By Anas Ansar, Magnus Treiber, and Franzisca Zanker | Issue 26
Was the pandemic a time to reset the structural inequalities of our (im)mobile times? At the keynote lecture of our network meeting on the 26th June, Gunjan Sodhi argued “migration is a proxy for race”. We take a small journey through our research experiences working with Global South migration researchers, Bangladeshi migrant workers and Eritrean refugees to show how the pandemic made pre-existing precarious conditions visible and activism more plausible. Yet persistent ignorance remains and with it the status quo of structural racism.
Hope for change?
As social distancing and working from home became common across the globe so did digital exchange and communication. In the ongoing dilemma to deal with inequalities in knowledge production, the ideal to include more Global South researchers suddenly became more plausible. Gone were the difficult challenges of finding funds for travel, filing receipts and waiting months for reimbursement and not to mention the problems to get a visa on time.
The pandemic suddenly made it possible to attend a meeting in Addis Ababa at 10 am, and in Mexico City by 4 pm. It was a time when some of us, amongst many other researchers, launched a small project on how the pandemic had affected migrant communities, thereby connecting researchers from Mexico, Qatar, Zimbabwe and Nepal with two researchers in Germany. Central to the project was not just to re-centre the South – as this was missing in most global reporting at the time – but to see the reflections from the four countries and regions as related to each other and to the state of global affairs. Such a trans-regional perspective would have been possible (for a selective section) prior to the pandemic, but this experience revealed the ease of digital communication, igniting an urge to gather, explore, and reflect on what was happening in other parts of the world. This ease of connection has stayed and along with it, new opportunities to amplify Global South voices, research, and perspectives and make them accessible to wider communities.
A changing tide
While global scholars got closer, activists found it increasingly difficult to reach out and get public attendance. One such activist initiative was the Eritrean diaspora movement called “Yi’akil”, “Enough!” protests against Eritrea’s human rights abuses and its fund-raising activities abroad were at its height when the pandemic started. Due to social distancing, public meetings were called off and for Yi’akil, online protest did not have the same effect. When mainstream media turned elsewhere, the movement lost visibility, its chance to mobilise activists – and eventually momentum.
After the Yi’akil protests disappeared during the pandemic, some more radical activist voices appeared in transnational social media channels and called for violent attacks on the loyalist counterparts in the Eritrean diaspora, in its festivals and seminars. They managed something new and unseen; in 2023 and 2024 they got hundreds of refugees to take to the streets in Gießen, Stuttgart and The Hague. They managed to mobilise those who had previously stayed silent and did not get involved in politics due to the fear of persecution of family members left behind and reliving old traumas.
In their new countries of arrival, this refugee community often felt they had to keep up appearances, keep a low profile, and avoid the past. Personal suffering could simply not be expressed until these new mass protests opened a collective valve. Violence, initially stirred by ring leaders, triggered own and suppressed experiences of violence in the military, during the war, and in Eritrean society as such. Violent protest brought a sense of liberating subjectivity and collective action back into the lives of the newly-arrived, it drew massive media attention on the Eritrean case – and for the first time also on the machinations of the loyalist diaspora.
The persistence of ignorance
We turn to our third vignette, despite increased visibility of working conditions for migrant workers during the pandemic this did not translate into any form of wider long-term recognition of migrant labour. Conditions, which became so desperate and awful for migrant workers have not changed. The employer sponsored exploitative Kafala system remains in place for the millions of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia (and other migrant dependent Gulf states). Yet the country introduced a 4-day work week to attract western ‘expatriates’ who are primarily employed in the oil and tech industries of the country, in its desperate image-making campaign ahead of its bid to host the FIFA World Cup 2034.
Episodes of whimsical practices by the receiving states and selective reforms to serve the interest of a few (locals and Western workers) remain silent on issues of the right to labour unionisation or fair contracts. Wage theft, forced labour, and other forms of exploitative working conditions for millions of low skilled migrant workers coming from countries like Bangladesh remain an issue, as a vivid testimony of how racism and hierarchy in migrant categories continue to persist and shape the migration governance.
If we turn back to the networks with the Global South scholars, despite changes in communication, the underlying inequalities in knowledge production haven’t changed. The structural issues on who can travel, with what funds and reimbursement, with what visa conditions, and trying to get to the destination haven’t changed one bit. A recent study shows that the poorer a person’s country of origin, the more likely that their (non-refundable and recently increased to 90€) Schengen visa application will be rejected.
Communication, visibility, and forms of the Eritrean diaspora activism changed. Ironically, the Covid-pandemic helped to bring out voices of the unheard, not least due to media attention easily drawn to discursive othering, but it also muted those who had protested peacefully for a long time. They were sometimes taken over by new – and sometimes violent – voices. This itself led to a backlash and European media jumped on the bandwagon of the (Eritrean) violent migrant ‘other’ that fitted the anti-migrant narratives that were growing across Europe. It also criminalised refugees and damaged their individual asylum cases, fuelling anti-migration sentiments and the call for further deportations in the respective host countries.
Visibility has also not translated into solidarity with migrant workers. It can perhaps lead us to question, once again, the position of migrants in the capitalist world order and the bitter fact that migration and therefore migrants, remain capitalism’s unfinished business. The inequalities in mobility that persist despite easier communication, the lack of solidarity despite growing visibility of the dismal conditions faced by migrant workers, the uptake of media attention of a new group, easily othered, all highlight the highly pervasive structural racism that still embeds mobility. The continuities of these precarities entangled in migrant life is the Long Covid we have not yet overcome.
Anas Ansar
Anas is senior researcher at the Arnold-Bergsträsser-Institute (ABI), Freiburg and fellow at the Bonn Center of Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). University of Bonn, Germany. His research focuses on South Asia-Gulf Labour migration corridor, diaspora political engagement, contested borderland identities and humanitarian governance at the margin.
Magnus Treiber
Magnus teaches anthropology at Munich
University. He has conducted extensive research on migration within and from the Horn of Africa, Eritrea in particular. Among others he has published Migration aus Eritrea, 2017, and ‘Entangled Paths through Different Times. Refugees in and from the African Horn’ in Africa Today, 2022: 69/1-2.
Franzisca Zanker
Franzisca is a senior researcher at the Arnold- Bergstraesser-Institute, Freiburg. Her research focuses on the political interests and agency in (forced) migration in Africa, South of the Sahara. She currently heads the ERC-funded project The Political Lives of Migrants: Perspectives from Africa.
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