How international migration
redefined citizenship: Human
rights & human trafficking in
perspective
Prof. A.B. Shamsul
Deputy Chair
The National Council of Professors
Malaysia
Presentation at UNESCO Paris, 5-6 May 2011
Of theories and tools
• Theorization on international migration is
empirically rooted in empirical experience
of North America and Europe
• It is based on the assumption that ‘legal
citizenship’ in North America & Europe is
transparent & certain, well-documented &
recorded
• Prosecution, Protection & Prevention are
conducted in relatively simple manner, in
both regions
Complex & Uncertain
• In countries in Asia & Africa, “legal citizenship”is far more complex & uncertain than
commonly recognized,
• It poses major challenges for how political
governance, economic welfare, and national
security should be pursued, domestically &
internationally
• Therefore, international migration from
developing & under-developed countries to
developing ones, needs new theories,
concepts & analytical tools to make sense what
it is and in formulating appropriate policies and
actions to seek solutions
Conflict & Confusion
• Unthinking adoption of analytical
categories that dominate explanation &
research on international migration in the
West has resulted in conflict & confusion,
in the form of:
– Public policies dilemmas
– Continuous gripping stories of human
tragedies
– Conceptual confusion
The Asian experience
as a mirror
• When one moves the lens to Asia, we
begin to understand the need for a far
broader range of categories.
• Even more surprising is that the Asia’s
experience illuminates features of the
West that have not been recognized
sufficiently by the West itself
Fake papers, real citizens
• The subterranean processes by which
millions have acquired citizenship.
• States don’t have comprehensive territorial
sovereignty
• Collusion of weak & erratic bureaucracies
and the organized syndicates/crimes
• how illegal immigrants acquire false
papers & the consequences on global
security & expansion international black
economy
Documentary citizenship
• Most world's illegal immigrants not
migrating directly to the West, but to
countries in the vast developing world.
• When they arrive in countries like
Pakistan, India and Malaysia--which are
often governed by weak and erratic
bureaucracies--they are able to obtain
citizenship papers fairly easily.
• Creation of "documentary citizenship" :
how paperwork--often falsely obtained-confers citizenship on illegal immigrants.
Documentary citizenship
prospers
• Once immigrants obtain documents, it is a
relatively simple matter for, say, an Indian
or Bangladeshi with Malaysian papers to
pass himself off as an Indian-Malaysian
citizens, both in Malaysia and abroad.
• Across the globe, there are literally tens of
millions of such illegal immigrants who
have assumed the guise of "citizens“
based on fake documents
What happens to human rights &
human trafficking?
• “Documentary citizenship” becomes the
legal canopy within which illegal human
trafficking occurred in developing countries
• by implication, their human rights are
being violated, too, at the same time.
• because respecting human rights for the
legal citizens is not on the top agenda in
these countries anyway, illegal migrants
without documents are suffers the most
Whereto from here?
• The old framework of Prosecution,
Protection & Prevention, relating to
human rights & human trafficking, based
on Western migration analytical tools,
policy guide, & experienced has clearly
shown to be not working
• Figuring out what may work?
• How to start?
Never too late…
• The need to launch a new set of
research on international migration and
the formation of ‘documentary
citizenship’ in developed, developing
and developed countries
• The challenge for the researchers
(i) to measure the unmeasurable &
(ii) to make the invisible world more
visible
Re-booting
• Sociology, political science &
economics are the traditional
disciplinary tools in international
migration studies
• The importance of anthropology & its
inclusion to make the invisible visible,
to provide ethnographies on the
unmeasurable
• Important reference: Kamal Sadiq,
Paper Citizens (OUP, 2008)