The Problems of Protection: Lessons from Migrant Vulnerability

The COVID-19 pandemic showed we are all vulnerable in a crisis, but also that crisis can deepen inequality. The virus infected (and continues to infect) regardless of race, class and passport, and this is precisely what exposes race, class, and passport as the inequality-producing mechanisms they are. Migrants – or certain kinds of migrants – are archetypal vulnerable subjects, not only vulnerable to disease, but to violence, exploitation, and insecurity. The pandemic exacerbated but did not create this vulnerability. What can migrants’ experiences teach us about broader vulnerability?

There are three kinds of migrants who are recognized as having particular vulnerabilities: the asylum-seeker/refugee, the victim of trafficking, and the undocumented migrant. The vulnerability of the first two gives them particular rights to state protection, with the border as not only a site of control, but also a point of humanitarian intervention.

However, the acknowledgment of vulnerability and the need for protection of refugees and victims of trafficking creates vulnerabilities for others. While some migrants are at risk, others are risky, and considerable efforts are made to distinguish between the two: the refugee and the bogus asylum seeker; the victim of trafficking and the trafficker; the documented contributor and the illegal immigrant.

To preserve the refugee category, it is necessary to deport “bogus asylum seekers.” To preserve the victim of trafficking category it is necessary to identify and punish those who facilitate movement. The distinction between the genuine refugee and the economic migrant, between the most vulnerable and those with lesser vulnerabilities, and between those exploited because of a position of vulnerability and those just plain exploited, all require sorting.

Sorting brings the threat of deportation for those who fall into the wrong pile, thereby creating the third group of vulnerable migrants, the undocumented. Their vulnerability is either justified or invisibilized. It is invisibilized when deported since as far as policy is concerned, they have dropped off the map. The risky migrant who is the antithesis of the individual refugee or victim of trafficking makes national society itself, and the citizen the subject of protection.

Vulnerability and Protection

Examining the vulnerability of migrants then shows us the importance of protection, and of the role of the law and the state. The requirement of the powerful to protect is a dual recognition of both vulnerability and authority. On the peripheries of the empire, colonial powers often claimed that they were acting to protect persecuted natives. The vulnerable were protected – whether slaves, aborigines, or ‘miserable peoples’ – largely when it was politically advantageous to do so, and protection served as a demonstration of European civilization and superiority.

Indeed, claims to protect the vulnerable in the case of asylum and trafficking continue to allow states to represent themselves as ‘virtuous actors’ on the national and international stage. However, precisely because we are all vulnerable, the recognition of exceptional vulnerability can risk normalizing ‘ordinary’ vulnerability. Recognition of trafficking/modern slavery introduces a new baseline: the vulnerability of overworked migrants and, importantly, non-migrants too not paid the minimum wage or allowed time off can be overlooked or minimized because it doesn’t constitute ‘trafficking.’

Rather than treating vulnerability as structurally produced, it becomes exceptionalized and seen as resulting from criminal bad actors. This has particular consequences for migrants, because they are already structurally excluded from the mainstream. Indeed, migrant vulnerability in part arises precisely because they are legally denied rights and protections granted to citizens – such as protection against discrimination, right to employment and welfare. They are differentiated from citizens and having been stripped of rights that citizens take for granted, some migrants are permitted to seek protection under a special and complicated regime.

The Problem of Deservingness

Furthermore, vulnerability invokes protection, but it also distinguishes between the deserving and the undeserving, justifying the exclusion of the undeserving by turning the undeserving into the spoilers for the deserving – because they don’t queue, give people the wrong idea, take what isn’t theirs, abuse the vulnerable and so on.

This centrality of deservingness belongs to a broader pattern: research funded under the Horizon 2020 project ETHOS, on everyday ideas of justice found that, in practice, rather than recognition, redistribution, and equality, most people understand justice as deservingness, drawing on ideas of moral character or virtue.

We found deservingness ideologies permeate the grounds, shape and site of justice, determining ideas about state responsibility to fulfill basic material needs such as shelter and food, enjoyment of social status and respect, and internal as well as international mobility. This indicates an impoverishment of our social fabric, or of our moral economies. As ontological approaches to vulnerability remind us, we are all as singular individuals vulnerable at some stage in our lives. In moments of need and acute vulnerability, we don’t ‘deserve’ protection, we simply need it.

This temporal dimension to vulnerability and protection needs to be taken seriously. Babies are vulnerable if abandoned, and we must protect them irrespective of our ideas of deservingness. But we do not protect them forever. They grow and change, and move into different kinds of social relations with us, including having the possibility of offering protection to others. As disability scholars and activists have demonstrated, to be in prolonged protection and permanent vulnerability is to be exposed to domination. Routes out of protection will depend on cases, individual and group, but they surely are demanded as an adequate response to vulnerability. Perhaps this requires thinking and acting on the relation between protection and solidarity.

And this relates to my final point. We cannot deny that in the world as currently ordered, and, as far as I can imagine, in whatever worlds will come in the future, protection is needed for individuals and groups. So we need to attend to the ever-changing politics of protection, and recognize that protection may be necessary, but it is not enough. Neither protection nor deservingness are adequate substitutes for justice.

Bridget Anderson is a Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

This article is part of a series on „Vulnerabilization of migrant workers during crises.“