Exploring Borders: Control, Movement, and the Challenge of the Transnational

Résumé du document

Globalization is characterized by a huge increase in flows of various kinds, such as merchandises, ideas, capital and also people. Even if the free circulation of flows blurs certain borders, the human circulation remains a burning issue for Western countries. The arrival of people coming from different parts of the world, especially from Third World countries, bringing with them different cultures, social practices, religions, is considered as a threat to the 'original', 'official' culture that is promoted in the country. Political agendas of First world countries reflect the idea that immigrants are challenging a so-called national identity, and are endangering the social cohesion of the state. This ideology justifies the tightening of borders and the new immigration policies created to limit and control immigration in First World countries.

Extraits

[...] Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity” New York: Simon & Schuster Ibrahim, M. (2005) Securitization of Migration: A Racial Discourse” in International Migration Vol pp 163-187 Lacan J. (2004) L' Angoisse. Le Séminaire, Livre X Paris: Seuil Noiriel, G. (2007) quoi sert l'Identité Nationale?”, Paris : Agone Van Houtum and Pipjers, (2007) European Union as a Gated Community: The Two-faced Border and Immigration Regime of the in Antipode Vol: 39, Issue: March 2007, pp. 291-309 Vukov, T. [...]

[...] Martin Barker, in The New racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe, examines the relation of such discourses with the political focus on immigration of the British Conservative Party in the late 1970's. The party perceived immigration as an “agent of destruction of the British nation” because of cultural difference, and could thereby justifies as strong policy of restrictive immigration. What is new in this trend is that it doesn't claim the superiority of one race or culture over the others, but rather assumes that cultures are different and that humans have a “natural tendency to form bounded social units and to differentiate themselves from outsiders”. [...]

[...] Vukov explains that the mass medias “shapes the public imaging of nation”, through the use of strategic mobilization of sense of threat. The systematic use of certain representation of migrants in the media creates a climate, a set of resonances in the society between individuals sharing the same “cultural panic” around undesirable. There is nothing rational in this fear that is in fact constructed and that relies on people's affectivity and sensations. One of the examples given by Vukov is the arrival of the Chinese ship Fujian in British Columbia in 1999. [...]

[...] We observe today an emphasis on the concept of “national identity” in politic, journalistic and scholar discourses, acknowledging that a nation promotes on identity among others, characterized by shared culture, values, belief, religion; and this identity is to be preserved and protected as the official one. As Hannah Arendt points it out in Origins of Totalitarianism', the emphasis on one identity neglects the fact that a country's population is never homogenous, but is rather composed of several ethnic groups or minorities living together, not necessarily sharing the same culture. (Arendt, 1951). This idea challenges the recent political discourses on immigration. [...]

[...] He explains that in order to define what belongs to a country, there is a need to define what doesn't belong to it. In this way, the society frames what is considered as a threat, what is excluded, what is undesirable. The migrants are then the perfect target of such exclusion, as they come from foreign countries and don't share the same values, and then are not of the identity. This is what happens for example in the European Union. [...]