Mobility Archives - Public Seminar

Reviews

Whose Home? Whose Rule?

Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule and the politics of autochthony

May 21, 2020 • by Mat Cusick

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 ...

Migration

The Fragility of the Global Mobility Regime

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

May 19, 2020 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

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 ...

The Fragility of the Global Mobility Regime

Migration

Borders in the Time of COVID-19

What the pandemic reveals about the regulation of mobility

April 17, 2020 • by Ayelet Shachar

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) ...

North America

The Great Immobility

March 17, 2020 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Less obvious is the lesson we could come to learn about mobility. At first glance, the restrictions on travel to the United States seem to affirm a common trope: our borders need to be sealed against immigrants who would do us harm. Build the Wall; stop the germs! But there is another ...

Migration

I am a Migrant

January 28, 2020 • by Mat Cusick

I moved for the first time with my family when I was three years old, for a typical reason often described as “economic opportunity.” This meant, in my father’s case, an editorial position at the newspaper in the city where he was born and raised -- what is known as ...

Migration

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

December 18, 2019 • by Anne McNevin

Well before this crisis, conditions in Australia’s offshore camps were described as “torture” by medical professionals, Amnesty International, and refugees themselves. Médecins Sans Frontières reported “catastrophic effects on …mental health” that are “among the worst that MSF has ever seen.” Twelve refugees have died while held offshore. Benham Satah, a Kurdish refugee who witnessed ...

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

Migration

Lockstitch Lives

Migrants in the Megacity

December 16, 2019 • by Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee

Yogesh is one of the people you meet in Lockstitch Lives – Migrants in the Megacity. This interactive documentary, produced by Society for Labour and Development and HELM Studio, transports you to the neighborhoods of Gurgaon, where you witness the rugged daily realities of scores of families like Yogesh’s. Using 360-degree multimedia, Virtual Reality, photography ...

Feature

Comments on The Arc of Protection

Toward a New International Refugee Regime

June 4, 2018 • by David Scott FitzGerald

The Arc of Protection identifies major shifts in the international refugee regime, diagnoses current problems, and proposes principles to undergird reforms. The book seeks to renegotiate the existing “grand bargain” between the global South and the global North, in which the global South keeps most refugees bottled up in return for ...

Feature

Borders and the Politics of Mourning

A Response in a Post-Trump World

December 19, 2016 • by Anne McNevin

It seems an understatement to emphasize the timeliness of the recent edition of The New School’s journal Social Research on “Borders and Politics of Mourning,” edited by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass. The title takes on a whole new meaning in the aftermath of the US election. The politics ...

Feature

Borders and the Politics of Mourning

Social Research: An International Quarterly (Summer 2016)

November 11, 2016 • by Douglas de Toledo Piza

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility (ZIMM) is honored to host the launch event of “Borders and the Politics of Mourning” a special issue published by Social Research: An International Quarterly (Summer 2016), with a keynote address by Judith Butler. With more than 15,000 migrants dead and disappeared since 2014, ...