Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
Miriam Ticktin
Abstract
This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. It focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—it asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? The book demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can be ... More
This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. It focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—it asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? The book demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, turning conditions such as HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. It also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices which criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.
Keywords:
compassion,
immigration politics,
France,
humanitarian immigration practices,
care,
protection,
asylum,
violence against women,
residency papers,
unusual pathologies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520269040 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520269040.001.0001 |
