Lightning Rods in the Local Moral Economy: Debating Unauthorized Migrants' Deservingness in Israel

Abstract

Localized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common "local moral economy." Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country's local moral economy -biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of "fruitful multiplication," and hasbara ("public diplomacy"/ propaganda) -and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship -e.g. "economic" vs. "political" migrants, "migrant workers" vs. "refugees," even the terms "authorized" and "unauthorized" themselves -bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.

“We must use every legal means to … put them behind bars, or to run them out of town”: Assembling citizenship deservingness in Toronto

“…Deservingness refers to the subjective allocation of "value" or "worth" to individuals, spaces, and events; a process that involves a moral and therefore affective evaluation (Willen, 2012(Willen, , 2015Yarris & Castañeda, 2015). Scholars have used the concept to examine how stakeholders open up or close off access to healthcare, welfare services, and social disaster relief using deservingness frames (Goldade & Okuyemi, 2012;Reid, 2013;Skinner, Freeman, Feather, & Roche, 2007;Willen, 2012;Yoo, 2002).…”

“…Assemblage refers to the arrangement of different components that have fluid and contingent relationships to each other and produce particular effects of power. Citizenship deservingness refers to the production of "value" and how it is allocated to particular individuals depending on their relationship to understandings of "good" citizenship (Anderson, 2013;Willen, 2015). To demonstrate the assembled and reassembled nature of citizenship deservingness, I examine the intersection between racialized nation-building projects, constructions of place, and changes to immigration policy and practice.…”

Children of the crisis: ethnographic perspectives on unaccompanied refugee youth in and en route to Europe

“…Our aim is thus twofold: While tracing the discursive practices whereby young unaccompanied refugees have come to be written into ambiguous social and political classifications, we do not reduce these processes to the discursive arena. By laying the focus on the particularity of 'local moral worlds' (Willen 2015) in the interplay with translocal dynamics, our aim is to come to a deeper understanding of the ways unaccompanied asylum seekers live and make sense of these shifting social terrains.…”

Sowa Rigpa Humanitarianism: Local Logics of Care within a Global Politics of Compassion

“…We acknowledge diverse applications of the “moral economy” concept (see Carrier ; Scott ; Willen ) but follow Saxer's use () in relation to Sowa Rigpa.…”