Volume II (2015)
The Equivocity of the Migrant:
Limits of the Political Category
Samuel Allen
Vassar College
Abstract
This essay aims to theoretically diagnose and critique the unique political status of the migrant today.
Beginning with an examination of the 2009 massacre of migrants in Tamaulipas, Mexico, it argues that
statelessness is central to the political status of the migrant. More specifically, following the work of
Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, it posits that belonging to a nation state is the precondition for
international juridical recognition, which is particularly relevant in the context of human rights protection.
The stateless person is denied not only basic legal protections but political inclusion altogether. This
person, termed ‘bare life, ‘ shows the limit of political intelligibility. This essay understands her status as
the exclusion from a specific classificatory system, i.e. political ontology, and offers a critique of the
priority of this ontology using the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The essay suggests instead the primacy of
ethics and the inadequacy of such an ontology.
On August 24, 2010, a group of seventy-three migrants was travelling north towards Texas through the
dangerous, northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The group heralded mostly from Central and South
America, many having come from Ecuador, Brazil, El Salvador and Honduras. It is said that the group
was intercepted by a number of gunmen, later discovered to be members of the cartel in control of the
area, Los Zetas. The group of migrants were then led to a nearby ranch and instructed to pay the Zetas
members. The migrants had very little money, and the gunmen suggested that they could instead work as
Zetas assassins while in the United States, earning up to $2000 a month.1 When members of the group
refused, the gunmen fired on the crowd. The only survivor of the event, an unidentified Ecuadorian teen,
Associated Press, “Migrants Killed for Refusing to Be Assassins, Teen Says,” NBC News, Aug. 26, 2010,
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38867434/ns/world_news-americas/t/migrants-killed-refusing-be-assassins-teensays/#.VOtyVfmjOG6.
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recounted this story. The teen was seriously injured in the event, sustaining bullet wounds to the face and
neck. He was only able to survive the altercation by feigning death until after the gunmen had fled the
scene. He then wandered to a nearby military checkpoint and alerted authorities.2 The responsibility for
the identification and legal documentation of the victims of the Tamaulipas massacre was equivocal at
best. It involved no fewer than six countries, each issuing separate statements concerning the victims,
establishing the extent of their involvement; usually these statements implored the Mexican government
to end the abuse of migrants at the hands of cartels.3
Though this incident was relatively well documented due to the number of victims, there are
thousands more kidnappings, extortions, rapes, and murders that happen in Mexico in nearly identical
circumstances that go unreported. The passage from South and Central America, through Mexico, to the
US has been called one of the most dangerous in the world.4 Perhaps the most tragic part of these
statistics is that, in many cases, these victims are invisible. In the case of the Tamaulipas massacre, many
of the victims were unable to be identified, and in other instances, migrants may disappear without a
trace.5 To render a person invisible is to deprive them of the protections afforded to the citizen, i.e., their
human rights and the active protection thereof.
It is my thesis that fundamental to the condition of invisibility of these victims is their political
status as migrants. The political subject must be recognized as such; it follows that the non-citizen, the
person outside of juridical recognition, is invisible. In transit, the migrant is of an ambiguous legal and
social identity. Though they are no longer permanent residents of the country from which they hail, the
migrant is also not a citizen of the country through which they might travel nor of their destination. The
migrant lies on the fringes of political legibility, and it is their peculiar status that I will here try to
theoretically diagnose and critique. I will begin by using the work of Hannah Arendt to understand how it
is that the stateless person is politically excluded and the implications this has with regards to the
protection of their human rights. I will then use the work of Giorgio Agamben to diagnose this form of
political exclusion and the problematics that accompany this status. Finally, the work of Emmanuel
Randal C. Archibald, “Victims of Massacre in Mexico Said to be Migrants,” New York Times, Aug. 25 th, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/americas/26mexico.html.
3
See, for instance, “Guatemala Exige a México Esclarecer Matanza de 72 Migrantes En Tamaulipas,” CNN
Mexico, Mar. 23, 2011, http://mexico.cnn.com/nacional/2011/08/23/guatemala-exige-a-mexico-esclarecer-matanzade-72-migrantes-en-tamaulipas; and “Honduras Pide a México Esclarecer Matanza de Inmigrantes,”
Informador.MX, Aug. 26, 2010, http://www.informador.com.mx/mexico/2010/228789/6/honduras-pide-a-mexicoesclarecer-matanza-de-inmigrantes.html.
4
EFE, “Varias Organizaciones En EE.UU. Condenan Matanza de 72 Inmigrantes En México,” Aug. 26, 2010,
http://noticias.terra.com.ar/sociedad/varias-organizaciones-en-eeuu-condenan-matanza-de-72-inmigrantes-enmexico,16c1a3fa070ba210VgnVCM3000009af154d0RCRD.html.
5
“72 Bodies Found in Connection to Mexican Drug War,” Newshour, PBS, Aug. 25, 2010.
2
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Levinas informs a critique of the primacy of political, and ontological, integration, suggesting the
possibility of ethical encounters external to any given ontological framework.
We will first try to understand political legibility by way of its constitutive juridical formulations.
Hannah Arendt engages with the parameters of political legibility through her genealogy of the rightsbearing citizen. For Arendt, the chartering of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1948 would become
a pivotal event in history. It was a novel articulation for a number of reasons. The law was ascribed a new
basis; no longer was religion sufficient grounds for one’s principles and their laws. Instead, the human
supplanted God. Humanity, not religion, granted freedoms and constructed laws. Furthermore, rights were
treated as something necessarily inalienable, a priori. Rights, as conceived, belonged to a normative
discourse. It is exactly by virtue of these most essential qualities that human rights, since its inception,
have proven fraught with inconsistencies and difficulties. As Arendt writes, “since the Rights of Man
were proclaimed to be ‘inalienable,’ irreducible to and undeducible from other rights of laws, no authority
was invoked for their establishment...No special law, moreover, was deemed necessary to protect them
because all laws were supposed to rest upon them.”6 If man, and by extension self-governance, were the
new order in which law was founded, the totality of a religious order had merely been replaced with the
human. The individual was still held validated in light of transcendental structure, only now it had
become an “‘abstract’ human being who seemed to live nowhere.”7 Human rights became a status of
development and national sovereignty, which embodied this development.8 However, as there was no
authority established to protect rights, human rights quickly became conjoined with national identity.
It becomes apparent how dispossessed peoples’ loss of national government protection results in
political exclusion, on both a domestic and international scope: “treaties of reciprocity and international
agreements have woven a web around the earth that makes it possible for the citizen of every country to
take his legal status with him no matter where he goes...Yet whoever is no longer caught in it finds
himself out of legality altogether.”9 The rights-bearing citizen then becomes synonymous with members
of the polis, the guaranteer of rights. This has negative significance as the loss of national rights becomes
identical with the loss of human ones.10
It is true that countries do offer protection to refugees and political asylum for persecuted peoples
in many cases. The types of persecuted peoples are numerous, though, and the set of legal procedures
established for the protection of these peoples are inadequate. Often, political relations and certain
6
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 291.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 291.
8
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 292.
9
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 294.
10
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 292.
7
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presuppositions about the types of persecution faced by victims mediate the protection afforded them, and
refugee status may be unattainable. For instance, the United States adopted the Immigration Act of 1924
that established the quota for the number of immigrants accepted into the country at two percent of the
number currently living there. Famously, in 1939, this resulted in the denial of asylum to 938 Jewish
Germans travelling on board the transatlantic liner, the St. Louis. Many of the passengers aboard the St.
Louis were fleeing Germany due to religious persecution, but the immigrant quota for Germany and
Austria had been filled for that year and even had a waitlist years in advance. The passengers of the St.
Louis were denied asylum because the US government recognized them not as refugees but as
immigrants.11 Not only were they denied asylum or material protection, but their persecution also went
unrecognized and was thereby invalidated. As immigrants, the protections that would have been afforded
to refugees were withheld, and their persons were laid bare, i.e., exposed to power they might not
otherwise have been.
The key point here is that the stateless person is driven back into the limits of law precisely by
being deprived of their legal status as citizen. By exclusion from this category, they are placed outside of
political legibility, denied not only supposedly inalienable rights but also their belonging to any political
community whatsoever. Arendt writes: “[Stateless peoples can see] that the abstract nakedness of being
nothing but human was their greatest danger…If a human being loses his political status, he should,
according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation
for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that
a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat
him as a fellow-man.”12
Giorgio Agamben provides further theoretical resources to diagnose the condition of such a
person. Agamben has done work on a juridical concept found in Roman law: homo sacer (or sacred man).
Homo sacer is a juridical status reserved as punishment for the crimes of cancellation of borders, a son’s
violence against the parent, or a council swindling a client.13 Whoever was designated as homo sacer was
stripped of their citizenship in such a radical way as to banish them from society. Agamben ascribes
homo sacer to “a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.”14
Using Aristotle’s terminology, Agamben understands the rightlessness of homo sacer as synonymous
“Voyage of the St. Louis,” Holocaust Encyclopedia Online,
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 (accessed February 23, 2015).
12
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300.
13
Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 85.
14
Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, 74.
11
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with bare, or strictly biological, life (zoé) contrasted with political, organized life (bios).15 This life, zoé,
stripped of all classificatory content and marked by juridical exclusion has been rendered naked and thus
nonlegal.
Bare life, for Agamben, is a fundamentally paradoxical status: bare life is delineated as such
through a ban, but this exclusion is executed by way of inclusion. In banning a subject from the normal
legal order, there is an obvious exclusion. However, as homo sacer embodies the subject who is neither
here nor there, so to speak, they are also paradoxically included, primarily as a figure on whom the
exercise of power is no longer regulated.16 Consequently, homo sacer can be killed with impunity
(impune occidi).17 The non-legal subject exists, but they lie within an isolated and remote stratum. In a
sense, they belong to a realm that is invisible, outside of any broader legal or social framework. They are
able to exist only by and through their non-existence.
Both Arendt and Agamben reveal that membership to a nation-state is the true condition for the
bearing of rights. “The so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed without any protection
precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state.”18 It
becomes clear that the stateless, the dispossessed, and the illegal migrant are the manifestation of bare life
par excellence. We can see that the illegal migrant occupies a peculiar political zone. By their
statelessness, the migrant is pushed into an equivocal, subterranean zone, lying on the outskirts of
political legibility. This is not wholly exclusion; it functions simultaneously as a means of integration.
They are because they are not. We glimpse here the boundaries of political ontology and the ramifications
thereof. The invisibility of the migrant, and the devastating human consequences that result therefrom, are
inextricably tied to their paradoxical status as non-. Their political integration is fundamental to their
visibility, but in a juridical framework, they can only be apprehended, or “possessed” in the Levinasian
sense, by their exclusion, their negativity. The migrant is reduced, wholly, to their illegality.
On October 3, 2013 a fishing trawler carrying some 500 migrants was sailing from Misrata, Libya
towards Italy. These migrants were predominantly from Ghana, Eritrea, and Somalia.19 Around a quarter
of a mile off the coast off the Italian island of Lampedusa, the trawler’s engine began to stall. It was still
dark outside, though, and they had not yet been spotted from the shore. In an attempt at a signal for help,
15
For more on the distinction between bios and zoé see, Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1.
Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, 77.
17
Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, 72.
18
Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign Power and Bare Life, 126.
19
Jim Yardley and Elisabetta Povoledo, “Migrants Die as Burning Boat Capsizes Off Italy,” New York Times on the
Web, October 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/world/europe/scores-die-in-shipwreck-offsicily.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
16
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someone on board set fire to a blanket and began waving it around in the air.20 The blanket then ignited
gasoline on board the vessel. In the ensuing panic, some of the migrants on board the ship dived
overboard while others gathered on one side of the vessel, away from the blaze. This caused the
dilapidated vessel to capsize.21 Of the 500 on board, including children, only 155 of the migrants
survived.22
In 2012, it is estimated that over 10,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Libya in
order to enter Italy by way of Lampedusa, Sicily, and other islands.23 Italy and Spain both are countries
with huge influxes of illegal migrants each year, heralding mostly from Africa and the Middle East. Often
facing persecution or unrest in their home countries, many migrants decide to enter Europe by sea.24 This
passage to Europe is exceedingly dangerous, though many migrants wittingly brave this route every year.
In the case of Italy-bound migrants, often in Turkey, Egypt, and Libya, migrants must often pay
thousands of dollars to traffickers in order to use their vessels. The traffickers will then load people onto a
large boat until they enter Italian waters where they are then put into smaller boats and left to float on the
current. Many of these smaller vessels are barely seaworthy.25
It is essential that migrants travelling by sea entrust themselves to traffickers in order to use their
vessels. However, migrants travelling through northern Africa often suffer from abuse, extortion, torture,
and rape at the hands of these traffickers. In the case of the migrants heading towards Lampedusa, the
testimony of dozens of survivors led to the arrest of one Somali man alleged to have been a trafficker. It is
alleged that he, along with other, unidentified Somalis and Libyans demanded €2000 from the migrants in
exchange for their freedom. Men who could not pay were subjected to various forms of torture, including
electrocution and bludgeoning by batons. Many women in the group were sexually assaulted and raped.
These sorts of crimes happen with increasing frequency in Libya, especially since the fall of Moamer
Kadhafi. However, when these crimes are brought to the attention of authorities, the allegations of these
migrants are rarely investigated.26 These migrants are within international jurisdiction, but deprived of a
20
Ibid.
Alan Johnston, “Hundreds Feared Dead from Italy Boat,” BBC News, October 3, 2013,
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24380247 (accessed February 23, 2015).
22
“State Funeral for Italy Migrants,” BBC News, October 9, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe24456058.
23
“Mediterranean ‘a cemetery’ – Maltese PM,” BBC News, October 12, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-24502279.
24
“Mediterranean ‘a cemetery’ – Maltese PM,” BBC News.
25
Jim Yardley and Elisabetta Povoledo, “Migrants Die as Burning Boat Capsizes Off Italy.”
26
“Lampedusa Shipwreck Migrants ‘Raped by Traffickers.’,” Telegraph.co.uk, November 8, 2013,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10436645/Lampedusa-shipwreck-migrants-raped-bytraffickers.html.
21
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national legal identity, they lack the visibility and efficacy that a national citizen would have. They are
vulnerable, bare, and susceptible to violence and exploitation because of their political exclusion.
The fundamental condition of the migrant is one inextricably linked to their political, juridical,
and social illegibility, i.e., the condition of their classification. It is precisely the classificatory compulsion
that Emmanuel Levinas engages with in his critique of ontology. Levinas famously postulates that in
order to comprehend a being as existing, it is necessary to know them as such, viz., to render them
intelligible.27 The intelligibility of being for Levinas is irreducibly tied to absolutes, which is a system of
classification: “an objective order from which there is no escape.”28 Levinas characterizes this objective,
knowing order as “totality.” Levinas is quick to note the shortcomings of the presuppositions employed in
such an order, though. Levinas has special interest in the relationship of the subject to that which lies
“beyond” the realm of totality. He is particularly observant of the disposition of the subject towards that
which is non-immediate and absent. Levinas claims, for instance, that the condition of desire strives for
an absolute alterity. removedness, and absence: “no journey, no change of climate or of scenery could
satisfy the desire bent towards it…The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward
the absolute other…[desire] implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea.”29 This
beyond-ness, or exteriority, is termed by Levinas as “infinity.” Levinas thinks totality implies a systemic
closedness predicated on a “recurrence” of being. In other words, if everything is encompassed within the
parameters of ontology, there could be nothing other than the Same. If entities are wholly reduced to their
ontological essence, “how can a jolt, an expulsion outside of the Same...occur?”30 Alternatively, Levinas
asks, how can being, or classification, exist without an exteriority, something removed which it then
responds to by integration?
Levinas’s critique of ontology then prompts him to posit that an exteriority prior to being. In fact,
this exteriority precedes classification and even allows for it. The usefulness of Levinas for our purposes
involves this idea. Classification and systemic integration are inadequate as they foreclose the possibility
of true ethics, insinuating that classification of a being is at once tied to the exercise of power over it:
“[comprehension of beings] does not invoke these beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a
violence and a negation...[Negation] denies the independence of a being: it belongs to me. Possession is
27
Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak,Simon Critchley, and Robert
Bernascont. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3.
28
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969 ),
21.
29
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33.
30
Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 83.
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the mode whereby a being, while existing, is partially denied. It is not only a question of the fact that the
being is an instrument, a tool...It is an end also...It offers itself, gives itself, belongs to me.”31 Through the
reduction of the other to a classification, an abstraction, the subordination of or even the enactment of
violence on the other is allowed. “Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power.”32 To allow a
being to exist independently of one’s possession of it, to establish a divide between the same and other is,
for Levinas, the practice of ethics. The encounter for Levinas becomes the primal experience, i.e., which
exists outside of and independently of classification.
In positing ethics, instead of ontology, as first philosophy, Levinas hopes to establish a possibility
of relating to the world without mediation through ideality and categories. This notion of the primacy of
ethics and the encounter, then, has direct bearing on the system by which migrants are rendered invisible.
We have diagnosed the condition of the migrant as one of a peculiar classification: inclusion by way of
exclusion. Even upon arrival at a destination, the migrant is preceded by their status as such. Regardless
of their reasons for migration, their hardships, or their needs in many cases, they are held by discourse at
arm’s length, refused political integration and the benefits that accompany it. They remain silent,
necessarily. The equivocity of the migrant is one within “totality”; are they not “possessed” before they
even arrive, viz. as illegal, immigrant, etc? Their possession then renders them invisible; they are, within
totality, only insofar as they are not. To posit a being beyond legality is to suggest the inadequacy of the
political category, to hypothesize the possibility of interaction, and being, independently of the parameters
imposed upon the migrant. If the political-ontological realm is insufficient, the horizon of the other is
opened to us; the possibility of the encounter, the ethical experience, is awakened. We are speaking no
longer of a legal relation but of a human one, predicated on listening, interaction, reciprocity, and
dialogue. To posit the migrant as more than their non-being is to recognize an interlocutor. Is not the
human the one for whom rights are given?
31
32
Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophcial Writings, 9.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46.
41