a migrant” would encourage exploring new models of membership and political organization. Currently, political philosophers start from the perspective of citizens thought to belong to a national community and to exercise self-determination over a territory. Not surprisingly, migrants face the burden of proof when justifying their admission and inclusion. If political philosophers took the perspective of migrants, their starting point would be the slogan, “No one is illegal”. They would recognize the precarity of everyone’s lives, especially in a future in which climate change will continue to displace millions of people. Mobility rights would be a foundation for just institutions.

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This blog post is based on my APA Central 2022 paper, “What If Refugees Designed Asylum”.

Alex Sager

Alex Sager is a professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Portland State University. He is the author of Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020) and Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility: The Migrant’s-Eye View of the World (Palgrave Pivot, 2018). He also regularly teaches Philosophy for Children and is the founder of the Oregon High School Ethics Bowl.