States and the Stateless: How Nationalism Drives Xenophobia and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
By Estelle Erwich
Whenever I lead any educational presentation for GRMR, I like to start off by asking the group what they think of when they hear the words refugee or migrant. I encourage the group to consider the images, news stories, and identifiers they have seen in media and political discussions. Without fail, the discussion always turns to the ways in which the 2016 election and the administration which followed changed the idea of who refugees and migrants are. Asylum seekers became illegal aliens, and migration a threat to the socioeconomic success of the country. This disdain for refugees and migrants does not stem simply from a place of xenophobia or isolationism, however. At their core, the ideas which underscore the rising trends of nationalism in this country are deeply incompatible with the existence of refugees and displaced or stateless people as a whole. The anti-immigrant rhetoric which surrounds us now is a direct manifestation of this.
Typically in Western media, it is unlikely to find a description of refugee movement as anything other than a “crisis,” or a discussion on refugee admittance without heavy emphasis on the “risk” it surely poses. The refugee is the other, the outsider, and deemed to be definitively incompatible with the political and legal congruence of a nation. This disdain for the refugee is not new, but a recurring trend that has grown with the political influence of the modern nation state. Within the nation state, “rights… are attributable to man only in the degree to which he is the immediately vanishing presupposition of the citizen,” (Agamben 117). Nationality is tied to recognition of one’s humanity, and without a claim to citizenship one is “unprotected by any specific law or convention, and are nothing but human beings,” (Arendt 118). Under these conditions, the distinction between what Giorgio Agamben would describe as ‘bare’ life ordained by God, zoe, and political life structured by man, bios, fails to exist. Individuals are therefore defined by their relationship to the state. One is designated as either an insider or outsider, entitled to rights or not, depending on their status as a citizen. A stateless person such as the refugee, however, subsists outside of this binary.
By existing outside of the state’s approval through citizenship, the refugee claims an autonomy that is not reliant on the state, superseding its authority. The nation state’s ability to define and identify its population is the basis of its claim to sovereignty, and therefore necessary for its survival. The refugee is a direct threat to its authority by “breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, [and throwing] into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty,” (Agamben 115). Existing without its permission and irreverent to its authority, the refugee threatens the nation state and questions its principles by exposing its claim to sovereignty to be arbitrary at best, and fictitious at worst. Therefore, it is in the interest of nationalist, authoritarian, and facsist regimes to find ways to exclude, dehumanize, and delegitimize refugees and other stateless people from their socio-political landscapes.
Though refugees pose a threat to its very legitimacy, the nation state cannot explicitly act out of the disdain they have for the stateless. The same neoliberalism which built the modern nation state also underscored the advent of supranational political institutions, human rights treaties, and general political guidelines which modern states agree to abide by internationally. While these structures are ultimately used for the economic and political interests of Western powers, they also maintain international law and humanitarian standards for which they were created. Due to international pressure to uphold the human rights of refugees such as was outlined in Geneva in 1951, the nation state is forced to interact with and provide for refugees who seek asylum within their borders. Throughout the following examples, state’s policies and actions towards refugees, whether obvious or implicit, reflect the state’s disdain for the refugees and the perceived threat to the state’s sovereignty.
The role of humanitarian aid provider, which the state is often pressured into, creates what Agamben describes as the “paradox of human rights.” This paradox occurs when the state’s system, which reserves human rights only for those defined by citizenship, encounters stateless people whose claim to human rights is based on nothing but their bare humanity. This creates a crisis for the state, as they must either refuse the refugees on the grounds of their lack of statehood, exposing their ability to uphold human rights as conditional, or grant refugees protection, admitting that their system of sociopolitical identification is superficial and arbitrary. This upsets the fragile balance of the nation state, as “the figure that should have perfectly incarnated the rights of man, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of the concept,” (Agamben 116). The paradox of human rights forces the nation state to acknowledge the humanity of a person who exists outside of their authority, or fail to meet international standards for a modern and humane nation (116).
Once the state begins to interact with refugees, their attitude towards them can often be explicitly seen through anti-refugee sentiment. However, this attitude can also be seen in far less obvious ways, as it is embedded into all aspects of the state’s responses to refugees, including humanitarian efforts. Ironically, humanitarianism can be used as a political tool for the state’s purposes when humanitarianism is depoliticized (Chimni 249). The nation state measures human value in political means, so separating politics from humanitarianism is an effort to further dehumanize the refugee. This step of removing the validity of a person’s identity by depoliticizing them allows states to act towards them without legality, accountability, or consequence. Refugees can be seen as a humanitarian cause, or a problem to fix, but not as a person in the way that a citizen would be.
Depoliticization can also manifest itself through the explicitly negative dehumanization of stateless people. This occurs when referring to immigrants as ‘aliens,’ detaining asylum seekers in inhumane conditions, or asserting that refugee admittance poses an innate danger to a country’s native population. Most importantly, there is a clear distinction made between those who can claim citizenship or recognition by the government, and those who do not. At its most extreme, this tactic of dehumanization has long been used by fascist and totalitarian regimes. For example, in the Nazi internment camps of WWII (which, notably, originated as refugee camps), “one of the few rules that the Nazis faithfully observed… was that it was only after the Jews and gypsies were completely denationalized… could they be sent to extermination camps,” (Agamben 117). Within the nation state, denationalization (or, emphasis on one’s lack of nationality as a whole) is the first step towards dehumanization, as within the nationalist system there can be the use of “discrimination as the great social weapon” (Arendt 118) to justify future violence on the basis of social identity.
Finally, the relationship between the nation state and the refugee can be seen through the state’s manipulation of displaced people as a political pawn. Whether through policy decisions, national attitudes, or even language choices, the state takes advantage of refugee populations in an attempt to reestablish a sense of authority. The displaced person may test the very framework of the nation state, but their presence can be strategically manipulated by the state in order to reinforce a sense of nationalism. A key feature of nationalism is its “us vs. them” mentality, and refugees become an ideal candidate for the role of the latter. By referring to them as illegal immigrants and potential criminals instead of refugees, the state can frame them as a threat and outsider to the population, which encourages the nation’s trust in their own identity and government. Even the referral of refugee movements as being an emergency or refugee “crisis” is purposeful - it indicates that their statelessness is an abnormal and unacceptable state of being, a problem to be fixed, and a burden upon the state. Even if the refugee is granted asylum, they are still treated as an outsider and ostracized by their own communities (Arendt 119). The practice of framing the stateless person as a common enemy to nationally rally against allows the state to use refugee identity as a political pawn to help them maintain control on their monopoly of national identity.
The contemporary nation state finds itself in a political landscape that threatens to undermine its claim to omnipotence. Nations are as reliant on the subjugation and categorization of their people as they are on their physical borders. Yet just as physical borders are becoming increasingly obsolete to the forces of globalization, the ever-growing presence of stateless people, such as the refugee, threatens to disrupt the state’s ability to control and categorize its population, and consequently maintain its control. The identity of the refugee, which comes into direct conflict with the ideas of identity which the nation state espouses, threatens to dismantle its entire claim to sovereignty by proving it to be arbitrary. The response of the state to refugees, through explicit anti-immigrant sentiment and less obvious manipulations of humanitarianism, is a direct response to this perceived threat. In the ever-globalizing landscape of contemporary politics, where borders and citizenships become increasingly obsolete, the refugee questions the principles of pre-existing political systems while simultaneously representing the new “central figure of our political history,” (Agamben 117).
But this does not just matter theoretically, as these political occurrences also impact how policy and media treat the refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants who live in this country. Regardless of the facts, such as how seeking asylum is legal and a human right (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14) or cities which house immigrants are proven to have lower crime rates (Adelman et al), the political implications of increasing nationalist sentiment are rising rates of xenophobia and anti-immigrant and refugee rhetoric. In order to protect and support the refugee and immigrant communities around us, our actions cannot stop with the different resources we can provide to them. We must be actively aware of the politics at play around us and how they drastically impact the lives of millions who call this country home, and intentionally involve ourselves in changing the political rhetoric and conversation surrounding immigration today.
Works Cited
Adelman, Robert, et al. “Urban Crime Rates and the Changing Face of Immigration: Evidence across Four Decades.” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016, pp. 52–77., https://doi.org/10.1080/15377938.2016.1261057.
Agamben, Giorgio. “We Refugees.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 49, no. 2, 1995, pp. 114–119., doi:10.1080/00397709.1995.10733798.
Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, 2017, pp. 110–119., doi:10.4324/9781315092478-1.
Chimni, B. S. “Globalization, Humanitarianism and the Erosion of Refugee Protection.” Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2000, pp. 243–263., doi:10.1093/jrs/13.3.243.