Migratory Cogitations (1)

My latest project pertains to migration, and it arose with regards to my semi-work on Augustine of Hippo.  In a published work, I made use of the possibility that his deployment of peregrinus/-i could imply more than simply a "pilgrim."  This itself is not new, at least to me at least.  There's been some work done on how the peregrini were a social class, and that Augustine's use of it does not simply mean "pilgrimage" (as the Latin word is often translated) in any modern sense of that word.  In the paper, which seemed to be read at least enough by Augustine scholars with Academia.edu accounts to gain me some behind-the-paywall notifications of citations, I simply used it to suggest its instructive import into ecclesiology today.  It seems to me that discussing in some more detail would not only be helpful in general, but also be useful in discussing issues between theology and migration.

Certainly, migration has been a topic of great importance lately.  When we hear about "migrant" in the news and in theology, we perhaps think about the migrants in Lampedusa, whom Pope Francis visited four months after his pontifical inauguration in 2013, or the images of drowned bodies washing up on the banks of the Mediterranean Sea or Rio Grande.  But in many respects the term "migrant" does not accurately describe the nature of migration in a way that meaningfully re-situates dispossessed and precarious peoples to the center of the church's missional consciousness.  What I'm suggesting strongly here is that in reality, theologies of "migration" risk essentializing all migrants as marginalized peoples when, in reality, migrancy and marginality are not ontologically equivalent.  The rich migrate too.  Tourists are migrants as well, their migration motivated by their desire to flee busy-ness or sameness. Thus, my work aims to think through migration theologies, desiring to crisp the understanding of "migrant," so that "the migrant" does not become a theological obscuration, that people could claim marginality by virtue of having participated in a generic migration experience.

My initial entry point comes from Peter Phan's work on ecclesiology and migration, which can be easily summed up as saying that migration should be considered a fifth mark of the church.  Or, as he put it, extra migrationem nulla ecclesia. His thesis is not complicated if one attended carefully to the church's history - this latter attention is, to be honest, not easily assumable in our present historical contexts.  The gospel spread because most of the disciples migrated, bringing the gospel from Jerusalem to Samaria and then to the ends of the earth.  That there are church bodies throughout the world today testify to the criticality of migration in the church's story.  Without migratory technologies, Nestorian and Jesuit missionaries would not have been able to enjoy a foothold in China.  How else could the gospel be enculturated into the United States had the Spanish, French, English, German, Irish, Polish, and other national peoples, not had the possibility of migrating into the country to begin with?  Hence, it is not hard to demonstrate Phan's thesis that migration made the church.

But just because migration made the church does not mean that it is obligated to care for suffering migrants, any more than how the church's experiences of being persecuted did not foreclose the possibility of it being the persecutor.  After all, the theologically flippant could simply claim that pre-20th century migration was very different than the migration issues surrounding refugees or asylum.  Certainly, there is the historical reality that, at least in the United States, immigration laws only kicked in beginning 1882, with the Chinese Exclusion Act.  Additionally, proponents of stricter immigration and carte blanche exclusion of non-White asylum seekers and refugees would argue that states have the right to enforce boundaries in accordance to their own principles, however ethically dubious those principles may be.  All this to say, it is insufficient to simply make the connection that the church's migrant identity connects to its migrant mission.  My suggestion is that the next step to this discussion is to interrogate the nature of the migrancy in ecclesiology.

Philosophical Disquisitions: The Migratory Figure

Two resources are available that forward our considerations.  The first is philosophical, namely,  Thomas Nail's The Figure of the Migrant.  Nail is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver and is active in migrant activism.  For him, a critical aspect in his book is that migrants (re)shape the state, not the other way around.  That is to say, our operating paradigm for conceptualizing migration is often to assume the state as static and preeminent, with migration being a second-order reflection and structured as a dynamism between two states.  Nail sought to turn the logic on its head, arguing that it is social movements, of which migration is one, that (re)constitute states.  The question, then, is what the nature of that social movement is.  His critical argument is that social expansion or the accumulation of political power could not be possible without social expulsion or dispossession.  In his interview in The Other Journal, he provides an example of the circularity of the dynamic of expelling the migrant and its necessity for social expansion.  The way this circularity works - the "ordinary" flow, if you will - involves four kinopolitical expulsionary forces: centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic forces. These correspond to the four ontological migrant figures: the Nomad, Barbarian, Vagabond, and Proletariat.

For explanation, let us focus momentarily on the Nomad.  The figure of the nomadic migrant arises as they are centripetally abandoned from society through the disempowerment of the periphery.  An example of this comes from the Neolithic period as freely-available hunter-gathering land becomes cordoned off into agricultural land.  This expulsion pivotally shifted human societies from the hunter-gathering sort into the agricultural.  Consequently, the nomads abandoned the arable lands and created a new existence in the less-arable mountains and steppes.  But this migrant nature persists today.  Internal land "reforms" and other policies in various central American states that sought to open land to foreign investment made local farmers unable to hold on to their lands, which either meant that they had to abandon them to foreign investment, relying on other sources of income.  But migrant figures are not completely divested of any ways of remedying their situations.  They can, and often do, respond through their kinetic counterpower.  The nomadic migrant's kinetic counterpower comes in the form of the poorly-named "raid."  Raiding, of course, conjures up negative images that can add fuel to the fire of right-wing, xenophobic rhetoric, but as Nail makes clear, the counterpower is not a means of "stealing" or pilfering but of survival.  Because of their expulsion in order to ensure social expansion in their original countries, nomadic migrants may move elsewhere, earning resources and sending them back to their loved ones to support them. 

Let us focus on another figure for additional considerations: the Barbarian.  The barbarian migrant arises as they are centrifugally expelled from society through excluding them from political life.  This exclusion need not be legal, as is the case with Native American lands in the United States; exclusion can come from bankruptcy or other forms of political marginalization.  Hence, the kinetic counterpower of the barbarian migrant is flight or fight - to flee or to revolt against society.  Nail raises the example of the slave revolts in the Roman Empire; slaves either could flee (i.e. migrate to better circumstances), or turn back to revolt against the system (i.e. return home to change it).  Again, as it is with the Nomad, we do not have to restrict ourselves to dealing with literal Barbarians.  Thanks to neoliberal frames of governance that have totally restructured adversely the lives of farmers throughout central America, migrants move northward in search of less dangerous pastures. Nail raises as an example the Zapatista movement as an example of a revolt that sought to change conditions at home so that such migration would not be necessary in the first place.

Now, one might ask how this is helpful at all for what I'm thinking of doing.  Well, Nail is useful in several regards.  First, he illustrates the diversity of migration dynamics; an overarching and all-encompassing "migrant" category is not possible.  He hints at it by noting that "we are all migrants."  I surmise that what he is really saying is that migratory dynamics characterize all human experiences.  However, in light of the goings-on in the world today, that phrase could be mistaken as an essentializing phrase, as if what is happening to migrants along the US southern border should not be taken too seriously since "we're all migrants anyways."  But related to that concern is also the essentialization of the migration experience, as if all migrants suffer similarly when, in reality, they don't.  Nail's discussion of tourism as migration highlights that problem.  Certainly, I agree with him that the tourist experiences some form of dislocation - we are, after all, not in Kansas anymore - but the tourist is not forcibly expelled; they voluntarily migrate and expect to do so on a temporary basis.  We cannot compare a rich Emirati driving his gold Lamborghini and flying super-first class on Emirates to take his family to New York for a week-long visit to an Eritrean trying to make the extremely perilous Mediterranean crossing in order to escape crushing poverty and social turmoil in his country.  I'm sure Nail does not intend this, but a less careful reader might make such an odd comparison.

But second, Nail unpacks to some extent some of the dimensions of the migrant experiences, as well as highlighting the interconnectivity between them.  The Nomad, Barbarian, Vagabond, and Proletarian are not hermetically sealed categories, as if those expelled by centripetal social forces cannot suffer expulsion from tensional ones as well.  The expulsions that create migrant figures often present aspects of some or all of these forces.  Yet, naming them is critical, for it begins the process of deconstructing the migrant experience in order that we do not reassemble them back in an essentializing fashion.  It is in the interstices between such essentializations that privilege and power hide, shielding the powerful and even deflecting the attention of those who look to them to uphold their responsibilities towards justice. 

Third, and most relevant to our concerns, is the figure of the vagabond migrant.  The Vagabond experience social expulsion thanks to the force of law, to which the kinetic counter-power is some form of rebellion against the law's injustice.  Again, this is not merely a legal situation.  Ecclesiological vagabonds are termed heretics, and there are processes of ecclesiastical expulsion for those who rebel against church law and doctrine.  Echoing the figure of the barbarian migrant, ecclesial vagabonds have banded together to form movements, the most famous of which was the Protestant Reformation.  But keep in mind that through all our deliberations that it is not the pre-existing state/church that determines its nature, but that those movements compel their identitarian (re)developments.  Think about how church doctrines have been fine-tuned and/or taken on different trajectories because of theological innovations, reformations, and counter-reformations.  Indeed, perhaps hearkening a bit to the work of Herman Bavinck, it is the diversity of these theologies - not necessarily the unity - that make church church. This is something we will continue cogitating in our next post.