Migrants:A Conversation (Issue #1)

by Editors of Cul-de-sac (Zuko Zikalala, Doina Sandor, Diane George, and O. Hugo Benavides) Conducted March 4, 2025

Note from the editors: What follows is an earnest conversation of our experiences, thoughts, feelings, and hopes surrounding the theme of migration. We say "surrounding" because encircling and exhausting the themes of such a multi-faceted topic is not our ambition. Yet, we hope to start a dialogue in which we get to learn, understand, and help one another to add nuance to what has become a bi-polar topic. It's a long but honest read. We hope that you, like we, find it a starting point to what comes next.

Part I

[O. Hugo Benavides (Hugo) ]

For our conversation today, I hope you will let me serve as a guide directing our interchange, at least at the beginning.

I've learned a lot of things through Greg, my partner, about the theater. I’ve learned that it will help a lot if we respond and reply to each other as much as possible. Actors call this “hearing each other”—quite different from us performing monologues for each other. We need to hear the import of the inflections each of us brings to our thoughts, reflections, and analysis on the topic of migrants and the way that subject is framed.

I found myself being very nervous about leading this discussion today. Then I realized I was nervous because the safety I felt talking with you gave me the openness to realize how vulnerable I really felt engaging this subject. “If I can say what I really feel,” my inner thought went, “who knows what will come out or where this will end up?”

Michel Foucault used to say that he wrote books because he didn't know what he thought. I hope this conversation will help us find out what we think. And what we're feeling beyond the frameworks we have come to use for a subject we now find ourselves wanting to open to renewed—and perhaps intensified—scrutiny.

The poet Nikki Giovanni says somewhere that the point of life is not to agonize over committing errors but to respond generatively to the errors we make. I’m also thinking of the playwright Samuel Beckett’s instruction to himself (in the face of the absence of all hope) “to fail better.”

Let’s start with what each of our experiences of migration has been and is now. I would like to hear us talk about what it has been like for each of us being a migrant interacting with other migrants. Above all, what elements of the experience have touched us the most? Who wants to throw themselves into the bull ring first?

[Diane George (Diane)]

I feel very privileged to live in a place, notwithstanding what's going on right now, where I've always had shelter and food and safety and free speech. And I haven't had to migrate to get those things. But I've worked with migrants my whole professional life. I'm so grateful for that. It has allowed me to see another world that millions and millions of people are now forced to live in. UN figures for the year 2020 show that 281 million people are migrants—close to 4% of the earth’s human population. I’m sure it’s higher now.

I've been in my life profoundly impacted by the people I've represented as a lawyer, many of whom have become friends, and the people I've worked with in Mexico or in the US-Mexican organizations working with migrants.

I think everyone should have to do that. If I could, I would mandate that every citizen engage with migrant organizations. There’s so much superficial rhetoric that flies around. I always go back to Leo Chavez, the American anthropologist who studies international migration, whose 2008 book The Latino Threat looks at how in the late 1980s and early 90s, with the rise of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the language used by the media to talk about immigrants changed. He traces how the language becomes that of “invasion,” “disease,” and of a hostile “army.” You see a very deliberate rhetoric associating migration with criminality and the thread of anonymous, faceless, invading “hordes.” This is long before Trump’s rise as a political figure. This language informs the way people think about migrants.

And how do we talk about this without talking about capitalism creating, and simultaneously distracting attention from, the reasons that people migrate in the first place? How do we connect global capitalism, inequality, and exploitation directly to human migration? How do we intervene to interrupt the demonization of migrants as a distraction used to alienate people from their own everyday experience of capitalism’s universal harms? We who work in this arena every day take these connections almost for granted, but most people don’t. I'm not saying I know what to do about the enormous consequences of this ignorance. I’m just putting its existence out there.

People are angry and are being told that it's immigrants who are to blame, that it's immigrants taking their jobs, that it's immigrants who are criminals just by existing. It’s a terrifyingly easy demographic to blame.

As a teacher, when I speak to my students about migration, I always try to be clear: I am talking about people’s lives. We can disagree on immigration policy. But as scholars, we are talking about lived experience—and valuing or de-valuing human lives. The point is to understand the reality of what it is to live as a migrant. I think that’s where we have to shift the dialogue.

[Doina Sandor (Doina)]

What kind of legal representation did you provide to migrants and others you've worked with?

[Diane]

I worked for a small firm, three lawyers, and we did business migration to keep the firm afloat. We did a lot of H-1Bs and green cards through what was called “labor certification” at the time. But we also did political cases. So I represented a lot of people who were seeking asylum, and I developed a specialty in that. I represented people from Northern Ireland, Haiti, China, South Africa—people from all over the world.

[Doina]

Were they young? How did they come to you?

[Diane]

They were all ages but yes, many were young. The lawyers in the office were all National Lawyers Guild members and we had a lot of connections—political connections—through that.

We also handled the complex immigration cases for a local union, so many of our clients came through that channel—a lot of Eastern European clients, Muslim people from the former Yugoslavia.

[Doina]

What you are saying is so interesting. Migration has so many facets—you end up being a migrant for so many different reasons. Some are very empowered and can move quite freely. I have a friend who is British. He is a migrant, I guess. He emigrated with his family to one of the Gulf states. They have a very privileged life with a big house, a driver, two nannies.

He wasn't there by force or by necessity. He was there because his wife got an interesting job offer that would further her career. We call people like him “expats.” We feel the need to differentiate. Maybe I'm an expat. To be more precise, I was a migrant and now I’m an expat. I don’t know the exact line—it’s blurry. But my friend was a completely different type of migrant from the people who worked in his household who came from the Philippines or from Sri Lanka or from other places I can’t now be sure of. And they, in turn, are different from political migrants and from refugees—the people you represented, Diane.

[Diane]

Well, we represented a wide range. There were also people who were privileged, like the computer programmers for whom we got H1Bs. But when you're a small firm, you have to do cases like that to keep afloat.

[Doina]

In my case, no one was killing me. I was not being persecuted. I'm not gay or suffering any obvious oppression. I had access to health care. I had all these basic things—my basic needs were being met. I belonged to a loving household. I had all these options and opportunities in my own country, but I still chose to leave. How should we classify people like me? We’re migrants, but we’re also different from other migrants.

[Hugo]

I think there are two sides. On the one side, there's varied ways that the nuance of class or sexuality or religion or all kinds of things intersect. So there's a big difference in that household in the Gulf country. They're all migrants, but those servants are in a very different position from that of their Global North expat employers. That’s crucial. But just for a moment, I want to add to the enormities of that divide an accompanying, parallel fracture that I think is important to recognize and to try hard not to minimize.

When I (or anyone else) leave home, for whatever reason—by persecution or choice—something happens to my psyche. What do I do as a human being in response to that? How do I open myself to the experience of my break from “homeland”? From within the vulnerabilities this break inevitably produces, how do I not fall victim to the already weaponized binary categories of “native or foreigner,” “citizen or stateless,” “friend or enemy,” “patriot or hostile infiltrator,” an unconditionally accepted and loved member of the community or one who is an existential threat to the culture and body politic of the ‘host’ country”? My own recent wrestling with the fallout and overlap among these categories comes from living in La Roma, a very upscale neighborhood in Mexico City. I was working for a corporation doing diversity work. Half of us in my building were fucking gringos. I heard English all the time.

Are we despicable, or are we trying to do something different? What is happening to my identity and my psyche as I’m exposed and exposing myself to living inside these fractures?

But Zuko we haven't heard from you.

[Zuko Zikalala (Zuko)]

I can speak of my experience—and my relation to—the figure of the migrant in various ways.

I can speak of my experience as a South African. South Africa is a country that has a lot of xenophobia—or what we call “Afrophobia.” That fact has shaped my own becoming.

When I had to move and live and settle in the US, I experienced myself, in one sense, “on the other end” of that xenophobia. At the same time, I felt the need to continue to be wary of the different xenophobia I felt operating in the US.

I also was aware of experiencing a psychic rupture. Something destabilizing happened—happens. It affects your dream life. One thing I used to tell people: I didn't realize just how superstitious I was until I had to leave South Africa and live in the US. My dream life was affected immensely. Certain dreams are interpreted back home as having a lot of meaning. A lot flows from that. And then I read Wilson Harris’s “The Music of Living Landscapes,” and I realized, “Oh no, nightmares of this sort are a normal part of leaving the Global South and settling in the Global North.” Yes, there's displacement, but then there's also the ways in which I feel that displacement, even in my body. Once I understand that I have inherited the effects of migration as a shared experience common to so many of us, I understand this as part of the ordering of the world, not just as the isolating, individualized malign effect of contemporary state action in the age of globalization.

I think this ties into Cul-de-sac’s foundational idea, the utopian inclination towards casting migration within a framework in which oppression and harms can be refigured as grounds for historical justice. I think we are trying to make our online journal part of a potentially emancipative common ground. Aren’t we trying to cast utopian light on the history we are living as a way to prepare ourselves for a borderless world? Does that mean the same thing for everyone? Does it mean the same for the white male subject who imagines himself as the very foundation of reason as it does for the nomad who traverses all of society to reveal its terminal brokenness? For whom, and on behalf of what shared history, are borders now being controlled and managed?

Maybe it’s obvious but still important to say that borders are not experienced the same way by everyone. I sense that I feel in my body the inheritance of many of the same things people undergoing forced migration are experiencing now all over the world. As a Black subject—and as a Black body—I experience borders as sites that I have to negotiate at every level all the time. That’s true whether I’m entering the gate at campus or I’m in an airport. All sorts of regulations are always going on.

[Hugo]

I have the same sense. It’s as if customs and passport control are not only at the borders but everywhere—apartment buildings, homes, streets, public buildings, stores, corporate offices, parks, gated communities.

[Zuko]

Exactly. Yes. So, we live at many different junctures. Thresholds are not just one kind of issue. Where do you belong? Do you belong in a particular space? I’m at the point now where I find myself realizing in a low-key way that I am probably romanticizing the entire notion of “home.” “Home” may actually not even be available in any immediate, taken-for-granted way.

[Hugo]

One of my favorite James Baldwin lines is: “‘Home’—you know, the very word begins to have a diabolical ring.” He had to leave home, he used to say, to realize he was American.

I just finished writing an article on migration that has now left me with the following question: “What country am I going to be faithful to? The country that expelled me—that threw me out, that couldn’t support me—or the country that tells me I am primitive and an anonymous, unremembered fragment indistinguishable within an undifferentiated “horde” that doesn’t belong anywhere on earth? What phrase other than “psychic rupture” can we possibly have for the subjectivity of such a condition?

Now, maybe paradoxically, I want to get away from this idea that immigration equals suffering. Maybe it's because I'm older. When you were talking earlier, Zuko, I felt my age. I felt myself almost saying to myself, I'm tired of being a gay person in a state of victimhood.”

You know, we are more than victims. Emigrants and immigrants are more than victims.

And I think in some ways you hinted at this, Diane, when you said what a privilege it is to learn from that experience. What agency does the migrant possess? Might not that agency be enormously valuable?

I don't want to deny the suffering. How do we proceed from this initially paradoxical-sounding formulation?

[Doina]

For me it is important to distinguish between the different types of migrants, and that links to the idea of “agency.” Even as a child, I always felt the need to leave home, to become someone else. . . the real me. “Home” was everything, anything outside of my apartment. Isn’t leaving part of becoming something? And how illusory is that idea that you become something by leaving. . . . When I first arrived in New York, I became exactly what I wanted to leave behind. I was so lost as to who I was that I needed to identify with something, and what better something than the thing that I wanted to deny?

I felt I couldn't breathe—that I desperately needed to be somewhere else. The vulnerability I felt in Romania is hard to describe.

I still feel it. But sometimes I also feel very guilty. For example, I feel like I'm taking jobs from other people in the country in which I’m living whether it’s in the UK, the US, or Switzerland.

My employers are paying me less, and they can control me more than they can a non-immigrant. Still, I’m taking that job.

I feel I should try to integrate and belong—play the game. . . . And then I don't because I don't speak Swiss German—because my close friends are British, not Swiss.

So I live in a bubble. Where does my right to be here come from—fundamentally? Am I imposing? Am I an imposter?

I feel the violence inherent in my vulnerability. I am subject to regulation and administrative control in ways non-immigrant citizens don’t experience. “They” can throw me out anytime. I worry about my visa. I worry about having enough money to survive on my own here (without the benefit of friends or family to help). I don't have the same sense of security that Swiss citizens have. At the same time, I have cast myself free from the tyrannies of nationality and state in a way that they have not. I am freer than they are. I am in their space, in their country. I share in their customs. I can feel myself both as victim and aggressor. When I go to the doctor, for instance, I feel like I force others to speak English, a language that's not their “native tongue.” And that’s because I can’t speak German. Why do they agree to this?

They accommodate that fact because they make money from it. We’re in a capitalist system together. They want my money and I need their service. At the same time, it's not fair, maybe to either of us.

There is an element of guilt. I take Zuko’s point: what is the utopian dream underlying and informing our daily consciousness and fantasies about home, place, country, nation, freedom, and the continuity of our lives? Is it open borders? You can move anywhere and shouldn't really belong to one place, or can you belong everywhere? What would such a “belonging” really be like or mean? Would it mean belonging in practice to a privileged elite who know what they're doing? Or would such a universal belonging be available to everyone?

[Hugo]

Do you feel guilt towards the Romanian subjects you left as well? Guilt that you have a better life than most of them?

[Doina]

I don't know that I do. They have friendships that are long-lasting, and they have a better living standard. They have concrete, tangible embodiments of home and family. They don't have all these questions you are asking.

[Hugo]

Let me ask you this one: Would you go back to live their lives with them?

[Doina]

No, I definitely would not.

There's something very nice about not knowing what it is like or how to be a migrant. But I wouldn’t forfeit that knowledge for anything. It comes at a high price, but I couldn’t bear to live now without the knowledge being a migrant has given me.

Is my life better? It’s richer because I've met so many other people. I think I have had more profound, more complex, more far-reaching, direct, and resonant struggles with the realities of our present world than conventional nationalism permits. I understand what Diane means when she talks about the necessity of being on both sides of migration—seeing first-hand its enormous, revelatory shaping role in human experience.

I remember coming back from a party with a friend—a Swiss friend. I asked them, “Do you ever worry about money? Have you ever worried about where money for food tomorrow or to pay your rent is going to come from?

They were very honest and said, “No, never. I've never worried about anything.” Can you imagine that? I was stunned by the answer.

[Hugo]

I find the answer very sad. I find it almost inhuman. It’s human experience—but I find it perversely impoverished.

[Doina]

My friend is actually bright, complex, caring, emotionally intelligent. But they’ve never had to struggle with not belonging, feeling out of place, feeling vulnerable, not feeling like “you.” I think it’s important for us to understand and think about what it means that there are people who have never felt the urge to leave because the world—their economic world, their mental world—was fine.

[Hugo]

Your example connects us to the larger, crucial issue of the relation of migration to identity.

One of the dominant, fraught conceptions and brutal prevailing ideologies in the West is that identity is inseparable from unbounded privatized possessive entitlements. But this, paradoxically, creates an insatiability of unmet—unattainable—needs. No matter how rich and successful I am as a capitalist consumer, I can never satisfy my infinite needs. And if I am not getting what I need, surely the hordes (whose undeserved sufferings fill me with such dread, rage, and fear of retribution) are to blame.

In Ecuador today that translates into blaming Venezuelans and Cubans because they're supposedly killing women, taking our jobs, and destroying the country. And, or course, it's all BS.

How does all this come together to affect people who are moving from one space to another across the earth? How does this desperate capitalist ideology of all value as isolated possessive dominion in the form of monetized property affect the forces compelling millions to leave the place they were born and move to places in which they have to redefine what it means to “belong”?

How does this process affect your sense of identity and worldview—your understanding of the coherence of your continuity in time and space? How does that make you who you are?

I keep thinking of your friend and why this makes me so sad. Not to experience something is to miss your own life. Maybe we’re trying to make Cul-de-sac a place where we don’t have to do that.

We can't be everybody, but a certain way of reading written texts gives us access to other subjectivities. That’s my hope anyway. I'll never be a Black woman, but damn, am I fascinated by the experience of Black women. I realized some time ago that 50% of all the work I quote and cite in my own writing comes from Black female artists.

What I’m saying here applies to what I think about being gay. When I came out, it almost drove me to suicide. Not missing that experience may be the most important thing I’ve done in my life.

It allowed me to connect to other people. How do we not miss our own lives so that we can connect better with others? I’m not interested in proselytizing. It’s a practical question framed by desire. It’s a question I hope Cul-de-sac will help me to answer.

It is not about Whitney Houston “being every woman,” as her song says. But not to have access to knowledge of the experience her artistry makes available to everyone is to miss something indispensable.

[Diane]

I think that's the crux of everything. I hope students come out of my classes feeling they've broadened their world just a little bit.

Every student of mine has to create a life history of a migrant. Everybody talks to an immigrant in depth. Every student has to confront opening themselves to someone’s lived experience of migration.

Zuko, when you talked about asking yourself whether utopia was a place without borders, I had a big smile on my face. Yes. That's what it's all about. Rejecting this nation state concept that decrees that we have to put up walls and create the foreign “other” and then say, “I'm better than you and you can't come here because you're less than I am.” And defining ourselves in opposition to what we perceive them to be: “criminals, rapists, and thieves crossing the southern border.” No borders—that's a happy thought.

Doina, my first reaction to your story about your friend was, “I’m really glad now that I have had times where I have had no money—when I was not sure how I was going to pay my bills. That experience helps me to understand what many other people are going through.”

At the same time, though, don't we all want a world in which no one has to worry about basic subsistence? In which we all have health care, where we all have food. Where migration is an available choice not a traumatic necessity.

In Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower, she brilliantly creates spatial hierarchies In a quasi post-apocalyptic world using imagery of walls and the lack of walls. Where the characters are situated in relation to these walls—their “positionality”—shapes how they see the world and themselves.

The main character lives in a walled community that has a special, very dangerous wire around the top. People see and experience this as a privileged, wealthy place. They’re struggling inside the walls, but at least they have walls.

And eventually those walls, with which they have cut themselves off from other people, are what bring about their downfall. People are jealous of what they have and find a way to break in and destroy the community.

Walls don't bring security. Borders don't bring security. Community brings security and strength. But we desire walls. Ultimately, maybe that’s our downfall.

Zuko, I was struck by what you said about the white male subject. Again, the word “positionality” is useful here, I think. The expat is the white male figure who can traverse the globe at will navigating all its passages and opportunities legally for his own benefit and to increase his footprint and the presence of his power in the world. It has always been white Europeans: the French on ships in Algiers Harbor watching the bombing of Algiers; travel writers in colonial Ireland writing about the hunger; wealthy and middle-class travelers to “exotic” places looking at Indigenous inhabitants the way naturalists were looking at their specimens.

Doina, you don’t fit this description at all. Positionality—you’re in Europe. You're in a wealthy country. The people whose jobs you think you’re taking are going to find employment. Structurally, you’re in a very different position from destitute and desperate people who are coming in and doing the work no one wants to do and then being denounced, deported, and scapegoated for posing a threat to the survival of the nation.

I don’t think your choice to live outside Romania is a moral failure requiring reparation or apology in any way. I do respect your right to feel that it is.

[Hugo]

I'm not sure I agree if that means supporting Doina’s feelings of guilt.

[Zuko]

I want to echo what Diane said. The difficulty is to convey the untranslatability of being a migrant—the “otherness” of that subjectivity—and navigating it with everyone else whom we encounter or come to know. That’s the real work. How do we authentically honor everyone’s inability to ever completely honor another person’s opacity—each person’s right to opacity?

Historically I think maybe we have come to imagine the figure of the migrant, the expat, the refugee, the exile, the asylum seeker, the seasonal worker through technologies, forms, and expressive genres that have always made the figure in question available to us—have produced the figure we are seeing—as an “other” who is knowable.

That itself is the problem, I think. That is the problem with all our narratives, including—and maybe especially—our narratives about victimization.

I don't think representational and expressive assurances of knowability accurately reflect actual human experience.

[Hugo]

Let me grab that. I think you just did something—said something—that I was trying to do and say earlier.

People who migrate are not knowable and are not supposed to be salvageable. I think that's the narrative that is being produced and acted out right now. Either there's an anti-migrant rhetoric that immigrants are victimizers and hurting us or—and this is a narrative of privilege I do not want to fall into—immigrants need to be saved.

So where do I enter among these narratives? Where does Cul-de-sac enter? What’s the narrative of inter-subjectivity adequate to the historical fact that the four of us were born each on a different continent? Europe, North America, South America, and Africa. This is right, isn’t it? And we're here attempting to find a common language. I think the purpose should be not to find a common language. I don't think the goal should be not to have any borders. I think that's a delusional and maybe oppressive white dream.

I think the purpose is what Zuko just said—and what Nikki Giovanni implies: The right and freedom of everyone to make and become themselves through responding generatively to their mistakes. Maybe the common task is to create an environment for that. It’s a very different enterprise from building and increasing state power.

How do we transmit the sense of valuing untranslatability—human opacity—which Zuko sees as so fundamental to justly honoring mutuality in an age of coerced mass migration? I think we should try to hold on to that question.

It's not that there is this known, recordable, preservable human experience that then we must define and communicate. On the contrary, there's something there that's untranslatable, uncommunicable that we must wrestle with.

That’s the best part of the four of us here. It’s not the knowable part but actually the part which gets hit, impacted, or stroked by the other’s experience but which remains out of representational sight. It’s the part that opens something up while remaining inexpressible. The inability to express—which, again, is in Beckett and in Nikki Giovanni—is to be valued and honored and accepted, not conquered or dismissed. I see Cul-de-sac as a place to practice and play with whatever ethos each and all of us find comes from valuing this insight. Let’s call it valuing the opacity intrinsic to inter-subjectivity within modernity’s unrelenting, untold violence of mass migration.

This idea of the permanent migrant is a very modern construction. So is the idea of the gay subject. What are we to make of this newness? The meaning of movement itself has changed, it seems to me. So has the meaning of the politics of inter-subjectivity and of equality.

My utopian side hopes that our emotional engagements and investments in our experiences of this newness—our resulting search for adequate expressive forms for our engagements’ truths—will lead somewhere interesting and even good. I hope Cul-de-sac can become part of such an effort.

[Doina]

Let me play devil's advocate. Hugo, you know I sometimes do that. The question that I often pose myself is how is it that people who are emigrants from Romania—who have left to live in Spain, Italy, Portugal, or wherever—how is it that when it comes to voting, they vote for the far right? Why do they vote against themselves and, in the end, against the opportunities they themselves were given? Why do they vote against affording others the liberties and openness to belong and search for whatever they're searching for?

They want to prevent other people from having the same opportunities or experiences. They do that as one result of their migration.

Zuko, I find what you say about the right to opacity—the right not to be known—profound. This feels like a new idea to me and also a new political perspective on creating justice beyond the limits and pathologies of the nation state. What I am talking about are the current dynamics of migration as it is controlled, corrupted, and weaponized by those whose power is derived from nation states and the hierarchies of power and impunity they are built upon and which they exploit for their own ends.

The people I’m talking about want to be known—but not for who they really are. They want to be known in their new countries for who they want to become. What they want to become is someone similar to people in their new country. When somebody comes from where they come from, they face the challenge, all of a sudden, not just of what they want to pretend to be but of their fear that they will be associated in the eyes of their new fellow citizens with this “alien” group from which they originally came. They fear that their former association with their country of origin will jeopardize their status and entitlement to belong. Or maybe they have become those people.

This opens a breach in your presentation of your identity to others. Many former migrants turn on new migrants from the same country. I experienced the bitterness of this sharply. I still avoid Romanians. Their hostility (or mine?) costs me dearly. They remind me not just of who I am, but of where I left and why I left. Then I end up stereotyping them, even here in this conversation. This thought we’re pursuing of migration as a process of translation and identity, as trading in authenticity and belonging—I think it’s a very violent process. I also think it’s a politically repressive—a politically stifling—process. This is true whether I succeed or fail in improving my economic condition.

I find it very hard to explain to someone, including my mom or my sister or my friends, what my experience is like. I'm untranslatable. Even as I talk about it, there's no way to understand it unless you live it. Diane, I sense this is what you are trying to teach your students. You can study and interview, but unless you do it—unless you feel it—you cannot truly know it.

There is a complexity to everything that's happening subjectively that no amount of empathy can reach. Yes, rationally, I'm not taking anyone's job. Otherwise, they would have filled it. They wouldn't have given it to me. At the same time, I am accepting less money. I find myself behaving in subservient ways. I feel invisible shackles impeding my movements among people. I'm not in control. At the same time, I know it's an imaginary control that I feel the lack of. If I were in Romania, it wouldn't be any different.

The only part of migration that is more violent than the psychological part is the direct physical policing at the borders or when you are expelled from the country.

[Hugo]

That puts something on the table I want to talk about. I think the violence comes because the migrant—and the figure of “the migrant”—actively exposes the fractures of capitalism in a very discomforting way.

The migrant exposes the violence of capitalism to people who have temporarily domesticated and accommodated its harshness in all sorts of ways. The figure of the migrant re-exposes people to what they want to understand as having already been overcome in their country’s history. Your actual, present experience as a migrant, Doina, won’t let them quite do that, and they react to that re-activated exposure to their own vulnerabilities strongly and sometimes violently.

I have kept myself up at night wondering why the figure of the migrant provokes such virulent hatred. It comes from somewhere. Maybe the desperation implied by the enormities of displacement that migration entails at all levels exposes dominators in an uncontrolled way to the actual unappeasable pain and impunity of coercion against which the usual apologetics, rationales, and normalizations have already failed.

[Doina]

Migration destabilizes who you want to be or with whom you want to be—who you are or who you hope to be. It's just such an in-your-face type of thing.

From the smallest things—from what you eat, what you wear, how you speak, to how you think. You have to discover what your priorities are and how you see the world. We all want conformity. We don't want people to be different. It’s hard to deal with differences. It's hard to deal with conflict.

[Diane]

Some of us become anthropologists because we're fascinated by difference. We want to know about the range of humanity’s “ways of being.” But I think for most people they don't want to deal with it. They don't want the discomfort of having their lives unsettled. Doina, what you said is making me think of what Hugo always says about race, quoting Stuart Hall: the roots of racism—of racial antipathy—lie not in dislike or hatred but originate from hidden—disowned—love and desires.

[Hugo]

Yes. You hate people who are different than you because there’s actually something that's drawing you towards them—but you can't allow that attraction because it destabilizes—and might change—who you are, who you think you are, or who you want to pretend to be.

It destabilizes your hierarchies and your heart. Migration elicits deep emotions from everyone, including guilt and desire. It’s a big mistake not to make the emotional aspect of migration central to our discussions.

Doina, I want to turn to something you said earlier. We think of migration as movement—as the search for a “better life.” That applies to all of us involved in this discussion, one way or another. But when many of us succeed in that goal, it does not mean that our outlook towards others—especially towards other migrants—necessarily is founded on empathy for their situations gained from our own experiences of the pain, suffering, and cruelties of our own situations.

It’s very easy to focus on the directional arrow of our improved circumstances and accomplishments as migrants. But what about the directional arrow of how our migration affects—or has affected—our relationships to others?

I'm always shocked when I find gay people who are extremely racist. I want to say to them, “Given your experience of discrimination—of profound discrimination—how can you then inflict it on others? But people can, and do, do precisely this all the time. How can Ecuadorians discriminate against Venezuelans?

Every Ecuadorian has an immigrant family member, and still, they discriminate against migrants. As you say, Doina, a better life does not necessarily connect the immigrant to greater empathy or connectedness to other people's lives.

[Doina]

As a migrant, you have to—or think you have to—be ruthless and selfish and single-minded. Sometimes we help each other along the way, but at the end of the day, only one makes it over that fence. Something breaks in that process—something I have tried to repair.

Not that I have succeeded in this. I've hurt other people in the process—or I think I have. Maybe that was inevitable or maybe not. I don't know how to explain exactly what I mean. There’s the sense of a dark, despairing feeling even if you succeed. And I’m not sure what I mean by “succeed.” Maybe, feel like you can survive? Something like that. This feeling lies outside most discussions or theories of what a successful migrant is.

It's very unsettling actually. I know I’m not making myself clear.

[Hugo]

I kind of like that we're having difficulty expressing what we want to say.

[Doina]

What? You can't read my mind? You can't immediately make complete sense of what I’m saying? What’s wrong with you?

[Zuko]

I'm still hearing Doina use the word “selfish.” When I first went to the States, the first couple of months—it was extremely difficult for me to settle in. I felt weird. Other students who had just come to the US, would say to me, “Listen, be selfish. Look out for yourself.” I would also have conversations with people back home. The spectacle of wealth juxtaposed with people who are displaced in Philadelphia shocked me. It brought up feelings of guilt. It brought up all these difficult feelings.

The movements involved in migration are emotional as well as physical. The emotional movements create a psychological mobility that is disorienting. “Where will your emotional state take you?” you ask yourself.

Aspirations, ethics, hope, fears, investments, ambitions—all these are in play. But maybe the struggle that shook me the most was that, for the first time in my life, I had to imagine myself as a migrant. Was this going to end up well? A big part of the rupture I felt was my own discomfort and doubt about the training I could feel myself receiving from all this movement. This training—this success at being an immigrant—I could feel wasn’t what I wanted. This is not what a good life is.

Feelings like that.

I remember asking a friend, “Is migratory guilt like a real thing?” My friend said, “No, no, you can't carry that. You don't want to burden yourself with that weight.” They wanted to put my question aside. They wanted to undo it.

[Hugo]

But being for the self does not equal being against others. Being “selfish” is, you know, “being of the self.” Protecting myself is and should be connected to protecting others. Putting yourself first is basic to taking care of other people. I know that as a caregiver.

I want and need to be helped when I'm vulnerable or needy. I need help to get to that selfish place where now I can take care of myself. But the good is not to then use my strength to compete against others.

How do we do that? Because that's not a given. Reciprocity and mutuality do not seem to be the natural central features of human psychology. The yearning for a just, universal mutuality as the common ground of human relations seems to me to be part of a fairly recent Western Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Middle Eastern religious and cultural tradition that developed in the West in the wake of the enormities of the catastrophic, eliminationist brutality and violence of imperial domination and rule. I would include anthropology as a modern scholarly discipline and professional practice within this tradition.

Anthropology is finally an act of faith. It’s an act of faith that includes my belief in you—in all three of you—and our ability to attempt together to articulate a particular vision.

What I'm not able to say is that this vision will be successfully realized. The attempt and the vision are very different things. Anthropology is something I believe in. Being “selfish” is an intrinsic part of this act of faith of mine

I think something traumatic happens to immigrants when we get put in a very vulnerable position. I think that trauma damages us in a profound way. But I'm not sure about this.

[Doina]

When I look back on my time in New York, I realize it was super confusing. At first my identity was very Romanian. I felt very homesick. I found myself defining myself by the norms, thought structures, and emotional investments of precisely the place that I so desperately wanted to leave. But I also wanted not to be obvious—not to be visibly Romanian. I wanted to be inconspicuous, to blend into anonymity because I had no model for being. I felt myself to be a shape shifter. It was my only recourse.

I was reading. My friend wrote a book, and I was reading it. There was a passage in which he said something like, “What's the shape of an egg without the shell around it?” I thought that was beautiful because I think that I'm a bit like that. I think that's what migration does to you. It forces you to try to find your “shape” outside the boundaries of the place and people who made you. At first, your frames of reference are externalities. These include the things you're fighting against and the things you think or want to aspire to.

In New York a lot of people were generous and kind. I felt guilty because there was no way for me to say, “Thank you.” I didn't know how to reciprocate. They were helping me. I didn't know if I could ever give back something adequate for what they had done for me. I didn't want to be indebted. But I also wanted to accept people’s generosity. I knew their goodness wasn't directed towards me specifically. It was directed at something larger than me. They were people who understood the difficulties of the situation—the difficulties both immigrants and non-immigrants faced.

But that's where the guilt also comes from, from a position of inequality or inability to reciprocate. And then guilt in the UK came from the fact that I was taking someone’s job. I was being paid a pittance for a job that somebody else should have had. At the same time, I think about affirmative action. Hugo, you taught me I was deserving. You taught me I had to fight for what I need. That I deserved the success I got through my own efforts. Then there’s the neoliberal corporate capitalist ideology that the market delivers to people the rewards each person deserves. Success is just the mirror of the virtue its beneficiaries display by working so hard and efficiently. Which is bullshit. We all know that, but I didn't know that then. I didn’t know how to get to where I wanted to go.

Who are all these people helping and being kind and generous? How in God's world does that goodness transform into a general societal hatred towards someone like me at some later point in time? That's the bit that really baffles me.

I would gladly help a younger me or a younger Zuko or a young writer just starting out. But I don't really know how I would react to a 40-year-old me. What would I do regarding a person similar to me, at the same professional level, fighting for the same survival and the same space? My sense is that I would end up being generous and kind and withdrawing from the competition and conflict. But I can understand why many people won't do that. Because they've worked so hard. They feel they deserve it. They deserve to be there. They made all these sacrifices. They forget that they're not there by their own special abilities, but because someone else has helped them, someone else has been generous.

What happens inside the minds of people when they turn against other people just like themselves? I don't know.

[Hugo]

I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves of just how much the immigrant experience and the production of the category of “the migrant” is connected to so many other things.

Obviously, this is connected to economics. But it's also connected to identity. For immigrants to be called “hordes,” to be discriminated against, and even be quarantined is not new at all. This shit has been going on for centuries. But I do think what may be new is that the West is collapsing. The West is entering a particular moment of crisis. Within that crisis, irreconcilable, warring identities intrinsic to globalized capitalism produce general destabilization and fear.

I just read this morning that Elon Musk said something about populating Mars. It's as if he were saying, “We already have this planet, and we’re about to wreck it because that’s what the profitability principle at the heart of reality commands and decrees. We who are in command know how to gamble with the lives of everyone to ensure optimized outcomes. We’ve already given up on this planet.” We’re in a particularly extreme moment of crisis.

I keep going back to Baldwin. He knew how psychologically destabilizing real change is. There’s a passage in which he analogizes it by asking what would happen if we were to go out and see two moons? Or two suns? It would fucking terrify us. How would we be able to recognize ourselves? That's what I think is happening. The world is collapsing, and we know it, but we don’t know how to understand ourselves in this situation. Instead of facing reality, we say, “Let's just blame the mirrors in which we see the reflections of our own projected terrors but misidentify them as the imminent danger of invading hordes of migrants overrunning our borders.” It reminds me of why Borges hated mirrors so much.

If we just get rid of the mirror, then we won't ever have to know how we looked. I think the immigrant is that mirror. That's where the hatred comes in.

You’re right, Doina. Migration is not only about economics, nor is it only about identity. It’s also about the tearing of the whole fabric of everyday humane, human relations in a period of acute historical crisis.

With so many things happening at the same time and with the incoherence of the intense destruction we are witnessing, the need becomes more urgent to create a place in which to try to understand what the full experience entailed in the demonization—the dehumanization—of the migrant really consists of and to push back against it as hard as we can.