Abstract
As globalization continues to be the predominant mode of international economic and political interaction, the questions of immigration and refugee status have taken on a new importance. The United States’ border with Mexico and the external borders of the European Union have become sites for a protracted struggle over the creation of “smart borders,” or borders that allow the passage of qualified labor and economic goods while preventing the crossing of unskilled labor, drug traffic, and terrorism. However, as these border policing techniques have intensified, a new logic of immigration and refugee enforcement has arisen that has produced a de facto collapse between the foreign and domestic policies regarding inclusion in the state. This indistinct border, resembling what Didier Bigo (2001) has referred to as the Mobius ribbon of internal and external security, has in turn intensified the sense of crisis surrounding immigration and refugee policing in the public eye.
This research will address a recent event, where an ethnic and cultural minority – the Roma – living in France were identified as a security and public health threat, detained, and finally deported. European Union agreements allow for the free movement and settlement of all citizens of every member state. The French government argued that the Roma had the right to free movement, but not settlement. The entire situation revealed a problem that has been haunting Europe: even while viewing itself as the ultimate experiment in tolerance and inclusion after the trauma of World War II and the Holocaust, deep-seated prejudices remain. The Roma, known in the popular European mind as Gypsies, remain one of the last cultural and ethnic minorities against whom it is acceptable to discriminate. The existence of a relatively small number of recent Roma immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria is used to produce the entire population as lawless, nomadic, and as a general threat to the social body.
The Roma expulsion of 2010 is a clear case of the crisis of borders ushered in by globalization. However, we have very little understanding of how the processes that produced the Roma as a sort of ‘internal immigrant’ interacted with national and international law and policy to create the conditions for the expulsion. This research project will expose these processes and interactions by primarily producing a pair of intersecting histories, one policy and law driven, one politically and culturally driven. Coupled with selected interviews and fieldwork, the research will develop into a robust case illuminating the problems and processes of border security in a globalized world.
Project Overview
In July of 2010 the French police shot a young Romany man to death. The French authorities claimed that the 22-year-old Luigi Duquenet did not stop his car at a police checkpoint, and in the process of running the barricade knocked over a gendarme. The gendarmes opened fire and killed Duquenet. In response, dozens of Roma (often referred to as Gypsies) rioted in Saint Aignan, wielding hatchets and iron bars as they confronted authorities at a local police station. President Sarkozy’s government soon responded with a “crackdown on illegal camps,” claiming that the camps were “sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, for prostitution and crime” (BBC “Q&A,” 2010). The crackdown was ostensibly aimed at all illegal encampments in France, but in practice and policy targeted the Roma specifically (Bennhold and Castle 2010; Willsher 2010). As several scholars have pointed out over a number of years, most Roma in the European Union are citizens of the countries in which they reside, including France, and live in permanent housing, not in camps or semi-permanent housing (Cahn & Guild 2008); however, a minority of Roma are recent arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria who do not always appear ‘normalized.’ What is unique in the current situation is how the Roma are collectively being produced by the French state as an immigration enforcement issue, disregarding numerous agreements, treaties, and policy statements by the European Union, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament that state that all member state citizens have the right to movement and settlement.
Sarkozy has argued that the expulsions were to be voluntary repatriations, but as numerous media accounts have shown, many Roma have been ‘agreeing’ to leave France quite literally as their makeshift homes are bulldozed to the ground or wheeled away by contracted companies (Davies 2010). Voluntary expulsion has included a plane ticket to Romania or Bulgaria and 300 euro per adult and 100 euro per child (BBC, “France,” 2010).
The controversy has raised numerous questions about human rights, citizenship, and immigration. This research project fills a gap in the current conversations, though, by focusing on how immigration enforcement tactics are being mobilized against a population that has many established rights, including the rights to free movement and settlement within the European Union generally and France specifically. These tactics have the effect of freezing populations in place, even while the EU continues to construct an identity for itself as founded on the free movement of people, goods, and services. This expansion of tactics typically used against an outside, non-EU citizens, has been turned onto a population on the inside, highlighting the interpenetration of domestic and foreign policies in the context of post-9/11 securitization (Bigo 2001; Coleman 2008). The Mershon Center grant will allow me to investigate the specific practices that make up this turn toward domestic/foreign policy indistinction in the context of the Roma expulsions.
Project Significance
This project fits with the Mershon Center theme of “the ideas, identities, and decisional processes that affect security.” I argue that the indistinction between foreign and domestic policies, especially those pertaining to human mobility, are predicated upon notions of nationhood and otherness that produce resentment and antagonism. Understanding the political, cultural, and economic constructions of this self/other relationship are crucial for addressing contemporary climates of securitization. Further, it is important because there is a gap in the current literature on immigration and security studies. Much of the literature either treats immigration as an abstract theoretical issue, privileging discussions of rights and belonging in the abstract (Calavita 2005; Walters 2004), or through policy analysis, privileging what governments say rather than what they do (Dauvergne 2008; Cornelisse 2010). An emerging body of literature (Bigo 2001; Coleman 2008; Mountz 2010), of which this study would be a part, focuses on the nexus among these two areas with an added focus on what governments actually do: in other words, focus on the abstract notions of political philosophy, the aspirational/rhetorical activity of policy, and the practices of immigration policing.
The focus on the state as a practice (Mountz 2010), rather than strictly an idea, brings discussions of immigration policing and securitization out of the realm of rhetorical battles and into the material study of how the nation-state is constructed. Rather than following the lead of much established research which foregrounds a search for an originary position from which to construct an argument for or against immigration – and therefore engage in an endless back and forth between the privileging of human rights or national security – the focus of the proposed research on the practices of security, in the context of the French Roma expulsion, is the feedback loop of the abstract imagined community/concrete human individual. Situating the research in a way that engages this loop properly addresses the complexity of contemporary immigration security.
Research Design and Methods
Given the context outlined above, I propose to do the following:
1) archival research,
2) map access to the government ministries relevant to the Roma expulsions,
3) interviews with non-governmental organizations working on Roma rights issues,
4) site visits and fieldwork.
I will outline in more detail each aspect of the project below. Overall, I propose to spend up to twelve weeks in Paris, France. The time frame for the project would be between September and December 2011 – late enough to accommodate the French holiday month of August, wherein access to archives and interview subjects would be difficult. French language is a necessary skill for completing this research: I have been taking French courses, and will continue to do so until I embark on this research trip.
Archival research in the Archives Nationales (at Le Hôtel de Soubise and Le Hôtel de Rohan in the Le Marais district in Paris for documents before 1958 and the Centre des Archives Contemporaines in Fontainebleau for the period after 1958) will result in the production of two related but distinct historical projects. The first, a legal history, will focus on the legal and policy decisions that led to the expulsion of Roma from France in late summer and early fall 2010. This will include European Union and French national policies, and will target the longest term possible to draw connections and disjunctures between previous eras and the present. The second is a political history, and will focus more broadly on conceptions of French and Roma identities as constructed in the French media, scholarship, and literature. This dual trajectory is possible, based on overlapping sources and the likelihood of archival availability. It is also desirable, in that having a history of law and policy as well as a one of culture and identity will provide a robust conception of the genesis and execution of the Roma expulsion that highlights gaps and convergences among rhetoric and practice, aspiration and material reality.
For the present project’s time frame, it is unreasonable to expect to interview representatives from the government ministries pertinent to the Roma expulsions. First, the events are so recent as to render any outsider enquiry immediately problematic, and will most likely position interviewees in an unnecessarily defensive or antagonistic stance. Second, the French bureaucracy is highly complex, and the proposed time frame will not be long enough to map the terrain, build trust, and conduct interviews. So, the current project will focus on mapping the French bureaucracy – especially the offices of the Foreign Minister, Defense Minister, Immigration Minister, and the Ministry of Culture, the office charged with maintaining and protecting French identity – and on making inroads toward building trust and rapport, to make future interviews possible.
Where I have already begun to lay the groundwork for interviews is with representatives from relevant non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on Roma rights and immigration issues. I have already made contact with a number of people who can help this research succeed. Interviews will be semi-structured, with a small number of core questions that will be asked of all interview subjects; however, the desire is that each interview will yield emergent themes and ideas that will spin off in unique ways, opening up spaces and questions that cannot be anticipated in advance.
Finally, several site visits are proposed to known Roma encampment locations, both closed and active camps. These site visits are crucial for understanding the terrain and locales of the camps, as one of the primary objections to the Roma camps voiced during the expulsion debates was their appearance as public health hazards and eyesores. Understanding the locations of the encampments past and present will help shed light on the legal and political dynamics of how the Roma have and have not integrated into French society, adding another layer of complexity to the histories undertaken in the archives.
Anticipated Products
This pilot project will generate data for the core of my dissertation research in the Department of Comparative Studies, and will serve as preliminary research for a successful National Science Foundation dissertation improvement grant. I will apply for the NSF grant in February 2012. I also anticipate publishing at least one peer-reviewed article in a top journal in my interdisciplinary fields as a result of my research.
Budget
I am requesting a 12-week budget, totaling $7205, to be spent in the following ways:
| Item |
Cost |
|
Item |
Cost |
| International Flight |
$1000 |
|
Housing in Paris |
$250/week
$3000 total |
| Mandatory Insurance Office of International Affairs |
$33/month
$100 total |
|
Food |
$200/week
$2400 total |
| Local Transportation |
$200 |
|
Archive Expenses (including photocopies) |
$500 |
| |
|
|
TOTAL: |
$7200 |
Bibliography
BBC. 2010. “Q&A: France Roma expulsions.” BBC Online. October 19: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11027288.
BBC. 2010. “France sends Roma Gypsies back to Romania.” BBC Online. August 20: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11020429.
Bennhold, Katrin and Stephen Castle. 2010. “EU calls France’s Roma expulsions a ‘disgrace’.” New York Times. September 14: www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/world/europe/15roma.html.
Bigo, Didier. 2001. “The Mobius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies).” in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 91-116.
Calavita, Kitty. 2005. Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Cahn, Claude and Elspeth Guild. “Recent Migration of Roma in Europe.” commissioned by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights (10 December 2008).
Coleman, Mathew. 2008. “Between Public Policy and Foreign Policy: US Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Immigrant.” Urban Geography 29(1): 4-28.
Cornelisse, Galina. 2010. Immigration Detention and Human Rights: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. Boston, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Dauvergne, Catherine. 2008. Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Davies, Lizzy. 2010. “France pushes forward Roma deportations: ‘They are trying to get rid of us all’.” The Guardian. August 19: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/19/france-begins-roma-deportations.
Mountz, Alison. 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Walters, William. 2004. “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.” Citizenship Studies 8(3): 237-260.
Willsher, Kim. 2010. “France’s deportation of Roma shown to be illegal in leaked memo, say critics.” The Guardian. September 13: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/13/france-deportation-roma-illegal-memo.
