May 15 saw the return of the Alfred Dubs Lecture on Migration and Refugees, set up by The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement at Cambridge University in 2021. The name honours Alfred Dubs, a former child refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and lifelong campaigner for refugee rights.
The subject this year was ‘Race, corporate sovereigns, and corporate borders’, presented by Professor Tendayi E. Achiume. In addition to being a Professor of Law at the University of California, Achiume has also been a UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.
Professor Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at New York University, acted as the discussant. Dr Tugba Basaran, Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, chaired the lecture.
Achiume’s area of expertise is in how ideas of race intersect with borders. She rejected the idea of borders as colour-blind. Instead, she argued that many national and international borders in the 21st century discriminate against people of colour and economically deprived individuals. She argued that the Schengen Zone is an example of this. This area covers 29 European countries, which citizens can freely travel, work, and live in without border checks. All Schengen Zone countries also have a single set of rules for non-Schengen visitors.
It is these rules that Achiume argued discriminate along lines of race. While citizens from North and most of South America don’t require visas for short trips, visitors from all African countries still require them. Similarly, African immigrants applying for a 90-day travel visa are more likely to have their application rejected than North Americans. This applies even to Africans who are fully sponsored.
The other part of Achiume’s lecture focused on the influence of transnational corporations on borders, particularly racialised borders. In our globalised world, transnationals can move between borders far easier than working class citizens. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allowed transnationals from the USA to move the processing parts of their operations across the Mexican border. There they have utilised low-paid, non-unionised Mexicans as cheap labour. This has driven many Mexicans across the border, to supplement low incomes by donating blood plasma in the USA. Once there, they are in a legally ambiguous situation, and at risk of detention. NAFTA has simultaneously reduced border restrictions for transnationals, while placing working-class Mexicans in a legal grey area. Achiume described this as ‘jurisdictional arbitrage’: when some individuals or bodies circumvent border laws more easily than others.
Achiume also drew on the example of the Zimbabwe-South Africa border on the Limpopo River as highlighting the influence of corporations over borders and migration. This is a site of mass migration for black Zimbabweans, many of whom attempt to cross the border to work on fruit farms run by South Africans. Some of these farmers are white, and some moved to South Africa from Zimbabwe around the time of Zimbabwe’s independence. Where farms are in control of determining their workforce, they can effectively decide who is lawfully present and who is not in ways that amount to sovereign control. Additionally, these migrants’ grey legal status gives them fewer rights, allowing South African farmers to exploit their labour.
There is a precedent of this in colonialism, such as the transatlantic slave trade, in which slave merchants shaped the movement of Africans across continents. The South Africa-Zimbabwe border is another example: concentration of land in South Africa among a small number of wealthy white people is a legacy of British colonialism. Zimbabwe’s borders were likewise delineated by the British South Africa Company in the 19th century. Not only are these examples of borders being racialised, they are also examples of wealth dictating border policy.
Vasuki Nesiah closed the lecture by using Achiume’s notion of corporate borders as a heuristic to analyse racial and corporate borders in the context of the current war against Gaza. She argued that an infrastructure of racialized mobilities and immobilities have exacerbated the tragedies unfolding in historic Palestine. For instance, many Palestinians were trapped in Rafah as sitting targets. Their entrapment has been conditioned by the fusion of Israel’s miliary campaign (itself super charged by transnational weapons companies), immigration policies of many countries, and the afterlives of colonial bordering practices.
She also gave another example of racial-capitalist fusion by pointing to how the ideologies and political economy of security and militarisation were intertwined with the ideologies and political economy of labour under Israeli occupation, including the system of walls and checkpoints that conditioned the mobility of Palestinians in the occupied territories. With the start of the war, 200,000 Palestinian work permits were revoked and reworked into the recruitment of economically precarious brown and black labour from Malawi, India and Sri Lanka, where a neocolonial world order created opportunities for global capital. These domains were another context where state and corporate structures colluded in the racialized mobilities and immobilities that were illuminated by Achiume’s framework of ‘corporate borders’.
This year’s Alfred Dubs Lecture was especially timely, coming shortly after the UK government approved deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. At the same time, the EU has strengthened border controls through the Pact on Migration and Asylum. Achiume and Nesiah saw this as an opportunity to rethink border controls, to put migrants before transnational companies.
The lecture was attended by academics and students in the field of human movement and displacement, both from Cambridge and outside of it. Some attendees had been involved with refugees in various countries. Currently, human displacement is at its highest level since the 1940s. This will have a profound effect on our approach to borders. The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement’s mission is to address the plight of displaced populations across the world. Understanding the world’s borders and their history is a crucial part of this.
Speaking about this lecture, Dr Basaran said “Prof Achiume’s terrific interventions request us to move beyond a colour-blind approach and confronting intersectional forms of discrimination in international law. Her works, again and again, bring race to various borders – whether political, legal, digital, or corporate borders - along with an emphasis on temporalities, often ignored, from empire to reparations. Quite a tour de force.”
