⁂ Migrant as Chimera; Necropolitical Nosologies (Pt. I)
To eliminate the Migrant, we must define him.
Migrant: Someone having experienced or experiencing Migration
Migration: (see circular migration, climate migration, displacement, economic migration, facilitated migration, family migration, forced migration, human mobility, internal migration, international migration, irregular migration, labour migration, migrant, mixed migration, safe, orderly and regular migration, resettlement, return migration).
Borges, in a virtuoso and mercifully-brief performance of his role as gargoyle peering inescapably over Hispanic letters, stuck a lance into the ribcage of every (allegedly) bilingual dilettante in the Hispanophone when he went on record and spoke off-the-cuff about the superior nuance and richness of the English-language in comparison to his native Castilian. He described English with its kaleidoscopic registers of Norman and Anglo-Saxon (“half-Latin, half-Germanic”) decorated with plundered words from every corner of the globe with the typical, effusive admiration Latin American intellectuals pour upon examples of mestizaje that have the good sense to remain fictional, anonymous and in the past if they must insist on not remaining purely hypothetical. And yet, seeing him so confidently idealizing this hybrid (betraying a Latin American face behind an anglophile mask), I wonder if Borges ever wondered about Love.
Love (and this is not my original idea by any stretch) is arguably the most misused and abused word in the English language. We Anglophones Love scrapbooking and Love our mothers and with slight sonic modification we also Love being stuck in traffic (we understand when we are pre-speech, or are expected to, that this means its opposite through intonation or the addition of vocal fry).
What would Borges respond with if he were asked directly about Love? Or is it simply that Love hadn’t in his time collapsed from exhaustion as it lacquered everything cognizable with every intensity a person can feel or fail to feel. Perhaps he would be baffled; with an English grandmother, what could he be expected to know of Love?
From his gothic perch in Switzerland, as the final prophet who had swallowed the last bit of sagacity left in the European literary tradition, if he were asked, what would we he say about another lexical void? If we could summon the Tetranomen himself, what would he make of Migrant. Perhaps he would be baffled; ancient and eternal, what could he be expected to know of Migrants.
Like Love’s walls, the semantic borders of Migrant–naturally porous and permeable–have fully dissolved until they no longer hold any meaning With baffling imprecision the word has come to refer to just about anyone who has ever ventured beyond the district boundary of the hospital where they were born, dreamed of one day doing so, and those who never had to—that is, all people. It is stretched beyond understanding, becoming translucent as it is forced to envelop and encompass the whole of humanity gripped or spared by the asphyxiating misery of “constant” and “eternal” movement. Tumbled around by the constant and cyclical violence in our roundabout, circular contemporary political discourse, the word has been forcibly blanded and it is now as thin and round a slices of good Iberian ham.
Paradoxically, it still manages to arouse heated passions. The word doubles as a printable slur when it’s formed in the mouth of a bigot. Migrant is anonymous because of its ubiquity. The word is everywhere, increasingly inescapable in the mode of a bacterium colonizing new worlds after hitching a ride on the teeming hides of astronauts who should have known better.
This could be the sort of sardonic, passing remark that the French think is acceptable small talk at an otherwise pleasant lunch, if we weren’t now deprived of useful language at the precise moment when we might be saved by wise use of it. The true migrant, the authentic migrant, the simon-pure Migrant, slips beyond our reach and out of focus as we fumble around for adjectival phrases to rescue a unique face out of the amorphous mass of human misery in the 21st century.
It is only in moments that leave us breathless with their absurdity when the word momentarily crystalizes and asserts itself, briefly alluding to a lost essence. I recall a viral video (perhaps only among Californians but other nations seldom matter to me), of a white man in San Francisco (or Oakland? Insisting on a difference is Bay Area sophistry) stating his opposition to the City-County’s “progressive” policies. Good people of all kinds along with a few immigration lawyers, were horrified and outraged when he stated without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness that, as an East Coast transplant in Byzantium on the Bay, he too was a Migrant. We all swore we barely dodged death by pena ajena that day and called for #Just1More deportation. People were baffled at his ignorance. He was–people scolded breathlessly as if he was actually reading the tweets himself –a U.S. citizen traveling unimpeded on U.S. soil.
Unfortunately, he was not wrong. Formally, we might refer to him as an internal migrant. Yes, a Migrant. A true economic Migrant. Or a refugee of Manhattan real estate, if you’d like. An internally displaced person, as eggheads at the International Organization for Migration might say. We instinctively know why this feels wrong. The ghosts of the simon-pure Migrant haunt us and knock things over from time to time. And yet, technically and pedantically, he was not wrong.
This is the consequence of accepting only one criterion, of building a sprawling ontological category on as meaningless, universal and inevitable a phenomenon as mobility (and its antithesis, necessarily). This is the consequence of our slothful credulity.
From this one criterion, we see the proliferation of dozens, perhaps infinite and uncountable numbers, of technical, legal and academic definitions that together with the vernacular, nearly-universally pejorative terms which like a taxonomist on a tropical island attempt to catalog and name new species of the Migrant for scientific, scholarly or bureaucratic reasons. Only Nomadic peoples whose societies and culture make it impossible to speak of leaving and arriving escape the allegations of Migration. The settled have always viewed with suspicion and disdain the Nomad. The anti-Migrant. The threat they represented and the unintelligibility of their cultures are revealed to us forever in venom-laded words like barbarian or chichimeca; words that belie the brief time humanity has been fixed by grass roots to specific plots on the earth’s surface and the fear this may one day end. It is the Nomad solely by virtue of their existence that gives us a vision of the Migrant all together sharper and without the chromatic aberrations of the most advanced academics or NGOs. The Nomad’s mobility is not the Migrant’s. The Nomad is fully at ease in his flux, inhabiting his own skin as he moves through a seamless, endless world. It is the ur-form, utterly unrecognizable to us. Miserably, the Migrant’s schizophrenic mobility forever gnaws at itself, unable to accept or tolerate the delerium he is locked into. The Migrant is safe nowhere and the hot, dry winds which cast them out return to whither his roots whenever he attempts to set them down on other soils. Where the Migrant’s movement is always a rupture that leaves an uneven and jagged end as a new chapter is theoretically begun, the Nomad cannot be displaced. In fact, forced settlement and the imposition of settled agriculture and life in cities has been the civilized’s imposition and retribution upon the Nomad. The Nomad is unique among humanity because he escapes the trap of Migration. Not even the idealized indigène in European imaginations or the flesh-and-blood autochthonous peoples resisting coordinated international violence in this world escape accusations of Migration. Despite cultures and shared histories that claim with some proven veracity that they have lived on their lands since there were lands and since there were people, the descendants of settlers resort to mendacious slander to cast doubt on their permanence. Whether it is the submerged plains of Beringia, the Bab al-Mandeb, the whole Pacific or Great Rift valleys, by transitive property of the anthropological evidence of hominid expansion, even indigenous people are transmuted into the Migrant.
These settlers, removed generations and in some cases centuries from the most recent ancestor who left the exhausted, nitrogen-longing, and blood-soaked fields of Europe frequently claim the Migrant for their own purposes. Here Migration stands for its opposite. It is a stroke of rhetorical genius—one often reinvented with great cleverness and spoken with great trepidation as if it was being discovered for the first time each time—among those on the right to insist that everyone is a Migrant. In their use, it no longer need only refer to a people in motion or who have once dared move, but also to those who do not have to. “I’m a migrant too,” says the East Coast millionaire.“I’m a migrant too; my grandfather was Swedish,” says the native Minnesotan. “I’m a migrant too, half-American on my mom’s side and half-German on my dad’s,” says the Irish-American without a single German ancestor. These crimes against language and truth happen every day and we learn and teach each other that it is bad etiquette to correct someone in the midst of committing their crime. It’s not worth it endure a debate when truth here is a bourgeois conceit. The poor cannot afford it, the rich do not need it. The Migrant doesn’t know what it is and will lay eyes on it only in his final moments.
They are of course lazily and perhaps unknowingly imitating more sophisticated assassins. Phrases in the greatest hits medleys of settler-colonies like nation of migrants or children of migrants, are the apogée and most productive impetus of this pogrom of semantics. Here the word is used to establish permanence and belonging, and it is put on permanent display as part of the exhibit evincing the kind and liberal attitude of a nation that builds camps because the déportations don’t happen fast enough (yet). Settler-colonists now standing guard in militias are the Migrant. They now watch over the razor-wire which has replaced the chalk lines their ancestors once arrived at with scalps bloodied by Frisian or Neapolitan lice. It is because of this, exactly, that they feel the right to claim the Migrant.
The logic is childlike; Migrant worn in the style of nationality or ethnicity, an essence that is perduring and that one can wear when it is in fashion and put back when it becomes démodé. It’s like Whiteness: intangible, heritable property handed down from generation to generation mostly automatically and invisibly so that it appears chromosomal to the heir. The ancestors have done the work and the descendants inherit the benefit of ill gotten gains and recount the travails of their ancestors to cloak themselves in empathetic narratives to absolve themselves as ambitions to redistribute the bounty grow louder or to dodge the mere suggestion they might find it slightly less ghoulish to feel just a dose of shame or remorse.
Nations of Migrants are, beyond doubt, those with the most restrictive anti-Migrant laws and the rhetoric is no less a part of the apparatus of detention and deportation than border fences, detention centers or kangaroo courts. “I am no different from you,” they say as they send teenagers on death flights back to the gangs which threatened to quarter them or use their entrails as street signage. The effect is to conceal the power dynamic at play, the effect is to sanitize the rank hypocrisy of the act and to anesthetize us to the obscenity of the libidinal desire hiding in plain site of anti-Migrant politics.
These strategies of equivocation form one cause of death in the autopsy of meaning. The other, is of course, the insatiable hunger for specificity, technicality and shorthands of those great beige Gorgons: Academia, Law, Bureaucracy and Statistics. These are the most clearly delineated sub-meanings, and many brilliant minds spend lifetimes attempting to refine and produce census counts of these homunculi-Migrants. Some brave, foolish ones, even attempt to make a moral case for why they should be spared the rack other migrants surely deserve and will be stretched on.
By no means the first, but the most significant has been the apotheosis in recent memory of the Refugee; the blessèd-Migrant. A peculiar and powerful talisman protects them—the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. From this grimoire, they claim a right to exist and by small miracle the claim is mostly respected. These unique rights were designed for the survivors of Hitler’s mass displacement-by-hunger in Holland and Eisenhower’s firestorms and carpet bombings in Germany. The victorious powers’ need to ensure viable states anchored in ethnic hegemony required spot-treating the continent’s German stains, relocating millions to a new, Germany forcibly made noble and only as large as the allies’ suspicions would tolerate (even then they were fearful enough to cleave it into misshapen halves). Mass movement on this scale had been unseen; the idea seems somewhat innocent and naïve now.
Jesus said to the Magdalene—noli me tangere. The Convention exhorted Europe and the Australians— ne pas refouler.
States may decide to be more benevolent, carving out additional rights for others outside the range of the convention. But, they always in effect attempt to recreate the Refugee’s protections without the unanimity and universality of the Refugee’s sacrosanct rights. The Refugee is the origin species in the fractal taxonomy of the Migrant. He reveals the motivations that divide this amorphous and ill-defined population and dispels the romantic pretenses of society and State that have always been polite obfuscation. The Refugee Convention simultaneously crystalized the figure of the unauthorized-Migrant, the Abel to Refugee Cain, and births all its mutant euphemisms: Clandestine, Illegal, Irregular, Sans-papiers, Tago ng Tago, Mojado. By making inviolable the enumerated rights of refugees, those of others who did not meet the technical criteria and thus were not protected from the state’s caprice and rejection were subsequently easily and gleefully jailed, tortured and exiled.
The Refugee is the Rosetta Stone that reveals that there is nothing complex, noble or arcane about our infinite categorization of the Migrant. The Refugee dispels the inanity of mobility as sole criterion, they reveal instead that sole criterion has always been State Authority, the raw power of the dominant political class born down upon the world’s sarcacens and huns. Setting aside momentarily the Clandestine or Irregular Migrant, there are those migrants who exist outside the law or who simply haven’t yet been legislated into the regime of removals, detentions and deportations. These include migrants whose initial entry may have been sanctioned, presumably under the auspices of the Refugee Convention or other national schemes but who may have failed to demonstrate to the suit-wearing mandarins that their specific plight satisfied criteria. There are the others who due to misfortunate or the fracases of life characteristic of transitory, rootless existence may be afflicted by disqualification and are marooned in a country which casts them outside the scope of benevolence but who cannot set upon them the mechanisms of deportation due to technical or geopolitical considerations which render the she-wolf motherlands that made them orphans unfit parents for renewed custody. This happens often with those whose nations cast them out during civil strife or wars, but whose geopolitical value isn’t high enough to guarantee more than 40-120 days to pack bags and make arrangements once the conflict has —dubiously— been declared finished by the relevant International agencies or by the national department with the corresponding remit. Despite their often decades-long residencies in countries where they have given birth to children who do not speak their grandmothers’ languages, they live on the knife-edge waiting for the day political concerns of the local kind see them as fat, easy prey for an outlet of nativist rage and the craft of adversarial politics.
There are those who are twice unlucky—beyond the benevolence of the state but not beyond the psychopathic field of vision of its middle classes. The undocumented Migrant. This unauthorized Migrant enjoys no such protections and instead receives a promise from the host State, and–through the mirror games of diplomacy every other state, including their own–that they will be violated, denigrated and eliminated if need be. These migrants are defined largely by their erroneous conjugation of the Refugee: the forces which cast them out are too novel to be drawn within the pastiche of mid-century crimes against humanity and geopolitical needs which shaped the Convention. Millions are born with a perverse planned obsolescence, waiting for the day they will become vestigial people whose labor is superfluous simply because they had the great misfortune of having been brought to light in great, numerous nations.
Host nations bend their laws into unintelligible knots and inject their politics with poisons simply to deny the unauthorized-Migrant rights and benefits. I have often doubted whether this was not a type of immune response. As if, like the nomad, the unauthorized-Migrant was himself incompatible with civilization on a planet without corals and without glaciers.
The process by which Migrant abolished its linguistic borders, I dare surmise, is not accidental. Across the world, the real, authentic, genuine, undeniable, indisputable, subaltern, simon-pure Migrant is now at the mercy of another historical (pessimistically, final) right-wing turn which has enveloped all policies and priorities that involve them or implicate them as the would-be eugenicists and génocidaires on the right increasingly outfox a stupid, quixotic left that still thinks Emma Lazarus or monkish legalese could move an embittered, but otherwise probably still sensible public that can’t find time or use for its paeans. It can’t be that this deportation of meaning has happened in parallel to the era of mass deportation; it surely is part of it.
Indeed, emptiness and imprecision has been a goal, not always stated or consciously moved towards but detectable, deeply nested in gradual labor, fruitful labor of the right clamoring for a rescission of the post-Nazi, post-refugee convention graces temporarily granted to the Migrant.
What is left is the Migrant as Chimera. As we have ceded ground and accepted the universality and inevitability of migration, the normalization has seemingly contradictorily made the true, authentic, simon-pure Migrant an aberrant beast whose humanity is nowhere to be found between the goat’s horns or the snake’s fangs.
The world is now one of Chimeras.
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The Chimeras are at the Charsian gates with a mirror that will reveal the true face of the world.
