Reflections on Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Global Border Regime by Catherine Abou-Khalil
Our next Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Global Border Regime,” will take place on Thursday, February 15, 2024 and will embody understanding migrants’ experiences and journeys through an intersectional lens.
What determines admissibility or deservingness of protection? Since the war in Ukraine, attention and access to resources has varied from previous and current refugee crises. While conversations and attention tend to shift from one crisis to the next without any concrete solutions, as we have seen with the situations in Afghanistan and Syria, access to entering borders has grown rapidly for Ukrainians within the United States and across various countries within Europe. The European Union has opened borders for Ukrainians that were once closed for Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans. It is crucial to draw attention to the inequality taking place in the borderland and in response strategies.
TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University, published data on asylum seekers trying to cross into the US from its Southern border without proper documentation. The study indicated that 95.5% of “inadmissible” Ukrainians that traveled to Mexico to cross into the US border were admitted, while only 11.2% of all other ‘inadmissible’ asylum seekers were permitted to cross the border. Of those not Ukrainian that were not allowed into the US, 73% of them were men. Almost all asylum seekers from this data had credible fear of persecution, which is grounds to grant asylum.
Non-Ukrainian asylum seekers have been predominantly othered and not permitted to cross into the EU or US border. An intersectional analysis brings a unique perspective and uncovers otherwise unnoticed answers to such observations. Why were men mainly rejected from crossing the border? Is it because brown men are seen as threats or that women are seen as more vulnerable? The identities of asylum seekers are often boxed into a binary framing where masculinity is seen as menacing and femininity is seen as vulnerability.
What does this imply for the LGBTQIA+ community seeking refuge who don’t quite ‘fit’ into a binary or heteronormative box? According to Human Rights Watch, LGBT asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border are often made to return back to Mexico despite the US Department of Homeland Security recognizing they face risk of persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. How are some asylum seekers deemed deserving of protection while others not?
While this short reflection doesn’t dive quite deep enough into discussion of such critical observations, our upcoming seminar aims to understand the motives of border externalization of the EU and US and how these motives intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. As the main organizer of this upcoming seminar, I wanted to share my reflections on why it is so important to create a space for a conversation about migration that centers identity and asks intersectional questions.