In migration’s “science kitchens”

Let’s take a look at what happens in the kitchens where current knowledge on Central American migration is cooked up. In the process, we’ll discover who owns the kitchens, who does their cooking, what plates they’re offering us and how they’re seasoned. In so doing, we’ll see a triple game of domination.

José Luis Rocha

Knowledge isn’t produced in the aseptic test tubes hawked by the torchbearers of scientific neutrality. The process is both burdened and enriched by the traditions and interests that inform the activities of those who produce it and by the institutional vices, trajectories and debts—moral, cultural and financial—of the institutions that crank it out.

Where do we get our thoughts?

The late French political sociologist Pierre Bourdieu postulated the individual roots of conditioning when he argued that the kind of social science one can do depends on one’s relationship with the social world, and therefore on the position one occupies in this world. Feuerbach said it only slightly differently: one thinks differently in a palace than in a hut. Applying these long-established findings to the sphere of organizations that finance and produce knowledge about migration leads to the conclusion that you can’t write the same document for the United Nations or the International Organization for Migrations (IOM) as for a small leftist agency, a Lutheran Church project or a congress of academics with a critical bent.

Those who finance research on migratory phenomena have their own agenda and set the production guidelines to fit their particular culture and institutional interests. One doesn’t have to dig very deep or cultivate a long relationship to realize that the major funders establish an employer-employee relationship with social scientists rather than any form of patronage. That relationship is legally expressed in a contract but also expands its ramifications to non-contractual obligations implicit in a relationship in which the producer’s subaltern position obliges him or her to accept an epistemological paradigm, i.e. some coordinates of what’s politically correct that operate as a conceptual framework; the automatism of clichés consecrated through use and with subtextual political proposals; and certain labor practices—such as submitting the text to successive revisions to decaffeinate it—and organizational habits inscribed in the operational framework, including the events, places and public to which the knowledge must be disseminated to achieve the rank of “knowledge with an impact.”

Bourdieu spoke of the “kitchens of science.” We should explore them, because that’s where we’ll find the funders with their more or less hidden agendas and the cooks following a recipe others wrote. These kitchens impose political-financial constraints on critical knowledge about migrations, including who can produce knowledge about them, who finances them, how this funding is executed, which topics are financed and which neglected, and what effects these dynamics have on the possibilities of producing critical knowledge.

Having been at the forefront of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that did various consultancies for the OIM and five United Nations agencies, I know first-hand what I’m writing about. And having had the opportunity to compare it with colleagues from other countries, I know this is common to the whole Central American region. These findings may have an even more extensive application.

Central America’s four kitchens

There are four “kitchens” of migration research in Central America, which I’ll describe here in order of lesser to greater productivity. The first encompasses the universities. Their main dishes are amateur investigations by undergraduate students who use their own very limited resources to conduct brief field studies and review the existing literature to produce theses for their bachelor’s degree. In other words this is a kitchen with low productivity and no dissemination. The theses are stored in the most hidden corners of the university libraries and only the most diligent researchers use their findings or raw material.

NGOs completely dependent on international funds comprise the second kitchen. They have low productivity and their research has a very limited geographical and conceptual scope, as the studies tend to be focused on very specific aspects, such as family disintegration due to migrations in a particular village.

The third kitchen is that of the Latin American Social Sciences Faculties (FLACSO), which do important studies on the topic in Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador. Their limitation is that they are subcontracted by the major agencies, most often by IOM and UN agencies.

The fourth kitchen is more like a food court. It is made up of the multitude of consultants in Central America who sell their research services to foreign cooperation agencies, UN agencies, international financial institutions, governments, intergovernmental agencies such as the IOM, private enterprise and NGOs.

Those individuals who do migration studies are usually professionals with post-graduate qualifications who in the nineties left the precarious universities—which mainly offered piecework contracts for class hours—for the generous cornucopia of international cooperation. The conjunction of consultants with the UN and IOM has been responsible for the majority of studies on Central American migrants. Costa Rica is the exception to that dynamic because its universities are much more developed than in the rest of the region, making it possible for numerous investigations to be produced and published with academic autonomy. But even there the most productive researchers have grown in the shadow of the UN, IOM and Ford Foundation.

An interesting example in Nicaragua

The fact that there’s no complete catalog of migration studies prevents us from weighting the different platforms and patrons of knowledge production on the subject. But as an example, we can take a look at the bibliography of one investigation in particular—on the relatively loose topic of international migration and development in Nicaragua—where we see that 26% of the 63 texts bear the seal of the UN and/or IOM, entities that figure in first place for financing migration studies. In second place with 14% were those produced by consultants at the service of the World Bank or Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Third place goes to FLACSO (8%), the majority of whose texts were sponsored by major foundations such as Ford. And in fourth place with 5% are texts that appear with those foundations’ own seal.

Even though 30% of the studies cited were produced by academics and published in US and Costa Rican university journals and books, they are predominantly on agrarian development, not migration, and not one was produced in a Nicaraguan university. Some 17% of the bibliography covers statistical reports of the US and Costa Rican governments, but those on migration were prepared in the US Census Bureau, which hardly qualifies as a Central American producer of knowledge.

Who are they financing?
And what do they want to finance?

As we can see, then, the main funders are the UN agencies, IOM, international financing institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and IDB and the most powerful financing foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller.

Their main requirements tend to minimize a priori the scientific, critical and independent nature of the research. The way the agencies have set them up, the studies must be applied—i.e. they must resolve very specific aspects such as calculating the volume of the potential market of savers that emigrants’ remittances encourage in a village back home. They must be based on quantitative data and aimed at decision-makers. And they must not be conflictive.

The kind of information that is typically required includes the dimensions of migrant flows, number of disappeared, volume and fluctuation of the remittances, etc. They want figures, numbers, charts and graphs… like talismans that invoke a lack of thinking. British writer Andrew Lang’s statement fits them like a glove: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than illumination.”

Given that decision-makers don’t have much time to invest in reading brainy or extensive treatises, one of the most sought-after products in the consultancy market is the “policy briefing.” These are concise texts that in four sweeps of the pen serve as unquestionable touchstones and open the possibility of the knowledge turning into technology, an applied science capable of producing direct and immediate changes in any sphere of reality.

In other words, what are encouraged are works of social engineering, drawn up by sociologists or economists that Bourdieu called “social engineers,” whose function is to provide prescriptions to the managers of private businesses or government administrations. As Bourdieu explains, these works rationalize the practical or semi-scientific knowledge of the dominant class’ social world. Today’s rulers need a science capable of ‘rationalizing’ domination—in the double sense of the word.

They want precise recommendations

Whether brief or extensive, any study must culminate with a few exact, precise recommendations: how to ensure that banks can capture the remittances, how to reduce the flow of undocumented migrants, the appropriate policies for reinserting returnees…

The goals don’t need to be reasonably realizable; they just need to be politically correct. In this regard, it can be said that the investigations perpetuate the relations of domination in two aspects: providing clues about how to manipulate reality to benefit an economic group—as in the case of banks getting their hands on remittances—or, as in the case of unrealizable proposals, reinforcing a determined vision of reality and of the aspirations in the world of what “must be.”

Researchers must take great care in assigning blame, above all if the guilty party is a government agency, as in the case of human rights abuses; in explaining the backdrop to the conflict that generates migrants; or in mentioning what state policies unleash risky situations for migrants. When the search for causes makes it necessary to unravel blame, then abstract and depoliticized concepts such as “unemployment,” “frictional unemployment,” “globalization of the labor markets” and “population mobility” are most resorted to and get the best press. Or else the irrepressible collective enemies crop up: organized crime, human traffickers, kidnappers and the “coyotes” who smuggle people across the border for a hefty fee.

Decaf research

This “decaffeinating” of research is a requirement demanded by the “clients,” the agencies, governments and NGOs that want solutions framed within their sphere of action: very targeted projects circumscribed to a territory, and within that aimed at a target population. Scholars must accept a Manichean framework that shows a universe divided into the negative and positive effects of migrations.

That dichotomy can be found in the terms of reference the agencies use to launch the bidding processes for the research contract. The researchers have to react to those terms with a proposal that is the antithesis of academia’s critical mentality because nothing triggers so many antibodies in the agencies as a proposal that has overtones of culminating in a study with high theoretical components, an essay style and a politicized vision that, in these settings, is synonymous with a leftist-smelling analysis.

What do the “owners”
do with the research?

Contractual obligations are the corset that constrains any attempt at critique by the researchers. The UN and IOM contracts generally include a renunciation of author’s rights, which leaves these agencies free to determine how much of the findings to publicize and where.

The researcher sacrifices ownership of the document and is legally impeded from disseminating or modifying it. Moreover, any documents gathered during the research process belong to the UN or IOM and may be required at any point during the contractual relationship or afterward. Extending their prerogatives beyond the limits prescribed by law, in open violation of the author’s right not to have his or her moral rights alienated, these funders also require anonymous authorship, so they can attribute it explicitly or implicitly to their own functionaries.

They also oblige the use of certain sources without any type of questioning and subject the text to a series of revisions ad infinitum aimed at filing down any barbs that could discomfit their counterparts and partners, including governments, IFIs and bilateral agencies. Challenging a source is enough to eliminate the politically incorrect and send the uncomfortable criticisms to the cutting-room floor as “unsubstantiated statements.”

The new owner of the text may edit it, present it as its own creation and keep in a filing cabinet until one glorious day, which could be two months or three years after the research was done, the text written and the contract expired, the researcher might be invited to present his or her findings in a luxurious hotel conference room—never in a university and certainly never in the community where the field work was done—to an audience of yawning state officials there against their will. It’s advocacy day. The university classroom—whether magna or parvus—has ceased being the meeting place for scholars to show off the fruit of their inquiries.

The funders’ preferred topics

To keep their clients satisfied, the IOM and UN select topics that anticipate a skew in the treatment, a kind of commitment to one version of the facts. The preferred one tends to be illicit human trafficking.

It is followed, in alliance with USAID and the UN health agencies (UNAIDS, UN Population Fund and World Health Organization), by a marked emphasis on the link between AIDS and migrants, which in certain contexts lacks any basis at all or is a smokescreen to cover other more plausible associations. In this regard, it is noteworthy that no UN agency is concerning itself with the strongly verified AIDS-tourism link and that UNICEF isn’t financing any studies on the relationship between tourism and child prostitution.

A brief review of the bibliography with an IOM seal shows us that institution’s commitment to a criminalizing vision of the spectrum of migrations and a “securitizing” approach to them, stressing the gathering and distribution of information about what since the early nineties has been called the “smuggling of migrants.”

The IFIs, above all the IDB and World Bank, as well as UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, continue to show a marked preference for studies on remittances that lead to their “banking” i.e. their insertion into the conventional financial circuits; promoting a banking culture and the virtue of savings among migrants and their relatives to get them to make their crumbs—which added together amount to rather impressive fortunes—accessible to investors and speculators, and thus put them at the service of the global casino.

The IOM has also moved into this game, signing agreements with the most powerful and ubiquitous private banks, financing education on banking culture among remittance recipients and disseminating banking propaganda urbi et orbi. By so doing, it is flagrantly subsidizing the most sumptuous fishers in the turbulent waters of the most devastating economic crises.

The ideal migrant

Various UN agencies are trying to design the ideal migrant before our very eyes: the one who gets to the country of destination unaccompanied, works hard and then returns. This exemplary cycle is presented as a win-win-win situation in which the emitting country, the receiving country and the migrants themselves all benefit.

In other words: the submissive remittances—channeled through banks to their most profitable destinations—require well-behaved migrants who come, work and then leave without a word when their physical strength begins to decline and before their dependent family members get tempted to join them. The capitalism of the metropolises doesn’t even want the burden of reproducing the labor force, so the “human waste” is sent back to the periphery countries like the garbage they don’t want to recycle.

Issues avoided in the “kitchens”

The effect of this selection of topics is to block political aspects and provide other viewpoints, starting with those aimed at explaining the socioeconomic conditions that encourage migration. Market access has increasingly been presented as a more important limitation to local development than political participation. A seductive connection has been established between citizenship and market. “Citizens’ evolution,” argues Brazilian political scientist Evelina Dagnino, “now means individual integration into the market as consumer and as producer. This appears to be the principle underlying a great number of programs to help people ‘acquire citizenship’; i.e. help them learn to start micro-businesses. In a context in which the State is progressively bailing out of its role of guaranteeing rights, the market is offered to the citizenry as a substitute authority.”

In contrast, there is a huge gamut of neglected or deliberately avoided topics. Among others, labor trafficking and the exploitation of undocumented workers by business¬people, the role of migratory policies in increasing migrants’ risk, the violation of undocumented migrants’ human rights in detention centers, the social movements of migrants and of activists who support them, boycotts against companies that profit from the transfer of remittances (Western Union and Money Gram are untouchable), the links between neoliberal policies and migration, challenges to the legal framework regulating the migratory order (particularly the right of States to deport and detain undocumented migrants) and everything that implies a political or epistemological challenge to the accepted “common sense” and oft-repeated clichés.

What real migrants are like

Those clichés are tied to the imposed topics and act like automatic brakes on sociological imagination, like sterilizing mental schemes. An example of these unfertile frameworks is the false dichotomy between productive and unproductive remittances, according to which unproductive ones are those destined to consumption, subsistence or family wellbeing. “Unproductive” is an adjective that weighs like a degrading stigma, suggesting that such idle use needs remedying. But how can a serious economist sustain that investment in food and health doesn’t have repercussions on production? The answer is very simple: if researchers want to continue being contracted by these agencies, they have to chorus the Manichean refrain of the beatific productive remittances vs. the satanic unproductive ones.

This intellectual apathy is possible because social scientists are willing to sacrifice their scientific intelligence to insert themselves into the prestigious market of consul¬tancies by the multilaterals. According to Bourdieu, it requires putting oneself into a situation that generates real problems, genuine difficulties.

They aren’t just passive statistics

The consequences of this modus operandi and its dramatis personae on the production of critical knowledge about migrations could be segmented into at least three types: epistemological effects, political effects and effects related to the researchers’ own socioeconomic restrictions.

Among the epistemological effects, reproduction of the paradigm on the criminalization of migrations stands out. Migration is presented above all as an act that involves risks and puts the migrant in contact with organized crime. In simple terms, this paradigm revolves around the distinction between orderly migration (i.e. documented) that produces development and disorderly migration (i.e. irregular, undocumented, unauthorized and even illegal) that reaps rape, AIDS, family disintegration, trafficking in humans, unproductive remittances, jail and even death. The latter is also associated with drug trafficking, the demographic explosion, invasion, a threat to national cultures, brain drain and lack of governance. This vision leads to the conclusion that irregular migration is the problem, a pernicious phase, a temporary imbalance, a loss and above all an anomaly that can and must be fixed by technical means in the form of social engineering.

This paradigm requires that the migrants appear as passive—and massive—objects without a word to contribute about their process. Their only face is abstract, statistical. Migrants are there to be counted, classified, at times felt sorry for and even occasionally trained in a financial literacy course that teaches them how to work the magic that transforms unproductive remittances into productive, banked ones. This interested reduction paves the way toward a simplified and manipulable vision of migrants exempted from genuine problems and realities, Bourdieu would say. And certainly from their own voice.

Neither victims nor heroes

Manipulation of the image of migrants leads to another Manichean dichotomy: they are painted as either victims—of human trafficking, illegal migratory trafficking, AIDS, family breakdowns—or else as villains such as coyotes (the very ones who do the migratory trafficking), remittance parasites or at best people who make bad decisions and run irresponsible risks. The manipulated image can also be idealized, presenting the migrants as entrepreneurial heroes, of course on the condition that they acquire the virtues of Weberian capitalists.

It is on these dichotomies that the social engineering proposals are mounted. A proposal I heard hundreds of times in UN meetings sounded attractive to me at the beginning: “We’re going to strengthen the positive elements of migrations and mitigate their negative factors,” as if such elements appear in a chemically pure state, are technically distinguishable and are docilely receptive to public policies, or what are called “development interventions.” In practice, the thinkable is reduced to what is susceptible to translation into policies, a requirement of immediate applicability that can only be based on Manichean distinctions and voluntaristic simplifications.

When truth isn’t what it’s all about

The demand for knowledge to be applicable and expressible in the form of policy briefings has even more radical consequences, assuming as it does that knowledge lacks value in and of itself. A new approach, a novel point of view that reveals something not previously visible isn’t valued as knowledge.

The German sociologist/philosopher Max Horkheimer sustains that such instrumentalizing of knowledge represents the triumph of pragmatism. In that pragmatic vision of the world, he explains, truth isn’t desirable only for itself, but insofar as it functions better. To prove that it is thought through with reason, all thinking has to have a justification; it must guarantee its functional utility.

Achieving real knowledge frequently involves providing a different viewpoint; changing a perception, putting what is not “seen” under another “light”; or showing that things could be different. But in today’s era of utopia-free technocracy, thinking is limited to recording facts and clarifying the chain of means and effects to achieve certain ends. Its operative value, the role it plays in the dominion of humans and nature, says Horkheimer, has finally been converted into a single criterion. For that reason, as soon as words aren’t clear and openly used to measure technically relevant probabilities, or are at the service of other practical ends, they are in danger of being viewed as suspicious, as nothing other than useless blah-blah, because truth isn’t seen as an end in itself.

The research terms of reference designed by migrant study funders ensure the avoidance of such blah-blah by directing the efforts to applied research, based on surveys that contain the always venerated “hard data.”

There is also ideological terrorism

Other requirements with political effects can also be found at times in the terms of reference, including adopting an anti-human trafficking approach, a vital element of the criminalization of migrations and of methodological nationalism.

This approach pleases the incumbent governments in their highly restrictive border control policy and migratory policies. Given that the declared purpose of insisting on the shady and criminal aspects of migration is to protect people, the end justifies the means. The UN and the IOM, in concert with diverse governmental administrations, have had no qualms about promoting the anti-human trafficking approach, even at the cost of migrants’ human rights, such as the rights to free movement and to not be pressured by terrorizing publicity, as the German political scientists Fabian Georgi and Susanne Schatral have underscored.

One dramatic example of this will to terrify is more extreme than those applied so far in Central America, although they are born of a single volition. It is a video placed on YouTube in the name of the IOM and Federal Office for Migration (FOM) of Berne, Switzerland, that shows a conversation between a father in some African country and a son in a telephone booth on a rainy night in some European country. It is peppered with scenes showing the son in situations that contradict the rosy picture he’s describing to his father: in reality he’s starving, homeless, persecuted…

The father listens to his son’s merciful fabrications from the warm, well lit, luxurious room of a successful professional, a member of the upper middle class, suggesting that migration is by definition a brutal drop in living conditions, as well as throwing the migrants into an unspeakable Calvary. The video was uploaded at the same time as a press release telling of an “awareness campaign among the people in Cameroon and Nigeria to inform them about negative consequences of illegal migration.” The European Union joined FOM in that pilot project. The FOM says it is backed by the IOM and in fact, the report is signed by an official of each institution.

The report’s motives are clear: “There is hardly anybody who has not seen pictures showing overcrowded vessels and people jettisoned into the sea by ruthless migrant smugglers, pictures of ships capsized, of people brought out of the water dead. For want of an economic perspective, people from Africa head to European countries such as Switzerland in search of a better life.

“These people often cherish expectations of a prosperous future abroad—expectations doomed to disappoint because the everyday life of illegal immigrants inevitably falls short of their hopes.”

According to Danish researcher Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, the IOM received US$265 million to assist governments in deportation processes and other activities, among them the promotion of the security and banking remittance approaches.

Defined agendas that
reproduce “common sense”

In Central America, a less explicit attempt but one with identical purposes was the promotion of the film “El Camino” (The Road), a Costa Rican-Nicaraguan-French film supported by the IOM, the International Labor Organization, the Dutch Cooperation Institute (Hivos) and France’s Foreign Relations Ministry. The film, conceived and directed by Ishtar Yasin, daughter of Iraquí-Chilean emigrants to Russia, who lived in Nicaragua in the first couple of years of the revolution, shows a fictional journey through the wilderness by an 11-year-old girl and her younger brother from Managua’s marginal barrio of La Chureca to Costa Rica in search of their mother, who emigrated there eight years earlier. The boy ends up lost in the jungle bordering the two countries and the girl is taken as a sex slave by a foreign pedophile.

These initiatives of ideological terrorism find echo among journalists, artists and social scientists who take on the security agenda and turn into organic intellectuals underpinning the hegemony of methodological nationalism. Given that their agenda is usually defined from the offices of the big funding agencies under the excuse of offering apolitical scientific services, consultants are conditioned in practice to produce research aimed at portraying ideal migrants—those who arrive alone, work hard and return to their countries of origin when the coffee or strawberry harvest is over—or at discovering how remittances are being or can be channeled to productive uses and/or showing the risk of undocumented migration.

In the end, their agenda is defined by IOM’s big funder in Latin America: the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The IOM’s subaltern role to USAID is perceptible in its project portfolio and in the concomitant cloning of its agenda, easily verifiable in a synoptic glance at their web pages. There’s no conspiracy theory here: the IOM willingly drinks from the cups placed before it. On the IOM’s side this is the result of a lack of criteria and both an organizational and individual survival wish more than any plot inspired by an ideological program. On the researchers’ side is a propensity to think “with guardrails,” as Hannah Arendt labeled it, accepting and reproducing what is presented as “common sense” about migrants. The relative automatism of these synchronized dynamics buttresses their efficacy.

The scholars are partly the victims of ideological cooptation. Methodological nationalism is a siren song to which many academics of limited critical training fall prey. Their submission also operates through the socioeconomic constrictions of their work and the reproduction of their living conditions. These constrictions stop them from challenging the common sense dispatched by the UN and IOM. Their reproduction implies accepting the terms proposed by their patrons: the analytic framework, the requirement of applicability and the short-term perspective. But applied short-term studies can’t penetrate deeply.

The triple game of domination

Jandhyala Tilak, the Indian knowledge and education specialist, notes that international cooperation’s intervention in research takes the form of consultancies and establishes the research agendas so that cooperation’s short-term needs and compulsions help negate the value of long-term research and fail to build up sustainable capacities in universities and other research entities. Researchers are constrained by terms of reference that establish narrow limits for what may be questioned. Their legacies are preceded by a testament: the terms of the contract. The researchers must please their patrons if they want to be contracted again in the future. Bourdieu was quite right when he argued that stances taken on the social world are perhaps due in part to the conditions in which they are produced, to the specific logic of the political apparatuses and the political “game,” of cooptation of the circulation of ideas…

This position expresses the triple game of domination that keeps a tight gag on critical thinking: cooptation by the hegemonic nationalist methodology, the long shadow USAID casts over the IOM and the financial impossibility that those who work on the issue of migration in the “kitchens of science” can design an autonomous and critical research agenda.

José Luis Rocha is a member of the envío editorial council, and currently associated with the Sociology Institute of Philipps University of Marburg, Germany.

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