Transcript - "CRG Visiting Scholar Showcase"
April 6, 2023 -- CRG Forum Series
Listen to "CRG Visiting Scholar Showcase" with Marijke Bassani, Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz, and Rachel Rosenbloom.
LETI VOLPP: I'm Leti Volpp. I'm the Director for the Center for Race and Gender. We are so thrilled to see you all here.
I want to begin with the land acknowledgement.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley Community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868.
So we're here to showcase our three visiting scholars. We're all doing phenomenal work. I'm going to briefly introduce them and we're going to hear from each of them and. Here and then we'll open. It up for discussion. So our first visiting scholar will be Marijke.
And I will very briefly introduce to Marijke, is a Lamalama, Binthi Warra and Bulgun Warra Aboriginal woman who hails from the sovereign lands of the Guugu Yimithirr people located in the Cape York Peninsula, in rural northern Australia. Marijke is Human Rights Lawyer, a Lecturer, Advocate, American Australian Association Scholar, Roberta Sykes Scholar and Cape York Leaders Program Ambassador and scholar, and currently sits on the National LGBTI Human Rights Subcommittee at Australian Lawyers For human rights. And is completing an international cross-border PhD in Law from which Marijke will draw remark. The title of which is, “Welcoming the Unwelcome: Reclaiming space as the Indigenous ‘Other’. A Black Rainbow Homecoming”.
Next, we're going to hear from Sofi Jansson-Keshavar, who is a PhD candidate in Welfare Law at Linköping University in Sweden. Sofi has a background in Global Development Studies and International Migration and Ethnic Relations and previously has done research on histories of detention practices in Sweden. She has experience of working with reception policies of “unaccompanied children” in different municipalities and has been involved in networks of support for people living in irregularized conditions. And will speak about her Ph.D. research, which is titled, “Temporary Legality and Local Border Regimes in the Welfare State of Sweden”.
Third, we will hear from Rachel Rosenblum, Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, who's a Faculty Fellow at Northeastern’s Center for Law, Equity, and Race. was a co-founder of the Northeastern Immigrant Justice Clinic, director of that clinic. Was a Human Rights Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, and the supervising attorney for the center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. And who's currently writing a book on the history of efforts to restrict constitutional birthright citizenship from the 1880s through the Trump administration, and this remarks are going to be called, “Race, Borders, and Birthright Citizenship”.
So without further ado, I will turn it over. To you.
MARIJKE BASSANI: I would also just like to open it up by acknowledging that we are on the land of the Ohlone peoples and I want to pay my respects to their Elders, both past and present, as well as any emerging leaders in the Ohlone community. And I also want to extend that respect and that acknowledgement to any people in the audience who might identify as Native as well. Sovereignty was never ceded, it continues to exist today. Always was, always will be Indigenous land. And I just want to thank the Ohlone peoples for the honor and privilege of being here and holding space on Turtle Island. Thank you from my Ancestors, to your Ancestors.
[greeting in Guugu Yimithirr language] Yurra wanhthara! Ngathu Gadil Marijke Bassani How are you all doing?! My name is Marijke Bassani and my cultural Skin name is Weeren, which in my Lamalama language means, “rain that falls from the sky”. And that name was given to me by a Lamalama matriarch in my community. And so the story goes that wherever I go in the world, rain follows. And not to brag or anything but California has been receiving record amounts of rainfall since I arrived. So you know. You're welcome. I'm also a Lamalama, Binthi Warra and Bulgun Warra woman. The language I speak is Guugu Yimithirr and this is my first language. Guguu Yimithirr is also the name of my tribes’ nation. I come from a small, remote Indigenous community in Far North Queensland, which is situated in the Cape York Peninsula of the country that we all know colonially today as “Australia”.
My PhD thesis is looking at the invisibility and hyper-visibility of Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse peoples within their communities in Australia, but also the legal system and using that term quite broadly to include the Australian domestic legal system, and also the international human rights law system. But before we dive deep into the details of my research, I think it's really important just to provide some context and background, because you know, we all need to be on the same page.
So this map here represents all the Indigenous nations of Australia, and this is the area that I come from (points to the Cape York Peninsula). And that's also where my research is concentrated. So there are over 500 Indigenous nations in Australia and that's not even entirely accurate. But I mean, what records concerning Indigenous peoples are. And when it comes to Indigenous peoples in Australia….we are made-up of two distinct cultural groups, but we're quite similar. So that is Aboriginal peoples, which I feel everyone is familiar with and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which traditionally occupied this area up here (points to the Torres Strait Islands). These islands here that are at the top of the screen. And so together, collectively, we identify ourselves as First Nations peoples. You know, First Peoples, Indigenous peoples, Black Australians and also Blackfullas. Now that last term, I would probably caution against using because it's one of those terms that is self-identified, meaning it comes from the community and only those in the community can use that term.
And contrary to popular belief, but the term “Aborigine” is also very offensive in Australia (due to historical and anthropological connotations attached to the term that have dehumanising themes). It's a big no-no in my country, and the only person that we have given a pass to for using that word is Ms Janet Jackson because we love Janet Jackson who used it in her 90s smash hit “Runaway”. I'm not sure if any everyone remembers it. It was a great song. So unless you're Janet, I would also refrain from using the term “Aborigine”.
Okay, so this is a really big one. Indigeneity and Black identity in Australia. So it's very different to how Black identity manifests here in the U.S. so in Australia, Indigeneity and Black identity are inextricably linked. They're not mutually exclusive identities, they go hand in hand, you know. They reinforce each other. They empower each other. They're not separate categories. And so what this means in practice is that if you are Indigenous Australian, then that means you are also Black Australian. And it goes the other way around as well. So if you identify as Black Australian, that automatically means that you are Indigenous Australian. So you know very, very different to how that manifests here on Turtle Island. Sometimes we even remove the letter C from the word Black to I guess acknowledge that uniqueness and that we are “Blak Peoples” that identify as both Indigenous and Black simultaneously. So the main take away here folks, is that when it comes to Australian Indigeneity and Black identity. The two are very fluid and it's a very synchronous relationship.
In terms of my identity and I guess where I fit within that, so outside of my clan and nation positioning, which is how I introduced myself earlier, I very much identify as Black and Indigenous simultaneously, which here is quite unusual, right? But in Australia, if I used familiar terms that we know here, like “mixed”, “bi-racial”, you know “25% this”, “10% that”, “half this, half that” let me tell you my community would come for me hard and they would check me real quick because we have a strong resistance in Australia to using colonial blood quantum language that comes from our colonizer to describe our identity, which is so ancient it predates Egypt going back 75,000 plus years. So we simply refuse to use our colonizers language to describe our ancient lineage. And that's really what that is about because I guess when it comes to our identity, it's so much deeper than the color of our skin and the texture of our hair. It's a world view. It's a way of life. We believe that the soul of the land and our Ancestors, and the spirit of our Ancestors runs through our veins, that's in our blood. And that's what we acknowledge not “mixed this”, and “25% this”, or “biracial that”.
And so, simply put, we believe that we are medicine to the land and to the community in the same way that the community and the land are medicine to us. So that's really what that is about. And this is something I'd love, love, love to dive deeper into, but we just don't have time today. But I'm happy to field questions on this as well, later on.
OK, so this is the Cape York Peninsula and this is where my research is concentrated. It's also where I live. So I come from here and here and also that dot over there (points to map of Cape York Peninsula). So these red dots signal where all the participants, who participated in interviews for my research, all come from. In this part of the country, more than 60% of the population is Indigenous which is huge. And culture and language is very strong as a result. So many Indigenous peoples who live in this part of Australia, you know, are typically multilingual, bilingual and speak English as a second, third, sometimes even fourth language. So yeah, culture and language is very, very strong.
When it comes to how I captured some of the experiences, or for all of the experiences rather, I used individual interviews. I also captured experiences through “Yarning Circles”, which is a culturally appropriate way in Australia to describe research focus groups involving Indigenous people. Much of those were conducted in person or by phone. That was my recruitment criteria over there (points to screen). So you had to be Indigenous, 18 years of age or over, expressed a diverse gender and/or sexual identity, (whether that was openly, privately or even if you were questioning that as well), and then obviously, participants had to be from or living within a Cape York community.
I decided to use a self-selection process straight up because currently in these communities, it's really unsafe to openly express a diverse gender and/or sexual identity. And that lack of safety is attributed to a colonial history in the area that has resulted in this legacy of heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity showing up in these communities and being viciously defended and maintained. And so those elements function in these communities today. And what that legacy has done is it's feeding awful things like homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia and biphobia.
So these are my research questions and this is a piece of artwork that I commissioned an Indigenous artist to do who was also queer and from my area. This was what my recruitment posters looked like. Indigenous people are typically very visual and creative, we love bright colours, we love art and so this was a design for one of my three recruitment posters. And as you can see here, we identify as Black and so that language appears on the poster and throughout recruitment. My research questions are very broad and that's intentional. I wanted them to be quite open because there's literally like little to no information and literature on this demographic in Australia. And so I wanted to keep it really open. But to summarize these questions, I'm basically looking at how this colonial legacy that I mentioned earlier has contributed to our own “Othering” within our communities on our own lands. And then as part of that, I'm also looking at how that “Othering” continues to be maintained within these communities. And so the second part of that also looked at, what are some of the consequences that often result from being visible as both a Black/Indigenous and gender and sexuality diverse person within the legal system and within the community. And again, using that term “legal system” very broadly to include both domestic and international systems. And I'd love to get into the legal, you know, results that I was able to uncover, we don't have time for that today and so I thought it might be more interesting to talk about what I uncovered as part of the theme of “Identity” but I am happy to also field some questions about that as well at the end. Side note, this picture and some of the others that you'll see on the next slides are photos from one of my communities. My community was so inspired by my research that they decided to hold our first ever Pride March and it was the first ever Pride March to take place in the whole region. Makes me a little bit emotional and I get all deep in my feels when I think about it. And so these are photos from the day. And I'm not sure if you noticed the police car in the background as well but it really kind of brings home how unsafe it is to openly identify in some of these communities. Mind you, I'm not sure the Police would do a great job of protecting us anyway given the historical, and ongoing, brutal encounters we have with Australian law enforcement.
But in terms of “Identity” themes there are many overarching themes, but when it came to “Identity”, there were two big key ones. And the first one was this general resistance to subscribe to existing LGBTQI+ labels, definitions and codifications, which I thought was really interesting and the reasons for that resistance was mostly, you know, participants believed that there was an incompatibility with the synchronous and fluid nature of Indigeneity, gender and sexuality. Because it's very intertwined for us, it's not separated. And there was also a preference among participants for culturally linguistic specific terms that were specific to their community, language, and/or tribe. And then also decolonial terms as well, which emerged from the community. So there was also a preference for that language over existing mainstream language. And one of the other reasons for that resistance was concerns around inheriting what they called the societal baggage and harmful stereotypes that are attached to existing LGBTQI+ labels and categories. And then finally, there was also a really strong rejection of the coming out narrative that is attached to these existing labels, which I've put up there, but I'm going to keep going, as I'm looking at the time.
The second big thing that emerged as part of “Identity” was around pronouns. And this is what I really wanted to discuss today because I found this super, super interesting. So pronouns were just not identified as a priority at all. And when they were used, they were used in a very fluid and inconsistent manner and this was due to three reasons.
So the first one was around Indigenous and cultural identity. And that almost always preceded gender and sexual identity. It was important to be Indigenous first, and gender and sexuality diverse second or sometimes third. And so because of that, there was also a lot of misgendering around pronouns and when people did express pronouns, I noticed other participants would consistently misgender them, but only ever in cultural contexts. So this misgendering was taking place to honor existing titles, roles, kinship responsibilities, because again, Indigeneity and cultural identity preceded gender and sexual identity. That was really interesting. And there was also a preference for the use of informal gender affirming names over pronouns. Meaning participants found it more validating of their diverse gender identity if they were referred to by their self-identified gender affirming name over using the correct pronouns.
And then finally, one I thought was really interesting was that participants considered gender pronouns to be colonial and grounded in this idea of Whiteness due to the incompatibility with the way in which pronouns are structured in Indigenous languages, particularly in the Cape York area. And as part of that, this concept of linguistic assimilation kept emerging. And to be honest, it made me really uncomfortable to uncover that, but I felt that I had a responsibility not just as a human rights lawyer and a legal scholar but as a member of the Cape York Indigenous LGBTQI+ community, I had a responsibility to hear this message and interpret this message that I was receiving from my fellow kin, and so that's what I did.
And I want to read this extract from an interview with a participant who I felt just did such a great job of explaining it from her worldview because I think it also is a great way to put into context this concept of linguistic assimilation that was raised. “Personally, I don't care about pronouns, but I'm definitely happy to respect other people's pronouns. But like, I don't want that to be forced onto me because my first language is not English and pronouns are different than my first language, which is my tribal language. Certain words in my first language include all genders and pronouns. It's more gender inclusive than English pronouns, which are very divisive. We already have this and believed in diverse genders and sexualities, and then White people came here and told us that's wrong and abused us for it. And told us to drop that belief system. And now it's so confusing because it's come back, but we have to do it their way, the White way, when we already had our own way.” This made me uncomfortable, but in a really good way, you know? Did I lean into that discomfort? Yes, because I have a responsibility to do so. The first thing I did after interviewing this participant was dive deep into my own first language. And I really reflected on how pronouns show up in my language and how they are structured.
And so to demonstrate this, I want to use the moon here or as we say in my language “Waarigan”, I want to use Waarigan as an example. Waarigan in my culture is simultaneously gendered and non-binary. Waarigan is associated with swellings, bodily swellings, including the ocean, environment, as well as pregnancies, and men with many wives. But despite this kind of twofold gendered non-binary nature that Waarigan has Guugu Yimithirr speakers would never use plural terms to acknowledge Waarigan or define Waarigan. And that's because Guugu Yimithirr pronouns are not used to affirm or signal gender identity, they're used to acknowledge one's presence or one's existence instead.
This means it's not about acknowledging someone's gender and that framework or structure is really due to Guugu Yimithirr being a very space conscious language. Meaning that speakers, we don't really refer to the position of things relative to ourselves. Instead we refer to the position of things relative to the cardinal points, you know, the sky. So it's less about the human being and the human experience, and is more about where that person's spirit lies in relation to the land and the sky. And so, put simply, Guugu Yimithirr speakers we feel pronouns in the same way that we feel cardinal directions. It's an inherent knowing that doesn't need to be affirmed or signalled because the purpose and focus of Guugu Yimithirr pronouns is understanding, as I mentioned, the individual's position with respect to the community and the surrounding environment.
And so I'm going to wrap it up here. And I just wanted to end by simply stating that if this research has taught me anything, it's taught me that existing decolonization discourses really need to place more emphasis on recognizing the importance of cultivating space for Indigenous peoples to self-determine and assert and proclaim sovereignty over our own bodies, our own genders, and our own sexualities, rather than just our lands. Because we already know that the dispossession, the violation and the control of Indigenous lands is so inextricably connected to the dispossession, the violation, and the control of Indigenous bodies.
And so, folks, that's why I'm out here calling for bodies back and land back. And I hope that my presentation today inspires you to also spread that message. Thank you.
[audience clapping]
SOFI JANSSON-KESHAVAR: It's gonna be difficult coming after this presentation. It is very, you know, black and white to dry presentation. With a very depressive picture in the end coming up. Well, I'm going to try to do my best to keep your attention anyways, so let's see. OK.
Well, thank you everyone here for coming in today and and thank you also Leti and Ariana and CRG for having me here as a visiting student researcher for three months, which has been a pleasure and quite soon about to end.
Unfortunately, well. And my talk today is entitled “Temporary Legality and Local Border Regimes in the Welfare State of Sweden”. And basically I'm going to give you, we'll try to present to you the the main idea behind my my PhD project. Because my project focuses on temporal legality and the ways in which it allows for different local forms of bordering. That also at the same time allows for very localized ideas of racialization of refugees in Sweden. And I'm going to try. To give you. An idea why this is so?
By temporary legality here, well, I refer to the increasing use of temporary protection status for refugees in Europe, which has been kind of a development that we've seen in the last decade or so, but especially after 2015, when, as you, I think you all know that Europe had an increasing number of people who managed to cross the borders of Europe to seek asylum. So this idea of making refugee protection or temporary is, well, it's a deterrence policy. Which sort of has the aim to make people return, which we know is not going to happen. But that's sort of the logic behind this this development into temporary protection. So while you know more permanent status and residence permits, have has been the norm previously in terms of protection for refugees, at least within the European kind of geographical space. Now a more sort of temporary possibility to reside in a European country as a refugee, then is related to “integration requirements”. I put a quote here because that's not sort of what I want to call it, but it's what it's referred to by European states that in order for people to sort of be welcome, they have to show their integration. And this can be shown in terms of, for example, you know being self-sufficient, in terms of having an income, housing, language proficiency, and you know, all sorts of, like knowledge about the host society, and the values and so forth. And these sort of kind of requirements then or integration requirements are used then as sort of thresholds for the attainment of a permanent status or foundry, unification and citizenship.
And these requirements have been used for a long time also. But what has happened now that is important, also in relation to the use of temporary legality, is that they have been made exclusionary, like increasingly difficult to meet or maintain.
So actually giving you sort of the general picture of developments in in Europe in terms of temporary legality, well, I'm going to give you a short kind of background of what this sort of looks like in Sweden then, because that's what my project is about.
So it was post 2015. In 2016, Sweden introduced this new immigration legislation. Where temporary residence permits were introduced, which previously for decades permanent permits have been the norm. So now since 2016 only temporary protection status of either 13 months are given to those who receive subsidiary protection status, and 3 years to those who receive refugee status. But these, I mean, these permits can be renewed. It's not that they would be immediately sort of facing deportation after this short period of time. They can be renewed, however, it's dependent on that you know that the grounds for assignment are still asylum is still the same. But nothing has changed in terms of your protection status.
Okay, so in order to qualify for more like long term possibilities to build a life and you, you know reside in Sweden as a refugee, then you have to show that you can support yourself in terms of work-related income. And also that you have, what is called a “well behaved lifestyle”, which which basically as you might understand, is about, you know, not having a criminal record and you know and things like that.
And and family unification, which has also been, you know, increasingly difficult for people who arrive in Europe, as also like part of this package of this temporariness of protection right. That people are supposed to return. So we make it very difficult for people to be actually live together with their their love. So in Sweden, then now to be able to live with your partner and children, you have to have income and housing that meet certain level of requirements. So the housing for example? Well, it depends on how large your family is, because the more children you have, the bigger apartment you need. And that also increases the income you need in terms of rent being paid, and also the number of family members that you have to sort of provide for.
And then we also have a a set of like separate requirements for those who sought asylum in Sweden as unaccompanied children, but for various reasons that I don't have time to cover now, and they had their asylum claims rejected and they were then facing deportation. So in 2018, they introduced these sort of requirements for them to be able to regularize their situation. So if they get a high school degree and employment after that, they can qualify for a permanent status in Sweden. And I'm going to come back to this shortly.
So why I'm I'm sort of arguing that that you know, that temporary legality allows for local bordering in Sweden is because these regulations that concern these requirements, such as, for example, housing, income, opportunities and schooling. While they're actually determined or shaped or regulated at the subnational, in Sweden, municipal level. And this means that. Well, since we have in Sweden 290 different municipalities, I don't have a map here, but you can imagine there are quite many smaller geographical units in Sweden then that have what is referred to as local self-government. So it's I mean the Swedish welfare state system is different in terms of governance. Then here. The Federal, State of the U.S., so municipalities, they cannot, for example, make laws, but they have a certain discretion in terms of local matters, which are, for example, related to housing provision. Like what type of housing are we going to build within the municipality? Are we going to build public or? Allow public housing? Rental apartments? Or only luxury housing for rich people? And so forth. But also municipalities have a responsibility to provide welfare services such as social welfare assistance, schooling, preschools and elderly care, and so.
So while. We have then you know 200 different municipalities that regulates housing, income opportunities and schooling very differently. Well, this means that also the possibilities to actually meet these requirements, they also vary locally. So to put it simply my argument then, is that temporary legality actually allows for local differentiations in terms of access to permanent status and family reunification. And, excuse me.
So what is important is that, well, temporary legality or temporary status is something that has been newly introduced in Sweden, and other Scandinavian or northern European countries. But what is not really new is this local variation in terms of how welfare services are istributed in Sweden. So my argument is that what is important is to look at these intersections of temporary legality and these local differentiations, in terms of access to different welfare services. Which creates sort of a new condition or a life condition for people arriving in Sweden and getting a refugee temporary protection.
So well, so how do I study this in my PhD? Well, methodologically speaking, I'm actually inspired by the work by Leti and her colleagues here at UC Berkeley, and they have edited this book with the title “Looking For Law In All the Wrong Places -- Justice Beyond and Between”. And while this is sort of, and, their idea is to question the right place, or if there is such a right place of law. Or the right place to sort of study law or look for law. And while they're looking at law from the perspective of the humanities, while I'm doing something quite differently. But this is sort of inspired me to think about you know the wrong places of law in relation to my research. So for me, methodologically speaking, what I'm sort of trying to do is looking for immigration law or asylum law, if you wish, in all the sort of wrong places. But the wrong place has a dual meaning in my research in a way that since immigration law traditionally represents a nationally state law, right? However, as I argue that with the introduction then of temporary legality, the municipality has become an important site to study in relation to immigration law and more importantly, its effects on people that it regulates. And but the wrong place however, also refers to the ways in which different actors and sectors of the welfare state has actually become sort of migration authorities or border workers.
So I look at two different pieces than of national legislations to sort of trace how temporary legality shapes access to residence permits on a local level and how this also, as they argue, varies locally. And they do this mainly by interviewing different actors. But I've also done some participatory research and so forth with people who are affected by these local policies. And so I'm not really studying sort of legal materials, but, you know, using other types of methods to look at the effects of temporary legality. So to briefly give you the idea of what these legislations are about and. The Settlement Act, was a national legislation introduced in 2016, which forces all municipalities in Sweden to accommodate refugees after they receive temporary protection status. And previously it was voluntary, so only some of the municipalities would sort of agree to accommodate refugees. And so this is sort of the state forcing the municipalities to do this. And this means that they have to provide housing for refugees along with other welfare services that aren't all people residing in municipality are entitled to. But when it comes to housing, these municipalities have actually, you know, developed very local housing and settlement policy. These uh, which means that they vary from very sort of temporary poor short term housing possibilities in some municipalities and other municipalities provide more like long term permanent, sort of more livable housing possibilities for people.
Shortly, I'm going to give a couple of examples from my research to show then why these local variations in terms of access to housing, how they then might become important for permanent status obtainment and also to be able to be reunited with your family.
But before doing that, I'm just briefly going to explain. Sort of. The other part of my research, which is on the High School Act. And this is the legislation that was introduced in 2018. And that only apply those to those youth who applied for asylum and then had their claims rejected and who found themselves then in situations of deportability, and they were going to be deported. And there were, you know, like big debates in Sweden about how they had been treated for various reasons within the legal system and so forth. Which ended up in this sort of new possibility for them to regularize their status. And that means that they can apply for a temporary residence permit to study in high school, and if they manage to get a high school degree, they get six months. No, no longer than that, to find an employment or a job that sort of qualifies for the requirements for permanent resident permits.
And I don't have sort of time to go into detail details about how this sort of plays out locally, but to just name one thing that is sort of very problematic, but this legislation is that, well, sort of the grounds to get a permanent, sorry, a temporary residence permit in Sweden through this high School Act is based on your school attendance and grading. So it's actually, you know, their teachers that sort of directly decides on the future of their students, in terms of them being allowed to stay in Sweden or actually being deported. Because if they fail this these requirements, they're going to be deported.
So when studying this legislation, then locally, while for the Salem Act, I've been looking at 4 specific municipalities, and with and me and actually together with two colleagues I've interviewed local politicians, civil servants that work with the reception and providing housing and so forth. And also sort of civil society or activists working also to sort of try to make the conditions less harsh for people in certain municipalities. And in relation to the High School act. I'm not really focused on specific municipalities, but I have rather interviewed a number of different actors such as teachers, head teachers, studying counselors, and social workers and so forth but all in different ways become important for the possibilities for these youth to regularize their situation.
So what I'm going to talk about last this is my these are going to be my last points where I'm going to try to show them how this plays out locally. Well and in a recent article me and and my colleagues, we have looked at local refugee settlement policy and housing policy in four different municipalities. But I'm going to give you just a couple of examples from two of these municipalities to title, to to try to sort of give you an idea of how access to housing also sort of regulates residence permit.
So one of these municipalities have provided very like temporary housing possibilities of two years at the most and also under extremely poor conditions. So to name just one of the different housing possibilities that they provide is in these caravans. So this is sort of a very symbolic act from this municipality to sort of manifest that they don't want to do this and they have no housing to be able to accommodate refugees. So they want to to sort of signal that this is what happens when the state tries to sort of force us into accommodating refugees because we have no housing. However, this lack of housing is, of course, something that they have constructed. So these caravans that used to be more of them in this sort of, and dirt field is also located next to a dumpster area, which is the part that you see behind these caravans as sort of, also this very, You know, placement of these people. And as you might already understand, I mean these are not living conditions that would qualify for family reunification. Right? In this municipality, which is also a common practice, those who are perceived as single households or single men usually are people who in many cases also are trying to sort of be reunited with their families. And they often get us access to even, like, worse housing condition. So I mean this also then affects their possibilities to be reunited with their children and their partners, but also this type of living condition also prevents them from kind of, you know, getting, being able to focus on their studies because they also have to find somewhere to live. This is only temporary for them. And finding housing without having an income is sort of impossible almost. So you know, to regularize their situation in terms of, well, they have a temporary permit, right? But in order to have a permanent residence permit and sort of, a more sort of stable condition this is really not helping.
So in contrast, one of the other municipalities that we studied, they were, you know, giving more, yeah, permanent long term housing possibilities in sort of regular apartment. But they were really insisting on people becoming self-sufficient as the immigration legislation. So they were basically saying, well, people are welcome here, but as long as they also, you know, get employed, don't become a burden for the municipality and so forth. And while we were discussing since this municipality also has sort of a relatively more generous housing policy compared to the other municipality that I mention. And we were discussing, Okay, so do you also sort of provide housing to assist in a family reunification? And then the interview is she was saying that, well, the good thing about this, these requirements is that. Well, that what we see is that people are working harder to actually, you know, get a job which saw as something positive. Now to be able to be reunited with their families. However, it's up to them. We cannot do anything about it, but if they would have an income and they need a bigger apartment, for example, to be able to be reunited, then we could help. I mean, we could sort of get in contact with other landlords and the municipality and explain the situation and then they would help these families. But being dependent on having an income so. This is sort of. An example of how this plays out, but differently then in in terms of like localizing this border effects of temporary legality.
And this is my last point. So to give you just one example of why I why I say that these different also practices also sort of produce localized logics of racialization is because, for example, the municipality that gives these very poor housing conditions in the caravan. They last year when we saw the war on Ukraine breaking out and we had people fleeing Ukraine coming to Sweden and this municipality said, Ah we welcome refugees from Ukraine, but we are definitely not going to accommodate non-European refugees. And why is that well? They were very openly saying that, well, they are overrepresented in social, being social costs and also they are very, I quote “difficult to integrate into Swedish”. So in this way, creating you know very racialized idea about the difference between your non-Europeans and Europeans as sort of like culturally different in terms of being able to integrate.
So that's, I'm going to stop here because I'm also running over time. But I hope I've tried to give you an idea of what I'm working on. I'm sort of like halfway through or a little bit more than halfway through my PhD. So I'm happy to hear any comments or questions that you might have. Thank you so much.
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: Musical chairs here.
MARIJKE BASSANI: Yeah, Musical chairs
SOFI JANSSON-KESHAVAR: Okay so. Let's see.
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: Yeah. OK. Yeah. All right. Hello, everyone. So I'm here. I'm actually just finishing up a couple of months here and have been mostly doing archival research at the Bancroft Library and the State Archives since in Sacramento. So I'm writing a book about conflicts over American birthright citizenship since 1868. And since we've got a nice kind of, you know, cross-section of people here, I'm not going to assume any knowledge. It's great to see this kind of diversity of projects here, right. So we're all starting from scratch on on each other's projects. I want to fill you in on. Some basics first.
So why 1868? Because that is when the 14th Amendment was ratified and the 14th Amendment declares that all those born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state, where in which they reside. So we call that the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment did not invent birthright citizenship. It was a central part of this. It has been a central part of this country's legal and political. History since since the founding of the United States, but before the 14th amendment, it was a matter of common law, so it was a judge made rule. It wasn't in a statute, and it wasn't in the. Constitution and it was racially restricted. Not all the time. So there were some judges who found that free black people were citizens and their, earlier, before the Civil War, but but then some who didn't. And then in the infamous Dred Scott case in 1857, the Supreme Court held that black people could not be citizens of the United States, right? So then we. Had the civil war. Fought partly over the Dred Scott decision, and after the Civil War, you get the 14th Amendment, which is specifically intended to overturn Dred Scott and to radically reconfigure the relationship between race and citizenship in the United States.
So let me just pause for a minute and look at that one phrase and they're subject to the jurisdiction thereof, because that tends to be what there's arguments about. What does that mean? Well, I'll just say for now that if you look at the debates in Congress, when they were drafting this language. It's pretty clear that the people who drafted this meant that language to exclude members of sovereign Native nations from this provision. And that they did so to basically to preserve a particular status quo of the relationship between the United States government and indigenous peoples. And there and to some extent, there are some comments that really are seem to be genuinely respectful of native sovereignty, but I think much more than that. It was sort of a practical matter of, of kind of not disturbing the status quo in the sense that governments can't make treaties with their own citizens. And the United States. The federal government had a lot of treaties with native nations. Not that it particularly honored the terms of any of those treaties, but there that was in sort of entrenched system. And the people who were drafting this language, we're not trying to disrupt that whole system. And I also think it's worth. Noting stopping for a minute and just noting here that indigenous people were also not clamoring for US citizenship and we tend to think of of birthright citizenship today as sort of signaling inclusion and equality. But you know, historically, for many people on this land, it's signaled conquest, and loss of sovereignty, and loss of land.
So that's there were a lot of that came up in the debates a lot. The other thing that came up a lot was the children of Chinese immigrants so. You had white Californians who were nervous about this language because they thought it would tie their hands in terms of discriminating against Chinese Americans. Who were you know, starting to be a factor in Western U.S. states at that point. And so this issue came up and the. In those debates, it's very clear from the people who are crafting this language that they really did mean everyone in terms of that, that the line that they were trying to draw was a line about sovereignty but not a line about race and. And both of those issues actually came up in in the first two big cases that came up in the Supreme Court on these issues.
So in 1884, Winnebago man named John Elk was involved in the case, claiming citizenship, and the court said, “No”. Because he was born at the Winnebago Nation, he was not a citizen. And then in 1898. Eight in a case called Wong Kim Ark.
Oh, I guess I could. Oh, no, not yet. I have a lower density of it's a little bit of a PowerPoint here, but not as much as my colleagues here.
So in 1898, Wong Kim Ark, that involved a person born here in San Francisco, child of Chinese immigrants and the court said yes, he was a citizen. And the language there was the opening words. “All people, all persons born or general, not to say universal, restricted only by place and jurist. And not by color or race.”
So to fast forward to the era we are living in now, you may have noticed birthright citizenship is in the news a fair amount, and was in Donald Trump's Twitter feed when he was, yeah, before he got kicked off. And so this movement kind of emerged in the 1980s, it has close ties to anti-immigrants and white nationalist movements. It promotes these very highly racialized and gendered images of sort of the invasion of pregnant women across the U.S. Mexico border, right? I'm sure you're you've all seen this somewhere or another. That's one wing of it. There's also what I consider kind of the Law Professor wing of it, which is not as openly racist. And. Which and that the interesting thing I'll just mention about it, is generally trying to restrict birthright citizenship and trying to restrict immigration kind of go hand in hand. But there is this kind of argument out there by a few people. It's not a very big group, but I think of that, in fact is saying we should restrict birthright citizenship but actually liberalize immigration law. So there's it's, it's a, it's somewhat complicated. But basically, contemporary proponents of these ideas and basically what they're saying it it has to do with that subject to the jurisdiction language. They're saying that to be born subject to the jurisdiction, you have to have parents who are citizens or permanent residents. So that's why the Kamala Harris references up there. Her parents were grad students here at Cal, and she was born and may have been on student visas. So this is. Mostly I think the target of this movement has really been the children of undocumented immigrants, but it also is the children of people who are here on temporary visas.
So folks who make these arguments tend to say that what they're doing is very new. I mean new since the 80s, and that it is responding to kind of new issues that have emerged in American Society, namely a growing undocumented population and the rise of the welfare state. But what this book that I'm writing will show is that in fact people have been arguing about the citizenship clause for pretty much as long as we have had a citizenship clause.
So just this is a very broad and quick overview, but basically there's three phases to this history. Phase One was in the 1880s and 90s during the Chinese exclusion year. So Chinese immigrants were subject to very, very harsh restrictions were not being allowed in at the border. But their U.S. born children were exempt from those restrictions, and so then there was a backlash against that. And you had legal scholars and government officials starting to say, wait, this is undermining the Chinese Exclusion Act. And they finally convinced people within the Attorney General's office and to bring a test case, and which that was the Wong Kim Ark case. So they singled out Wong Kim Ark and said you can't come in. And this the case went all the way to the. Supreme Court and they lost and Wong Kim Ark won and that's why we have that. That that case law that we can rely on.
So the second time this come up and this is really kind of, I'd say the the most important part of the research I'm doing because it's the part we know the least about. There's been very little work on this kind of middle period, which was, which was basically between World War I and World War II, and really emerged from the Japanese exclusion movement. So Chinese immigration basically stops with the Chinese Exclusion Law.
You then have a wave of Japanese immigration. It's quite different in the sense that Chinese immigration is almost entirely male because of U.S. policies that kept Chinese women out and Japanese immigration for various reasons ends up having a much more even gender ratio and tends to be characterized by like young married couples that start to have kids, and want to have want to own family farm. Terms, which is of course, what generations of European immigrants did right. But when Asian immigrants start doing this, there's this racist backlash and you get this phenomenon of white settlers basically configuring themselves as natives who are being colonized by Asian immigrants, right. And this whole sort of.
And so first they go after land ownership and the California Legislature and a bunch of other state legislatures ban land ownership by Asian immigrants and then. So what people do is they buy the land in the name of their kids. So what you see, that's a man named Jukichi Harada,his child. Who and so as did many other people at that time, they that family bought land in the name of the kids. And the state, it tried to confiscate it and it went to court. There were a number of cases that they went to court and and the courts affirmed that these kids could buy the land. And that you couldn't reach that second generation, basically right, that birthright citizenship sort of provided a stopping point for these discriminatory laws. So when that happened, the same people who were had been behind the land law switched gears and went after birthright citizenship. And there was a period of time where there were proposals for constitutional amendments that were, you know, in Congress, et cetera.
So and then the third one, I won't even go into because I think you know it. That's the kind of the contemporary movement, heavily anti-Mexican in its framing.
So let me just say that kind of the, what's the big picture? Here I think that at the heart of this story is kind of a central tension between these two principles that are very central to our society and kind of emerged it right around the same time. So one is that the government is not allowed to make any distinctions in legal status among people who were born here. Right? That's the citizenship. And it's a. It's kind of the strongest anti-caste principle it's, you know not it's it's potential has not been totally realized. But is a a strong a powerful anti-caste principle in our legal system. Right that whatever distinctions are made they kind of can't reach then they don't get inherit. That at the same time what emerges is this notion that the government can make basically any distinctions it wants among people who are not born here. This is the plenary power doctrine. This is central part of immigration law. It's why we have the Chinese Exclusion Act. And now, you know, harsh, really like harsh policies at the border and detention and deportation. And I think this contrast is stronger in the United States than is in a lot of places. So for example, a lot of European countries, there is neither as absolute a birthright citizenship rule nor as and nor as harsh a kind of a regime of plenary power. And so. I think really what this this kind of gets embodied in these mixed status families who are enmeshed in both of those regimes at the same time. And what I'm interested in looking at is these moments when that particular tension becomes, you know, particularly pronounced and these two concepts kind of put. Pressure on one another. So I'll stop there and we. Got 4 minutes for discussion.
LETI VOPP: So maybe. We got a little more than four.
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: Oh, sorry, I was misreading it. Yes, we've got 15. OK, we're good.
LETI VOLPP: Collect questions. You know, we'll we'll take a few and then you all can. So are there questions? What?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Well, I have a question. First off, thank you guys. So much for being here today. This is this. Is such a treat. This is a question for you, Professor Rosenbloom. I actually for another one of my classes. I just read, “Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary”, by A. Naomi Paik. which is a focus on like the border crisis. And it's so interesting to hear your emphasis on understanding our history with like immigration control. I'm thinking of like Wong Wing vs. the United States, and lawful and unlawful citizenship. And like recognizing settler colonialism, and slavery, and our duplication crisis. But I guess my question for you is why do you think it's important to focus on birthright citizenship? And how can that inform our current like border control crisis?
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: How can it? Well, that's a big one.
LETI VOLPP: Don’t respond, we are collecting questions. You can let that percolate.
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: Ohh, sorry. Yes, I didn't pay attention.
LETI VOLPP: I have some questions, but I'll just limit myself. Can you say more about yarning circles and where that concept or term came? From and for Sofi, in terms of thinking about. What would you you said? It's not the term I would use integration, so what term would you use? And then. Are there ways in which economic assimilation and cultural assimilation, is it possible to separate those? Or are they like completely internal than this? And then for Rachel, a question that actually links all of this, which is in relation to the birthright citizenship and settler-colonialism? Some of you have heard, you know, people have pointed out that there seems to be a correlation between settler-colonial States and birthright citizenship and you could share about that. Oh yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Question as much as the comment. It's like if. You looked at the three titles of your. Talks, it seems like although in such different. Things, of course, legality is the commonality between. All of them. But I just wanted to thank all of you as each one touches my life personally. Like all three of these. I don't know. And I was like, surprised. I was like.Every single one of your topics. Like how is it that like one California born, white person could actually be touched by all three of these topics. And like those absolute personal way. So thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: So I have a question for each and Marijke, am I saying that right? Am I saying right?
MARIJKE BASSANI: Yeah, that's perfect. OK.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: So yeah, I am curious about the legal implications that you just sort of touched on of your research. If you could just say. A few words about that. And Sofi, I'm interested in, like, did you see in your research how the different municipalities perhaps prejudices against particular refugee groups then changed or impacted or directed the laws that they made about what they were offering to those groups, in terms of we're or not offering to those particular refugee groups, in terms of housing and working jobs? And then Professor Rosenbloom. You know, we talked about this before, but I am, I still have it stuck in my head about how someone can be, this is the way that it was with my father when he was a refugee from the Philippines after World War 2 and how he was naturalized into the United States, when he says what he always said because his grandfather had been a citizen of the United States. Like is that an example of generation skipping birthright citizenship? And like, how much does that have to do with again the country of origin? The Philippines versus China, you know, versus Japan? You know, in the Philippines having had, while having it one time, then bought from by the United States from Spain for $22 million. And I think that's it.
LETI VOLPP: Any other comments or question? OK, so in any order, please feel free to respond.
MARIJKE BASSANI: I'm happy to answer your question about the yawning circle. So I'm not quite sure who coined that term and where it comes from, but I can look into that for you and get back to you. But what I do know is that the word “Yarn” is used really commonly amongst Indigenous Australian circles to refer to a framework of sharing stories and sharing experiences. And so. You know, if I'm in community or when I was practicing community as a community lawyer as well. I would say to clients, “Well, let's go have a yarn. I'll come into my office, we’ll have a yarn.” So it's just a non-threatening way to communicate with indigenous Australian people because of that history there that we have with settlers. And you know our colonisers, who are still a Commonwealth country, we're not a Republic like the U.S. although. Hopefully one day we will be. Yeah. So it really kind. Of comes from. I guess this safety holistic framework around. You know, just creating. A space that is more culturally appropriate, more culturally safe. That isn't threatening. Because the term focus groups is, so is so scientific, you know, so social sciences. What does that mean? And so it's about communicating in a way that the community understands and using words and terms that the community uses to communicate with each other.
SOFI JANSSON-KESHAVAR: Did you want to respond to the other question? As well or.
MARIJKE BASSANI: I'm still thinking about that.
SOFI JANSSON-KESHAVAR: Okay, Okay. I'm gonna let you here. Okay. Thank you so much for your question, Leti. And well, I said that that's not the term. I used which was maybe not correct. Because I am well when I think about it, I have also. You know in this article that I'm also sort of working on I used the term integration requirements to also kind of give the idea how integration is also in this case, also used in a very specific way of bordering. So it becomes sort of a tool for allowing this localized forms of ordering, whereas integration is not more sort of like a concept that I feel comfortable about kind of using in relation to different groups of people and so forth. So that's maybe. Or what I meant. But I do use it as a way to sort of show how this notion or idea about integration actually takes very concrete bordering forms. In the case of like temporary reality. And if that is a good thing to do, I'm not. I'm not sure, but at the moment, that's the way I've been sort of, you know, thinking about it. So thank you very much for that question.
And in relation to you mentioned this, but if that you can separate economics, economic simulation or like cultural ideas of? And I'm going to. Have to think more about that because I. Think that it is very much sort of enmeshed in these sort of racialized ideas about different groups of refugees. Because also it's sort of within this neoliberal idea of, you know, people becoming an economic burden which is part of this whole racist welfare discourse on, you know, refugees being a burden for the welfare state. Which is also sort of them placing in them in a position that they are always sort of prone to sort of, you know, abuse and use the welfare system. More than those who are actually sort of should be the beneficiaries or entitled to the welfare state, right? So I think that, you know, these ideas about employment rates and, you know, the who is sort of prone to become a dependent on social welfare assistance, and so forth becomes. Also, sort of a cultural trait. That is, you know, imposed on different groups of refugees. So I think it is very much sort of enmeshed. But sometimes also, I think more the one like one or the other.
And I can then directly maybe if you allow me to respond to your question about. This sort of. Singling out of different groups of refugees, if I understood you correctly, depending on different municipalities. So well yes, because one for example, the example that I mentioned where they talk about, you know, Ukrainian refugees as like European refugees and non refugees, non-European refugees. They were referring in this particular case specifically to like quota refugees that are resettled through the UNHCR, which in Sweden are usually people coming from different African countries. So it's also has this sort of, you know, like racialized understanding of who is a refugee that. Is also sort of more prone to be a burden for the. for the municipality. But there is also sort of, I would say a general. Racialization of refugees in terms of, you know, the male from the Middle East and different African countries are generally sort of pictured as a threat to Western society or Scandinavian welfare state in this case. And I mentioned that briefly, but usually also like those are perceived as single men who are usually originating from like the Middle East or Africa, and are sort of also giving you know less or worse, housing conditions. So there is sort of like a racializing idea of this in terms of access to housing in this case. But that plays out, I would say differently in different municipalities, but there's there is sort of a general idea you could say, yeah. Thank you very much for your questions.
RACHEL ROSENBLOOM: So let me see if I can put together some of the questions that were asked. So first, well, so why birthright citizenship? And I think in a way this gets to your question too.
So there's, there's really three sources of citizen. There's being born in the United States. There is being born to parents who are U.S. Even if you're born outside the United States, and sometimes that's grandparents who passed it on to the parents who passed it on to you, and then there's naturalization, right. And I'm interested in in race and gender in the history of all of those forms of citizenship. But I feel like of those birthright citizenship is sort of. There's this missing history in a way there's like, for example, this. I don't know if you've seen this really. You know, there's a book called “White By Law”, right about naturalization. And there's someone colleague of mine who's working a really great book on acquired citizenship. We call that people who are born abroad. And I kind of wanted to do that, birthright citizenship, and in particular I think because it's in the news so much, and I feel like it, people don't understand that. You know everyone treats it as this thing that sort of emerged recently. And it's emerged because of this crisis. So in a way, I mean, this gets to the other part of your the much harder part of your question, right. How is this going to speak to what's going on at the border? I'm not sure it is in any practical direct way. But I think it's a very implicated in what I'm I think there's a close connection in the sense that. Every time birthright citizenship comes up, it comes up because of a supposed crisis at the border, right? And we can look back 100 years ago and say. You know, that was just a race panic or something. You know, we can. But when you're in it, right the if you look at how this gets played out in the news, people take this seriously. But you know what are we going to do? There's all these undocumented immigrants. There's all this crisis at the border, and I think that if you have some historical perspective on this, it helps you kind of respond to those questions in a different way.
So and in terms of settler colonialism? Absolutely. I mean I think that's a central part of the book. And I think that I think. That if you look at the centrality of birthright citizenship in the United States. There's really two routes, right? The original route is settler colonialism and that if you look at what countries in the world have birthright citizenship. It tends to be, you know, the Americas mostly it's right. It's countries that wanted to settle those lands with white settlers and wanted to make it very easy to get citizenship. Their easy naturalization and then the children are citizens automatical. But and then the. Other route, of course, is the Civil War. Right, that the sort of the. The original route is is similar colonialism and then making that racially inclusive is all about our history of of the civil war. And so those point and kind of different directions of and I I think also. Uh, I certainly don't mean this to be a huge defense of birthright citizenship is necessarily the best rule, and this there are some really interesting critiques out there, right? Because as I said, kind of creates an anti-caste principle. But that's of course only within our borders, right? Globally it creates a a different caste system of you know where you're born can can make such a difference in your life and so. So I'm not in any way. Yeah, but those those arguments are really about kind of getting rid of borders, which I'm fully supportive of. And they're not. I think sometimes people shorthand the current movement as the movement to end birthright citizenship. And one of the points I'm trying to make in the book is that none of those people are actually trying to end birthright citizenship. They're trying to restrict access to it, and that I have a very clear, you know, and on that issue, I have a very clear sense of which I think is the right and the wrong answer, and to how that works in the racial politics of, you know, the history of our country. So but it yeah, it does get it gets really, I think you know, bringing in the the both of those strands makes it a much. More complex story.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you. Any last words.
MARIJKE BASSANI: I can answer. That last question, thank you for your patience. I just wanted to have. A little think about that one. More because I'm actually deep into that chapter currently.
So to answer your question, what are the legal implications of my research? So I mean. So it was unsurprising to learn that the participants who sit at so many intersections in life, indigenous and gender, sexually diverse, were invisible when it came to accessing justice, legal protections, and legal services. But they were hyper visible when it came to their race and indigeneity in those spaces. And so that has a lot to do with our history in Australia, which is also similar to the U.S., marked by racial violence, police brutality and slavery.
A lot of people don't realize that Australia actually did participate in slavery, it just wasn't the African slave trade. And that's because there were black people already in Australia available to exploit for free. And so that's what happened. And that's also actually how I came to have an Italian surname because my family were enslaved on islands by an Italian family who had immigrated to Australia many years ago. And so my family were enslaved by this family for decades and so. That's how I came to have an Italian surname. And so that's our history, right? That's the framework. And currently this is a number that continues to grow. There's been over 400 deaths in custody of indigenous people with no convictions, no legal consequences. And so when you take into account that history, you know, participants are very reluctant to engage with any kind of legal service, or framework, or system because of that fear. And what they've learned, what what they've experienced through their families, and also what they've grown up hearing their families share. And so because of that lived experience when it came to.
How that impacted them on a daily basis. So in situations where they did need to access some kind of legal service, they reported having to engage in what they called straight passing, right? So you know, repressing their gender and sexual identity because they were, you know, of the belief that would only further compound their experience because they knew that they were going to have a negative experience because of their race and indigeneity. And so they decided that they could hide this, at least hide this side of, you know, their makeup, right? But you can't hide race or color. And so yeah, there was a lot of straight passing reported, which I thought was really interesting. And there were even participants who had relationships with, you know, government, child protection services and who are on child Safety Watch lists and things like that. And they would report. Again, straight passing out of fear that if the Child Protection Service agent also discovered that they were trans or non-binary that this might also affect their ability to get their children back from the state?
LETI VOLPP: Thank you. Alright, a round of applause.
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