S4 E4 Free speech for whom?

Michaela Benson [MB]: Hi. Welcome to Who do we think we are? Where we debunk myths and misunderstandings about citizenship and migration, no hot takes or hasty analysis, just experts drawing on their professional insights to unpack this fast changing field that nowadays is forever on the front page. I'm Michaela Benson, a sociologist working on citizenship and migration,

Nando Sigona [NS]:And I'm Nando Sigona, also a sociologist working on international migration and forced displacement.

MB: And we're both interested in borders, how they're constructed, the work they do, what makes some people feel welcome, entitled, even while others seem forever shut out from feeling secure, safe and being able to call a place home. And we share that interest with our guest today, Heba Gowayed. Heba's award winning book 'Refuge' came out in 2022 and saw her follow Syrians hoping to rebuild their lives in Germany, Canada and the US. It showed how, while states may offer legal solutions to displacement, they can nonetheless minoritize newcomers and deny their potential by failing to recognize their histories, aspirations and personhood. These days, Heba is working on a project 'the cost of borders', which we'll hear all about in a moment.

NS: We want to speak to Heba right now, because for this season or who do we think we are? We are looking at the USA and the role that migration and borders play in the Make America Great Again project of Trump and his backers. We have talked about sanctuary cities, the American dream, liminal legality, and today, we are turning to free speech.

MB: As well as being an associate professor at City University, New York Hunter College and the Graduate Center and a Carnegie Fellow, Heba is a passionate voice speaking out against the arrest of students protesting genocide in Palestine, arrests that have happened under Trump, But let's not forget they also happened under Biden. So we're curious, where does free speech sit in this complex picture of bordering migration, deportation and protest in the US? We met with Heba to find out, but started by asking her what role borders and migration have played in her own life story.

Heba Gowayed [HG]: So I was born in Cairo, Egypt, but I came to the United States as an immigrant with my parents quite young, and I've always had this ethos of growing up as an immigrant. I still think of myself as being both Egyptian and American, and I even returned to Cairo to do my undergraduate studies where I was part of the Egyptian revolution, which is the connection that I have with Syrians who were also participating in a revolution that unfortunately devolved into a civil war. And that's how sort of I got the start on refuge and began to interview people who are arriving here, who were escaping NS: Recently Heba, you have been working on a project called 'the cost of borders'. And borders are central to this podcast. I want to ask you, what do you mean by cost of borders? Obviously, we're not just talking about financial or economic cost alone, don't we?

HG: Yes, that's exactly right. So while I was doing research for refuge, one of the cases that I considered were people who had sought asylum in Germany. So these were Syrians who left home, crossed the border, often into Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon, and then made the journey, often from Turkey, across the Aegean Sea to the European Union, and from there, from Greece, traveled across the European Union to Germany, where I met them. And in all three of the key sites that I did for refuge, which was the United States, Canada and Germany, I asked people, you know, what was your journey here? How did you get here? And in the case of the United States and Canada, because people had been resettled, which means that they were pre vetted - they applied for refugee status with the UNHCR, then they had an interview, then they arrived to these countries on a flight - in the case of people who seek asylum, it means that you show up to the country that you're going to and you apply. And this question that I asked could sometimes take days to answer. Sometimes we had breakfast and then we had lunch together, and then we had dinner together. And the reason for that is that the journeys were not remembered vis-a-vis the countries that people had crossed, and were not remembered necessarily with regards to any sorts of visas or passports, but instead were remembered via the costs that people incurred to travel from point to point. So people would tell me how much they would pay smugglers, how much time it took to get from one place to another. People even would say that they couldn't stand the smell of tuna anymore, because they had to eat so much of it on the road. And this got me thinking about how we think about borders. So we think about borders as the sovereign legal markers of territory. But people don't experience borders like that, and so they experience them as this series of costs, as almost fees of getting from one place to another. And you're absolutely right, Nando, it's not just financial costs. So the way that I'm thinking about the cost of borders as I begin to sort of write this book, is to think about four sets of costs. So the first being the costs of freedom, being able to live your life the way that you want to live it, whether that's for a woman that I recently interviewed who is enslaved of Mauritania, where it's literal freedom, or whether it's for the mother who does not want her daughter to endure FGM. So this, this aspect of freedom, the ability to live your life the way you want to live it, is the first way to think about borders and their costs. The second is money, and I don't mean just money from the perspective of people, but also from the perspective of states. Borders are incredibly expensive, unwieldy apparatus of steel and technology that even as states spend more and more than ever before, somehow it's never enough. They are insatiable, and that's kind of by design, because if you imagine immigrants as primarily threats to your security, then you need to spend more on that security, right? If security is working, you need more of it. If security is not working, then you must not have enough security. And so against that unwieldy apparatus, what's happened is that a smuggling network has formed in order to resist that apparatus. And of course, all of this together forms a sort of industry, right? It forms an economy that then can only, as all other sort of capitalist entities, can only then increase, right? So it's kind of goes haywire when I think about costs, too. I think about payments that people make, or the money that people take from their families, the ways that people help each other on the road, but also exploitative costs, right? When there's money involved, people take advantage of people who don't have it. The third part of the way that you think about costs is in terms of life. So years spent, lost at the border, jobs and aspirations and creative endeavors that never happen because people are caught in the mix. And then finally, and this maybe is what we'll talk about more today, is the cost of nation, right? Is the cost of the freedoms that we all share within the nation that erects borders, because at the end of the day, you know, when we suspend due process for one person, when we dehumanize one person that facilitates the dehumanization and suspension of the rights of us all. And my argument is that borders eventually rot the nation out from within that directs them.

MB: What you're talking about here in the main is a kind of a human cost approach, and human as in not just migrants, but migrants and citizens alike. And we see this in other work on bordering, such costs have an impact, not only on those who've crossed borders, but also on citizens too. It's what our colleagues here in the UK, Nira Yuval Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy, have defined as everyday bordering. And in recent months, and not only under Trump, but also previously under Biden, we've seen the criminalization and arrest of students, in particular those protesting genocide in Palestine, people like Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia, who was arrested back in March when he was entertained and marked for deportation. That story of Khalil and others has since evolved and will continue to do so before this recording goes out. But Heba was wondering, more generally, how can we think about this crackdown on free speech and protest as linked to bordering, which I would define as the process of producing and reproducing borders in everyday life in various different domains. And how do we grapple with the fact that the people perpetrating this crackdown actually frame themselves as proponents of free speech? Could you shed some light on this for us?

HG: Yeah, so, Michaela, this is a very complicated, multi layered question, but at its core is something quite simple, which is that walls or surveillance towers repel first and ask questions later. We have long in this country, suspended due process for immigrants, despite the fact that it is constitutionally guaranteed. And by due process, I mean being able to have a fair shot under the law. Right that you get a court case, you get your moment in court, you get your sort of moment to be considered vis-a-vis the legal framework within a nation. And the thing about it is that because we've invested in border violence for such a long time and, of course, there's a story of everyday bordering, of, you know, borders being everywhere, from our subway platforms to our classrooms. But I'm saying just the act of of the erection of walls, of the increasing securitization of those frontiers, of them pushing further and further away and also in, it has inherent to it, this suspension of rights. And what we're seeing, particularly in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, which I think is such a telling case, and I did write about this for The Guardian a few months ago, what we're seeing is sort of a testing of how far away they can get with these deportation acts, with this idea. And I want to clarify something for the listener, immigration in the United States, which is a settler colony, is the way that this country diversified. So when you look, for instance, we had racial quotas up until 1965 and when you look at the break of those racial quotas, the end of immigration by your racial background, you begin to see that a country that was 86% white, non-Hispanic became just, you know, a little over 50% white, non Hispanic. So you see a massive diversification of this nation that happens from 1965 and that makes deportation, or the removal of immigrants from this nation a process of its whitening. So if you understand the Trump administration's goal as whitening the nation, which we can see with everything from the attacks on DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion - in our institutions to policies, for instance, that created a carve out for Afrikaner people who were to be resettled because of white persecution in South Africa, but at the same time denied the resettlement of any of the other categories of people who were experiencing Civil War, strife or persecution, then you begin to sort of see how this tool of deportation is being used. And Mahmoud Khalil not only had a green card, he is a productive member of his community, he was somebody who engaged in civil disobedience on college campuses, which is how we imagine the role as an educator. That's how I imagine the role of a college campus, which should be an incredibly safe space for students to express their views, even views that I don't agree with and it was on the basis of that expression, and nobody disputes this right, that it was on the basis of words that he was detained and held and couldn't even participate in his for the birth of his first child. So this is a very, very violent act that's based on nothing but the man's speech. And unfortunately, it's not just him. It's Rümeysa Öztürk, who is a young Turkish student who was at Brown University, who simply wrote an op ed that was on Palestine. It is Mohsen Mahdawi who was actually going for his citizenship, you know, appointment, when he was detained. And there are many other students who have also been confronted with this. And the thing about it is that because, as you said at the start the Biden administration, and you know, the oppression of pro-Palestinian voices has been bipartisan, that this is a very useful target, that Palestinian activism and anti-genocide activists are a very useful target for this experiment with whitening the nation.

NS: Thank you very much Heba. Before going more in depth into the whitening project of the Trump administration, I want to go back to a point around some of the basics. Free speech is famously enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. How does free speech on paper contrast with what's happening now to free speech on the streets in us?

HG: Yeah, absolutely. So the First Amendment protects five freedoms. It's your freedom of religion, your freedom of speech, your freedom of press, your freedom of assembly and your freedom of petition. It is adopted as a 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, and it's like, these are the essential liberties, like these. This is the stuff that makes America America, right? And what we're seeing is a real attack on that notion of speech. And again, it's through this avenue, in part. of Palestine, which has always been the exception, right? There's much, much that's been written about this, but the Palestinian exception to free speech, for instance, on our university campuses, in our workplaces, has always existed where you know you can say all these things, but when it comes to Palestine, if you're talking about the freedom of Palestinians, somehow that gets a different response, even from institutions that think of themselves as otherwise liberal. And what we're seeing is, you know, recently actually Judge William Young, who is, by the way, a Reagan appointee. So for anybody who knows about Ronald Reagan and the history of the United States, he's like the pinnacle of neoliberalism and you know not our guy. He's not our guy. He writes this scathing 161 page opinion that he says is the most crucial he's written in 30 years that argue the effects of these targeted deportation and again, this is about Mahmoud Khalil argue the effects of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech. So even in our courts, right which are conservative entities by design, the justices, even the ones who are not, you know, appointed by liberals, appointed by Democrats, are looking at what is happening and are shocked at the attack on freedom of speech that we're seeing, but we're also seeing increased doxing. You know, you brought up, you know, Charlie Kirk in that situation in the intro, we're seeing increased doxing. We're seeing increased targeting. I myself, was just added to Canary mission over the weekend, and so, you know, we have this at Canary mission, which is a list of academics who are sort of seen as being pro-Palestine, but it's supposed to be a targeting list, unfortunately. That's the list, the Canary mission list, is the list that the Trump administration has used to target Rümeysa and Mahmoud and Mohsen Mahdawi. It came out in court. This list is also there's apparently a special group to surveil the members on the list which also came out in court, to target these people's and this is all again, based on things people have said, have written. It is not based on anything that is not protected under the First Amendment right that is not protected under under the Freedom of speech. And so we are at this moment in which we're witnessing something that it's not that it doesn't have precedent in America, right? I mean, we have the McCarthy era, but we have not seen in a very long time, and it is actually quite disturbing the way that it's unfolding in a very short period of time.

MB: While you were speaking, that's exactly what I was thinking was, it seems very McCarthy Era. What's happening now, and of course, what's happened in the time in between is, you know, a real unpacking of what happened during that era, and kind of rehabilitation of some of the people who were, who were at the heart of that and we know that academics were targeted as part of the McCarthy era approach as well. I want to kind of come back to this kind of question about whitening as well. And when you were talking about this, I was thinking that immigration policy particularly has long been used to whitewash nations. I mean, there's a famous book in the UK called 'Whitewashing Britain' by Kathleen Paul that documents very, very carefully how that idea of Britishness became increasingly white in the shift through kind of political decolonization. And you've pointed out that the privileging of whiteness in the US, it's guaranteeing through legislation is, as in the case of the UK, nothing, nothing new. And you've gone back to at least, I think, 1790 to show those continuities. Can you fill us in a little bit?

HG: Yes, so of course, in order to understand the United States, you have to understand that it is a settler colonial nation. So it's based on, its existence is based on the genocide of indigenous people whose land this is and was, and it's also based in enslavement. And really, everything that I say from, you know, from now, has to be based on these two twin pillars of foundation. But the first sort of formal Immigration Act in the United States is a 1790 Naturalization Act. And the 1790 Naturalization Act was a way to figure out how to incorporate these people who are coming into a nascent polity, right into what is the United States. And it limited citizenship at the time to free white persons, ie land owning people and who were of good moral character. And then the next thing we get is the idea of the 14th Amendment, which extended that to through birthright to people who were formerly enslaved, right, who would not have equal rights under the law for another two centuries, but who were sort of considered also citizens of the country. And then fast forward to 1882 right, where we get the first sort of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was our first sort of race-based restriction to immigration. So right now, you have white people can be citizens. Black people who were enslaved here could become citizens, but then you don't have sort of that inclusion. What about all these people who come as who have begun to come as immigrants is sort of the question. And for a while, Chinese people were coming. They were working in the United States. They were participating in the economy, but then and using language that is pretty similar to now, right, describing people as lazy, describing people as taking other but also simultaneously taking other people's jobs, describing them as debaucherous, not having the same moral standards that Americans have. Have, you know, dabbling in drugs, right? You get the 1882 Act, which greatly restricts and excludes, right, Chinese immigration. And importantly, it makes them deportable, which is, which is sort of a new thing, right? Saying we can't have you co present, you are now deportable, right? And all this while, again, because whiteness is the is the condition for inclusion, whiteness also becomes sort of the way in which immigration is managed. And you get this formalized and expanded through in 1924 through the Johnson Reed act that establishes racial quotas by limiting the number of people who could arrive in the country to 2% of the population in the 1890 census, a time when non European immigrants could not come to the United States, right? So again, this is like, it's saying everybody can come. There's a quota for everybody, but only 2% of who you were. And so most countries in the world get, like, the mandatory 100 people. If you look at these charts, that 100 people could come from these countries. But actually even those 100 people couldn't come, because in order to immigrate, you had to have a possibility to become a citizen, which meant, again, you had to become white. And there's a series of fascinating court cases that happen in this time period of people who are saying, well, my skin is light, and people who say, Well, you know, I'm a I contribute to society, or people who say, Well, I'm Aryan, right? You get a lot of Persians who say, I'm Aryan. You get, actually, funnily enough, an Arab immigrant who, you know, all the other Arabs had been denied, but this guy was Christian, and he says, Well, you know, if Jesus is white, I come from where Jesus comes from, and therefore I'm also white. And that guy actually succeeds, which is why, to this day, Arabs are classified under white in the United States, which is kind of the biggest joke. That shows you how this whole race thing, you know, is real in its consequences, but very much made up. But to your point, Michaela, in 1965 this is all abolished. And get the Immigration and Nationality Act and they say, okay, racial quotas are abolished, everybody can come. But even if you look at the congressional conversation around the Immigration and Nationality Act, you see that they imagined that because they were going to use family reunification as the way for people to come to the United States, and because only white people had been admitted, they imagined that this would keep the country white. Now, of course, they were wrong, and you begin to see again, the country diversify vis a vis this immigration. Now, as that's happening, though, the protections, the social protections that are available, begin to shrink. And they begin to shrink because these people who are coming are cast as interlopers, cast as taking our jobs. And you see the shrinking of social protections. You see the criminalization of legal pathways, the shrinking of legal pathways, and you see the criminalization of immigrants, particularly after 9/11 with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. So also for the listeners who might not be familiar with the American context, but also for any Americans listening to this, who tend to forget ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are very, very new, right? We only get them in 2003 so we're talking they're, you know, it's, it's 22 years of this. And for the longest time, for much of America's existence, we did not have these entities. And so when we talk about immigration and whitening, it's the throughline throughout and deportation has long been used as a sort of tool. We're not even getting to the McCarthy era and the unique machinations that were done there in order to exclude people's voices, but this is a longstanding American sort of tradition around immigration and also around other institutions.

NS: Heba, thanks a lot for giving us this historical overview, highlighting all these continuity. So I was thinking about, was it interesting to see how different communities have been, the way bordered and rebordered over time, but within this sort of macro, ideological project that you highlight? But what I would like to ask you to expand a bit is like, so there is all these continuities. But how can these help us to understand the current moment? The Trump era? What Trump is bringing that is new, if anything? But also how the responses that these actions over time have all the opposition, the forms of resistance over time to these measures can teach us about how to face the present?

HG: It's such a good question Nando I struggle honestly to identify what is new versus what is a continuation. In a lot of ways, what we're seeing, as we said, Palestinian protesters were repressed under Biden as they have been under Trump and were oppressed prior to Biden as well. You know, the attacks on our institutions, on our universities, began under Biden. ICE has been around again since 2003 the border has been made larger and more unwieldy and more violent by every president. And so a lot of this is continuous, and again, it's continuous in some ways, since 1790 and even before that. But what we are seeing now is the explicit and express commitment to mass deportation. We're seeing that it doesn't matter we're not couching it anymore in people's criminal records. We're not couching it anymore in the notion that people's paperwork isn't isn't legitimate, or people aren't following the rules. Instead, what we're seeing is sort of a belligerent and dramatically expanded apparatus that is expressly whitening this country. I mean, the language that's used about, you know, about the these people being dangerous, these people being criminals, just by virtue of who they are, even prior to the election, the notion that Haitians were eating people's pets, right? There's this incredible dehumanization that's happening. It's the spectacle of cruelty, honestly, that we're seeing now, it's a relishing of this kind of violence that is, I think, a departure from the period past, and it's also a dramatic expansion of the ranks of ICE. And so I think this question of where continuity ends and where this is new is a good one. But I think even the fact, even as it's continuous, the expansion of scope, right, so a massive quantitative expansion creates a qualitative difference in a sense, right?

MB: I think that that kind of reflection on how mainstream that violence has become, and how commonplace it is for them to broadcast that violence is very clearly a shift in amplification in lots of ways, and unfortunately, it's one that we're seeing in other parts of the world as well, not just in the US. But I wondered if we could kind of shift back a little bit to talk about academic freedom. And I can remember last year going to the ASA in Montreal and being quite surprised by the extent to which this was a topic of conversation within the American Sociological Association. And it struck me at the time that this was quite different. It has quite different status in the US to what it has in the UK. So I'm not going to try and define it myself, but I wondered if you could reflect a little bit on what academic freedom is supposed to be in the US, how you would define it and understand it, and what remains of it, where it goes next, amidst all the escalations we've been discussing here.

HG: So academic freedom, again, is tethered to this first amendment. You know, freedom. It's the freedom of speech. It's the freedom to write what you want to write. It's the freedom to teach what you want to teach. You know, as professors, we imagine our jobs as having this kind of freedom, right? So it's not the pay. The pay is not what attracts you, to your professorial job, you know, it's this space, it's it's the agency, it's the ability to create and innovate and teach students and engage with them and engage with your colleagues. And we're seeing that restricted on almost every level. So we're seeing restrictions on what can be written in funding applications. We're seeing the erosion of funders. So we're seeing more and more funders, particularly state federal funding, being shut down. We're seeing attempts to restrict what professors can say in classrooms. So for instance, the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, which restricts criticism of the State of Israel, is increasingly being adopted across institutions or being debated to be adopted across institutions which would make any criticism of Israel or Zionism in your class, potentially, you know, a conflict with the rules of the institution right, it would enable your penalization. And then we haven't even gotten to the attacks on our students, to the restrictions on their speech, to the fact that students, whether immigrant or not, can be arrested just by virtue of demonstrating, and that not only can they be arrested, I think the thing that's most disturbing to me is that our own administrators at our institutions are calling the cops on our own students. I mean when you walk into a classroom and you are confronted on your first day with the 18 to 21 year olds. And I teach at an institution where we also sometimes get older students, but you walk in, you see all those faces who are there to learn, you feel a sense of responsibility and obligation to those people you are leading a classroom, and for people who are leading an institution to betray those who make up their institution in such a way, I don't think I'll ever get over that. And again, it's all about speech. These students are not accused of doing anything other than speaking. And you know, we're seeing it actually, globally, right? We're seeing also restrictions and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the UK as well. We're seeing it everywhere. You know, you watch footage of people being arrested simply for standing up against genocide everywhere around the world, and so as we sort of see this unfold, our academic institutions., and the thing about it is academic institutions are targets for authoritarians, and it's because of this promise of freedom of speech and freedom of discourse that exists within these institutions. And so there's nothing new under the sun, and this certainly isn't but it is quite shocking and quite disturbing how it's unfolding in the speed at which it's unfolding in the United States.

MB: Thank you so much, Heba, that's been a real eye opener in many, many ways. We've really enjoyed talking to you today and just a reminder to our listeners, we're recording in early October, and this is probably going to go out later in the year, and there's no doubt in our minds that the conversation will remain highly relevant, as it has done for several years, and actually hundreds of years, as Heba's already explained to us. So thank you very much.

HG: Thank you for having me. This was you know, it's never easy to have these conversations, but it was pleasant to be here with you too.

MB: You were listening to Heba Gowayed talking to me, Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona You can catch our show notes and transcripts over. Who do we think we are.org?

NS: This season has been made as part of the research project Rebordering Britain and Britain's after Brexit, MIGZEN funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Learn more at migzen..net we'll be back with you in a month, continuing our look at borders Maga and USA.

MB: Today, our producer is Alice Bloch, sound engineer and editor Emma Halton at Brilliant Audio. Thanks also to George Kalivis for graphics and social media. And as usual, our normal plea, please follow and rate us on the app you're using to hear this, and we're on Instagram at Abt citizenship,

NS: Thanks for listening. Bye.