Rebecca Hamlin's "Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move"

Session Submission Type: In-Person Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel brings together migration scholars with expertise in the fields of International Relations (Lamis Abdelaaty), Political Theory (Sarah Song), Socio-Legal Studies (Rawan Arar), and American Politics (Tom Wong) to discuss this highly intra-disciplinary book. In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford University Press 2021), author Rebecca Hamlin presents the first book-length treatment of how the constructed legal fiction of the migrant/refugee binary emerged, how it shapes the study of border crossing, and how it is deployed in various border crossing situations around the world.

Today, the concept of "the refugee" as distinct from other migrants looms large. Immigration laws have developed to reinforce a dichotomy between those viewed as voluntary, often economically motivated, migrants who can be legitimately excluded by potential host states, and those viewed as forced, often politically motivated, refugees who should be let in. In Crossing, Hamlin critically examines advocacy positions that cling to this distinction. Everything we know about people who decide to move suggests that border crossing is far more complicated than any binary, or even a continuum, can encompass. Drawing on cases of various "border crises" across Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East, Hamlin outlines major inconsistencies and faulty assumptions on which the binary relies. The migrant/refugee binary is not just an innocuous shorthand—indeed, its power stems from the way in which it is painted as apolitical. In truth, the binary is a dangerous legal fiction, politically constructed with the ultimate goal of making harsh border control measures more ethically palatable to the public.

In making this argument, Crossing traverses many subfields of Political Science, looking historically to the development of the concept of a refugee alongside the rise of the colonial states of Europe, examining the advocacy and public relations work of the major International Organization involved with refugees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and engaging in a cross national comparison of border crossing into the US and EU. The book also breaks from the longstanding bias in the field of migration studies to focus on migration into the Global North, by presenting case studies of how the binary functions in the two largest contemporary displacement crises: Jordan and Lebanon (receiving Syrians) and Colombia and Peru (receiving Venezuelans). These accounts of South-South border crossing help to illustrate the ways in which the migrant/refugee binary is a construct driven by the interests of wealthy Global North states, perpetuating neocolonial global power dynamics.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Chair

• Lamis Abdelaaty Syracuse University

Presenters

• Rebecca Hamlin University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Sarah Song University of California, Berkeley

• Tom K. Wong University of California, San Diego

• Rawan Arar University of Washington