Migrations & Diaspora — A Turning Point?
The Lepage Center’s 2021–22 programming theme is “Turning Points in History.” To deepen our understanding of significant transitions in the present, the six-month series looks to past turning points to impart lessons for today’s world.
On Thursday, February 24, 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, triggering a massive refugee crisis. Nearly 2.5 million Ukrainians, most of them women and children, attempted to escape the country, with the vast majority crossing the border into Poland. The situation in Ukraine joins myriad examples throughout history of people fleeing unlivable violence and instability. Large-scale migration has increasingly become a topic of global concern as the modern conception of the nation-state, with strict borders and a uniform cultural identity, comes into conflict with the mass movement of people.
What can we learn from the long history of migratory movements and refugee crises to understand the ongoing crisis in Ukraine? What factors drive people to leave their homelands? How do nations and institutions respond when confronted with migration? To explore this topic, the Lepage Center hosted two roundtable events in conversation with experts on migration and displacement to understand the way the movement of people impacts our world.
During each event, scholars discussed migration in different broad geographic and chronological contexts: World War I and Central America. In the first roundtable event moderated by Dr. Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández (Villanova University), panelists Dr. Leisy Abrego (UCLA), Dr. Jason de León (UCLA), and Dr. Amelia Frank-Vitale (Princeton University) discussed the impact of U.S. interventionist policies on Central American migration and the intense violence, hardship, and discrimination migrants face as they travel to the US. During the second roundtable, moderated by Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr (Villanova University), Dr. Emily Baughan (University of Sheffield), Dr. Reena Goldthree (Princeton University), and Dr. Ronald Suny (University of Michigan) considered WWI as a turning point in the history of migration, international humanitarianism, and global diasporas. The scholars identified commonalities in the history of migration and displacement across space and time and offered new lenses of analysis for us to use in conceptualizing the consequences of the mass movement of people in the past, present, and future.
World War I and the Armenian Genocide
Migration is deeply involved with questions of identity and community as displaced people work to maintain their culture in a new context. From 1915-to 1916, the government in the Ottoman Empire began the massacre and deportation of approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the Empire. Dr. Ronald Suny, an expert on Armenian history and a member of the small but vibrant Armenian diaspora, offers up a simple explanation of the concept of diaspora. As Dr. Suny explains “Members of a diaspora have some sense of connection real or imagined to their homeland.” He continues, “They still feel a link between where they came from and where they’re now living outside of the homeland… That’s what diaspora is ultimately. It is an attempt to create a kind of imagined community — a nation outside of the national homeland.”
Dr. Reena Goldthree examines how the military serves as a unique engine for migration. Dr. Goldthree added to the discussion of diaspora, explaining that the African diaspora holds a “sense of mutual destiny even if separated geographically… a sense of lateral connection beyond the homeland…it’s not just a sense of connection to the African continent but to Black communities as well.” During WWI, thousands of Black soldiers from Canada, Europe, the United States, Puerto Rico, and the British and French Caribbean colonies enlisted and converged on the Western Front. Millions of Africans also contributed to the war effort in a variety of roles, though most served as laborers. According to Dr. Goldthree, meeting fellow Black soldiers coming from colonized spaces caused these men “to understand that the violence and inequality of imperialism were not simply local phenomena. They were global phenomena.” The Great War catalyzed massive shifts in population as people from all over the world met and diverged, fled violence or marched toward it, some resettling permanently in new places they had experienced as a result of the international conflict.
Migration is often a deeply racialized experience bound up in imperialism and capitalism. During WWI, this was not only reflected in the racist persecution of Black soldiers described by Dr. Goldthree, but it was also deeply embedded in the aims of early humanitarian organizations. Dr. Emily Baughan links the rise of humanitarian organizations to the influx of refugees and displaced children after World War I. Humanitarian aid organizations considered stability and prosperity essential conditions for international peace and collaboration; these groups worked diligently with the League of Nations to solve what they perceived to be a severe problem of statelessness, particularly among Russian refugees. White refugee children were seen as a prime opportunity to develop ideal, productive citizens who could be easily assimilated into various nations, cultures, and workplaces. Though there are undeniably altruistic elements of humanitarian aid, it is necessary to recognize the distinct preference to rescue and assimilate white refugees in the Western world — a tendency that is glaringly reflected in the Ukrainian crisis today.
Central America
The scholars in the Central American roundtable provided clear evidence that violence, repression, foreign intervention, and economics are primary causes of migration. In a 2015 paper, Dr. Amelia Frank-Vitale states that solving the migrant crisis “will require addressing the root causes in the migrants’ home countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Chief among the motivations is the violence ordinary people face in daily life thanks to the impunity with which criminal gangs operate.” Dr. Leisy Abrego describes how the public assassination of beloved El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero on March 24, 1980, catalyzed a wave of migration as approximately 400,000 people fled the intense violence and political corruption that had taken over the country. Romero was a determined advocate for the voiceless in El Salvador, denouncing the wave of violence carried out by the country’s right-wing regime. His murder and the subsequent chaos sent a clear message to citizens that they were not safe. The result was a mass exodus.
US intervention has had a significant negative effect on Central American migration. US involvement in Central American conflicts created a highly militarized and imperialistic environment in countries like Honduras, which the US used as a base to launch counter-insurgency efforts in a failed attempt to “stabilize” and “control” the region. Dr. Frank-Vitale specifically highlights the US government’s support for fraudulent elections held in Honduras in 2009 and 2017 as events that significantly damaged the exercise of democracy and further contributed to migration out of the country.
The speakers in this roundtable also discussed how Capitalism was a major driver of migration, especially with the onset of US interventions worsening economic conditions in Central America. Trade agreements brokered by the US like NAFTA and the Central American Free Trade Agreement damage local economies and cause the price of goods to plummet, which in turn decreases wages for workers. “It’s given people very few options for making a living and those basically revolve around making Levi’s for substandard wages…US trade agreements in these places make economies unsustainable for those who are on the ground there, which makes blue jeans cheaper for Americans but also makes life unlivable for Central Americans who then have to migrate in order to find a living wage,” Dr. Jason de León explained.
Dr. Leisy Abrego expanded on the intersection of migration and racism, stating that Central Americans are too often characterized by the US government as a “crisis” or a national threat and are repeatedly described in terms of violence, danger, crime, and political radicalism. The illegalization of human beings through US immigration policy serves as a justification for using harsh methods of deterrence at the southern border, including detention and the separation of families. This suffering is compounded by the perilous journey migrants are forced to undergo to reach the border. Migration may be sparked by the desire for a better life, but too often, the journey begins with the necessity to escape traumatic circumstances — no matter how difficult and dangerous the way out may be.
Ukraine
Many complex factors drive migration — violence, political instability, climate change, and the search for economic opportunities chief among them. Ultimately, migration is a fundamental part of the human experience, and it is likely to become an ever more salient issue as the planet changes. Discussions of migration are particularly rich with comparison in the present moment, as the world witnesses the current refugee crisis unfolding in Ukraine. The wave of migrants fleeing Ukraine has been met with a smaller force of people arriving in the country to join the conflict, paralleling Dr. Goldthree’s statements about the military serving as a prominent source of migration, moving people throughout the world for the purposes of conducting war or maintaining peace. On February 27, Poland’s Border Guard claimed that at least 22,000 people have crossed the border into Ukraine, many of them Ukrainians returning to the country to aid in the fight against Russia.
Another commonality can be found in the racial dynamics of the refugee crisis. Just as in the early history of humanitarian organizations, the desire to provide aid is intrinsically affected by racial bias. The overwhelmingly supportive response from Europe and the United States toward Ukrainian refugees differs greatly from their treatment of refugees and asylum seekers from Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. The Syrian refugee crisis alone is ample evidence of the prejudice and discrimination on display. Problematic media coverage emphasizes the “civility” and similarities between Ukrainians and other Western nations, implying that they are set apart from refugees fleeing other war-torn countries. Similar coverage, along with harsh policies, also affects the treatment of refugees on our own southern border.
Of course, it is not wrong to be heartbroken in the face of violence and cruelty. We should welcome those who are displaced with all the kindness and care we can muster. The problem arises when our acceptance of suffering people is contingent upon their perceived similarity or difference from us.
RESOURCES
World War I:
Overview of the Armenian Genocide
Baughan, Emily. Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism and the British Empire, 1915–1970. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 2020.
Baughan, Emily. International Adoption and Anglo-American Internationalism, c. 1918–1925. Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2018), 181–217.
Goldthree, Reena N. “‘Vive La France!’: British Caribbean soldiers and interracial intimacies on the Western Front.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 3 (2016) doi:10.1353/cch.2016.0040.
Goldthree, Reena N. “‘A Greater Enterprise than the Panama Canal’: Migrant Labor and Military Recruitment in the World War I–Era Circum-Caribbean.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 13, no. 3 (2016): 57–82.
Goldthree, Reena N. “Afro-Cuban Intellectuals and the New Negro Renaissance: Bernardo Ruiz Suárez’s The Color Question in the Two Americas.” In New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, edited by Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, 41–58. Northwestern University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7tq4rv.6.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2017.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Central America:
Abrego, Leisy J. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Abrego, Leisy J., Shannon Gleeson, Tony Payan, and Erika de la Garza. “Workers, Families, and Immigration Policies.” Undecided Nation: Political Gridlock and the Immigration Crisis 2014: 209–228.
ABREGO, LEISY J., and CECILIA MENJÍVAR. “IMMIGRANT LATINA MOTHERS AS TARGETS OF LEGAL VIOLENCE.” International Journal of Sociology of the Family 37, no. 1 (2011): 9–26.
Abrego, Leisy J. “Legal Consciousness of Undocumented Latinos: Fear and Stigma as Barriers to Claims-Making for First- and 1.5-Generation Immigrants.” Law & Society Review 45, no. 2 (2011): 337.
de Leon, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015.
Frank‐Vitale, Amelia. 2020. “Stuck in Motion: Inhabiting the Space of Transit in Central American Migration.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2020.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Such a Thing as the American Dream: On Immigration, Affect, and the Election of Donald Trump.” Public Anthropologist 2, no. 2 (2020): 158–176.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. 2019. “Rolling the Windows Up: On (Not) Researching Violence and Strategic Distance.” Geopolitics, September 9, 2019, 1–20.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Looming Crisis: What the United States Must Do to Address the Plight of Migrants from Central America.” Institute of Current World Affairs, 2015.
Ukraine:
Ukraine: Information and Ways to Help, compiled by the Lepage Center.
Bayoumi, Moustafa. “They are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’: the racist coverage of Ukraine.” The Guardian, 2022.
United Nations. Ukraine war now ‘apocalyptic’ humanitarians warn, in call for safe access
“The Times: Daily News from the L.A. Times:” Media bias, and refugees ‘like us.’ Podcast episode.
The UN Refugee Agency: “Syria Refugee Crisis Explained,” 2021.
