The Department of Gender Studies, Central European University (CEU) and the Feminist Section of the Hungarian Sociological Association (Feminista Szekció, Magyar Szociológiai Társaság) jointly organized a public lecture on the topic of racism and xenophobia on 25 January. The lecture, entitled “Reinventing Migration Politics: Challenges to Racism and Xenophobia,” was delivered by Mojca Pajnik, Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana / Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Besides the CEU Community, several distinguished guests were present at the event from the world of diplomacy, academics and public life.
In her lecture Mojca Pajnik argued that productivity rates in the aging societies of the EU member states are increasingly possible to maintain because of the migrant labor force filling up positions of undervalued and low-paid work, especially in construction, manufacturing, and the feminized sectors of care and domestic work. Migrants tend to increasingly occupy precarious jobs, often related to black market economies with no or low levels of job security, low payment and with poor recognition of their skills. Also, those officially employed on the basis of different types of work permits find themselves in the grip of the flexibilization of the market reality, where they are forced to accept vulnerable, short-term, low-paid and low skilled jobs. Experiences of de-skilling, language barriers, discrimination in the workplace, coupled with racist and xenophobic attitudes, represent everyday reality for migrants. The actual demand for migrant labor remains poorly reflected in state policies, which, in turn, define and regulate the migrants’ positions primarily in terms of limitations and termination. Mojca Pajnik argues that current migration and integration policies that are, as a rule, accompanied by populist rhetoric and anti-migration discourses sustain migrants in “rightless” positions where not only are their human rights not respected but they are not even allowed to claim their rights. Ensuring migrants the “right to have rights” is thematized as a precondition for any serious attempt to claim migrants’ integration as a politics of equality, not exclusion. We are faced with the need for the reinvention of migration politics that also requires serious reaction to racism and xenophobia. Currently we are not only witnessing a rise of self-proclaimed “patriotic” organizations across Europe that spread racism, but also see the rise in the number of political parties and individual politicians adopting openly racist discourses. These resonate in actual anti-migration policies, such as the banning of visas, tightening of border controls or limiting employment or work for migrants to allegedly “protect” the national labor force.
Mojca Pajnik has authored and co-authored a number of publications in the fields of migrations, gender studies and the media.