Is violence enough to explain emergent migrations?
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, United States
Migrations have beginnings. There is specificity in their origins and destinations. They have endings. Conceived this way, we need to keep interrogating the data we have about migration and seek to understand when a new migration flow emerges, even if buried in a larger, older migration.
In this blog, I focus on what I find are two such new flows that are buried in larger contexts. One is the migration of unaccompanied minors from Central America, and the second is the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar, one of an enormous diversity of flows from Asia, many war-induced. Both these migrations are being interpreted as the outcomes of violence. Violence is definitely present and is the most self-evident explanation. But violence does not fall from the sky. It is made. Violence also tends to serve as an explanation, making locals who are threatened by the “other” the source of the violence against them. But why do peaceful people suddenly find themselves in a situation of extreme violence?[i]
After decades of peace, sudden violence
Over the past few years, there has been a sudden rise of violence against the Rohingya, an old Muslim minority that has been part of Myanmar for a long time.[ii] Myanmar’s people are mostly Buddhist, but until recently, coexistence had been peaceful.
One of the most extreme moments took place recently when military forces entered one of the Rohingya-occupied region and killed civilians. Why this sudden rage against people who had lived there for generations, barely noticed in the depth of vast rural territory?
It all started about five years ago. A particular sect of Buddhist monks called for the persecution of the Rohingya. They went so far as to re-interpret sections of the doctrine, invoking calls by the Buddhas to kill the Rohingya. This was an extreme case: most Buddhists did not join.
But the persecution of the Rohingya took off and they were forced to flee. In recognition of the sudden violent turn of events, the US took in over 50,000 and another 160,000 were taken in by other countries or used traffickers to get out of Myanmar.
One key public reckoning came in the summer of 2015, through press reports of an estimated 7,000 people in dozens of overloaded vessels floating aimlessly for up to two months in the vast Andaman Sea. This sea borders Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The governments in these countries were aware of this surge in fleeing people but had made it clear they were going to push them back to sea if they dared to land.[iii]
The press sounded the alert about these ships, piled high with people who had no access to food or water. When the horrifying details went viral, Indonesia, mostly, took in about half of that estimated population. The struggle to get countries to accept them was not easy. Their rescue added even more information about the horrific conditions, yet still left an estimated 3,000 floating in that vast ocean in precarious vessels. These 3,000 are but one component of a desperate search for bare life on the part of a rapidly growing number of men, women and children.
Parallel to this rising anger against the Rohingya is a massive set of expulsions of smallholders, all Buddhists, from their rural land. Foreign firms have been among the major investors since Myanmar opened its economy to foreign investment. Many of the rural people have protested, including against Aung San Suu Kyi, who once was their hero and hope for a more just system. That some Buddhists should become brutal persecutors of a small, peaceful Muslim minority may be only one of several other indicators pointing to a struggle for land, water and habitat by millions of forcefully displaced Buddhists.
Unaccompanied minors leaving Central America
Central America saw a sharp rise in the flight of unaccompanied minors over the last two years. One reason is the escalating urban violence of the last few years. This violence is in good part due to the destruction of smallholder rural economies due to land grabs to develop plantations. Escaping to the cities was the only option for many rural people, but the cities themselves had little development to generate jobs. Gangs and extreme violence in cities has been the outcome.
While Central America has long been an emigration region, for both political and economic reasons, this flow of unaccompanied children is new. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an estimated 63,000 unaccompanied minors, most from Central America, crossed the southern border of the US between 1 October 2013 and 31 July 2014. By the end of 2014, up to 90,000 unaccompanied children had crossed the border. There is no count for those who have died on this long trip, or been kidnapped to work in plantations, mines or the sex economy.
Gang and police violence are the main factors pushing youth out, according to statements by the children themselves, researchers, social workers, and by government experts.[iv] According to data collected by the Pew Research Center, San Pedro Sula in Honduras was the world’s murder capital in 2013, with a homicide rate of 187 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, driven by a surge in gang and drug trafficking violence. Honduras’s nation-wide murder rate was 90 per 100,000 in 2012, the highest in the world. In 2011 El Salvador had one of the highest homicides rate in Latin America, only surpassed by Honduras, Venezuela and Belize in the entire world.
In 2014, 98% of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US border were from Central America (Honduras (28%), Mexico (25%), Guatemala (24%), and El Salvador (21%)). This breakdown represents a significant shift: prior to 2012, more than 75% of unaccompanied children were from Mexico alone.
The sudden high numbers, the lack of facilities to accommodate minors in a system geared to adults, and strong anti-immigration sentiment may have contributed to a major change in US policy. It asked Mexico to control its border with Central America, which resulted in thousands of arrests and deportations at the border. This led to a drastic fall of 60% in the numbers of apprehended unaccompanied minors at the US border in September 2014 compared to a year earlier. Active detention efforts by Mexico’s guards at its southern frontier can be brutal. But the children keep leaving, driven by fear of the violence in their home countries.
These two new flows emerge from situations much larger than the internal logics of households, which are a key factor explaining most migrations. Extreme violence is the immediate self-evident reason. But so is today’s dominant mode of economic development centered on a massive expansion of extractive sectors — mining, water and land grabs, and plantation agriculture. This multi-decade history of destructions and expulsions has reached extreme levels, made visible in vast stretches of land and water that are now dead. At least some of the localized wars and conflicts arise from these destructions and expulsions, in a sort of fight for habitat.
This huge loss of habitat and resulting violence has expelled millions of smallholders and rural villages. Moving to the slums of large cities has increasingly become the last option, and for those who can afford it, migration.
[i] S. Sassen “A Massive Loss of Habitat: New Drivers for Migration,” Sociology of Development; and S. Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,” Globalizations 7, nos. 1–2 (Mar.-Jun. 2010): 23–50.
[ii] Summer Borwick, Mark Brough, Robert D. Schweitzer, Jane Shakespeare-Finch, and Lyn Vromans, “Well-being of Refugees from Burma: A Salutogenic Perspective”. International Migration 51, no. 5 (2013): 92–105.
[iii] Vanessa Gorra and Roel R. Ravanera, Commercial Pressures on Land in Asia: An Overview (Rome: International Land Coalition, 2011); and Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), 2015, accessed January 10, 2016, http://www.internal-displacement.org/.
[iv] Edilma L. Yearwood, “Let Us Respect the Children: The Plight of Unaccompanied Youth,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 27, no. 4 (2014): 205–6.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014; published in Chinese in both Taiwan and mainland China). Recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books are The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001), and Guests and Aliens (New Press 1999).
Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, including multiple doctor honoris causa, named lectures, and being selected as one of the top global thinkers on diverse lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences and made a member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of Netherland.
This piece is published as an output of the ‘On the Move’ conference held in Oslo, Norway, at the end of October 2016, and was submitted in December 2016.
