Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance

ABSTRACT Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but also in how they are challenged and subverted. Furthermore, by examining how the very concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are used in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes, it opens up critical questions about mobility, citizenship and the nation state. Collectively, these contributions aim to demonstrate how problematising migration and its categorisation can be a tool of enquiry into other phenomena and processes.


William Allen and Bridget Anderson
Europe, we are told, faces a 'migration crisis', if not multiple crises linked in global political imaginations. 1 This provides an opportunity to revisit key questions about migration. How is 'who counts as a migrant' changing? Who is getting to do that counting, and under what geopolitical circumstances? Why do these developments matter for policy, political action and migrants and citizens themselves? Categorisation is central to efforts to govern migrants and refugees, whether through formal or informal means and channels. Not only do categories make some people visible while making others invisible, they also set standards and normalise practices. However, moments of crises can reveal frictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities in these processes that appear at all scales: has been a powerful means of wage repression and profiteering. 11 He demonstrated that developing countries' share of global manufactured exports rose from around 5% in the 1950s to some 60% currently. The proportion of the industrial workforce living in less developed regions has risen from 34% in 1950 to 79% in 2010. 12 Now, 83% of the world's manufacturing workers live in the global south. Wages in many of these regions, he argues, are forced below the value of labour power. While there are problems with taxonomies of North and South, for most people in the world, where you are born accounts for your share of global wealth. And goods are affordable for impoverished workers (and non-workers) in the Global North because of a system of resource extraction, outsourcing and arms-length exploitation in the Global South. This is the context within which we see the obsession with immigration. But who is the 'migrant' that contemporary politics is so fixated on? The essays we have collected illustrate how this figure is differently constituted in different places. State policies at national and local levels, enforcement actions and practices of migrants and citizens themselves combine to create 'the migrant'. This in turn is giving rise to new geopolitical arrangements, relations and understandings.
Madeleine Sumption's piece discusses the state's need for quantitative data and analysis to inform policymaking, and the challenges of reconciling immigration as sets of legal categories with immigration as sets of practices. For example, just because people enter under the category of 'spouse' does not mean that they are not employed. She advocates using administrative data and linking datasets to provide a richer picture of migrants' lives. Such an approach potentially shows migrants as embedded in national populations and makes connections between the experiences of citizens and the experiences of migrants. However, there is a need to make the politics of such analyses explicit: she notes that making populations legible inevitably introduces risks. These risks are attendant on quantitative and qualitative research on migration more generally.
The challenge of migration statistics is the favoured status they confer to legal categories. We can learn much from history on the regulation and management of both human mobility and heterogeneity, particularly in reference to fixing racial and ethnic identities. Scholars have documented, often in meticulous detail, the efforts made to classify natives; place them in hierarchies; differentiate them by culture, race, personality and intelligence; and class them as indigenous, tribal and urban. This has not really been reflected in debates about migration. Yet, the law lends consequence to elements of social identity-including race, gender and religion-by investing them with legal consequences of inclusion and privilege or exclusion and subordination. Ian Hacking has written about the human sciences 'making up people' and the ways in which our investigations, as well as classification schemes implied within them, also group particular people as objects of scientific inquiry, thereby interacting with and changing them. 13 Meanwhile, legal categories such as 'refugee' come out of particular moments in history, revealing the primacy of (geo)politics-not law-in deciding who counts. 14 So, laws and policies not only 'manage migration', but also are critical to the very production of social relations. They interact with how people imagine both themselves and immigrants. 15 This is illustrated in Jennifer Hough's piece on the words used for North Korean defectors/refugees/ settlers. She explores how each term has its own weight, while also bringing access to certain benefits. But these terms also have temporalities: her research participants reveal how they might be less resistant to being distinguished as a 'migrant' on arrival, when requiring certain services or exemptions, but resent such distinction over time. 'Migrants' or 'refugees', in common with other forms of categorisation, may seek visibility and invisibility depending on the context. Thus, being a migrant is embedded in national, geopolitical histories, as both Hough's and Lena Rose's essays demonstrate. The latter argues that assumptions about European secularisation need to be revisited in order to respond to tensions between lived religion and the secular state. Taking a longer chronological perspective, we can see that religion, as well as (or instead of) nation, race and ethnicity, has provided the terms through which the foreigner has been perceived and received. Attending to the situations and experiences of migrants enables us to better understand contemporary 'host' societies and their efforts towards 'integration'.
However, addressing who counts as migrants also requires paying attention to staying put, or more specifically, the ways in which people move away from, mobilise against or endure challenging conditions. These three trajectories require different capacities and powers that collective or transnational activities can enhance, as Nicholas Van Hear argues. Almost everyone is mobility implicated: those who want no part of a globalised world are nevertheless part of one. Thus, migration is not just about migrants, but is entangled with multiple policies, practices and processes that stretch across time, spaces and places.
These entanglements continue to produce new geopolitical arrangements and relations of governance. As seen through the experiences of Roma in London, documented by Rachel Humphris and Sarah Walker, responses to beggars and begging now involve many kinds of groups who previously perhaps did not come together: local police in 'sending' and 'receiving' countries, voluntary sector organisations and agencies of the state. Meanwhile, Franck Düvell's observations reveal how the Turkish government and the EU continue to use migration issues to achieve policy objectives, sometimes in conflicting ways. One of these ways involves calling Syrians in Turkey 'brothers' or 'guests' instead of refugees.
These reflections raise questions not only about how the very categories of migrants and refugees are changing in moments of crises, but also how processes of categorisation and governance have wider geopolitical implications for our understandings of nations, states and citizens. At a more fundamental level, this forum also illustrates how migration can be a lens that enables us to better understand ourselves. As migrants slip in and out of their political and policy typologies, they reveal the inherent instability of the nation state project. Situating social scientific investigations within a continuous reflection on how and why migration is made an object of discourse and policy-as well as how it is rationalised, analysed and classified to produce different kinds of knowledge-potentially transforms the problematisation of migration into a tool for inquiry. We hope that this collection is a step towards doing so.
Staying Power: Mobility, Mobilisation and Endurance in Times of Geopolitical Upheaval

Nicholas Van Hear
As recent commentary on the worldwide rise of populism and nativism has highlighted, the ascendancy of the neo-liberal variant of globalisation over the last three decades or so has generated opportunities for some and made life harder for others. Political debate has developed a new nomenclature of the 'left', finally coming to terms with the 'left behind', the 'left out', the 'left aside' and the 'left overs'.
Given this context, it is important to understand how people fashion ways of making a life worth living in the face of the upheavals wrought by neoliberal globalisation. By 'a life worth living' I mean not just basic security and means of livelihood (in other words survival or coping), but dignity, a decent life for oneself, one's family and others who are close. I characterise this search for lives worth living in terms of mobility, mobilisation and endurance. 16 Mobility includes the experiences and forces that shape moving from adversity as a means of securing a better life. By mobilisation, I mean disparate forms of politics-overt and covert, explicit and implicit-that people engage in to improve their lives. Endurance refers to the capacity to live through adverse conditions by staying put. The purpose of this piece is to draw out some of the connections between these three pathways, and, by extension, to point to 'who counts in crises' as the subject of this forum.
What shapes people's capacity and choice to move, mobilise or endure? In a word, power. Differing resources and competences are needed to move from, mobilise against or endure economic decline, loss of livelihood, conflict and insecurity, environmental degradation, invasion of public space and other challenges that neoliberal globalisation brings. These capacities are drawn from one's socioeconomic position, standing and networks, but also rely on inner resources of emotional and mental strength. In aggregate, I conceive these attributes in terms of power.
In the sphere of mobility, the capacity to choose between moving and staying we may call moving power. Abilities to move and choices of destination depend on access to resources like money and networks. 17 Mobility also involves those would like to move but for various reasons cannot-'would be migrants' 18 -and relatives, friends and acquaintances of those who leave. Thus, migration is not just about migrants. These would be migrants and stayers can be considered 'mobility imbued' since their life worlds are at least partly shaped by the mobility of others. So too, albeit less directly, are those in the wider population who may have no desire or intention to move. Let us call these the 'mobility-implicated', since, like it or not, they are influenced by the mobility of people, money, ideas and things worldwide. The proportion of people who are mobile, mobility-imbued or mobility-implicated varies from society to society and over time.
In the sphere of mobilisation, the capacity to engage in political activity we may term mobilising power. Depending on the resources available, as well as the political climate, such activity may take the form of 'subterranean politics' 19 or 'everyday subsistence politics' 20 : local struggles in workplaces and neighbourhoods, and over housing, schools or public space, for example. At times, such everyday politics may coalesce into wider movements in the public sphere: mass public mobilisation, like the 'squares' protests from 2011 onwards, including the Arab and other 'springs' and 'awakenings', the Indignados, Occupy, Istanbul's Gezi Park protest and other forms of contentious politics. 21 Sometimes this may transmute into more conventional electoral politics, as in Greece (Syriza) and Spain (Podemos). Many of these forms of mobilisation are marked by a turning away from the established political order. They can take 'illiberal' forms, as seen in the attraction of populist, religious, nationalist, nativist, ethnic and other fundamentalist movements involving exclusionary identity politics and illiberal or sometimes anti-liberal insurgencies.
People may neither move to escape adverse conditions nor mobilise to contest them, but endure them instead: a third trajectory. This requires staying power and may draw on resources different from moving power and mobilising power-for example, particular forms of stamina and mental fortitude. The term 'staying power' is deliberately chosen here to denote the capacity to stay put, coupled with its vernacular meaning of the capacity to endure challenging conditions. Such activity could also be cast as the desire for continuity rather than change through movement whether in the form of mobility or mobilisation. Indeed, the argument could be made that in an age of upheaval wrought by turbo-capitalism, perhaps the most radical responses are to be still, to maintain continuity in the face of relentless turbulence.
This endurance trajectory should not be seen as a passive, residual or default option, but as a sometimes deliberate or conscious choice. 22 It is not what is left over when neither mobility nor mobilisation is pursued; rather endurance is a third trajectory of choosing to see out difficult circumstances. 'Staying power' is thus the counterpart of the powers both to move and to mobilise.
These powers and capacities, held by individuals and perhaps by households, can accumulate and shift over time. But these powers can be enhanced in two other ways. Individual capacities may coalesce into collective activity. Mobilisation is typically a collective political activity, but mobility can also take collective form-as we have seen during the 'migration crisis' of 2015-2016. Endurance, too, may be collective under some circumstances. When activities become collective, the power accumulated is more than the sum or aggregation of individual power: it is cumulative rather than incremental. Second, power can be enhanced when the different spheres of mobility, mobilisation and endurance combine. Again the effect may be cumulative rather than incremental. Migrants provide transnational support to those who mobilise or endure in the homeland. By sending remittances and other contributions to families and friends, or community projects (schools, health care, and other public enterprises), those who have moved away can enhance the staying power of those who remain. Furthermore, by lobbying in their countries of settlement, transferring money or communicating ideas, those who have moved away may enhance the mobilising power of those who stay and contest adverse conditions, which is how diaspora politics work. 23 Mobilisation can also happen among mobile populations when they engage in the 'mobile commons'. 24 This was seen in migrant actions during the 'migration crisis' of 2015-2016: marching en masse to borders in defiance of the authorities, breaking down border fences collectively and squatting in disused property rather than living in approved spaces. It is also seen in everyday acts of solidarity and mutual aid en route. When moving power combines with mobilising or staying power, more than the sum of particular powers is accumulated.
This tripartite schema-moving power, mobilising power and staying power-resonates to some degree with the classic Hirschman triad of 'exit, voice and loyalty'. 25 This has been revisited lately and re-cast from the methodological nationalism in which it was conceived to account for the transnationalism paradigm currently dominant in migration studies. Instead of either exit or voice, one increasing while the other diminishes, we can see that through transnational connections, exit can operate in concert with voice or even become voice: voice is 'transnationalised'. 26 The framework suggested here differs from the Hirschman scheme in its attention to the differential power or capacity to pursue the three trajectories, and the notion of staying power is somewhat different from Hirschman's 'loyalty', which is underdeveloped in his scheme. It also differs from Hirschman by underlining the cumulative power that can be the outcome of various combinations of mobility, mobilisation and endurance.
To understand migration and 'who counts as a migrant', we need to understand their counterparts who do not migrate. To understand mobility, we need to account for the relationship with those who do not move, but mobilise to contest adversity or hunker down and endure it. In short, in order to understand the powers to move and to mobilise, we need to pay equal attention to staying power.

Madeleine Sumption
When governments make decisions on migration policy, they do so based on an understanding of how and why migration takes place, who migrants are, and what the socioeconomic impacts of migration policies will be. An essential part of this understanding comes from statistics. Alongside qualitative analysis that helps us 'see inside' the process of migration and integration and quantitative data are crucial for assessing the scale and reach of a phenomenon. Nationally representative statistics enable us to understand the extent to which generalisations about the characteristics or activities of particular migrant groups are valid, whether perceived problems warrant action, or how many people a policy change is likely to affect. 27 Indeed, government officials make extensive use of statistical evidence as they formulate policies as well as justify them to the public and press. 28 Furthermore, government agencies are often encouraged-or required-to quantify costs and benefits of new policies. 29 Given these observations, it is surprising that most statistics available to migration researchers provide few opportunities to distinguish between different reasons for migration and legal channels through which people move. This matters because, unlike much of the existing quantitative evidence, government decisions on whom to grant admission or settlement-the core of migration policy-cannot treat all migrants as interchangeable. Asylum seekers, those joining family members, international students, employees and entrepreneurs all face very different circumstances. Even policies that appear to treat migration as a monolithic category, such as the UK's target for reducing net migration to below 100,000 (which includes people of all citizenships and reasons for moving), must be implemented through a series of changes to individual migration channels. If these policies are to be informed by quantitative evidence, they require data that enables at least some consideration of the different routes through which people migrate.
Much of the quantitative research on migration concerns economic impacts in countries of destination, particularly the effects on labour market and public finances. Almost all the literature in this field defines 'migrants' by country of birth or nationality (the latter sometimes grouped) and year of arrival. These studies receive considerable scrutiny in public and political debates, often justifying generic statements such as 'migrants boost public finances' or 'migration drives down wages'. But many are not particularly helpful as a guide to immigration policymaking because they typically combine all migrants into an undifferentiated pool of people who in practice have very different characteristics and were admitted to the country for different reasons. 30 But knowing the net contribution of the foreign born to public finances is of relatively little practical use for policy. If policymakers want to adjust migration policy based on evidence about its fiscal impacts, what matters is whether the specific groups of people they plan admit or restrict are net contributors and by how much-not what the average fiscal contribution of a foreign-born person is. Understanding the potential impacts of policy changes thus requires us to consider specific legal migration channels, rather than generic 'migration'.
The quality of migration statistics has improved dramatically in highincome countries over the past twenty years. At least in high-income countries, where technical capacity and financial resources for data collection are greatest, default variables on country of birth, nationality and year of arrival are now widely available in household survey data and summary administrative statistics (i.e. visa records). However, the number of countries that systematically collect good data that gives insight into both the social and economic life of individuals and households and their reasons for migration or the type of residence permit on which they arrived is still small. 31 Key exceptions include Australia and New Zealand, which run dedicated longitudinal surveys of people receiving permanent residence through different legal routes; and the UK, which collects regular data in household surveys on the self-reported reason for migration. Several countries have collected one-off or ad hoc data on reason for migration, including EU countries as part of two Eurostat Labour Force Survey modules, or the United States' Princeton-based New Immigrant Survey. Others, such as Canada and Sweden, have exploited administrative data from tax and employment records to track migrants' outcomes over time including by initial residence permit type.
These more specific variables open up possibilities for breaking down migration into different routes that approximate the legal categories under which people were admitted. Of course, such categorisations will remain somewhat crude, 'flattening' the complex motivations that actually shape migration decisions into a single 'main reason' or visa category. As with any statistical exercise base on inevitably simplifying data, this is a limitation that it is important to bear in mind when interpreting the results.
In the future, what kind of data does policy-orientated migration research need? Firstly, administrative data are currently under-exploited. Administrative data have two major benefits over survey data. They often cover the entire population interacting with a particular government body or service, greatly reducing the problems of small sample sizes that can make it hard to analyse specific subgroups, as well as the problem of declining response rates that many high-income countries have seen in their household survey data. 32 Also, administrative data are often longitudinal tracking the same individuals over time, making it easier to identify the reasons for changing trends. Administrative data can be more cost effective than survey sources, especially compared to longitudinal surveys that require interviewers to contact and re-contact individual interviewees.
Unlike survey data that are explicitly collected with statistical goals in mind, administrative data are a by-product of government activities such as the collection of taxes or delivery of public services. This can limit available variables to information needed for a particular government process. However, this can be resolved somewhat by linking datasets together (using individual identifiers such as tax ID or passport numbers). Canada, for example, has linked its tax and visa records, allowing it to track people who entered the country on specific visa types and analyse their employment and earnings several years later, providing a unique insight into whether specific economic migration channels were successful in admitting people with good integration prospects in Canada. But, despite these potential benefits, administrative data are rarely developed into easily analysed formats and are typically difficult for academics and government analysts to access for research.
Secondly, governments could identify secure ways to make the complex set of migration data sources more widely available to researchers outside of government. Government statistics and analysis departments are constrained by limited staffing, while non-government researchers have more freedom to explore broader trends that are not tied to a policy agenda. Of course, releasing potentially sensitive data into public use demands caution. However, access can be improved such as 'trusted' researcher programmes, secure data labs and portals that allow users to query data without accessing individual records. Making a larger volume of survey and administrative migration data systematically available would require resources but could have an important payoff for knowledge about migration.
Thirdly, there needs to be more inquiry into the limitations of key statistical sources and techniques-including linking different datasets-as well as piloting new methods of data collection to understand the role of definitional and data collection discrepancies. This is particularly the case if we become more demanding of data to analyse specific subgroups by reason for migration. This should, over the long term, greatly improve the accuracy of the statistics and their policy relevance.
Developing more detailed data on categories of migration is not without hazards. Simply because we have somewhat more sophisticated data does not mean that interpretations of the analysis will be sophisticated. Indeed, making crude generalisations about 'family migrants' is just as problematic as making crude generalisations about 'migrants' as a whole. Making the migrant population more 'legible' by imposing a simplifying set of assumptions about reasons for migration could have potentially unwelcome effects. It could facilitate a tendency to create hierarchies of 'good' and 'bad' migrants based purely on available metrics of economic contribution, to the detriment of non-economic considerations that are less easily measurable. 33 Nonetheless, moving away from binary categories of 'migrants' and 'nonmigrants', as well as examining different migration routes and motivations, are necessary steps towards research that more closely reflects the complexities of migration systems and processes. If policymaking informed by relevant and systematic quantitative evidence is a desirable goal, it is difficult to envisage much progress without making the data themselves more specific.

Franck Düvell
In 2017, the number of globally displaced persons reached a record 65 million people. Over a third, around 22 million, are from the wider neighbourhood of the European Union. Of the 21.3 million who fled to other countries and are categorised as refugees, around 3 million reside in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon, 980,000 in Iran and 660,000 in Jordan. From spring 2015 around 1 million left Turkey, usually irregularly, first for Greece and then on through the Balkans to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary (later Croatia), to Austria, Germany and Scandinavia. These movements are related to multiple crises of displacement and EU border controls.
Turkey became a crucial actor in this drama. The country was confronted with a number of simultaneous challenges and conflicts alongside the refugee influx: social unrest in 2013 which became known as the Gezi park movement; diminishing support for the ruling AKP party in the June 2015 elections; the 2015 resurgence of violence between the Turkish authorities and the Kurdish movement; a series of terrorist attacks; and an attempted military coup in July 2016. Turkish President Erdoğan attempted to turn this assemblage to his advantage.
From the beginning of the Syrian conflict until late 2015, Turkey had kept its borders open to people from neighbouring countries. However, the Directorate General for Migration Management rejected Syrians being legally categorised as 'refugees' (mülteci), but preferred the term persons under 'temporary protection'-or even suggested they are 'guests' (misafir), a category of no legal meaning. 34 Indeed, President Erdoğan designated them 'Muslim brothers' or 'ummah' in keeping with growing Islamisation and a new foreign policy aiming at attaining regional leadership. 35 For many years, Turkey had presented itself as generously hosting but also shouldering disproportionate responsibility for displaced people, using the refugee crisis to claim moral leadership. It bemoaned the lack of support from the EU: 'While Europe…closed their doors to refugees, only Turkey and a couple of other countries welcomed the oppressed', Erdoğan lamented. 36 However, Turkey did not or could not provide viable living conditions for migrants and refugees. Accommodation is rarely provided; permission to work is rarely given; and access to education and health-granted by law-often is not available in practice. 37 Scarcely surprisingly, people left Turkey in large numbers to move to the EU. 38 At the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in 2011, the EU was complacent. People were 'waved through' in Greece, Macedonia and Serbia and Croatia. Initial public and policy responses in Sweden, Denmark and Germany were welcoming. However, this began to be out-weighed by increasingly hostile constituencies and governments in Hungary, Denmark, Austria and elsewhere. Terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels fuelled anxiety and the rise of nationalist, often Euro-sceptic, parties including the Swedish Democrats, Danish Peoples Party, AfD (Germany), FPO (Austria) and Front National (France).
From 2014, the EU and more particularly the European Commission began to develop a policy mix that aimed to address root causes (violence, poverty, and other drivers of onward migration), enhanced border controls, improved reception systems, resettlement and relocation programmes, while returning those ineligible for international protection. However, member states, preferring protectionist approaches, delayed or refused to implement more liberal policies. Xenophobic responses combined with an anti-EU narrative and revived or produced new alliances, notably the Visegrad group of Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland and an Austria-led Balkan group.
This not only stalled most policies proposed by the Commission, but also resulted in considerable conflict between different member states: EU Commission President Juncker in his 'state of the union' speech suggested 'our European Union is not in a good state'. 39 (European Commission 2015). EU Council President Tusk also dramatically asserted 'the threat today is that of the disintegration of Europe,' 40 and insisted 'our main goal is to stem the flow of migrants to Europe'. 41 From October, the main goals were the closure of the so-called Balkan route and ending departures from Turkey. The EU bargained with Turkey's long-standing aspiration for a more liberal travel regime and EU membership: 'Council President Donald Tusk warned Turkey that it will only win concessions from the EU, such as easier travel visas, if it successfully reduces the flow of refugees reaching Europe'. 42 Yet migration flows gave Turkey new leverage against the EU: Erdoğan needed to silence the EU over his heavyhanded suppression of the opposition as well as demonstrate strength vis a vis the EU in order to enhance his domestic position.
In November 2015, the EU-Turkey Action plan on Syrian refugees and migration management was finally activated. In March 2016, an EU-Turkey agreement came into force: the EU agreed to provide Turkey with €6 billion for hosting refugees, to resettle some refugees from Turkey to the EU, grant visa liberalisation by June 2016 and 're-energise the accession process'. In return, Turkey was to accept readmission of returnees from the EU and 'take any necessary measures to prevent new sea or land routes for irregular migration opening from Turkey to the EU'. 43 Within weeks, irregular migration dropped to pre-crisis levels demonstrating that Turkey had the capacity to control its western sea borders. However, few people were returned or settled, and six months after the agreed date, visa liberalisation was still not approved as Turkey had not complied with the 'remaining requirements', while the accession process slowed down again. On several occasions, Turkey threatened to abandon the agreement: 'we can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria any time' Erdoğan warned in November 2016. 44 However, the negotiations had won the EU time. In November 2015, the Balkan route was closed. From February 2016, NATO and Frontex border controls in the Aegean Sea were enhanced. Then, March saw the establishment of so-called hot spots or reception centres on Greek islands which people are not allowed to leave. Given these potentially powerful deterrents, the EU's reliance on Turkey to prevent further migration has significantly diminished-as has Turkey's political leverage on migration. So far, it seems that the EU managed to outplay Turkey and regained control. Some years ago, at a conference in Madrid, a senior Frontex representative argued that trying to stop migrants as they arrived at the borders was too late. Instead, what was needed was more cooperation among neighbouring countries to prevent people reaching the European border in the first place. Migration control is now widely acknowledged as a matter of regional governance. This effectively means that 'unwanted' people are kept away from affluent countries and contained elsewhere-an approach that has been critically discussed as the externalisation of migration controls towards third countries. 45 Thus, relations between Turkey and the EU reveal how geographies of migration-expressed through phenomena and categories such as transit routes, places of departure/arrival, hubs or origins-impart a geopolitical dimension to migration governance. Indeed, mobility adds to the assemblage of domestic and international affairs of affected countries, impacting upon and driving changes in the power relations among states.
North Korean Defectors in South Korea: Is the Refugee Label Helpful?

Jennifer Hough
Since the 1990s, the number of people fleeing North Korea has increased dramatically. While they currently constitute just 0.06% of the South Korean population, in the context of continued North-South antagonism, they have considerable symbolic importance in promoting the superiority of the South Korean political system. South Korea's refusal to recognise North Korean sovereignty means that South Korean citizenship is extended to any 'ethnic Korean' born on the peninsula.
The three most common terms used to refer to North Koreans in official and popular discourse are t'albukcha ('North Korean escapee/defector'), saet'ŏmin ('new settler') and Pukhan i'tal chumin ('Residents Who Escaped North Korea'). This terminology has evolved alongside demographic and policy changes since the 1990s, which contributed to North Koreans shifting from 'heroes' to 'burdens'. 46 Prior to 1990, fewer than 600, primarily elite North Koreans arrived. They were heavily compensated through a reward system implemented by the South Korean military government in 1962, at the height of the Cold War. However, as increasing numbers of non-elite North Koreans started arriving in the 1990s due to famine throughout North Korea, successive South Korean administrations enacted legislation which significantly reduced the financial value of resettlement support and limited most assistance programmes to five years. 47 English-language terminology also changed: the English translation of the 1997 Protection Act marked the first official reference to North Koreans as 'refugees' where they had previously been called 'defectors'. This semantic shift, with its greater implications of victimhood, is curious given that none of the Korean-language terms include a sense of them as 'refugees'.
The semantic shift from 'defector' to 'refugee' has coincided with geopolitical shifts. One of these is increased American influence in the South Korean non-governmental sphere. Between 1999 and 2010 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-independent grant-making organisation funded by the U.S. Congress donated up to $11.9 million to South Korean organisations working towards the future 'democratisation' of North Korea. 48 Although U.S. influence has directed international attention to North Korean human rights issues, 49 some argue that this recent surge in human rights-related activity promotes a particular image of North Korea with the aim of destabilising the North Korean government through the securitisation and politicisation of knowledge claims about the country, in line with U.S. geopolitical interests. 50 Furthermore, there has been increased routinisation of the defection process. The heavily militarised border between North and South Korea means many North Koreans end up in China. During the 1990s, they might have remained there for years, undocumented and at risk of repatriation while earning money for the onward journey to South Korea. More recently, however, the cost of defection has risen substantially as North Koreans access more established brokerage networks, become more aware of risks of remaining in China, and access currency facilitated by the partial transition within North Korea from a planned to a market economy. Crossborder bribes, costing $50 in 2008 had risen to thousands of dollars by 2015. Consequently, would be defectors use money sent by relatives already in South Korea, or alternatively use money earned through private enterprise in addition to borrowing against their expected future resettlement payment.
The proliferation of names referring to North Koreans in South Korea sits within these contexts. However, none enjoyed wholehearted endorsement from the North Koreans I knew. They described t'albukcha ('North Korean escapees/defectors') as disrespectful. Ŭnhyŏk (aged 25), a politics student at university who had lived in South Korea for eight years, said, 'It has a very negative meaning-it implies that we've betrayed the North Korean system… [But] we weren't members of the [Korean Workers] Party…we just lived normal lives.' Some North Koreans also found sae'tŏmin ('new settlers') vague and alienating. Mihyang (34), a housewife who had lived in South Korea for a decade, said, 'We are compatriots and yet they label us foreign-ers…We are Korean (Han'guk saram) just the same, but they call me sae'tŏmin… Frankly, I feel hurt when I hear it.' While familiar with being referred to in English as 'refugees,' most reacted negatively to this term. They did not want to be thought of as victims-representations influenced by humanitarian campaigns that depicted North Korea as poverty stricken. Oksim (23) had lived in South Korea for ten months, having worked as a trader for four years before leaving North Korea, earning upwards of $2,000 a year. She juxtaposed early, largely sympathetic reactions from South Koreans to her more recent experiences, saying, 'I've slowly noticed that when I say t'albukcha, I feel slightly ignored…People tend to naturally feel sorry for people inferior to them…it's like they don't see you…They don't think of you as a Korean person'. She linked this victimised image to representations offered by the popular entertainment show Ije Mannaro Kamnida ('Now On My Way To Meet You'), during which selected female North Koreans described their escape stories-depictions she joined others in criticising for reinforcing the idea that North Korean women were ignorant victims to be pitied. 51 In the wake of such representation, time and again North Koreans' expectations that they would be respected as compatriots came up against their experiences of feeling treated like objects of curiosity, suspicion and pity.
These labels can be difficult to escape. Ch'unmi (41), a married graduate student who had been living in South Korea for twelve years, observed, "Say I lived in North Korea for ten years and then came and lived here for thirty years. Even though I would have lived in South Korea for a longer time, they would call me a Pukhan i'tal chumin ('Resident Who Escaped North Korea') … How can that be?' Ch'unmi linked the persistence of this label to inaccurate public perceptions about North Koreans' eligibility for long-term welfare support. Instead, she suggested that if there were clear-cut and highly publicised restrictions on how long North Koreans were eligible for welfare benefits, the label might cease to be so closely associated with them. (However, as a long-term South Korean resident, Ch'unmi was no longer eligible for the majority of government assistance programmes, which perhaps underpinned her resistance to labelling).
Sangch'ŏl (20) was one of a handful of interviewees who did not explicitly resist being referred to as nanmin ('refugee'). He said, 'T'albukcha is technically accurate but we didn't like it there at all. We escaped as victims…in that respect, nanmin is accurate.' Notably, he had only lived in South Korea for three years. It suggests that North Koreans might be less opposed to being called 'refugees' in the first years after arrival, because the label serves to legitimate their rights to claim particular benefits.
Even as many North Koreans in South Korea appreciated the need for a term to refer to them when they were the subject of policy and receiving government support, their main criticism was that all these terms marked them as different, separating them off as something other than simply 'Korean'. Moreover, they react against their depictions as victims by domestic and international media, and a perception reinforced by state policy, non-state actors and continued reference to them as 'refugees.' Rather than recognising North Koreans' rights as South Korean citizens, depicting them as victims portrays response to their needs as a form of charity presupposing relations of inequality. 52 Further, this highlights their contingent acceptance into South Korean society, which North Koreans themselves contested. Were the differentiating effects of terminology something North Koreans could ever escape? The common response that they would be considered North Korean 'until I die' suggested they thought not. However, this implies that without significant shifts in the South Korean context, including greater recognition of North Koreans' rights as citizens, their ability to contribute to broader social change will continue to be constrained.

Migration, State, and Religion: Conversion and Citizenship in Germany
Lena Rose Nadia 53 left oppressive circumstances in Iran in search of economic opportunities and the freedom to develop herself. After a long journey, she arrived at a refugee shelter in Germany in 2015, one of 1.1 million migrants mostly from Middle Eastern countries. 54 Amid a spectacular gesture of the 2015 'summer of welcome' from German civil society, volunteers from a small evangelical Christian church welcomed and supported her. Curious about their beliefs and keen to get to know locals, she attended church services. After some months she converted to Christianity and was baptised.
By this point, the German authorities had already refused her application for asylum due to the lack of a threat of 'real' persecution. However, her conversion to evangelical Christianity changed her position significantly. Nadia faced possible persecution in Iran prefigured by hostility from several non-Christians at the refugee shelter. She sought sanctuary in her church building and appealed the German state's decision.
But at her second hearing, a grotesque situation unfolded: the judge claimed Nadia had converted as a strategy to obstruct her return to Iran. This judge-employed by a secular state-wanted to assess the validity of her new-found faith. The small church that had accompanied Nadia on her spiritual journey and acted 'illegally' by granting her sanctuary had already catechised her well in a specially designed baptism course. So, she was able to answer the judge's questions about Jesus, her biblical knowledge, and how she prayed. Although her answers were convincing, she was eventually sent back to the third country through which she first entered the territory of the European Union. This in turn shifted the decision about her possible return to Iran to other authorities. During Nadia's two hearings in Germany, her nationality turned first against her and then worked in her favour, mediated by her religious affiliation.
In a world divided into nation-states, every person is expected to have a territorial and national identity in which they must be rooted. For many, failure to stay put results in perceived 'uprootedness' and a condition of 'displacement'. 55 However, what if a person identifies primarily with other affiliations, such as religious belief? What if 'home' lies in the future and can only be fully attained in 'paradise'? What if such migrants encounter 'host' citizens of Western liberal democracies who share the same beliefs? And what do migrants' religious beliefs reveal about a secular state's assumptions about religion, and what it means to be 'Christian'?
Migrants' affiliations beyond their nationality expose tensions among migration, Western liberal states and religious belonging. Considering migration through the lens of religious belonging is not new. Levitt and Glick Schiller considered members of the same faith tradition as part of a 'transnational social field'. 56 The lens of religion helps overcome the methodological nationalism of much migration research, and bring into relief other affiliations that may play a more important role in migrants' lives. However, the idea of a transnational social field neglects how relationships between the members of respective religious communities in different locations are determined by cultural and historic aspects that distort notions of 'continuity'.
In liberal democratic Western nation-states in particular, the figure of 'the migrant' is often considered as threat to a seemingly homogenous 'community of value' 57 and as the foreign 'other' against which a nation is defined. 58 For example, after the welcome by German civil society in 2015, the atmosphere changed. Concerns rose about resources, integration and the political footholds the populist right achieved in various Federal States. Without wanting to underplay people's desire to help, it is notable that even in 2015, 92% of volunteers named 'corporate feeling' among themselves as one of the major motivations in their engagement, 59 thus in effect strengthening a feeling of 'Us' in their dealings with the 'foreigner'. Now, deeper questions are (re-)emerging about the 'core values' of German society and their possible undermining or re-making through the 'disruptive migrant'. Traditional Christianity in Germany, in its Roman Catholic or Protestant variety, forms part of the cultural aspects of such 'core values'. Thus, much migration scholarship has focused on the 'integration' of Muslims in secular Western democracies with (at least nominal) Christian majorities. 60 Islam (often reduced to a single narrative) is usually imagined as inherently different to the 'core values' of liberal Western societies, leading to Huntington's famous 'clash' of 'civilisations'. 61 Moreover, in popular discourse, religious identities are often coupled with nationality, as in 'all Iraqis are Muslim'. This links religion-rather than only national identity-with perceived threats posed on a 'community of value' by the 'Other'.
This suggests that in post-Enlightenment Western liberal democratic states, there is a tension between 'lived religion' (i.e. religious belonging and expression as one's primary affiliation) and the secular state, rather than with a particular religion per se. It might be easier for a Muslim apostate to be welcomed in a Western Christian-influenced society than a newly converted Christian migrant. Examining the German state's dealing with religious conversions and asylum claims ascribed to religious persecution, as well as the encounters between Christians in Germany and the newly arrived migrants, shows that the real struggle might lie in different religious expression than a particular religion in itself. While a certain ambient Christian faith can be counted among Germany's 'core values', a lens on the religious lives of migrants can reveal the complexity of religious traditions themselves, and their disruption through conversion of the 'outsider'.
Like Nadia, some Middle Eastern migrants are curious about Christianity and attend Lutheran or Catholic services. Unlike the smaller evangelical churches, many of these state churches are unprepared for this interest, since the practice of conversion is alien to them: most church members are born into their membership and have their denomination recorded in their birth certificates. Requests to be baptised disrupts understandings of traditional Christianity, and as a result, the religious categorisation of migrants. During some asylum application interviews, German officials meet converts with exasperation. "Why did you have to convert in the first place?" they ask, not comprehending why anybody would, for the sake of religion, put themselves into a situation that makes it necessary to leave their 'home', or risk persecution on return, and seek shelter elsewhere.
The inability of a secular state with a Christian tradition to recognise 'lived religion' leads to difficulties in formulating policies that meet migrants' needs. This is apparent in responses to harassment of Christians in religiously mixed shelters. While evangelical churches raise awareness about this issue, 62 suggesting separate accommodation for Christians and Muslims, the established Roman Catholic and Lutheran state churches refute such suggestions. They refer to the state's 'core value' of freedom of religion and the expectation that migrants have to learn that 'this is how things work here'. 63 Furthermore, the Berlin Senate's 'Master Plan for Integration and Security' did not include any clause for the protection of religious minorities, which was only inserted following the pressure of the largest network of evangelical organisations. Still, religion is not recorded during the first registration of migrants, making the idea of separate shelters according to religious belonging practically impossible.
The presence of religious migrants and new forms of religious persecution in Germany reveal differences between what it means to be 'German' and 'religious'. Is Nadia 'other' because she is Iranian, or because she is now an evangelical Christian convert rather than a member of a state church? The presence of religious migrants also further complicates the distinction between 'migrant' and 'citizen'. By taking Nadia in, didn't members of the church decide that her membership of their community was more important than following the German state's laws? In total, migrants not only highlight methodological nationalism in our thinking, but also challenge theoretical, political and policy understandings of religious communities and their relation to states.
Home, Homelessness and 'Go Home': Scales of Migration Governance in the European Union

Rachel Humphris and Sarah Walker
For generations, Roma have been excluded and marginalised from European societies. Today, their experiences provide a lens through which we can examine the shifting and heterogeneous nature of borders within and beyond Europe. Interrogating migration governance through the case of Romanian Roma in London is particularly productive at this moment of 'crisis' in the European Union. London is both a global metropolis and centre of migration -a spectacle of the shifting forms of the European border. It is a site where scales of governance from local administration to the European and transnational intersect in visible ways. Exploring the spatio-racialised governance of Roma sheds light on how borders shift and categories of the 'migrant' are (re) made. Who is in a position of control in relation to movement? Who can be where? Who is considered to be part of what community?
Beggars are a socially excluded group consisting of both citizens (national and EU) and non-citizens. The beggar can encompass the non-migrant, the vagrant, the outcast and the person who formally belongs to the 'community', but who does not belong to 'the community of value'. 64 As such, begging reveals fractures between legal and normative statuses ascribed to citizenship. In the 'workercitizen' ideal, the citizen contributes to the community of value through work. Though the beggar may be a citizen, the 'work' of begging is considered as gaining something for nothing, unproductive and thus dishonourable and not 'work'. As such, beggars are excluded from consideration as self-sufficient citizens by virtue of their perceived idleness and dishonourable behaviour. The figure of the beggar exposes how citizenship is based on hierarchies of values and a moral economy of labour where some work does not count as work at all and is insufficient for inclusion in the citizenship body. 65 Begging has been illegal in England and Wales since the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Other tools of governance include the 'Anti-Social Behaviour Order' (ASBO), introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Begging is deviant behaviour and justifies exclusion from public space and sight. Control of public space can be seen as the control of 'disorder': thus, immigration policies and securitisation discourses feed into control measures around public space, leading to increased criminalisation of behaviours. Walters described these mechanisms of exclusion as domopolitics (i.e. governing the state like a home), pointing to the 'equation between enhanced immigration and asylum controls and a heightened sense of citizenship and community within society'. 66 Legislation has the additional function of constructing a certain image of social identity into which deviants do not fit and thus are viewed as 'other'.
Processes of othering and securitisation of migration are inextricably linked to images and imaginaries. The suspect mobility of Roma as an unwanted population draws on long established artefacts of racialisation linked to 'Gypsies'. In the case of Roma migrants, a discourse of stigmatised representations cast all homeless Roma as beggars, despite evidence to the contrary. 67 Representations of Roma as nomadic beggars and thieves are implicit in policy responses and reproduce the idea that Roma are not fully European. 68 Wherever Roma settle, they are portrayed as belonging elsewhere.
The notion that migrant Roma possess a 'culture of begging' justified a number of responses at different scales. The local authority where we undertook our research had commissioned a national homelessness charity and a Roma charity to 'understand' the Roma 'culture of begging'. Spurred by the phenomenon of Roma beggars, a 'cross-border enforcement group' for rough sleeping had been reinstated, consisting of the Mayor of London's Rough Sleeping Group, in collaboration with London Local Authorities, voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) working with rough sleepers, the police and the Home Office. In addition, state authorities in Romania were brought into the operation as experts on managing 'their Roma'. The British Transport Police had participated in a mission to Romania to collaborate and share learning with the Romanian police on identifying and managing Roma populations. Further legislation has enabled increasing control over public spaces. In October 2014, 'public spaces protection orders' (PSPOs), were introduced under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, allowing councils to ban any activity they judge to have a 'detrimental effect' on the 'quality of life' of an area.
Introducing new legislation to criminalise unwanted behaviour in certain areas is a long-standing technique of enforcing immigration laws through crime and therefore undermining the conferring of rights on migrants. 69 In several wealthy EU member states, anti-begging legislation is increasingly used to remove unproductive migrants. For example, in May 2016, the UK Home Office made rough sleeping an abuse of the right to freedom of movement, paving the way for increased 'administrative removals'. 70 Management of begging becomes a mechanism to control the migration of Roma, further solidifying their status as the figure of the unwanted EU migrant. The spaces frequented by Roma who beg are regulated and controlled: from the micro-level of the local authority and the criminalisation of inhabiting very small spaces such as doorways, to the transnational European level via cooperation among the Home Office, the Metropolitan police and the Romanian police. The citizen beggar can be removed from the street through PSPOs and the Vagrancy Act, but the Roma beggar can be removed from the space of the nation-state through the collaboration of immigration enforcement with VSOs.
Governance mechanisms are simultaneously becoming hyper-local and extra-national, 'exemplifying strategies of 'remote control' (to prevent 'undesirable' migrants reaching EU Member States) and 'internal controls' (to eject them afterwards). 71 The movement of the Roma beggar embodies this multilayered governance enacted by an ever more complex array of institutional actors. These multi-level scales of governance work as forms of 'everyday bordering' 72 , whereby VSOs are co-opted into the enforcement of borders.
The grey legal areas around European Union citizens' rights add a layer of complexity in implementing laws and policies on the ground opening spaces of discretion for front line workers. These commissioning and subcontracting arrangements also restrict the spaces where alternative narratives regarding Roma migrants might emerge.
Roma challenge the notion of the citizen as subjects of constant devaluation (economically and symbolically), contributing to an understanding of how membership is continually negotiated, produced and contested. Roma migrants found begging are read and interpreted through many different systems of inscription that are attributed through dominant symbolic systems with negative value. The case of migrant Roma found begging starkly reveals how membership does not rest on a body being tied to the territory of the nationstate (and being one that works or labours), but rather a body fit and morally valued for the practices the state promotes. This shift represents a continuing process of 'differential inclusion' 73 where territory, membership and access to social rights are increasingly fragmented and the 'boundaries between inclusion and exclusion become pressed and confused'. 74 Representations and techniques of governing coalesce to brand beggars as outsiders, all homeless Roma as beggars and thus all Roma as the quintessential outsider whose presence justifies and requires extra-national assistance. Roma represent how Europe is constituted as a political project and linked to identity politics based on a certain morality of labour and behaviour-from which Roma and others are excluded.
Historically, Roma have been strongly imagined as Europe's internal 'other'. The stigmatisation of Roma migrants manifests itself in the ethnicisation and heightened criminal enforcement of begging. Suspect Roma mobility is in stark contrast to the right of free movement for EU citizen-workers. In light of Brexit, largely driven by fears of 'excessive' free movement of EU migrants, the category of the unwanted EU migrant is expanding beyond Roma. The treatment and governance of Roma are an early indicator of advancing forms of migration governance. A finer-grained ethnographic approach is one way to grasp the complex and shifting 'power-geometries' 75 and their effects on those on the geographical and social margins of society. More generally, researchers need to respond with new methodological approaches to identify and unpick the effects of new partnerships, funding arrangements, targets and categorisations at different levels of migration governance. These have important consequences for notions of membership and belonging which in turn are part of shifting configurations in an increasingly uncertain Europe.