Gear 12: Over Here.
If there ever was a gear, migration is it. A single word, that bleeds together games of exclusion, anxieties about resources, histories, culture clashes, and down right racisms. One becomes then caught in a morass of language. Possibly legitimate
IN one sense} concerns about where people live, and what resources are allowed to one pampered part of the globe and what are denied to the masses, slip very quickly into a wider debate and more disturbing debate about the nature of peoples, and the concept of being a nation. So extreme is this explosion into many registers, that is it appears almost impossible to talk about migration without also appearing elitist in some way.:)One the one hand one is a middle class intellectual, advocating a toleration that impacts more on the poor, and on those who compete for jobs, than on oneself; On the other to talk o migration is to want to exclude portions of the world from a wealth that is unjustly owned in this part of it. Migration is either a debate about forcing others to share resources; or else it is about keeping hold of a birth right which is unjustified save through appeals to nations and history.
Perhaps at the core of this problem is another, even deeper one. The Gear of Migration I powerful, as it is defined within the folds of the nation state. A nation, claiming rights of land and history, blood and economics, is clearly defined in relation to this Gear,. That is the very rational of being a nation, of controlling portion of space and time, is threaten or confirmed by migration. Migrations then either what the threatened state needs to control, in order to survive at all; or else it is the extra power the really powerful nation state can invoke. I is a force from outside the realm of this state a force that in providing extra resources allows the state to advance in way that it could not dream of. Migrants are the a hidden powerhouse and yet also, if the mood music moves a threat. The trouble of course is that there is not a candle between these two elements. We might moan about migration and yet we are also flattered by it. Because they want to come we fell ourselves special; We define ourselves in the moan that we are where all migrants want to go. The racisms then that we allow in excluding those we do not want and the racisms of grandeur, and of feeling ourselves special. Even our worries become also a mark of our being different: A Britain that no one was trying to go to would be a sorry affair. On the other side, in that beefy self-confidence that allows others , there is always a caveat. We allow as long as we are wealthy, and as long as our economy is growing from the process. There are then always conditions. As we feel the pinch, then we pinch migration, or attempt to. It s hen a resource we might in our self confidence use, and yet it is also one we always worried at; Or again it might be something that we might want to stop, and so assert our historical rights to excess resource, and ye in doing so we confirm we are special and different; we are desirable.
Migration is then set up again that e nation-state, as both its nadir, but also its supreme confirmer. States know they are powerful as they are destination that people want to go to. Likewise a sate where all the people are would be migrants has failed to become a nation. It is rather a place of poverty, corruption and the impossibility of government. At best it is a society migration as it happens is a secrete source of wealth as money is sent back to these who remain; but its possibility confirms the people in their slavery. That is they look at other countries and see that they are have a wealth that cannot be dreamed of in their current place, and seek to flee. The possibility of migration, and the promised that animate it, then offer an oppressed population an alternative to bad government, a dream of flight that only confirms the status (and prolems0 of a country.
Migration then saves airs the self-imposed barometer by which nation states judge their power. That is they judge (and then seek to police0 their conceptual muscle within the wider global community. To be the place people talk about and dream of going, is to have a power indeed. It is to allow then to talk big in global community. Migration, is its possibility, the slips beyond the stale very slippery, and frankly debates within a nation, and becomes more about a complex conception colonialism, and its reaction. Various countries by becoming the goals for migration, or place that people talk about, the utopia, become also in a sense sacrosanct. One does not belief then the system that change as such shrangia will become more common or be forced to share their wealth. more than that, in the dream of migration and entire dream of living elsewhere is sold. The American dream, creeps across the world, as an alternative to migration.
On might blocked within a system with allows by historical accident great wealth and even greater poverty, and seeks to lock individuals into their allotted place without appeals to nations and immigration control. And yet this is all alright, if only one drinks this sticky caffeine concoction: it I the essence or epitome of a culture. One need not migrate or question if only one has a coke.
Migration is then also the flip side to advertising. That is to the fact that many western based (or at leas begun) multi-nationalist use he language of migration, an the image of the free west to sell God knows what dreams and what over valued tat to the rest of the world . form this last point tow further global effects of migration of defined. Firstly Migration clearly heights a genuine inequity in the current system of global government; and secondly this conceptual battle, this using the images of a migration made impossible is itself political and cultural dynamite.
TO deal with the first point it is of course one of the problems with our system, that we belief it operate more or less in harmony. We are then rather blind to actual huge contradictions in its makeup. Take for example the idea of the nation state and free marker. A Nation sate, that is a random agglomerations of subcultures, lands histories and government is clearly posited to the free market (or at least very distinct form it). This is after all h ‘debate in America of health care. He free-market for health rejects the state, and its interference. But the same argument is found over the debate about regulation of bakers or the problem of global warming. It rests in a fundamental contradiction we have two tradition (and rightwing) ways to understand ho as a community we come together. They have different histories and evolved at slightly different times (and in the contest of something else- call it the industrial revolution), and have different concerns and histories. Politically we have then spend a lot of time and energy of reconciling these two very different takes on reality. As a rule we nation states would like to expand free trade in relation to money but not labour. This is of course, in classical free market theory a contradiction. How can one have a genuine free market if one doe into allows cheap labour into where it is needed? The result of course has been that many jobs have migrated (rather than people coming in). This then of course creates a new eddy in the powers of poor nation sets. As a people they have taken jobs, while as a nation the west has lost them. he effect then of GATT has been to effectively nationalize (in part the job structured: we in the Britain at least talk of jobs going to India or China, and this flight of work is very much a part of the our consciousness of there countries Jobs migrate then because people cannot. This fact then has two attendant problems of its own.
Firstly it will breed presentiment in the job donor country. We might have lost the job because no one was prepared to work for those wages, but that doe into mean we actually 9when times get tougher) really wanted to lose that job. Or at lead the possibility of it. For in this system, once types of jobs have flown it is almost inconceivable that they will ever return. The economy is the fundamentally changed, Jobs and stay gone. This of course then makes appeals to historical context in the understanding of downturns and upturns rather problematic and difficult ideas. Secondly in the other nations, the lands to which jobs have gone we can hide all kinds of abuses and double standards. Not only are their countries ‘allowed’ in their own systems level of oppression we would not tolerate. Our cheap product are then made on the back of a oppression we canto stomached. But also as we have defined that certain other elements of globalization ( global warming and terrorism) are to be handled at the nation state level, the moving out our jobs is moving our pollution. We state then to look good, and you make other nations, by our new criterion for goodness look bad.
The GATT agreement in a one inverted or sought to invert the migration. If people cannot flow into countries the jobs can flow out of them. it confirmed then the power of the an overt the market, in the short term. Nations were allowed their power over migration, and yet in doing so, in creating invested migration, it then spawned new problem of its own. Migration is reverse (jobs not people) is just as troublesome for the nation in the long terms as it is grinding forward.
The second point mentioned about, concerned that effect of migration, to spawn an idea of freedom, tied to a product. The problem of courser with this approaches is that although it was (and no doubt still is) very gratifying for the west, it also creates new problems. These problems revolve around the kind of effect upon culture that this marketing of cod freedom must affect to be effective. That I if one is selling dream of freedom, a dream that is meant only to stay a dream, and never become the grisly reality itself, then one is doing so only by putting into question, and for not point existing social norm as or structures. One issues then a pointless challenge. To Drink Coke is to be the rebel. This challenge is all the more pointless because we will not back it up with collateral support. something is challenge, some tradition is question and yet nothing follows. The result is two fold. one the one hand tradition system collapse or are comprised. They then transform or are violently transformed, into that mainstay or humanity without state, the Mafia. Mafia system organization (Gangster or Lord resistance armies or whatever) are simply the norm when the faith in the old system was collapsed to such a point when none have beilifying it is, and yet where no other system no other viable mechanism for power has succeeded this demise. The belief in the freedom of the west, an the question s it asks of traditions systems, had then not led to freedom, so much as the proliferation of Mafia-patronage style system across the globe. These systems then use the image the west (and rebellion-) to confirm their rather traditional power structures.: structures then than can be malign or benign on context, but ways with a nod to the West and this other set of values.
The only other alternative is to resist the west absolutely, and claim that every it says or does is as corrupting as Coke and as valueless. One then condemns not merely the product If freedom, but also the powers that related hose products, and sets up a rival rejecting brand. This is of course Al Queda in a nutshell. A brands to rival Coke and its powers, and the resist violently all westernization, good or bad or indifferent. The West marketing o itself and its pretensions turns around to undermine its very power (or better to punish it for selling a dream another than a reality.
The Gear of Migration is then so very complex, it gears up not only grateful disparate ideas or arguments in western cultures, arguments that actually have no resolution, and worse than that have no simple plane of reference. Total about migration in terms of economic, is also to talk of it in term or race or nationalisms. And yet beyond this double bind is in fact far more complex, in that it pitches one beyond the gear of migration, and into the troubles of nations That is the of being ‘over here. The problem of nation states asserting a right in the face of force that unpick that right, even as they apparently allow for it. A problem then tat greatly expands that problematic gear of migration to include job as well as people, oppression as well as freedom, and ideas as well as folk .The restful is that migration on a wider level becomes bound up with a wider cultural war, or debate with takes in the concept of freedom, and powers and duties of states. The problem of course so, these debate then feed back into that local debate about migration, and merely gear up the argument, making it richer and more complex, and with it even more problematic and irresolvable.
