“I will tell you the story of belatedness”

Why for us, migrants, it is always too late

“I will tell you the story of belatedness. We migrants, we refugees, we foreigners.We are always seen as delayed people.We arrive [at] the right time.And it is always too late.”Shahram Khosravi It is mid-June when we video chat with Dagmawi Yimer, an Ethiopian refugee and filmmaker living in Italy, for the first ...
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Whose Home? Whose Rule?

Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule and the politics of autochthony

Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press: 2020) In February 2002, five months after Narendra Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, an anti-Muslim pogrom erupted in his state. In three months of violence, Hindu nationalist rioters raped and murdered hundreds of Muslim ...
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Whose Home? Whose Rule?

The Fragility of the Global Mobility Regime

What states could not do on their own, the virus has completed

For the past decade or so, immigration advocates in the global North have seen their primary opponents as populist parties and politicians, who rose to power on assertions that immigration is economically and demographically harmful to advanced democracies. It has been a long, drawn-out battle and, since Brexit and the ...
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The Fragility of the Global Mobility Regime

Borders in the Time of COVID-19

What the pandemic reveals about the regulation of mobility

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the significance of borders. While much attention has been paid to debates surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall,” the current crisis reveals that governments seeking to restrict mobility rely only partly (and increasingly rarely) ...
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Borders in the Time of COVID-19