Border as Mess: Navigating Contradictions and Borderwork in Civil Society Migrant Assistance

ABSTRACT

A growing body of scholarly work addresses the involvement, in migration governance, of civil society actors. Much of this literature highlights – within the bottom-up initiatives of NGOs, charities, volunteers and activists – the central role of hospitality and solidarity. Civil society initiatives are often contrasted to restrictive state policies and assumed to favour democratic integration. In this article, I question this interpretation in favour of a more complex, messier account of reality. In civil society initiatives, bordering is as much the doing of institutions as it is of citizens who, through borderwork, construct and contest borders. Through an analysis of everyday practices of migrant support in Milan, Italy, I bring this messiness to the fore. I rely on ethnographic insight to highlight contradictions embedded in borderwork, in which seemingly opposed forces are present. I show that the space between such opposites is a space in which the meaning of borders is constantly negotiated. My data adds complexity to interpretations of civil-society initiatives, suggesting that, when ordinary citizens engaging in them enable mobility for some and hinder it for others, this is the very essence of borderwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• borderwork
• civil society
• migration governance
• ethnography
• contradiction

In loving memory of Gianluca, who more than anyone embodied messiness and contradiction.

1. Introduction

In recent years, research about assistance to migrants has investigated a variety of actors engaging in this field. While this tendency is faithful to the increasingly complex reality of migrant assistance, scholarly work tends toward a rather polarised interpretation. On the one hand, state-driven migration control and governance (Pécoud 2015) are critiqued for their dehumanizing consequences. Institutional assistance to migrants, through emergency humanitarian support, is equated to a tool of control and border securitisation (Fassin 2005, Ticktin 2011, Watson 2011). On the other hand, the so-called European migration crisis has seen a surge in civil society involvement in this field. Literature focusing on civil society initiatives emphasises the central role of solidarity and the push toward egalitarianism and inclusion (Agustín and Jørgensen 2019). There is an assumption, underlying the work of many scholars, that civil society-driven initiatives may favour democratic integration. Another assumption contrasts these initiatives to exclusionary state-driven humanitarian assistance. In this article, I appreciate that in initiatives assisting newcomer migrants bordering is as much the doing of institutions as it is of citizens who, through borderwork, are ‘involved in constructing and contesting borders throughout Europe’ (Rumford 2008: 3).

Outsourcing border control functions to other actors, including civil society, has shifted bordering both outside the state apparatus and away from the geographic border (Lahav and Guiraudon 2000). Cities have become key sites of bordering. In the literature, they are indicated as spaces where institutional bordering processes are contested, and in which ordinary people and migrants challenge ‘the terms and content of membership’ (Young 2011: 535; see also Nyers 2010, Sanyal 2014, Bazurli 2019). Empirical studies illustrate how cities of sanctuary in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and elsewhere have contrasted state policies (Ridgely 2008, Darling 2010, Darling et al. 2012, Squire and Bagelman 2012). Few critical voices have suggested complex relations between state and urban levels of governance. Among them, Fauser (2017: 605) notes that cities ‘are considered key sites for the inclusion of migrants, affording them substantial (urban) citizenship’ whilst ‘[a]t the same time, transformations are affecting the city and urban spaces where a plethora of new mechanisms of control are emerging’.

Alongside local governments, civil society actors are key players in cities. Research focussing on civil society initiatives often associates them with political contestation (Sinatti 2019) and sees them as standing in opposition to state-driven assistance (Puggioni 2015, Ataç et al. 2016, Dadusc 2016, Youkhana and Sutter 2017, della Porta 2018, Sandri 2018, Feischmidt et al. 2019, Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019, della Porta et al. 2020 ). Hinging on concepts such as hospitality and solidarity (Rygiel 2011, English 2014, Cantat 2016, Papataxiarsis 2016, Rozakou 2016 and 2017, della Porta 2018, English et al. 2019, Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019), civil society-driven migrant assistance is seen as pursuing inclusionary efforts. Rozakou (2012: 563), for instance, found that in official reception centers ‘dominant official state discourse on hospitality was reproduced’ by casting asylum seekers as ‘worthy guests’. In contrast, civil society volunteers on the streets attempted to reverse exclusionary discourse on hospitality and establish relations of reciprocity and sociality with asylum seekers. In the work of Cantat (2016: 23), the term solidarity is similarly associated with ‘struggles’ that oppose a state ‘logic of exclusion and subordinate inclusion’. Cantat (ibidem: 17) interprets solidarity practices as ‘linking refugees and activists’ and allowing ‘the emergence of discourses and identities that challenge statist and bordered accounts of belonging’.

I argue that a reading of civil society initiatives as expressions of hospitable solidarity and as being in antithesis with state policies is oversimplifying for two reasons. First, I suggest that civil society initiatives constitute spaces in which borderwork is practiced and the line between inclusion and exclusion redrawn. Second, state and civil society are not internally homogenous, and I propose that mess and contradiction are the very essence of civil society borderwork. I further discuss these two reasons next.

With the term borderwork, I am faithful to the definition by Rumford (2008), who indicates the involvement of ordinary people in processes of production, reproduction and transformation of the border that have traditionally been the domain of nation-states (Lahav and Guiraudon 2000). Borderwork, in this sense, reflects the b/ordering theorised in a book with this title by van Houtum and colleagues (2005), who point at links between bordering and social ordering. Borders delimit not only nation-states, but also citizenship (Nyers 2003). Ordinary citizens are increasingly involved in bordering, through ‘everyday construction of borders through ideology, cultural mediation, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and everyday forms of transnationalism’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018: 229). Rumford (2008) compares borders to firewalls filtering between those who belong and those who do not. Bordering, as Yuval-Davis and colleagues (2018: 231) put it, ‘construct[s] borders as more or less permeable, view[s] those who want to cross the border as more or less of a threat and construct[s] borders around different criteria for participation and entitlement for those who do cross them’. Civil society assistance to migrants presents those involved with a myriad of micro-opportunities to define who is eligible and who is not, what is desirable and what is unacceptable, and in what terms. Activities of migrant assistance are a constant daily act of constructing and deconstructing borders.

A reading of the state and civil society as internally homogenous and clashing against each other is, moreover, simplistic. I convene with Ambrosini (2021), who speaks of migrant assistance as a battlefield on which actors have different visions and interests, and on which shared initiatives may be the outcome of alliances between what he calls ‘strange bedfellows’. Bazurli (2019: 343), for instance, indicates that ‘cities are not condemned to be passive receivers of social changes and political conditions imposed at a higher scale’ and that left-leaning local governments and pro-migrant social movements may build strategic alliances. That different visions and interests are present not just between state and civil society, but also within civil society initiatives has been highlighted by authors who point at contradictions and tensions that inhabit them. In their attempt to answer the question as to whether migrant solidarity can indeed constitute ‘a radical politics’, English and colleagues (2019), for instance, associate solidarity with ‘collective’, ‘democratic’, ‘equitable’ and ‘non-hierarchical’. They also distinguish it from charity. Similarly, Rozakou (2016: 186) defines solidarity as other than unequal gift-giving, and as a form of sociality that strives toward ‘the formation of new social spaces in the relations between immigrants and refugees and residents […] who are trying […] to incorporate them in culturally significant forms of social interaction’ and ‘social spaces that intend to materialise alternative visions of society’. While these works do acknowledge the existence of contradictions and tensions in civil society assistance, they do nonetheless still interpret it as carrying democratic and egalitarian transformative potential, together with the hope that it might promote ‘structural cultural and political changes’ (Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019: 48). In this article I take a further step and consider the different visions and interests that have been recognised within civil society initiatives as leading to contradictions and tensions that are unavoidable, as endemic manifestations of borderwork. Borders mean different things to different people, and through borderwork they are constantly renegotiated, enforced, challenged, confirmed, and transformed. By definition, then, borderwork is messy: it comes with lack of clarity and contradiction. Borders in fact carry a ‘double meaning as lines of separation and contact in space’ so that the ‘separation and contact functions of borders […] occur simultaneously’ (Popescu 2012: 9, 11). At the border, both functions may coexist. Contradictions, in which seemingly clear-cut opposites mingle with each other, form the workings of borderwork and are constantly enacted in assistance to migrants. I view such contradictions not as ‘either or’ but as ‘both and’: I emphasise ‘a situation when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present’ (Harvey 2014: 1) and by exploring the space between those opposites I strive for painting a picture that is more faithful to the complexity of everyday life. The space between those opposites is inhabited by contradictions, tensions and contestations that, in borderwork, represent the two sides of a same coin.

In this article I explore how workers and volunteers in civil society-led migrant assistance experience such contradictions; how they make sense of what they do and why they do it; how they grapple with some of the ethical dilemmas embedded in this field. I do this supported by ethnographic data collected between 2014 and 2017 among civil society initiatives offering first assistance to newcomer migrants and asylum seekers in the Italian city of Milan. At the peak of arrivals in southern Europe, my main field site was the Hub. This location in the vicinity of the city’s Central Railway Station owed its name to its role as a first point of arrival in the city. From the start, the Hub grouped initiatives originating from different civil society forces: from informal activist groups, to volunteer associations, to established charities and NGOs. It thus offered a unique setting to appreciate the diversity of voices within civil society. In the following pages I zoom into the alignments and frictions between people engaging at the Hub to consider these a natural expression of the messiness of borderwork.

My arguments unfold as follows: first, I introduce the reader to my field site. I also justify my methodological choices and explain why ethnography is particularly indicated to bring to light the messiness and contradictions that inhabit civil society initiatives. Two empirical sections follow: in the first, I provide an account of the diversity of people’s motivations to become involved at the Hub. I then move on, in the next empirical section, to discuss how such differences are the mirror of deeper contradictions. I also argue that such contradictions form the working cogs of civil society borderwork. In a closing section, I offer some conclusions.

2. The Hub: Researching Mess through Ethnography

The origins of the Hub date back to October 2013, when the news of two shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa dominated the Italian national media. In Milan, this news drew public attention to the significant number of migrants who slept rough around the premises of the city’s Central Railway Station. For many of the latter, Milan was a transit point as they tried to make their way to European destinations further north. This visible sight urged Milanese civil society to mobilise. Spontaneous responses included the distribution of food, blankets, clothing and healthcare at the station. Soon, the municipal authorities invited volunteers, charities and non-governmental organisations to pool their efforts together and made physical premises available for them to operate in a shared space. The Hub therefore stands as an example of how Milan’s left-leaning local government built strategic alliances with civil society forces (Bazurli 2019). Emergency municipal funding to cover the costs of running the Hub was allocated to one charity, though reliance on substantial self-financing ensured relative independence for this and other civil society initiatives (see also Sinatti 2019). The Hub initially performed an important logistic function: migrants arriving by train from disembarkation ports in the south of Italy were distributed from here within a network of emergency sleeping facilities in the city and its outskirts, or they were offered a bed on site. From site for the distribution of essential goods and services to migrants in transit, the Hub later became a Centro di Accoglienza Straordinaria, a temporary shelter set up as an emergency measure to cater for the growing number of asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their case that official reception centres were unable to meet. Municipal data indicates that between 2013 and 2017, when the Hub was operational, an official number of 125,500 people received assistance in the city’s overall reception centres.

My fieldwork at the Hub included intermittent participant observation stints for a total of approximately 250 h of on-site presence over a four-year period. In between field visits, I maintained contact with respondents following their social media activity. I also conducted twenty in-depth interviews with volunteers and workers. This combination of methods allowed coupling the direct observation of people’s offline and online behaviours with joint reflection about their underlying motivations during interviews and informal conversations. This allows my data to uncover inconsistencies between what people do, what they say, and what they say they do, thus grasping the contradictions that come with assistance to migrants. I openly disclosed my role as a researcher, and obtained authorisations from the Municipality and other organisations whose staff I closely observed or interviewed. As agreed through informed consent with respondents and in line with the ethical requirements of my institution¹, I refer to individuals in this article with pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. Whilst acknowledging the added insight they would have brought to this research, I deliberately limited fieldwork with migrants to observations. Interviews and social media contact with individuals aspiring to apply for asylum would have demanded additional precautions. Their rapid turnover at the Hub and language barriers, moreover, would have required a longer timeframe than that available for this research to build the necessary rapport.

Ethnography is particularly suited for studying contradictions for three reasons. First, reality is by its own nature contradictory and, as social scientists, we should be faithful to such messiness (Law 2004). Doing ethnography is in itself a messy process, reflected in the bricolage of methods for collecting research data (Ehn et al. 2015). Ethnographic research is a messy practice also because research steps are not necessarily clearly delineated and flow over into each other (ibidem). This mirrors the messiness of the world we study and makes ethnography an exceptionally fitting methodology to capture contradictions in everyday activities and interactions.

Second, ethnography invites us as scholars to be reflexive about how we may interpret reality according to our own mental schemes. What we see as researchers in the field is subject to what Paul Stoller has called ‘gaze’. ‘“Gaze” is the act of seeing; it is an act of selective perception. Much of what we see is shaped by our experiences, and our ‘gaze’ has a direct bearing on what we think. And what we see and think, to take the process one step further, has a bearing upon what we say and what and how we write’ (Stoller 1989: 38–39). Through selective perception, we may look at what we want to see, and interpret it according to our own mental schemes. If we do not use reflexivity, we risk applying our own moral judgements and being blind to contradictions. We may privilege looking for inclusiveness in the initiatives of certain actors (civil society ones) while searching for exclusionary traits in the initiatives of others (institutions). As Aparna, Schapendonk and Merlín-Escorza (2020: 111) highlight, as academics in the field of migration, mobilities and borders ‘we are held less accountable to our own messy role in the messy processes of researching in a field that is itself highly politicized’. Ethnography helps overcome the risks of selective perception and limited researcher accountability by offering a set of methods that, coupled with reflexivity, allow capturing the messiness and contradictions of the everyday. Reflecting on why, as researchers, we see what we do the way we do may help overcome the tendency so common in the literature of binary interpretations.

The third reason for ethnography to be well suited for studying contradictions is that it invites us to look for these also among our respondents: in their actions and self-perceptions. According to a quote attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead ‘what people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things’. Unpacking such contradictions and inviting self-reflection about them is the core business of ethnographic research. As Berliner (2016: 5) explains: ‘[w]hen social actors become conscious of their inconsistencies, […] self-awareness takes place’ and in these moments of ‘reflexivity-in-action […] self-knowledge and feeling about the self are being produced’. Through our presence in the field and research output, we can make our own respondents aware of how they may apply selective perception. We can support them in aligning their intentions with the not always corresponding outcomes of their actions. We can encourage reflexivity and initiate discussions. Conversations I held with respondents, including discussing with them the findings I was writing about in my own publications (Sinatti 2019), encouraged moments of self-reflection. As I observed respondents’ reactions and listened to their thoughts, I became aware that, under the pressure of a situation of constant emergency, self-reflection was a luxury that they could seldom afford.

The three reasons I have just outlined support the choice of ethnography as a method to research the messy reality of civil society assistance to migrants. Through ethnographic insight, this article aims to ‘bring back ambivalent statements, contradictory attitudes, incompatible values, and emotional internal clashes as research objects’ (Berliner 2016: 5). According to Ingold (2017: 23) ‘[p]articipant observation can be uncomfortable, and […] people […] may do or say things that we find awful or abhorrent. Our task, then, is not to mask this abhorrence with a veil of sympathy, or present an artificially sanitized account of their words and deeds, but directly to take issue with them’. I hope to do justice, in the following pages, to such a deed.

3. Civil Society Migrant Assistance as Inhabited by Different Views

Before entering the Hub for the first time, I had been exposed to information about the sudden inflow of migrants in Milan through the news and social media. As a researcher born and raised in this city and who at the time had been living abroad for roughly a decade, in reading about my hometown I could not resist romantic interpretations about Milanese solidarity and hospitability. Upon starting fieldwork, however, reflexivity about my own positionality became an important part of the ethnographic experience. I felt uncomfortable as I saw situations and heard words that questioned my assumptions and my romantic vision of civil society action was soon challenged. I listened to gossip circulating among volunteers and workers, observed contradictions in their actions and witnessed disagreements between them. I learned to distinguish the variety of perspectives individuals brought to migrant assistance. I also came to see the coming together of these perspectives at the Hub as an essential feature of borderwork.

What struck me from the first days I spent at the Hub was the diversity of paths and personal histories that led people to become involved. Workers and volunteers pursued different aims. For some, it was an employment opportunity. Second generation migrants, for instance, saw a temporary job at the Hub as a chance to value unique resources that were seldom otherwise useful on the labour market, such as language skills. They engaged at the Hub with high hopes that this would be an entry point allowing them to move up the career ladder. After reviewing a list of precarious positions he had held as a porter and installer of fair exhibition stands, Abasi shared with me big dreams of following up, after the Hub, with work for an international NGO or a United Nations agency. For other locals with a history of marginality – homelessness, addiction, petty crime and time served in jail – employment at the Hub was conceived as part of reintegration into society. Some workers were long-term serving professionals with experience of civil servantship and project management for Milan’s charities and NGOs. Others brought professional qualifications as doctors, pharmacists, or psychologists. Alongside employed workers, unpaid volunteers also joined the Hub with equally diverse paths. Asylum seekers banned from employed work while they awaited a decision about their status filled their time by volunteering at the Hub, whilst also building a personal network in the city they hoped would become their long-term home. They did so alongside middle-class Milanese women wearing expensive pashmina scarfs wrapped around their necks.

The Hub united a diverse universe of people, not only with different personal social and professional backgrounds, but also diverse aspirations. Some acted out of a spirit of civic engagement or saw a political agenda underlying their involvement (Sinatti 2019). Others were moved by personal neediness – rather than the neediness of their beneficiaries – and the consequent urge to be part of something larger than themselves, a situation that Malkki (2015) has called the ‘need to help’ (see also Hayakawa 2014). At the Hub, actions undertaken in support of migrants required the voices of these different people to coordinate, revealing alignments and frictions. As I have pointed out elsewhere, for instance, ‘smaller initiatives refrained from involvement at the Hub, in opposition with the philosophy of larger organizations or with the official approach of municipal authorities’ (Sinatti 2019: 141).

English and colleagues (2019: 195) underscore that civil society initiatives are inhabited by tensions, dictated by ‘the limits of solidarity and what sets the work of transnational migrant solidarity collectives apart from the work of the charitable border-workers’. They explain the difference between solidarity and charity as follows: ‘When British and European activists provide free English classes and legal advice, is this solidarity (an act arising from shared interests in accordance with radical migrant solidarity theory), or a benevolent charitable act (using one’s own power and influence to help the disempowered who cannot help themselves)?’ (English et al. 2019: 199). At the Hub, I observed many perform charitable acts. These were at times characterised by over-giving, messiness and contradictions, as this extract from my fieldnotes illustrates:

As I sit at the entrance of the Hub, Paola [a volunteer] comes in waving her hands in the air with excitement. Thanks to funds raised among people living in her apartment block, she has had seven T-shirts printed with numbers on the back and seven pairs of matching shorts. A full basketball team, including two reserves for the bench. Before arriving, she has had a word with a group of youngsters a few blocks away who regularly hang out at a basketball field and has arranged a tournament. A few dozen migrants are inside the Hub today. Most of them sit at the tables scattered around the large hall. Others watch You Tube videos on one of the few computers arranged along the side wall, after having patiently waited for their 30-minute turn. Paola calls out at this crowd ‘Basket tournament! Who wants to join? I have team outfits!’ A few scramble for the opportunity. The fittest get there first and Paola is disappointed that she does not have enough outfits for all those who have stood up. The chosen few go off to play.

Moved by the belief that migrants should be offered more than basic assistance and helped to integrate through social activities, Paola ended up making her initiative accessible for some and off-limits for others. Her intention to act out of solidarity and empower migrants resulted in a benevolent charitable act for selected few. Circumstances similar to this occurred regularly, as testified by this further example from my fieldnotes:

Giacomo takes me to the area of the Hub where volunteers distribute food and give Italian language lessons. He insists that he wants to introduce me to someone: ‘Come and meet my little princess. She is so good, she is’. A young black girl, maybe thirteen years old, is seated next to a volunteer. Both are ready to dish out the food to the line of migrants that is gathering behind the make-shift counter of the canteen. The little princess regularly hangs out with the volunteers to lend a hand. Giacomo tells me how he offered her the chance to help herself to clothing from the warehouse: ‘I said to her “take whatever you like” and all she picked was a pair of leggings. I insisted and gave her a couple of T-shirts that are pretty for her age’.

This is one of many episodes I observed that made me feel uncomfortable. My assumption of civil society inclusiveness was challenged every time workers and volunteers unknowingly engaged in explicit differential treatment. This and other cases acted as reminders of the messiness of borderwork. Giacomo encouraging this migrant girl who, in his own words, ‘is so good’ to help herself to clothing stands in contrast with a scene I had observed only the day before. A male African migrant had just returned from the hospital after having had his leg put in plaster. He was wearing a smart, fitted pair of trousers that could not be taken off without cutting them, until the plaster was removed. His look was completed by a shirt, left unbuttoned at the top hinting at his hunky chest, and a pair of sunglasses, one of the two lenses showing a visible crack, casually flipped over his kinky hair. The volunteer in charge of the warehouse held out three alternatives: a pair of long tracksuit trousers and two pairs of Bermuda shorts. She signalled with her hands that he could pick only one. He looked at all three one at a time, then rolled them into a ball and left holding the bundle of clothes under his armpit, with a smile on his face. She tried to stop him, insisting that he could take only one, then with a shrug said ‘Oh, who cares. After all he does have a broken leg’. ‘Ah, no, you’re wrong: this guy is just a mister fancy’ one of the other volunteers commented, suggesting that she had just been taken advantage of by a non-deserving subject. On another occasion, I had observed Sergio, one of the workers, handing out a new jumper to a migrant. The latter was either mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed by trauma. Either way, he was known for occasionally experiencing panic attacks and displaying troubling behaviour. Sergio had developed a sympathy for this migrant. On observing the donation passing from the hands of the giver to those of the receiver, another migrant mimicked to Sergio whether he could also have a new jumper. Sergio shoed him off with his hand exclaiming ‘I don’t mind giving to him. But then others think I am here to give to everybody’. This last example recalls Malkki’s (2015: 6) observation that ‘the need of those to be helped appear[s] simultaneously somehow elementary (basic) and monumental (superhuman) in scale’. Stories of migrants that volunteers and workers exhibited on their social media accounts implicitly pointed at the deservingness of needy people who had crossed the Mediterranean on wheelchairs, with mental disabilities or as elderly people. In the case of the little princess, deservingness was dispensed not on the grounds of presumed need but instead of performance, thanks to her actively taking part in distributing assistance to her own kind.

Everyday situations at the Hub called for rapid responses. Immediate reactions are typically improvised, giving volunteers and workers little time to reflect about the meaning and consequences of their actions. At times, this triggered messy situations and contradictive behaviour. When migrant arrivals peaked to more than one thousand persons daily, some workers and volunteers felt that the need for assistance was so great that it could never be filled. Disillusioned with what they were doing, they believed that the initiative was failing – they lost trust in other members and in the ability of beneficiaries to help themselves. This sense of helplessness sometimes triggered bickering among respondents, for instance by questioning whether inexperienced volunteers, charity workers with a track-record assisting the homeless and substance-abusers, unskilled first-generation migrants or former convicts possessed the appropriate credentials for intervening at the Hub. I also observed fierce reactions toward migrants, when workers enforced order and discipline during food distribution by screaming and pushing them into a queue, or attempted to manage the occasional fight between migrants with further violence. These examples show that apparent contradictions ‘between undeniable local conflicts and, simultaneously, the everyday “conviviality” of boundary-crossings and inter-ethnic solidarities’ may go hand in hand (Karner and Parker 2011: 355).

The episodes above illustrate how daily work in a centre distributing assistance to migrants is rippled with small decisions about who is eligible and who is not, who is worthy and who is not. At the Hub, belonging to the host community of workers and volunteers was articulated against general categories of otherness. Citizens, strangers, outsiders, aliens: none of these social groups remain stable over time; they are subject to change. How do volunteers and workers act in this interplay between themselves and various categories of otherness? The notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) helps look at otherness from the perspective of negotiating subjects and thus understand the discretion that workers and volunteers have in labelling migrant others (Giudici 2020). Through practices such as those I described above, workers and volunteers entered into solidaristic or antagonistic relationships with migrants. The latter were the outsiders, whom volunteers and workers helped to negotiate and cross the boundary between outsider and insider. Due to his condition, the mentally disturbed migrant was seen as being in greater need than his peer. By offering her services as a volunteer during food distributions, the little princess was deemed eligible out of merit. By displaying cockiness in his choice of clothing, the migrant with a leg in plaster was judged as undeserving and taking advantage of the system.

4. Contradictions as the Working Cogs of Borderwork

In the previous section, I presented examples indicating that workers and volunteers held a position of power of inclusion or exclusion. My focus was to highlight the diversity of perspectives of individuals involved in civil society migrant assistance. In this section, I further underline that every choice that workers and volunteers made while dispensing assistance to migrants is an act of borderwork. My data confirms that, in borderwork, ‘everyday bordering is experienced and viewed differently by individuals of differential positionings, identifications and normative value systems’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018: 233-234). The disagreement between the warehouse worker and volunteer about whether the migrant with a leg in plaster was eligible for extra clothing or just a mister fancy shows that what research participants viewed as acceptable or not is culturally relative and depends on their subjective moral values. At the Hub, contradictions and disagreements between those involved in assisting migrants are illustrative of the diversity of discourses about desirable and undesirable migrants.

Contradictions, however, may not only derive from differences in views. The longer I spent at the Hub, the more I realised that they may also be inherent in actions themselves and unavoidable. One example stands out for its explanatory power. Before I discuss its implications for borderwork and messiness, I recount the story next:

On a warm summer evening the street outside the Hub is scattered with people. Workers and volunteers hang out with each other as one shift leaves and the other takes over. They chat and complain about the heat. Asylum seekers sit on the edge of the pavement, the lucky ones finding solace under the shade of a tree, killing time. Other asylum seekers lie a few hundred meters further down the road, on a patch of grass adjacent to one of Milan’s typical canals: here, they seek refreshment from the unbearable heat inside the Hub, intensified by the heavy smell of body odour that comes with hundreds of people sharing the same sleeping quarters on camp beds. One of the drivers charged with transferring asylum seekers to other reception centres in town ventures inside. Shortly after, visibly agitated and embarrassed he rushes out to other staff and volunteers: ‘Oh my God, oh, oh! There is one [girl] doing a job to another’. Several people rush inside to see what the commotion is about. On one of the camp beds, a male asylum seeker is lying down, covered by a blanket that can be seen bobbing up and down, as another asylum seeker performs a fellatio on him.

This incident illustrates the levels of promiscuity in which asylum seekers were living at the Hub, another issue that left me with a sour feeling of the inadequacy of what civil society assistance could achieve. For the purpose of this article, however, of interest are the responses that the incident provoked among workers and volunteers. On the evening itself, hilarity was the reaction of many who rushed inside to catch a glimpse of the scene. For days, they recounted the story to those who had not been present as a form of entertainment, accompanied by sneers and giggles. Other volunteers and workers were upset at the sight of their peers dehumanising migrants this way, as if they had no right to sexuality. Marta, for instance, shared with me in an interview that she instinctively thought of the incident as ‘something beautiful. It’s sensuality. It’s an expression of love, joy, elimination of stress. People who have just disembarked a ship coming from Libya are sufficiently stressed. They arrive and land in a huge structure [the Hub] and, at a certain point, impulses are impulses’. As a member of the mobile unit that roamed the streets around the Central Railway Station during the day in search of newly arrived migrants to direct to the Hub, Marta had grown accustomed to the sight of migrants in extreme distress. The idea of this being an expression of love comforted her.

In the days that followed, discussions among staff and volunteers about the fellatio became further loaded. Different opinions clashed. Some denounced the fact that men and women mingling together in an emergency shelter would lead to a second generation ‘problem’ as they would soon start ‘having babies’. Other centres in the city were indeed reporting pregnancies. In addition, the practice of migrants turning to prostitution as a desperate means of survival was known around the Hub and, according to some, needed to be controlled. According to others, the incident revealed a need for education to affectivity and sexuality among migrants, as well as prevention: ‘Migrants should feel the right to ask for a condom the same way they can ask for a piece of toilet paper’ an interviewee commented. Condom distribution became a contentious issue. For some it would expose women migrants to the risk of sexual exploitation. According to others, it would empower migrants of all genders and sexual orientations to own their bodies and protect themselves from STDs. In an interview with Marta, who supported the latter position, she said: ‘For those working here, there is no such thing as migrant sexuality. It isn’t there. It’s something that doesn’t exist. And when it does exist, it is either shameful, or it is trafficking’.

The discussions that followed the fellatio incident are emblematic of the kind of dilemmas volunteers and workers grappled with at the Hub daily. What should prevail? Protecting the right to self-determination and sexuality as a basic human right by distributing free condoms? Or attempting to control migrants by dissuading them from selling their bodies out of desperation, by not distributing condoms? Whichever choice – to distribute or not – one set of rights (to protection through control, or to self-determination through empowerment) would be unmet. Opinions were so polarised that a decision was never taken. A few weeks later, however, among the donations arriving daily at the Hub, a pack of condoms appeared. Someone placed it in the same room where migrants could fetch rations of toilet paper. Within days, the box was empty.

Cases of differential treatment of migrants that I illustrated in the previous section are exemplary of how contradictions may emerge from unconscious yet deliberate choices respondents made in daily interactions with migrants. These cases already testify the messiness of borderwork. The fellatio incident described here shows that contradictions may not only be the outcome of choices, but that they may also be unavoidable. Contradictions are inherent in situations that present themselves as wicked problems, in which whatever response involves an entanglement of effects. I consider this as a further expression of borderwork. In the example of the fellatio, clashes between workers and volunteers arose out of contradiction and in the space between opposites. The dilemma at stake, in fact, turned protection and control, self-determination and empowerment into mutually exclusive trade-offs, which would force some migrants into exclusion while favouring others.

During my time at the Hub, I observed many other contradictions arising in the space between presumed opposites. Volunteers and workers, for instance, offered advice to migrants on how to cross international borders undetected in order to reach northern European destinations. As a result, some respondents had their phones tapped by the Police, suspected of illegal trafficking of persons. Yet ‘angel of refugees’ was one of the nicknames that the same respondents earned on the streets and among asylum seekers. Another example is that assisting migrants may come with assisting traffickers too. Evidence from the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda found that a wave of victims included perpetrators who received humanitarian assistance alongside their own victims in refugee camps. In writing about this, Barnett and Weiss (2008: 275) comment that ‘[i]t was painful to recognize in real time how deeply intertwined support for victims and assistance to militants had become’. Similarly at the Hub, rumours spread about some of the migrants receiving assistance being scafisti (exploitative drivers of the boats on which migrants had reached Italy via the Mediterranean sea). Similarly, gossip abounded around individuals hired at the Hub as cultural mediators and interpreters. These were suspected of making extra profit on the side, when in exchange for a service fee they facilitated refugees to receive money from family members supporting their journey. Is the person charging a commission to receive funds without leaving trace of migrants’ passage an unscrupulous profit-maker or the provider of a much-needed service? Along the same lines, work by other scholars has shown that crime and solidarity may not be opposites but are entangled with each other (Cook 2011, Albahari 2015, Tazzioli 2018). Fassin (2005) shows how compassion and repression also go hand in hand in French immigration policies. Similarly, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Berg (2018) devoted an entire special issue of the journal Migration and Society to the encounter between two presumed opposites: hospitality and hostility. These and other contradictions are embedded in migrant support initiatives. Care and control, legality and illegality, crime and solidarity, hospitality and hostility: supposed opposites go hand in hand and become the motor behind civil society borderwork.

What I hope to have achieved in this section is to have given additional flavour to my earlier statement that opposites need not be mutually exclusive. Ethnographic examples support an interpretation that sees them, instead, as the two faces of a same coin: ‘[t]he fact of differences in the world – whether understood as contradictory, oppositional, or incommensurable – leads to the following in practice: we can attempt to select exclusively one or the other (“either/or”) or we can try to select both (“both/and”)’ (Berliner 2016: 7-8). Both/and contradictions are embedded in borderwork. Dehumanizing and empowering can be entangled to a point that attempting to judge whether they are good or bad no longer makes sense. On his institutional web profile at the Institute for Advanced Study at the School of Social Science in Princeton, anthropologist and ethnographer Didier Fassin² refers to a ‘reformulation of injustice as suffering, violence as trauma, and resistance as resilience’. In migrant assistance, we may similarly speak of a duality between care and control, repression and compassion (Fassin 2005, Ticktin 2011, Perkowski 2016).

5. Conclusion

In this article I uncover the messiness of migrant support initiatives by civil society. I show that such initiatives originate from multiple urges to act and respond to differently perceived needs. The examples illustrated in these pages bring to light the messiness and contradictions that are inherent in civil society initiatives assisting migrants. Contradictions are located in tensions between coexisting opposites: care and control, empowerment and protection, legality and illegality, crime and solidarity, hospitality and hostility. The examples I have provided are also representative of the fact that delegating migration management to civil society shifts to ordinary people the solution of ethical dilemmas inherent in such tensions between opposites. Workers and volunteers must wade through contradictions, which turns them into solidarians one day, charitable givers another day, or even perpetrators of violent or exclusive actions another. This is the essence of borderwork as practiced by ordinary people: through contradictions and the tensions that go with them, the making and unmaking of borders is a relentless, messy process.

My data confirm that civil society initiatives offering support to migrants are far from internally homogenous. They are rooted in different sets of beliefs and moralities, and in very different understandings of what borders should look like. Rather than evaluating initiatives for being exclusionary and controlling, or solidaristic and hospitable, scholarship should recognise that bordering is a complex business. In the space between opposites, on a daily basis workers and volunteers make small decisions that carry huge consequences for individuals on the move. Taken one way or the other, those decisions may hinder mobility for some and enable it for others. And it is through daily dealings with messiness and contradiction that the cogs of borderwork are put to work.

I offer in these pages an ethnographic account of some of the embodied encounters that take place in civil society initiatives assisting migrants. Interpreting these initiatives as borderwork implies considering them as a space of relationships. Follow up research investigating the perspectives of migrants on workers and volunteers would be a much-needed integration, allowing to interpret the messiness of borderwork in a more complex way. Despite this being a limitation in this article, I hope to have brought to life for the reader what these initiatives look, smell and feel like in the everyday and the many contradictions that inhabit them. I also hope to have shown that, as researchers, we can write about what in the field makes us feel uncomfortable. I have faith that this may inspire other scholars to write candidly and without fear, and to challenge what we might take for granted. In some studies, the rhetoric of civil society involvement is tacitly associated with values that are unquestioned. Does civil society involvement necessarily create less authoritarian relationships, or mitigated control? May civil society involvement truly open up ways to empower migrants and local society? Ethnographic insight into borderwork shows that answers to these questions might not be straightforward.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the men and women, migrants and non who opened to me the doors of the Hub, and of their hearts. I am grateful for their sharing with me laughter and sorrow, love and pain, and the daily difficulties involved in supporting other humans. This is the aspiration that ultimately drove them to do what they were doing. I am also grateful to Claudio, for making me come back home.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giulia Sinatti

Giulia Sinatti is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She uses an ethnographic approach to study states, supra-national agencies and civil society actors governing migrant mobility in Africa, Europe and elsewhere. She also uses ethnography in collaborative research to support innovation in healthcare and in industry.

Notes

1 https://fsw.vu.nl/nl/Images/FSW_Datamanagementbeleid_1.5_eng_tcm249-867378.pdf. Accessed 14 March, 2021.

2 https://www.ias.edu/ss. Accessed 28 July, 2021.