Abstract
Despite its relative brevity (108 pages of main text), Kyle Farmbry’s Migration and Xenophobia explores a truly wide range of subjects. Broadly, it examines the evolution of ideologies and manifestations of xenophobia across the globe in the context of changing patterns of historical, contemporaneous, and future international migration. Specifically, it compares, contrasts, and contextualizes popular and institutional (often xenophobic but also migrant-rights advocacy) responses to immigrant and refugee flows in three very different nation-states: South Africa, Malta, and the United States.
Farmbry’s initial chapters offer short histories and theorizations laying out his book’s broader themes. Chapter 2, for instance, provides a brief (though longue durée) history of disparate and overlapping dogmas and examples of xenophobia, reflecting on “how members of groups” have “th[ought] about others unlike themselves” at various points in international history (p. 17). Chapter 3, in turn, conceptualizes and provides a brief history of 20th- and early 21st-century refugee migration patterns and supranational efforts (particularly those of the United Nations) to shape international norms around refugee admissions and rights.
Farmbry dives into the heart of his text in the next three—case-study-specific—chapters. Chapter 4 explores both the deep history underlying and recent context behind rising xenophobia in South Africa. It argues that pre-Apartheid legacies, underlying economic challenges, and growing nationalism have combined to inflame nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment in contemporary South Africa. Chapter 5, by contrast, examines how the small Mediterranean island of Malta has increasingly become a focal point of refugee crossings and a site of local and supranational debates over migrants’ rights and incorporation or exclusion from the polity. It demonstrates that a strong Maltese sense of national identity and the island’s recent EU admission have collided to produce conflicting politics and policies toward migrants. Chapter 6 briefly summarizes well-known moments in the history of U.S. immigration law and discusses how recent developments in the Trump Era, particularly policies targeting unaccompanied migrant youths, have both built on and departed from the nation’s history of immigrant exclusion and inclusion. The conclusion reflects on how states can better combat xenophobia and offer integrative programs in an age of rising international migration in the early 21st century.
Without question, Migration and Xenophobia’s strongest interventions emerge from Farmbry’s deeply original juxtaposition of immigration to, xenophobia within, and migration/integration policies found in South Africa and Malta for a broad scholarly audience. While U.S.-based scholars sometimes compare American (im)migration policies and anti-immigrant politics to those of neighboring Canada or large nation-states in western or central Europe, much rarer are comparative studies of post-colonial/Apartheid nation-states such as South Africa or small island countries such as Malta. This reviewer is aware of no other work that specifically juxtaposes these three nation-states, let alone a text that compares immigration politics and policies in Malta and South Africa. Farmbry should be commended for his bold, original, and productive comparison.
In particular, his comparative approach makes clear that migration to and xenophobia within South Africa and Malta have long histories and that those legacies—along with these countries’ broader national histories of inequality and marginalization—directly impact immigration and refugee politics and policies in both nation-states today. For instance, Farmbry makes the convincing case that racist internal migration controls within Apartheid-era South Africa, which “focused on keeping segments of South Africa’s populations in specific places and minimizing opportunities outside of prescribed roles in society” (p. 60) continues to shape tensions over immigration and immigrants in the post-Apartheid era. While lawmakers in the early post-Apartheid period sometimes promoted the migration of skilled immigrants and/or blue-collar laborers as a means to boost the nation’s economy, Farmbry demonstrates how growing numbers of native-born South African residents—often struggling to escape low wages and/or impoverished conditions in the quarter century after the fall of Apartheid—have increasingly embraced nativist leaders, protectionist rhetoric, and/or outright xenophobia.
Conversely, Farmbry demonstrates that “Much of the modern context for tensions related to Maltese policy on patterns of migration” (p. 67) can be attributed to the politics of national memory and culture. Farmbry emphasizes that national history in Malta, as articulated in both popular expression and through public policy measures, places a great emphasis on the island’s: (1) location at the crossroads of overlapping Mediterranean cultures, (2) not-so-distant past as a British colonial outpost, (3) official Roman Catholic religion, and (4) small, distinct population. Migration and Xenophobia demonstrates how the preservation of Maltese national identity—particularly since joining the European Union in 2004—has been at the forefront of most recent popular and public policy debates over the nation-state’s immigration and refugee laws and migrants’ cultural integration.
Farmbry employs these two chapters to make the hopeful case that by better understanding national histories and more directly engaging with the underlying structural concerns of constituents (such as socioeconomic inequality and/or cultural preservation), it may be possible to prevent the ever-extent embers of xenophobia present in all countries from sparking into wildfires of anti-immigrant politics, expulsion, and even violence.
While these South African-Maltese comparative analyses are real strengths of Migration and Xenophobia, this reviewer found the addition of a third case study—the United States—less successful. Farmbry (rightly) makes it clear in his Introduction that it is not possible to write a complete history of xenophobia in the United States in a short chapter. Instead, he sets out to explore the origins and context of unaccompanied youth migration from Mexico and Central American nations and institutional and popular responses to their (would-be) entry in the Trump Era. In practice however, the chapter devotes more attention to summarizing (relatively well-known) policies governing U.S. immigration and refugee law from the late 19th-century to the present than examining and contextualizing the case study that is its ostensible focus.
A deeper engagement with relevant scholarship(s) would have strengthened both this U.S.-specific case study, most especially, and Migration and Xenophobia, more broadly. Most notably, it is not clear precisely what scholarly literature(s) or debates Farmbry’s examination of U.S. immigration and refugee policy draws from or seeks to intervene in. Apart from one citation to the well-known historian of American nativism, John Higham, a voluminous historical and political science scholarly literature (much of it recent) on the development of the federal immigration restriction apparatus and the evolution of nativist politics in American history is largely left unexplored. Similarly, legal, sociological, or administrative scholarship on the implementation and contestation over recent U.S. refugee and asylum policies is notably missing.
Missed opportunities to engage with relevant scholarship and scholarly debates are less prominent, but still noticeable, throughout the text. For instance, despite the centrality of Maltese national memory in Chapter 5, the absence of citations to support the author’s narrative about Maltese history prior to 1970 and the text’s minimal engagement with scholarship on the (re)creation of national memory (beyond the Introduction’s reference to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities) muddy what is and is not distinct about this case-study, in particular, and the author’s own interventions in that domain.
I have no doubt that interdisciplinary and comparative scholars of international migration would learn much by reading Migration and Xenophobia, especially its South African and Maltese case studies (this reviewer—a historian of U.S. immigration—sure did!). However, it is less readily apparent precisely which genres of migration scholarship the book best fits into and how researchers operating in discrete subfields would, in turn, build on this text’s own interventions.
Two other features deserve mention. Migration and Xenophobia’s emphasis on supranational efforts (especially those of the United Nations) to shape global (im)migration protocols and ensure migrant rights in both historical and contemporary contexts is commendable. However, the inclusion of four lengthy appendices comprised of UN declarations and international agreements about global migration (numbering over a 100 pages in length—nearly equal in size to the book’s main text) is puzzling in the absence of greater sustained and direct engagement with those precise texts throughout the book’s chapters and/or annotations to guide the reader in engaging with these primary sources.
One feature that is not absent in Migration and Xenophobia is a deep and admirable solidarity expressed toward the subjects of this book: international migrants. This scope of Farmbry’s project may be vast, but it never loses sight of the people who could be aided through, but are so often harmed by, public policies adopted in the three nation-states that comprise his case studies: desperate labor migrants in South Africa, refugees who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Malta, and traumatized unaccompanied youths seeking entry at the U.S. southern border. While Migration and Xenophobia correctly emphasizes the importance of understanding nation-specific contexts to better combat anti-migrant hostility via public policy, it also makes clear that at an even more foundational level, we must first recognize and highlight our common humanity to combat all forms of xenophobia.
