Solidarity Activism? Rethinking Citizenship Through Inaudibility

In November 2005, a group of Somali refugees organised a sit-in demonstration in front of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Yemen. Their demands included the increase of Somali-speaking UNHCR staff, provision of assistance such as additional healthcare, distribution of ID cards, and finding resettlement countries (UNHCR, 2005). In May 2006, more than a million immigrants, including undocumented migrants, organised a protest called a ‘Day Without Immigrants’ across the US. The purpose was to oppose tougher measures for illegal immigrants and stricter control of border security proposed at Congress (BBC News, 2006). In May 2007, some refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo stormed into the UNHCR office in Rabat, Morocco, and staged a sit-in protest in front of the office, demanding financial assistance to ‘live in dignified conditions’ (UNHCR, 2007). In January 2009, a massive demonstration of about 600 migrants and refugees broke out in Lampedusa, Italy. They were detained in an immigration facility, but broke down the front gate and burst into the town, shouting ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ ( The Guardian , 2009). Similar noncitizen-led protests have taken place in other parts of the world as well, such as France (Cissé, 1997), Canada (Nyers, 2003, 2008), India (Chatterjee, 2004), Australia (Nyers, 2006), Egypt (Moulin and Nyers, 2007), and Japan (Shindo, 2009). Noncitizen political participation is not necessarily a recent political phenomenon. For example, Mark Miller's study (1981) shows various types of protests, ranging from street demonstrations to sit-ins and wildcat strikes, organised by documented and undocumented migrants in France, Germany, and Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s. His study hinted at a sphere of politics that was different from the formal political arena. Perhaps for the lack of better words, Miller called migrant activism ‘extra‑parliamentary opposition’ to describe an action organised by people who ‘cannot participate in and get representation through normal democratic channels’ (1981: 83). However, recent studies on noncitizen political participation contain a distinctive approach to citizenship in order to fully explore the transformational effects of migrant activism. A premise underlying this scholarship is that citizenship is enacted ‘from below’ (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012: 9), by people who (re)claim their belonging despite being formally, or informally, excluded from state citizenship.

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