Sociologist pushes for migrant justice
by Clara Bennett-Jones ’27, Contributing Writer
Julia Morris, Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, published her book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, last year. Her research focuses on the political economy of migration, more specifically, Morris noted, “the ways in which capitalists and political powers can benefit from increased migration securitization conditions.” Morris has conducted fieldwork in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva and Fiji to study such impacts of outsourcing asylum. She ultimately advocates for freedom of movement and fair representation of migrants.
Morris began her talk by introducing the theoretical framework of extractivism to understand the industry. “[It] revolves around the commodification of human mobility and specifically refugees as commodities,” said Morris. Her work centers around the question of the different kinds of value refugees serve when they are treated as commodities. As she explained it, this question allows her to consider “not only the financial value extracted by industry workers contracted into asylum and resettlement operations and the geopolitical value of refugee crisis spectacles for politicians and media workers, but also the humanitarian, moral values where refugees are the commodities in the center.” Morris broke down these prongs throughout her talk.
On Feb. 27, in KJ 101, Morris began by talking about the financial value within the industry of asylum and resettlement operations in Nauru. She asserted that “asylum is an extractive industry” because it hones in on the forced removal of raw materials, and even lives. She related this practice to Nauru’s colonial phosphate industry and explores how asylum is upheld by those structures. In looking at this situation through a neocolonial lens, Morris noted “that there are colonial continuities that are starkly evident in the material life of value that connects past and contemporary practices of resource extraction.” This means that within the industry of asylum and resettlement, she continued, “colonialism is maintained.” Morris called out Nauru’s shift from processing phosphates to now processing migrants.
Morris called attention to the financial gains made within this industry and points specifically to the 2016 EU-Turkey deal. “Turkey [accepting] the return of asylum seekers and migrants in exchange for 6 million euros in aid,” said Morris. She proceeded to say that this program is “structurally bound up in the governance of race and place and, although masked by humanitarian precepts, is a Eurocentric system that’s actually set up as a gatekeeping apparatus to control mobility and labor.” Politicians also stand to profit from the governance of human mobility because, as Morris said, “support for right-wing anti-immigrant platforms rides on the hysteria.” Even humanitarian actors have a stake in the migration industry, essentially indicating that asylum functions through various modes of capital accumulation projects.
Morris also addressed the geopolitical value of the refugee crisis as a spectacle for politicians and media workers. Morris condemns the misleading descriptions of the “intrinsic suffering of migrants” and “benevolent national refugee systems.” In fact, Morris challenged previous scholarship in the migration industry that presents movements as apolitical. Morris also noted that the migration industry is bolstered by “left-liberal actors who put forward their victimized refugee representations.” By challenging conventional thinking about human rights as apolitical, she stresses that these practices are also power-related and render people “commodities in a marketplace.”
Morris ended her talk by discussing possible next steps in her research. She seeks to explore “aspects such as the growth of the asylum industry, migrants’ experience of the asylum process, and the infrastructural overlaps of over-extractive industries in Nauru.”
Morris is also interested in determining ways to “disrupt models or perennial extractivism and move towards more egalitarian practices of solidarity, coalitions, and commonalities rather than ones of suffering and salvation.”
She argued that “rather than mobilizing problematic dichotomies of refugee abuse and local human rights atrocities, we can focus on intersectional advocacy that highlights and considers forms of free movement that go beyond the regime of asylum.”
