This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. Miriam Ticktin focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—Ticktin asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? She demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, making conditions like HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. Ticktin’s analysis also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices that criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.
Casualties of Care Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
About the Book
Reviews
“Illuminating. . . . An important contribution to the study of the struggle for rights by migrant movements in Europe.”—Catherine Lloyd, Edinburgh, Scotland Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture And Society
"Oustanding. . . . A fascinating monograph."—Richard Keller H-France Review
“Explores problematic aspects of a humanitarian immigration policy that allows entry by migrants who have suffered sexual abuse, or are AIDS or cancer patients for example, but blocks immigration by the simply impoverished.”—Chronicle Of Higher Education"Casualties of Care is a well crafted, intelligent and carefully argued study of the social and policy effects of a seemingly benevolent set of 'humanitarian practices' used in the French immigration and asylum processes. One of the leading anthropologists of humanitarianism, Miriam Ticktin is well placed to write this definitive study, having undertaken nearly ten years of thorough ethnographic research in France. Her research findings draw from ethnographic interviews and participant observation as well as broader, more structural data on the movement of foreign labor within the French economy." --Richard Ashby Wilson, Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, University of Connecticut
"Ticktin cuts to the heart of contemporary concerns, speaking provocatively and incisively about humanitarianism and security through the topic of immigration." --Peter Redfield, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Politics and Antipolitics of Care
Part I The Context: Politics and Care
1. Sans-Papiers and the Context of Political Struggle
2. Genealogies of Care: The New Humanitarianism
Part II: On the Ground: Compassion and Pathology
3. The Illness Clause: Life and the Politics of Compassion
4. In the Name of Violence against Women
Part III: Antipolitics: Diseased Citizens and a Racialized Postcolonial State
5. Armed Love: Against Modern Slavery, Against Immigrants
6. Biological Involution? The Production
of Diseased Citizens
Conclusion: Engaging the Political
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Awards
- William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Europe
- William E. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Europe