A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe - Softcover

Fekete, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745327923 ISBN 13: 9780745327921

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Liz Fekete is a leading authority on issues of racism, Islamophobia and national security legislation. A Suitable Enemy draws on sixteen years of research to present a comprehensive overview of EU immigration, asylum, race and security policies. Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which anti-terrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and de-humanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia. At the heart of the book is an examination of xeno-racism -- a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism -- where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Liz Fekete is Executive Director of the Institute of Race Relations and has written and lectured widely on issues of migration, race and security in Europe. She edits the European Race Bulletin. She is a consultant on refugee and immigration issues to a number of organisations, including the Refugee Council, and was an expert witness at the Basso Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and the World Tribunal on Iraq. She is the author of A Suitable Enemy (Pluto, 2009).

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A Suitable Enemy

Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe

By Liz Fekete

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2009 Liz Fekete
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2792-1

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by A. Sivanandan, 
Introduction, 
XENO-RACISM AND THE SECURITY STATE, 
1. The Emergence of Xeno-racism, 
2. Anti-Muslim Racism and the Security State ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ACCUSATORY PROCESSES, 
ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ACCUSATORY PROCESSES, 
3. Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right, 
4. The New McCarthyism DETENTION AND DEPORTATION, 
DETENTION AND DEPORTATION, 
5. The Deportation Machine, 
6. 'Speech Crime' and Deportation THE FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS, 
THE FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS, 
7. They Are Children Too, 
8. Islamophobia, Youth Resistance and the Meaning of Liberty, 
Notes to the Text, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE EMERGENCE OF XENORACISM

Once, the West saw its 'superior' civilisation and economic system as under threat from the communist world. That was the ideological enemy as seen from the US; that was the hostile, intransigent neighbour as seen from western Europe. Today, the threat posed by 37.4 million displaced people, living either temporarily or permanently outside their countries of origin has replaced that posed by communism. For, in this brave new post-Cold War world, the enemy is not so much marked out by ideology as by poverty. As western security agencies, supranational global bodies, intergovernmental organisations and national governments mobilise against migratory movements from 'over-populated' and 'socially insecure countries with weaker economies', a whole new anti-refugee discourse has emerged in popular culture. Those seeking asylum are demonised as bogus, as illegal immigrants and economic migrants scrounging at capital's gate and threatening capital's culture. And it is this demonisation of the people that the capitalist western world seeks to exclude – in the name of the preservation of economic prosperity and national identity – that signals the emergence of a new racism. As Sivanandan has argued:

It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe's doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a 'natural' fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but 'xeno' in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism.

In the UK, it was after the election of the New Labour government in 1998, that xeno-racism became fully incorporated into domestic asylum policy. By making 'deterrence' (of 'economic migrants'), not human rights (the protection of refugees), the guiding principle of its asylum policy, a government committed to dismantling institutionalised racism has erected new structures of discrimination and, in the process, provided the ideological space in which racism towards asylum seekers became culturally acceptable.

'Managed Migration': the New Socio-economic Darwinism

Over the last two decades, the EU, while encouraging member states to harmonise asylum policies, has slowly been introducing measures to control 'migratory movements'. But more recently the EU's approach coalesced into an overall philosophy of 'global migration management'. Since the UN warned of the growing demographic crisis in Europe, brought on by an ageing workforce and declining birth rates, there has been a growing recognition within western Europe that immigration is necessary and that refugees might even provide an important source of skilled labour. Indeed, since the European Commission indicated in November 2000 that the EU should open up legal routes for migration, and national governments within Europe followed its lead by adopting skills-based recruitment programmes for foreign workers, European governments have been openly supporting 'managed migration'.

But while 'managed migration' may well be a means of opening up avenues for skilled immigrants (including refugees) to enter Europe as guestworkers, it is simultaneously leading throughout Europe to moves to abolish the right to claim asylum, as guaranteed by the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. For global migration management is not just a philosophy within which skills shortages are addressed; it has emerged as part of the strategic response of the powerful nations of the First World to the economic and social dislocation engendered, first, by the break-up of the former communist zone of influence and, second, by the impact of 'globalism's insatiable demand' on the Second and Third Worlds 'for free markets and unfettered conditions of trade'. It is a strategy that arises, ironically enough, from the recognition that the global market-induced displacement of people cannot be left to market forces but must be managed for the First World's benefit. If global capitalists are concerned with 'building a stable and regional environment for global accumulation' and 'a new legal and economic superstructure for the world economy', they are equally concerned with building a new global structure of immigration controls to decide which people can move freely around the world, and which people will have their movement restricted. One result of this is that the Fortress Europe 'zero immigration' approach, which characterised the end of the twentieth century, is not so much abandoned as refined.

But to understand how such a strategy of global migration management leads to xeno-racism, it is necessary first to outline the scale of international cooperation on migration issues and to detail specific, internationally agreed measures through which seeking asylum came to be regarded as an illegal, criminal act. Although the targets of global migration management may differ in terms of North American, Australian and European concerns, these power blocs share a common interest, as demonstrated by their cooperation in supranational bodies and intergovernmental agencies in pooling information on migratory movement. Such cooperation then informs regional policy, at the EU level, for instance.

The industrialised nations liaise through bodies like the International Centre for Migration Policy and Development (ICMPD), founded in 1993, which developed out of the Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia. It was originally set up to coordinate refugee and migration policies following the break-up of the former Soviet Union and saw its role as 'advising governments on the prevention of migratory movements from East to West and South to North'. Other mechanisms include regular meetings of the secretariat of the Budapest Process, a conference of ministers from some 34 states and representatives from inter-governmental organisations, which deals with the prevention of illegal migration and recommends action on issues like trafficking, smuggling and pre-entry and entry controls. By the late 1990s, there were at least 30 other networks and fora of activity set up by European states and intergovernmental organisations to predict migratory...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745327923
• ISBN 13: 9780745327921
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland