“Home” Does Not Equal “Citizenship” By Sara Shneiderman
Where is home? For any
of us? What does it mean to belong?
Since the executive
order on immigration was signed, I’ve been haunted by a photograph taken by my
great uncle David Seymour “Chim” in a Warsaw orphanage in 1948. In it, Tereszka,
a displaced child, draws a picture of “home.” Tereszka’s eyes have been
with me since I can remember, a reminder of the lucky circumstances of history
that enabled my grandparents to build a new home in the US after arriving as
Jewish refugees from Poland via France in 1940. Today her eyes bear a new
incredulity.
Conversations with
diverse friends and students since the executive order on immigration was
signed have revealed that our collective sense of home is shaken. Our
individual reckoning with this unsettling historical moment may differ
depending upon our personal constellation of citizenship and residence documentation
(or lack thereof), religious affiliation, physical appearance and geo-social
location. But Tereszka’s photo should remind us all how quickly lives may be
unraveled through violence, war, displacement, and policies such as the travel
ban.
In theory, the logic
of the executive order is predicated on the fiction that people feel at home
within the boundaries of the nation-state in which they hold the documentary
trappings of citizenship, and therefore have the option to simply stay or
return there. In practice, despite its temporary judicial suspension, the
order’s implementation at various border points clarifies in real, human terms
that whether by blood or descent, our ties to the nation-state that issues our
citizenship documents (or refuses to do so) do not necessarily determine where
we feel most at home. This disjuncture between what we might
call the documentary and affective dimensions of citizenship is a focus of my
anthropological research in South
Asia, and the Himalayas,
as well as part of my family history and life trajectory. As a
second-generation Jewish American, I am now resident in Canada on the unceded
territories of the Musqueam people.
The home that I make for my children here is premised on the colonial
usurpation of others’ traditional territories and homes, violence not unlike
the historical and contemporary aggressions elsewhere that have compelled so
many to seek refuge in the US.
The travel ban
prevents people fleeing such oppression from finding new homes, as well as
those who have made their home for years in the US from returning to it. For
me, the executive order feels like a betrayal of “home”, the place where my
forbears found refuge. I say this from a position of privilege as a white
permanent resident of Canada, but the emotional loss of the country that my
grandparents and parents believed in is real.
The executive order
was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The president’s statement on that
occasion excluded Jews, and was hailed by white supremacist leaders as a
necessary “de-judaification”
of history. The objective seems evident: to erase the history of past forms of
exclusion and violence in order to facilitate new ones, as Holocaust historian Timothy
Snyder explained in a recent interview. By the end of January 2017, 48 Jewish
centers in the US had received bomb threats. These threats are not only a
“Jewish issue”, just as the travel ban is not only a “Muslim issue”. While
recognizing the specific pain of those directly affected in each case, we need
to address these issues systemically, as part of a whole.
Those once oppressed
may also become oppressors, victims can become perpetrators. Recognizing this
is another way of countering attempts to reduce all members of any group to a
singular stereotype or ideological position. This means challenging Israel’s
politics of occupation, settlement and wall-building at the same time that we
work to remember the Holocaust. The US administration has directly cited the
Israeli experience as evidence that “the wall works”, and is reportedly seeking Israeli
advice on building the US/Mexico wall . These confluences
indicate the need for careful attention to situated histories and the granular
questions of how specific exclusions are produced—who the
agents are and what motivates them—to complement large-scale political
resistance. Connecting the dots between micro and macro, across space and time,
is one of the roles for anthropology and other critical social sciences in this
moment. There is a pressing need to recognize oppression and exclusion in both
particular and universal forms. We must share stories beyond our own
communities, but in ways that can be grasped by others who know little of our
own pasts.
The travel ban strips
us all of the agency to build our own senses of home. Instead, it over-identifies
all citizens with their putative state, rather than recognizing that many
people are at odds with the states in which they were born or hold citizenship.
Many of those seeking entry to the US now do so on humanitarian grounds, just
like those of earlier generations. My grandparents could no more remain in
Poland than Syrian refugees today have the option to stay at home. Documentary
citizenship from the nation-state which claims the territory in which they were
born offers no relief.
In other cases, such
as for the over 4
million stateless people in Nepal, the problem of being citizenshipless is
not a product of displacement, but rather of birth within the territorial
boundaries of a state that will not acknowledge entire categories of people as
its legitimate citizens due to their ethnic identity or family history. And yet
there is no other place to which they belong. The larger problem, then, is the
Westphalian nation-state system and its presumption of a direct correlation
between territorial location and a singular citizenship for each of us. By the
same token, as Audra Simpson powerfully explains in Mohawk Interruptus,
American citizenship—like that of many contemporary nation-states—is premised
upon the disavowal of indigenous sovereignties, and is therefore a site of
refusal for many. For such reasons, the historical accident of my own US
citizenship feels both fortunate and perpetually fraught.
It is ironic that
corporations (including universities) idealize the so-called “global citizen”
when s/he begins as a citizen of a handful of states in the Global North and
travels elsewhere to proselytize the virtues of capitalism, democracy or
“development.” Yet these organizations reject this concept when the direction
of movement is reversed. Many universities have released strong statements
condemning the travel ban; we should also urge them to rethink the notion of
“global citizenship” that undergirds many of their initiatives. We are not all
immigrants, we are not all global citizens, but we are all human. We all
deserve to make our homes in peace, while never forgetting the specific
historical circumstances that have delivered us here, often destroying other
homes along the way.
We must ask ourselves:
What historical circumstances have enabled each of us to make our home,
wherever we are? How do we make it a just and inclusive home now? How can we
help others find home in difficult times? Tereszka’s eyes demand nothing less.
