The journal Philosophy Today has a new special issue on “Philosophy in a Time of Pandemic.” It looks like it is all online for free here. It’s a big issue with many short articles. I have a piece in there as well. You can read it below or download here.

Here is the Abstract for my article:

The COVID world is just like it was before, only more so. Every problem that already existed is worse. What can philosophy do in such a world? I think there are at least two opportunities for philosophy today. The first is that philosophers can seize this historical moment to intervene in almost every sector of social, political, and ethical life. The second unique opportunity I think philosophers have is to cre- ate new concepts in response to new phenomena. New events call for new ways of thinking and being that change our world-view. COVID is not just an amplification of existing power structures. It has also changed our relationship to and awareness of the importance of social and viral mobilities. Might the concept of “motion” offer us a new perspective on the world?

The journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism has just published a blog post I wrote here.

Image credit: Steve Hillebrand, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Licensed under CC0 for Public Domain Dedication.

The current pandemic is another crisis being turned against immigrants. Five years after the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015 migrants are again being treated as terrorists. This time they are being treated as bioterrorists. Bioterrorism refers to the intentional release of toxic biological agents and migrants are being treated as if their bodies were intentional biological weapons when they are not. This is part of the ongoing characterization of migrants as “invading armies” sweeping the media these days.

Migrants are being denied entry to apply for asylum along the southern border of the United states. This violates national and international immigration law, yet it’s happening anyway in the name of a national health emergency. Donald Trump has temporarily suspended immigration law claiming that immigration is bioterrorism even though the Center for Disease Control has publicly said that asylum seekers pose no health risk.

Asylum seekers have been arriving at cities such as Tijuana and Brownsville by the thousands between 2018 and 2021, fleeing political, climate, and drug cartel violence in Central America. The reason for their pooling pattern of motion is that president Trump instituted a border program called “Remain in Mexico,” where migrants have to wait in Mexico while officials process their asylum cases. This process can take years. So far, only a tiny percentage of migrants out of the 47,000 in the program have been granted asylum since 2018.

As I write this, 10,000 migrants are waiting in Tijuana. Most are relieved that Joe Biden was elected President and that the “Remain in Mexico” will end soon. Some migrants can work and pay for housing in Tijuana while they wait. Still, others without resources live in tent cities with limited access to clean drinking water, electricity, toilets, food, and education. Drug cartels are also taking advantage of this pooling of bodies by kidnapping, extorting, raping, and murdering them.

The concentration of bodies in the border zone is polluting the environment and creating a health hazard. When there are heavy rains in Tijuana, they flood the migrant encampments, and the shallow sewage systems overflow everywhere. These camps are literally pools of water and waste that are endangering migrants. There is no drainage of water and no drainage of movement of migrants out of the camps. They have nowhere to go. Some may take their chances in crossing the border. Others may get sucked into the deportation industrial current. However, most stay and wait in squalor, depending upon aid organizations from the US to survive.

Migrants in camps outside Tijuana are not static. They circulate among the town and back and forth to the border regularly to check on their case status and see if border officials call them for an asylum interview. The border’s architecture pools them and circulates them in a small region like a flow of water pools and spirals into an eddy when it hits a barrier.

Read on. Read my sister article on migration and terrorism here.

Thirty years ago, there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now, there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming. It is not surprising that we have also seen the rise of an increasingly powerful global climate-security market designed to profit from and sustain these crises over the past two decades. The construction of walls and fences to block rising sea levels and incoming people has become one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, alongside migrant detention and deportation. Economists project it to reach $742 billion by 2023. This increase in human migration and borders has been a defining feature of the 21st century so far.

However, alongside the spread of global borders and security markets is also an incredible proliferation of “the migrant arts.” As I understand them, the migrant arts include art made by migrants or about migration, or both. Migrants have produced works of art on cell phones, on canvas, in stories, or assemblies of objects carried on their journeys. They have documented their journeys in collaboration with others, and many of these artworks have traveled as “migrant artworks” through curatorial networks, the Internet, and museum circuits. Such museums, thus, have operated as relay systems for circulating migrant art around the world.

However, the process of migration is exceptionally uneven and highly ambiguous. This because societies marginalize migrants and exiles to varying degrees along axes of race, class, and gender. The migrant arts have, thus, given birth to great joy, freedom, beauty, novel expression alongside great sadness, trauma, loss, and untimely death. We should not romanticize or exile the migrant arts. Nor should we merely pity those forced to leave their homes or homelands.1 Their situations are far too complex for either.

No generalizations about “the migrant arts” can capture the extreme and uneven diversity of the situation of migrants’ today or in history. Migrants have gone by many names throughout history. They have been called “nomads,” “barbarians,” “vagabonds,” and “proletarians.” Today, the United Nations simply calls them “migrants.” Whatever their names and motives, migrants have also been great inventors of new artistic and social forms, though they have often suffered terribly.2 The explosion of the migrant arts today foregrounds a unique social and aesthetic experience of ambiguity. Creativity and hope mixed with profound sadness and loss.

The migrant arts are the result of a dialectic between political borders and aesthetic orders. The more social borders there are, the more they tend to leak with new experiences of mobility. It is a common misconception that borders stop movement. Borders are not static barriers, and they cannot stop human movement. Rather, they tend to proliferate it, although in mostly destructive ways. Borders are continually shifting, being skirted around, eroded, burrowed
through and under, and rebuilt. For example, the U.S./Mexico border can funnel people into the middle of the desert, trap them inside the U.S., drive them under it, above it, or through it, and can even kill them. Borders can inspire countless works of art and stories, but can never stop people from moving.

How many times can a false idea like borders stopping movement cause death and destruction before we see what is going on? How many exceptions to the rule of “stopping movement” have to emerge before it’s time to find a new rule? I think the migrant arts can help us see what is going on. The more barriers there are, the more differences and aesthetic hybrids multiply under the constraints. The migrant arts can help show us all the ways that one can move and how these ways can be experienced dierently. They may not always be liberating or joyful, but at least they show us what migration is about in all its complexity and singularity whereas borders, however, do not.

One can think of how a single leak in a pipe begins to multiply the more duct tape one put’s on. At first, the water seems to slow down, but then it begins to drip out several sides of the tape at once. Taping only redirects the flows but does not stop them. Alternatively, think about the dialectic between Internet advertising and ad-blocking software. Each new ad wants to control your movement and direct you to its source, and each new version of ad-removal software intends to let you move as you wish. The more new kinds of ads there are, the more new kinds of ad-evading software there is. The attempt to control your browsing through ads does not reduce dierences but multiplies evasion techniques and ad techniques. Similarly, think about how each new law or increased enforcement strategy increases the number of criminals and ways of avoiding detection. The point is the same: attempts to block mobility only diversify it, although often with terrible consequences.

Read the rest here.