{"word_count": 2153, "character_count": 15233}
A Response to “Migration and Mobility” at the Annual Conference 2018 of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung,  “Knowledge and Society in Times of Upheaval”, Berlin, 20-21 November 2018.By Thomas Jessen Adams “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what has lit the flame.”&#160; So said former U.S. Secretary of State and failed 2008 and 2016 Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in a late November 2018 interview with the Guardian. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken…but I think it’s fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message-‘we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’-because if we don’t deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.”In 2018 one does not have to look far tofind a broad spectrum of politicians and thinkers citing the so-called “migrationissue” as the driving force behind reactionary politics in Europe, NorthAmerica, and the Antipodes.&#160; Whether inrelationship to the electoral successes of Viktor Orban, Brexit, and DonaldTrump or the seeming rising tide of the AfD, Marine (and Marion) Le Pen, theSwedish Democrats, Pauline Hanson, and a host of others, the global commonalityin the rebirth of right-wing nationalism appears as a deep transnational zeitgeistof xenophobia and nativism.&#160; One irony of Clinton’s recent comments is that within two short years she has gone from close association with the dream of open borders for commodities and labor to a leading critic of “compassionate approaches” to global migration from the perspective of political pragmatism and fear of so-called populism. Indeed, a main line of attack that she and her supporters waged in her Democratic primary battle with Bernie Sanders was his argument that “open borders” was a concept advanced by corporate interests and capital—epitomized by the Koch brothers—and thus it was false for him to claim the label of “progressive” and label her a centrist or moderate.&#160; This irony, by no means specific to Clinton but rather more generalized across what we might understand as professional-managerial class (PMC) liberalism is worth exploring in relationship to the recent panel “Migration and Mobility” at the 2018 Annual Conference “Knowledge and Society in Times of Upheaval” of the Forum Transregionale Studien and Max-Weber-Stiftung —Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, which took place at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB). Through a variety of approaches the papers presented by Xóchitl Bada, Jan Jansen, and Leo Lucassen point to three interrelated tendencies that PMC liberalism exhibits in relationship to the political “problem” of contemporary global migrations. By way of shorthand we can understand these tendencies as: ahistoricism, or perhaps more appropriately, antihistoricism; a disregard for labor issues; and a vision of politics grounded in elite brokership and technocraticism. In brief, following from Barbara and JohnEhrenreich, professional-managerial class here is defined as those “whose majorfunction in the social division of labor may be described broadly as thereproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”[1]Without making any broader claims about the sociological or historical coherenceof this group as a class, as a shorthand it is a useful heuristic for groupingtogether an international cohort that has benefitted materially and politicallyfrom economic globalization. Thus, PMC liberalism can be understood as thecontinued aspiration for “a society ruled by reason and led by public-spiritedintellectuals” and where equality is defined by the removal of ascriptive andjuridical barriers to meritocratic achievement and not redistribution ofmaterial resources.[2]&#160;  Jan C. Jansen at the Annual Conference 2018 in Berlin,&#160;Photo: Maurice Weiss / Ostkreuz While not his main purpose, in his paper,“Migration Control and Agency During the Atlantic Age of Revolutions:1770s-1820s,” Jan Jansen points us toward the extent to which adecontextualized ahistoricism characterizes so much of contemporary discourseon global migration as well as the importance of the resources (political,economic, cultural) that migrants bring to bear when crossing borders. Focusingon the Atlantic littoral between the American and Haitian Revolutions Jansen catalogsthe manner in which personal documentary evidence like passports, freedompapers, and the certificates of associational culture arose in tandem with animmigration bureaucracy and control. While by no means his main analyticsubject, Jansen’s research points tangentially to important points often lostin the current context.&#160; First, the 250,000 people who fled therevolutions in France and Haiti demonstrate how the category of refugee cannotbe divorced from the political, economic, and cultural power of the people whoinhabit the category. Just as more recently elite Cubans left behindpost-Revolutionary Cuba for a sympathetic and anti-communist United States andthe White South Africans who fled interracial democracy in South Africa for theAntipodes found an ease of political and cultural acceptance, so too did theelites of Ancien Régime France and theplantation owners of San-Domingue find American cities like Philadelphia andNew Orleans welcoming. While various national and international legal regimesdebate who can claim refugee status and for what reason, the experience ofthese groups remind us that what is often most consequential is not the form orextent of persecution or dislocation one is fleeing, but the economic andpolitical resources (including at different historical moments racial or ethnicascription) the displaced person can marshal. The ability to be documented has alwaysbeen a function of the potential documentee’s access to social and politicalpower.&#160; Jansen demonstrates this trend inthe absence as well as the growth of freedom papers in slave societies afterthe Age of Revolution attests. For those whose physical appearance or someother characteristic in particular legal and extra-legal contexts marked themas potentially unfree, freedom papers and the bureaucracies that produced thembecame integral tools in delineating who was and was not a slave. This was anespecially important development in a world where both opportunities for physicalmobility were increasing and various economic and political orders werebecoming more dependent on slave labor. Yet, the very attainment of papersthemselves—and all the attendant rights of mobility and liberty theyentailed—were the function of the political and social power that individualsand groups brought to the table in relationship to these bureaucracies. Indeed,as Jansen points out, the most documented people of the era were blackloyalists to Britain during and after the American Revolution. Their usefulnessto England as soldiers and allies allowed for them to demand and obtain thebureaucratic instruments of freedom in contexts where their racial ascriptionmight have otherwise made it questionable. This was not conferred on them bythe generosity of the Crown but fought for and won in a world in which theirinterests coincided with those of Great Britain.&#160;&#160; Xóchitl Bada&#160;at the Annual Conference 2018 in Berlin,&#160;Photo: Maurice Weiss / Ostkreuz. In her paper on “Transnational Networks forPortable Labor Rights in North America,” Xóchitl Bada helps to open up the keyquestion that the PMC liberal approach to migration leaves unaddressed: laborrights. In contexts like that of the contemporary United States, it is preciselythat status of undocumented workers as undocumented that makes themparticularly attractive for employers. Timeworn and usually racist canardsabout work ethic and living needs have always been used to paper over thisfact. Undocumentedness brings with it a lack of access to many of the resourcesthat have been purchased over centuries of bloody labor history. Minimum wages,overtime rules, workplace health and safety standards, rights to be free fromharassment and discrimination, and a host of other benefits were not conferredout of the liberal public-spiritedness of employers but entrenched viaconfrontation. Bada makes this clear when she points to the fact that in thecontemporary U.S. there is one labor inspector for every 141,000 employees. Thepaltriness of this number is the result of a multi-decade counteroffensive byAmerican business against the successful institution of these rights from the1930s through the 1960s.Nevertheless, American law andinternational treaty does confer some of these rights upon the undocumented. And,as Bada points out, a host of immigrant rights groups in the U.S. and LatinAmerica are doing yeoman’s work in educating migrants of their rights andpossibly remedies to their violations. The problem as it has always been isenforcement and the broader political and social context. Mitt Romney’simmigration plan of “self-deportation,” Barack Obama’s record number ofdeportations, and Donald Trump’s unleashing of an almost vigilantizedImmigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency all point to this particularproblem. Whether under Obama or Trump, such a context of mass-deportation(Obama) and quotidian terror (Trump) means that even if undocumented workersare able to plausibly access remedies to the violation of their labor rights, employersare operating in a world in which the plausibility of deportation or indefinitedetention remains so acute that even heroic efforts at raising theconsciousness of immigrants around the portability of some rights pales incomparison to the chips that their bosses bring to the bargaining table. Leo Lucassen&#160;at the Annual Conference 2018 in Berlin,Photo: Maurice Weiss / Ostkreuz. In “Migration, Scholarship and the PublicDebate: An Uphill Battle,” Leo Lucassen provides an invaluable primer for thoseof us who occasionally find ourselves moving beyond the scholarly confines ofacademic discourse and into the public debate around these issues. Lucassen’ssuggestion that when we lose our scholarly imprimatur and become perceived ascitizens or activists by television viewers and radio listeners we lose thepower we can bring to these debates perfectly mirrors my own experience inAustralia. Presenting facts, extended frameworks, comparisons, and globalcontext rather than clear opinion is particularly important.&#160; For instance, the fact that EU countries sawmore asylum seekers between 1990 and 1999 than in the last decade is eitherunknown, forgotten, or ignored by broad public discourse as well as elitepolitical actors like Clinton.&#160; Lucassen suggests a further context thatbrings me back to the original questions surrounding PMC liberalism and globalmigration. Just as the U.S. under Obama began to outsource immigrationenforcement to Mexico by incentivizing that country’s hardening of its southernborder, so too do E.U. countries pay those of Africa to keep migrants from reachingthe borders and shores of Europe. Like drone warfare in relationship toimperial hegemony and internal political legitimacy, these policies illustratethe bankruptcy of liberal PMC approaches to migration. One cannot understandwhy migrants leave Africa or Central America without understanding the recentactions of ostensibly liberal regimes like those of Obama and Clinton inHonduras or Francois Hollande in Mali, let alone centuries-long histories of colonialism,imperialism, and exploitation that is the longue durée context for contemporary dislocation. Thus,for Clinton to suggest that what “lit the flame” of reaction was the all toorelative “compassion” of countries like Angela Merkel’s Germany is not simplyahistoric, but antihistoric as reckoning with the history would force the U.S.Secretary of State during the 2009 coup in Honduras to come to grips with her ownrole and that of American economic imperialism and anti-socialism.&#160; Furthermore, what’s so striking about hercomments to the Guardian—and Clintonis merely a stand-in here for the broad liberal PMC approach—is its deepdisdain of mass politics. “The roil(ing) body politic” needs to be tamed, notby democratic countermobilizations but by well-meaning statespersons andexperts disavowing compassion and generosity.&#160;Thisis the worst possible political and intellectual response to right-wingnativism. The only way to defeat a mass politics is with a stronger masspolitics. Pushing a not-interventionist foreign policy has provenremarkably—and to many commentators surprisingly—popular in countries like theU.S. and the U.K. as articulated by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Anotherkey component of building such a politics, as Bada’s work hints at, is at theworkplace and through policies that push the mass-enforcement and raising oflabor standards—regardless of citizenship status. Severing the connection—realor perceived—between economic dislocation and immigration is the most pressingstrategy and policy to counter nativist mass-politics. Questions of culturalassimilation and national identity are decidedly less “roiling” when peoplehave economic security and jobs they do not abhor. Furthermore, in a worldwhere anti-immigration sentiment frequently goes hand and hand with a deepdistrust of a professional managerial class that has benefitted fromglobalization while many everyday Americans and Europeans get left behind, afocus on labor has the added effect of separating the wheat from chaff as itwere amongst the PMC. A sizable portion of that global elite likes migrationprecisely because many migrants are undocumented, conditional, or temporary andthus more easily exploited. A successful mass politics against nativism must beframed in terms of those who benefit from exploitation against those who areexploited. By disavowing the questions of history, labor, and politics thatthese papers suggest, professional managerial class liberalism aids and abetsthe forces of reactionary nativism.&#160; [1] Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “TheProfessional-Managerial Class,” RadicalAmerica, 1977[2] Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of theProfessional-Managerial Class (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013)10.&#160; About the AuthorThomas Jessen Adams is Visiting Fellow at re:work: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Senior Lecturer of History and American Studies at the University of Sydney. He is an historian of American social, cultural, and political life with a particular interest in understanding how various kinds of inequality have been produced and at times overcome. To that end, his research ranges across a variety of spatial and temporal contexts with particular foci on American labor, political economy, contentious politics, racial and gender ideology, and social movements with special attention to American cities and the U.S. South.Citation:&#160;Thomas Jessen Adams, Professional Managerial Class Liberalism and Global Migration,  in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 07.02.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/17867.