The Infrastructure of Migration and the Migration Regime: Human Rights, Race, and the Somali Struggle to Flee Violence

If the migration regime is defined as the system of laws, both national and international, as well as regulations and policies that have an impact on the lives of migrants as they flee their country of origin because of violence or persecution, move through various countries, and finally attempt to settle in a destination country or region they deem safe, then Somali refugees must endure a migration regime that in practice often defines them as undeserving of the idealistic expression of human rights outlined in international treaties, and instead governs migrants with a series of practices that exploit their labor and threaten their lives with a discourse of both symbolic and very real violence. By denying forced migrants their human rights, the migration regime is also denying migrants representation as human. This migration regime, which at its best functions to warehouse human beings and at its worst operates to exploit and even kill forced migrants, is possible both because Somalis have no functional government to advocate for them and because Somalis must carry with them negative signifiers of race, religion, and origin within a discourse that interprets black and Muslim as threats to safety and stability. In order to move away from danger and maintain community in the process, Somali refugees must participate in an infrastructure of migration that often operates to thwart the refugee regime. Thus the migration regime creates an international system of laws that ipso facto inhibits migration, while the diaspora creates and participates in a transnational community that operates to overcome those legal barriers. Much of the data for the following essay is based on qualitative interviews of refugees and forced migrants as well as government officials.

[NB: Abdi Roble and I are the photographer and writer respectively of the Somali Documentary Project. We both believe that it is the team aspect of our work that makes what we do possible.]