Donatella Di Cesare - Resident Foreigners

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Donatella Di Cesare

Translated by David Broder

polity

First published in Italian as Stranieri Residenti © Bollati Boringhieri 2017

This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3354-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3355-8 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Di Cesare, Donatella, author.

Title: Resident foreigners : a philosophy of migration / Donatella Di Cesare.

Other titles: Stranieri residenti. English

Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014899 (print) | LCCN 2019980058 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533541 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533558 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509533572 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration--Philosophy.

Classification: LCC JV6035 .D4913 2019 (print) | LCC JV6035 (ebook) | DDC 304.801--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014899

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980058

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To my grandfather Francesco La Torre,

anarchist and socialist,

who set off from Marseilles

and landed, clandestinely,

at Ellis Island in 1925

In this book, the reader will find no ‘answers’ to questions like ‘how migration flows ought to be governed’, what criteria should be used to ‘distinguish between refugees and economic migrants’, or how they should be ‘integrated’. Rather, this work poses a fundamental challenge to such questions. For they are all inscribed in a politics that, while it claims to be pragmatic, responds only to the self-immunizing logic of exclusion. No solutions are to be found along these lines. This politics, which goes so far as to portray even barring entry to the migrant as an expression of concern for her wellbeing, and her rejection as an act of consideration towards her, aims only to defend the state’s territory, understood as a closed-off space under collective ownership. But the nation cannot invoke any ius soli as a reason to deny hospitality, any more than it can a ius sanguinis. It is no surprise that two ancient spectres – the blood and the soil, which have forever been the linchpins of discrimination – have re-emerged in Europe in recent years.

Today’s world is subdivided into multiple states that face one another, confront one another, and support one another. For the children of the nation, the state appears as a natural, almost eternal entity; since birth, they have shared the dominant state-centric perspective, which still holds firm. Migration is, then, a deviance to be held in check, an anomaly to be got rid of. The migrant at the outer margin reminds the state of its historical becoming and discredits its mythical purity. That is why any reflection on migration must also rethink the state itself.

This book is the first of its kind to outline a ‘philosophy of migration’. Not even philosophy has thus far recognized the migrant’s citizenship rights. Only recently has it accepted her within its borders – and even then it keeps her under strict surveillance, ready to push her away again with the first expulsion order.

The first chapter reconstructs a debate between the partisans of closed borders and the champions of open borders – a very intense debate in the Anglophone and German contexts. These two positions each correspond in their own way to liberalism, and indeed reveal liberalism’s impasse: one of these positions supports sovereign self-determination, while the other demands an abstract freedom of movement. This book, for its part, is not willing to gaze out at the shipwreck from the shore. It sets itself at a distance from both positions.

A philosophy that starts out from migration, and which makes the reception of immigrants its first theme, allows migrating – released from arché , the founding principle of sovereignty – to become the point of entry, and lets migrants become the protagonist of a new and anarchic landscape. The migrant’s point of view cannot but have effects on politics as well as on philosophy, as it re-energizes both.

To migrate is not a biological drive, but rather an existential and political act. But the right to migrate is yet to be recognized. This book is intended as a contribution to the demand for a ius migrandi , in an age in which there is such a breakdown in human rights that it seems quite legitimate to ask whether the end of hospitality has already been sealed.

Looking back at our own time, future history books will not simply indulge today’s hegemonic narrative. They will have to say that Europe – the homeland of human rights – denied hospitality to people who were fleeing war, persecution, abuse and rape, desolation and hunger. The potential guest was instead stigmatized a priori as an enemy. In the pages of these future history books, those who were safe and protected by state borders will bear the burden and the responsibility for the lives – and deaths – caught up in this history.

As well as the land, the sea has an important place in these pages. It is an in-between space that both unites and separates. It is a passageway that steers clear of borders, erases any trace of appropriation, and preserves the memory of another clandestinity – the clandestinity of opposition, resistance and struggles. This is clandestinity not as a stigma – ‘the illegals’ – but rather as a choice. The sea route points to the overturning of order, to the challenge of the elsewhere and the other.

For too long, philosophy has wallowed in the edifying use of the word ‘other’. It has upheld an idea of hospitality as an absolute and impossible demand, unbound from politics and relegated to the level of religious charity or ethical engagement. This has had fatal results. Anachronistic and out of place, the acts of hospitality carried out by ‘humanitarians’ – those beautiful souls who still believe in justice – have been the target of derision and denunciation. They are first of all targeted by that politics which believes that it must govern in obedience to welfare chauvinism and the cynicism of ‘securitarianism’.