In Memoriam Sarah van Walsum

In her oration Sarah showed that the world looks completely different if you do not view it as ordered as traditional sovereign states with protected borders, but if you take the worldwide network of intimate family relations as a starting point for coherence. She pled for a constructive dialogue and intensive negotiation between these two perspectives. In this way the legitimate interest of states to regulate migration could be confronted with, for example, the pedagogical necessity to raise children in a family to harmonious individuals. The large-scaled research she could start in 2010 thanks to a NWO Vici grant aims to further elaborate these ideas. Four researchers – Jill Alpes, Younous Arbaoui, Nadia Ismaili and Johanne Sondergaard- therefore have the possibility to continue and build up further the research she started. Sarah mentored them even until she was bound to her sickbed.

The book The Family and the Nation: Dutch Family Migration Policies in the Context of Changing Family Norms (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) was groundbreaking. In the book Sarah describes the changes in Dutch migration law with use of the historical developments in the way the family is viewed between 1945-2000. Remarkable was that she found that while the view of the family became more and more liberal in national spheres, the family in migration law is still viewed very traditionally. The male provider of the family is still the dominant figure of the family in migration law, while in Dutch society this figure becomes less prominent. Sarah also showed convincingly that the way in which contact was being made between the Dutch colonials and the native people in the Dutch Colonies has left its footprints in the current migration policy.

A different aspect of her research about the relation between family and migration law was the positions of home carers and household service providers, most of the time irregular immigrant workers with a paltry position in labour law. “There is something remarkable going on here,” Sarah wrote in 2011 in the A&MR, “We don’t entrust the care of the house, child or elderly mother to just anyone. For these things we want people who are responsible , conscientious, capable, thorough and above all trustworthy. But as society we don’t grant these employees the most basic form of protection against dismissal and loss of income; in a lot of cases we don’t even grant them the right to open a bank account in their own name, to take health insurance or to rent a house. It is the incapability to act of the Dutch housewife until the 1950s, but then squared.”

Until recently, migration policies primarily targeted labour migrants and asylum seekers. Family migration was taken for granted. But now, many nations are restricting family migration, particularly from poorer countries. The Netherlands have even gone so far as to require family migrants to pass an integration test before being allowed to enter the country. How can this shift in policies be explained? Does it, as some suggest, indicate a new trend towards racist exclusion? This book places family migration policies in the broader perspective of changing family norms. In doing so, it shows the added value of studying immigration law not as an isolated field, but in connection with other fields of law and policy.Taking the Netherlands as an example, it shows how family migration policies have evolved from a system premised on the male breadwinner-citizen’s right to domicile, to one granting and restricting freedom of movement according to individual merit. Although grounded in a different ethos, the techniques of power now being used to enforce the emerging distinctions of a globalising world are in fact reminiscent of those once used to enforce the racial and gendered distinctions of the colonial past.

You can download Sarah van Walsum’s book and selected chapters here:

• Table of Contents and Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Conclusion

1994 – Mixed Metaphors_The Nation and the Family
2004 – The Dynamics of Emancipation and Exclusion
2007 – Women and Immigration law. Introduction
2009 – Against All Odds
2011 – Regulating Migrant Domestic Work in the Netherlands
2011 – Sex and the regulation of belonging
2011 – The Rise and Fall of the Breadwinner Citizen as Reflected in dutch and EU Migration Law
2012 – Inaugural speech ‘Intimate Stranger’
2013 – Belonging and Membership
2013 – Labour Legality and shifts in the Public Private divide
2014 – Transnational Households – Migrants and Care at Home and Abroad

Title: Global Social Protection: Protecting and Providing Outside the Nation-State Framework

Abstract: In today’s world, more than 220 million people live in a country that is not their own. Nevertheless, the provision of social protection, and the policy-making that undergirds it, remains largely confined to the national level. How are people on the move protected and provided for in this new global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of transnational individuals? In this first Sarah van Walsum Lecture, Peggy Levitt (Wellesley College and Harvard University) introduces a new Global Social Protection (GSP) research agenda aimed at answering questions about which protections exist for transnational individuals, which protections can travel across borders, who can access these protections, and who is left out.

About Peggy Levitt: Peggy is a Chair and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. She is also the co-director of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard.

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Title: Social Justice, Gender and Legal Change in Asylum Law

Abstract: Legal change is often thought of as change from the top down – change brought about by new legislation, regulations, precedent administrative, and federal court decisions, or changes resulting from major impact litigation. Gender asylum in the United States, however, tells an unusual story of legal change from the bottom up, grounded, at least in significant part, in direct representation of women refugees. Deborah Anker will tell the story of gender asylum in the United States, which provides a counter-example of how direct representation can actually change the culture of decision-making and be an effective vehicle for meaningful legal change. At the same time, such representation, rather than disempowering clients, can create authentic and non-hierarchical relationships between lawyer and client.

About Deborah Anker: Deborah is Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). Author of a leading treatise, Law of Asylum in the United States, Anker has co-drafted ground-breaking gender asylum guidelines and amicus curiae briefs. Professor Anker is one of the most widely known asylum scholars and practitioners in the United States.

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Title: Resettler Society - Making and Remaking Citizenship Through Private Refugee Sponsorship

Abstract: In her lecture Audrey Macklin introduces her research about private sponsorship of refugees. The overarching question driving the inquiry is this: how does making refugees into citizens remake the the citizenship of sponosrs? The lecture focusses on those aspects that touch on the confluence of family and state.  In her work Macklin embarks on empirical research to explore private refugee sponsorship from the perspective of sponsors, using a combination of surveys, focus groups and interviews. The research draws on three theoretical resources for conceptualizing private refugee sponsorship: cosmopolitanism as motive, privatization as mode, and active citizenship as effect.

About Audrey Macklin: Audrey is Director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and Chair in Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. She holds law degrees from Yale and Toronto, and a bachelor of science degree from Alberta. After graduating from Toronto, she served as law clerk to Mme Justice Bertha Wilson at the Supreme Court of Canada. She was appointed to the faculty of Dalhousie Law School in 1991, promoted to Associate Professor 1998, moved to the University of Toronto in 2000, and became a full professor in 2009. While teaching at Dalhousie, she also served as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board.

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Title: Legal issues in family migration

Abstract: In her lecture, Helena Wray discussed the UK Supreme Court’s case law on article 8 and family reunification as a reflection of the politicisation of the issue, of competing understandings of the judicial function in a democracy and of understandings of citizenship.

About Helena Wray: Helena is Associate Professor in Migration Law. She has researched and published extensively, with a particular focus on legal issues in family migration. She is editor of Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality and has led or been involved in several research and consultancy projects. She led teams which provided expert evidence in two test cases heard in the Supreme Court, Ali and Bibi v SSHD on pre-entry language testing for spouses, and the key case of MM v SSHD on the onerous financial conditions to be met by the sponsors of migrant spouses and partners. In 2015, she was the lead author of a major report, commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner for England from Middlesex University and Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and launched in Parliament, on the impact of the financial requirements in the family migration rules on children.  In 2013, she gave written and oral evidence in the House of Commons at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Migration’s Enquiry into Family Migration.

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Title: Some cursory remarks on race, mixture and law by three Dutch jurists

Abstract: De Hart’s lecture addresses the question how race-thinking was part of the Dutch legal system and legal scholarship as a way to explore the ‘legal archive’. It discusses the legal work on race and mixture of three Dutch jurists: L.W.C. van den Berg (1845-1927), a colonial legislator who wrote the Mixed Marriages Act for the Dutch East Indies; W.F. Wertheim (1907-1998), professor in colonial law, who later distanced himself from the Dutch colonial system of which he had been part, and H. de Bie (1879-1955) who, as the first children’s judge in Rotterdam, worried about Dutch girls and their intimate relationships with Chinese men. This study argues that understanding our legal past (the ‘legal archive’) is crucial to further our knowledge about how race and mixture work in law today, and that such knowledge is vital for social justice.

About Betty de Hart: Betty is a professor of transnational families and migration law at Vrije Universiteit. She conducts legal, empirical and historical research on the national, European and international rules that transnational families encounter, the views behind these rules as well as the impact on the everyday lives of transnational families. Such research will provide new insights into the meaning of nationality, citizenship and belonging.

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Title: Normalizing power and engaged narrative methodology: Refugee women, the forgotten category in the public discourse

Abstract: Since the turn of the century, the discourse of othering of non-Western migrants has been growing in many European societies. And since 2015, refugees have become a quite visible component in this discourse. Although, for decades, the dominant image of refugees has been constructed as people ‘at risk’, new competing images of refugee men ‘as risk’ have recently gained ground. For refugee women, however, the image of being victims and ‘at risk’ still prevails. This shows a strong underlying gendered logic of feminine vulnerability and masculine threat. In this lecture, I show how these images are situated within the dominant Dutch discourse of migration with taken-for-granted taxonomies of the self and the other. Specific in this normalized discourse for refugee women is that their agency is either ignored or their possible position as an activist is not acknowledged to exist. Using examples from two studies in which my research team engaged with the method of narrative engaged research, I show the importance of this particular narrative method in unsettling the normalizing power of othering. The theoretical argument of this lecture engages with ongoing discussions on power and agency. It argues that, when the power of exclusion works through repetition and is manifested in the daily normalization of actions, agency needs to provide an alternative in the same fluid manner. Narratives in dialogue provides an illuminating angle for discussing this specific kind of agency, as I will show through some examples from research.

About Halleh Ghorashi: Since 2012 Halleh is Full Professor of Diversity and Integration in the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Between 2005 and 2012 she held the prestigious position of PaVEM-chair in Management of Diversity and Integration at the Department of Organization Science at VU Amsterdam

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Title: On categories: what we see and what we don’t see when categorising migrant youth

Abstract: In her lecture Mazzucato discussed her research on youth with a migration background. She argued that especially large quantitative studies that tend to be most influential in affecting policy and laws on migrant youth, have been monolithic in the categories used. Studies on ‘migrant youth’ typically use categories based on ethnicity and generation. Yet such categorizations hide the physical mobility that many migrant background youth engage in. Transnational migration and mobility studies argue that such trips are important for youth’s sense of identity and feelings of belonging, yet such studies are small in scale, usually based on long-term recall, and have had little influence on the way that youth with a migration background are studied and data on them are collected in large-scale studies. Mazzucato reflected on categories in migrant youth research and how this has shaped the production of knowledge. She offered some possible alternatives based on the integrated findings from the Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives: Transnational Youth in Global South and North project (www.motrayl.com). ​

About Valentina Mazzucato: Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation & Development. She founded and directed the research programme on Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development from 2012 to 2020.

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Title: The fundamental inequalities of labour migration

Abstract: Labour migration regimes are characterised by fundamental inequalities on at least three levels: access to migration, discriminatory treatment inside the host country, inequality between countries of origin and destination. While the legal standards applicable to these three inequalities vary, the three dimensions are intertwined and often mutually reinforce each other. In my lecture, I will first introduce the three dimensions of inequality in labour migration with a specific focus on their interrelation. I will show that the dominant selection criteria in labour migration law often reinforce existing inequalities based on class, race, and nationality. At the same time, the perspective of migrants and the perspective of countries of origin is structurally underrepresented, if not neglected, in the regulation of labour migration. In the last part of the lecture, I will provide some ideas, how we could try to use the law, in particular human rights law, to remedy some of the identified inequalities and disparities and provide for a more participatory conception of labour migration.

About Anuscheh Farahat: Anuscheh is professor of Public Law, Migration Law and Human Rights Law at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

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Title: Why do it? Finding meaning in the work of migration and refugee law

Abstract: Drawing from his experience in the Colombian context, Juan M. Amaya-Castro talked about the challenges and complexities of developing a migration and refugee law infrastructure, by the State, in civil society, and in academia. What does migration control, migration professionalism, and migration scholarship mean, and what does it do, both in the Global South and beyond? Amaya-Castro proposes a global and political economy perspective, and argues that to think of migration law work as both part of the solution and part of the problem, can offer meaningful insights.

About Juan M. Amaya-Castro: Juan is associate professor of International Law at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. Juan worked at the University of Peace in Costa Rica, did his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University.

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Title: Work in a Hard Place: Migrant Care Workers' Life in Transnational Households

Abstract: In her presentation, Helma highlighted the critical issue of care migration, which tends to respond to the growing demand for care workers and is often associated with poor pay and challenging working conditions. In doing so, Helma strengthened the gender perspective in the field, as care workers are predominantly women who leave their families to provide essential care services. By including voices from her interviews, Helma illustrated the lived experiences of care workers, revealing their struggles and aspirations. Many migrant workers experience emotional distress from separation, and are overwhelmed and overburdened by their responsibilities, creating a tension between their private lives and their public role. Her research also highlighted systemic barriers faced by care workers. In particular, the concept of 'presence time' emerged as an important issue, illustrating how work expectations can blur the boundaries between work and private life. In this context, she found that migrant care workers were often vulnerable to exploitation under existing labor laws. In her conclusion, Helma proposed a social debate on the relationship between employment and care work as a gender-democratic project and a pardigma shift. She called for better support systems to protect migrant care workers, fair treatment mechanisms and also opened up the discussion about the framing of elderly homes.

About Helma Lutz: Helma is an eminent sociologist whose research career began in 1985 at the University of Amsterdam, where she obtained her PhD. Her research focuses on migration, gender and ethnicity from a critical feminist and intersectional perspective. Prof. Lutz has held positions at several prestigious institutions, including the Goethe University Frankfurt, where she was Professor of Women's and Gender Studies.

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