The Perceptions of Refugees and Immigrants as Biological by Delphine Polidori

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pathogenic imagery and metaphors have been used to describe displaced persons, especially migrants and refugees, as disease carriers and vectors. Originating in 19th century British anti-immigrant sentiment, the striking similarity of language and policies targeting the movements of both human beings and alien species has a long history, which this paper discusses to shed light on the West’s perception of non-natives over time. This paper explores the relationship between immigration politics and conservation science through the native-alien dichotomy, ecological imperialism, the synchrony of regulations targeting foreigners and invasive alien species alike, as well as the fusion of language between both academic fields through the use of biological imagery. By integrating insights from conservation science into the study of displacement, this paper argues that immigration policies aimed at restricting the mobility of all non-natives (human and non-human) are reinforced by language appealing to botanical and pathogenic imagery, indicating the overall perception of immigrants and refugees as a ubiquitous biological threat in the West. This fused perceptive is not only harmful, but also counterproductive, as it fails to address the structural drivers of migration, making the resettlement and integration of newcomers into their host country even more challenging.

Résumé

Dans le cadre de la pandémie COVID-19, l’imagerie et les métaphores pathogènes ont été utilisées pour désigner les personnes déplacées, en particulier les migrants et les réfugiés, comme des porteurs et des vecteurs de maladies. La similarité frappante du langage et des politiques ciblant les mouvements des êtres humains et des espèces exotiques, qui trouve son origine dans le sentiment anti-immigrant britannique du 19e siècle, a une longue histoire qu’étudie cet ouvrage pour éclairer la perception qu’a l’Occident des non-autochtones au fil du temps. Ce document explore la relation entre les politiques d’immigration et la science de la conservation à travers la dichotomie entre les exotiques et les indigènes, l’impérialisme écologique, la synchronisation des réglementations visant les étrangers et les espèces exotiques envahissantes, ainsi que la fusion du langage entre les deux domaines pédagogiques par le biais de l’imagerie biologique. En intégrant les idées de la science de la conservation dans l’étude des déplacements, cet ouvrage soutient que les politiques d’immigration visant à restreindre la mobilité de tous les non-autochtones (humains et non-humains) sont synthétisés par un langage faisant appel à l’imagerie botanique et pathogène, indiquant la perception générale des migrants et des réfugiés comme une menace biologique omniprésente en Occident. Cette perception fusionnée est non seulement nuisible, mais aussi contre-productive, car elle ne tient pas compte des leviers structurels de la migration, ce qui rend le rétablissement et l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants dans

Introduction

This essay will explore the striking similarity of language and policies targeting the movements of human beings and other species alike, in order to answer the following research question: how does integrating the notion of ‘invasive alien species’ (from conservation science) into the study of displacement help our understanding of how refugees and migrants are experienced in the West? After a comprehensive study of the native-alien dichotomy, ecological imperialism, the synchrony of regulations targeting ‘invasive alien species’ and migrants, as well as the fusion of language between the two, this essay will argue that immigration policies aimed at restricting the mobility of migrants and refugees are reinforced by language appealing to botanical and pathogenic imagery, indicating the overall perception of displaced persons as a ubiquitous biological threat in the West.

The native-alien dichotomy: an expression of the sedentary bias

It is difficult to discuss migrants and refugees without playing into the sedentary bias and the externalizing nature of their status.1 Before exploring this theme further, however, we need to define some key terminology relevant to both migration studies and conservation science. The United Nations Refugee Agency, also known as the UNHCR, clearly distinguishes refugees from migrants as “people who cannot return to their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution, conflict, violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and who, as a result, require international protection”2. Closely related, asylum seekers are technically refugees-in-waiting as people who have requested sanctuary from a nation-state, but whose demand has yet to be approved.3 While these legal distinctions exist between migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, this paper will group them together when talking about non-natives (also called ‘aliens’ by some) more generally, but also distinguish them when doing so is analytically useful. Moreover, the term ‘displaced persons’ in this paper is used to refer to people who migrate out of necessity (refugees) or precarity ((labour) migrants), as opposed to desire or opportunity (expatriates and others). Humans, however, are not the only living organisms subject to different classifications based on their country of origin and displacement. In conservation science, ‘alien’ species (also called ‘introduced’ or ‘exotic’ species) is one of the official terms used to describe any species which is not native to a territory in question4 . Meanwhile, those deemed harmful and destructive to indigenous biodiversity and native species are classified as ‘invasive alien species’ (IAS)5. These mainly enter a new region or continent by way of human intervention, either accidentally (through the transportation of people and goods across the world, or through the escape of domestic or livestock animals into the wild), or deliberately (as a form of biological control to target pests, or for aesthetic, monetary, as well as game hunting reasons)6 . A parallel emerges then, between the study of displaced persons and ‘alien’ species: the native-alien dichotomy. The status of migrants, refugees, and ‘alien’ species is laden with the idea that they are an exception to the norm, that is, to “the national […] order of things,”7 whereby people are recognized as citizens in a nation-state and receive protection from the national government8. In this sense, the native-alien dichotomy is informed by the notion of states and borders9 . Refugees are not only a result of the violent creation of nation-states, including that of Eastern European countries during World War Two or the creation of Israel in 1948. By demarcating the limits of a nation-state’s sovereignty, borders represent the limits between a refugee’s status as a human being and status as an ‘alien’10. As Hannah Arendt writes, “the loss of a polity itself expels [the displaced person] from humanity”11. Losing more than the protection from their state, a refugee or a migrant loses their “inalienable human rights”12 because as an ‘alien’ they no longer have a place which recognizes and protects those rights13. In other words, displaced persons become alienated when they are “expelled from the human community”14 and robbed of their “natural rights,”15 that is, their “right to have rights”16 . The native-alien dichotomy, furthermore, is rooted in the assumption that all human beings, and living organisms, originate from and are attached to one place only, a preconception that Liisa Malkki names the sedentary bias. This assumption shapes the perception citizens have of refugees and migrants, including their perceived value as human beings17, resulting in the problematization of these individuals in immigration politics. If we take the native-alien dichotomy a step further and distinguish between migrants and refugees, on one hand, and ‘introduced’ and ‘invasive’ species on the other, additional insights emerge. These secondary classifications further shape who is seen as deserving of protection and empathy, with refugees and ‘introduced’ species largely perceived as benign ‘alien’ beings, while migrants and ‘invasive’ species are often described as threats to the territory they are ‘invading’18 . As drivers of migration for all species (including human and non-human) are increasing, the confusion associated with divisions such as the native-alien one is as well. While the legal distinction between refugees and migrants is founded in whether someone migrated out of their own volition19, these formal categories are becoming more and more outdated in the context of climate change20, which is forcing people to migrate increasingly out of necessity or precarity. Furthermore, the separation between native and introduced species is also blurring as a result of species migrating in search of cooler climates and ecosystems, thereby challenging the established conservation logic for deciding which species to protect21 .

Ecological imperialism and the emergence of immigration policies

Ecological imperialism and the most successful ‘invasive alien species’

These classifications are not only subject to criticism but are also inherently subjective, having been created by, and in the interest of, human beings, otherwise known as the most successful ‘invasive alien species’, representing the most mobile and harmful beings to global biodiversity on this planet22. In fact, many scholars trace back “[many] current conservation problems and issues in terms of exotic and invasive alien plants and animals [to] western European imperial expansion, and thereafter with mostly northern hemisphere-led globalization,”23 what Alfred W. Crosby refers to as “ecological imperialism”24 . Migration, as we know, is part of our DNA: science has demonstrated that “we all share a family tree and a primordial migration story: [all] people outside Africa are descended from ancestors who left that continent more than 60,000 years ago. About 45,000 years ago, those first modern humans ventured into Europe, having made their way up through the Middle East.”25 At one point, however, geographic barriers prevented both humans and other living organisms from migrating beyond Europe: these natural barriers helped preserve biodiversity locally and across the globe, by preventing the homogenization of species26. While biogeography experienced a natural level of dynamism and fluctuation, humans were the ones who artificially facilitated and accelerated the migration of species (including that of humans) from Europe to the Americas, as well as to Australia and New Zealand27. Between 1492 and the early 1800s, Europeans not only displaced and massacred the Indigenous populations of these continents, but they also replaced the indigenous flora and fauna they found with their own, European species28. This introduction was successful because they “had evolved in [...] more competitive environments”29 where they had long been subject to anthropogenic pressures on the environment, including hunting and intensive agricultural practices. This transplantation of plants and animals allowed the colonists to reproduce their lifestyle overseas, facilitating their transition to life on the ‘new’ continents30 . As Crosby argues, the fact that “[the] parts of the world that today in terms of population and culture are most like Europe are far away from Europe […] [and] export more foodstuffs of European provenance – grains and meats – than any other lands on earth [even though they did not have them] five hundred years ago,”31 clearly demonstrates the biological and ecological component of the success of European imperialism32. Furthermore, Europeans did not only facilitate the migration of animals and plants, but they also carried with them diseases and viruses to which Indigenous populations were not immunized against33 . As Robert B. Marks writes, while the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ by Christopher Colombus in 1492 served as the catalyst for “a global exchange of peoples, pathogens, natural products, and foodstuffs […] it seems that the native peoples of the New World were the losers [in this exchange], for the encounter between the [two] Worlds brought two hitherto separate disease pools into contact”34. Rather than an exchange, then, Europe’s expansion into the New World was entirely extractive in nature. In the 1400s, throughout the ‘Old World,’ agrarian economies began facing the “ecological limits”35 of what Marks refers to as the “biological old regime,”36 a time preceding the Industrial Revolution when society was dependent on the size and quality of agricultural output to prosper37. In Europe, notably Britain, economic and population growth were becoming increasingly hampered by the shortages of land, but the “New World colonies provided additional “ghost acres” that allowed […] industrialization […] to unfold”38 by allowing the ‘Old World’ to expand beyond its natural resources39 . Taking into account the biological and ecological dimensions of imperialism, European colonists can be described as the most successful ‘invasive alien species’ of the human race (which is an ‘invasive alien species’ as a whole, as aforementioned) because they have not only invaded the greatest number of territories (to which they are artificially “native”40), harmed the native biodiversity of these regions (not to mention the implications of the Industrial Revolution for climate change), but also carried with them flora, fauna, and pathogens, all of which displaced and threatened the truly native, Indigenous species, and peoples in this supposedly ‘New’ World41. It could be argued that comparing European colonists, or any group of people for that matter, to ‘invasive alien species’ is inherently problematic, as this paper does with respect to refugees and migrants. Nonetheless, I would argue that applying this term to European colonists serves as a useful analogy. It accurately depicts their imperial and colonial record while, on the contrary, using this comparison on refugees and migrants is unfounded and xenophobic, reinforcing their stigmatization and marginalization in the West. This section has shown how nature and humankind are inextricably linked by European colonialism, which has in turn led to subjective classifications like the native-alien dichotomy when, in fact, both ‘invasive alien species’, on the one hand, and migrants and refugees, on the other hand, are creations and by-products of European colonialism42. In turn, this suggests that the West’s continual classification of species into native and ‘alien’ species, as well as the use of anti-immigration rhetoric framing displaced persons as anomalies, perpetuates colonial discourses and practices centered around the artificial native-alien division43. Thus, ‘invasive alien species’ are not only of biological concern in conservation science but also have an important human dimension44, confirming the “[importance in recognizing] the subjectivity of decision-making processes and the cultural and historical origins of many of today’s problem species”45 .

The emergence of policies restricting the entry of ‘alien’ species and migrants

The native-alien dichotomy first emerged in the 1830s when John Stevens Henslow and Hewet Cottrell Watson sought to define British plants, which in turn gave rise to the botanical practice of marking ‘alien’ species with asterisks to denote their inferiority relative to native species46. It was only in reaction to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and discourse in British society towards the end of the 19th century, however, that the origin of plant species truly became of concern to conservationists47. The arrival of thousands of Jewish people from Eastern Europe to the East End of London in the 1890s gave rise to sentiments of antisemitism and xenophobia within London, with native British citizens beginning to use biological imagery of disease and infection to describe migrants48. Notably, Rotherham and Lambert quote a Manchester Evening Chronicle from 1905 which paints an immigrant as “[a] dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on [British] soil”49. Soon after, in an effort to preserve the country’s ‘natural heritage,’ conservationists became very preoccupied with defining and protecting native species50 . This intimacy between the perception of migrants and ‘alien’ species at the time, however, was not limited to the language wielded in public discourse and conservation alike. Turning to the United States, discussions surrounding the value of ‘alien’ species and migrants developed in synchrony among scientists and politicians respectively, which in turn gave rise to methods for excluding certain categories and groups from the country51. Philip J. Pauly draws a parallel between the methods and regulations which emerged in synchrony during the 19th and 20th century to police the entry of foreign beings in general into the territory52. Notably, the gap between both debates was bridged when the logic used by botanists to select which species to preserve inspired the logic behind converting Ellis Island, which was initially designed in the 1890s to collect taxes from migrants, into a facility for filtering migrants in 190153. Importantly, the fact that medical inspection was a cornerstone in the selection process speaks to the way migrants were perceived as disease-carriers, inferior to the ‘native’ population of the United States54. In this system, only the healthiest migrants were granted entry55 . Moreover, this parallel between conservation and immigration was reinforced by the synchronized regulations which emerged to restrict the entry into the United States of ‘alien’ species, on the one hand, and migrants, on the other hand56. In his article, Daniel Simberloff neatly summarizes the evidence collected by Pauly in a table, listing the following regulations relating to ‘alien’ species: the California state quarantine (1881), the California fruit pest law (1883), the Lacey Act (1900), and the Plant Quarantine Act (1912)57. During the same period, the following immigration policies were enacted: the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Ellis Island restrictions (1901), national quotas on immigration (1921), and the Immigration Act (1924)58. Accordingly, the intimacy observed by Pauly and other scholars with regards to discourse and regulations, highlights the inextricable relationship between conservation science and immigration politics, which have long perpetuated the native-alien dichotomy, founded in a fear of the unknown, of the foreign ‘other’59 .

The fusion of conservation science and immigration politics through the use of language

The power and politicization of language

Categories, labels, imagery, or language more generally, serve as powerful tools which can be wielded both positively and negatively. This section will focus on the latter in order to analyze the fusion of imagery across both conservation science and immigration politics through the use of biological imagery. Roger Zetter argues that the word ‘label’ conveys a number of ideas, in that it “recognizes both a process of identification and a mark of identity; implies something independently applied, but also something which can be chosen and amended; has a tangible and real world meaning, but is also metaphorical and symbolic”60 . Indeed, our discussion of the native-alien dichotomy set against the backdrop of ecological imperialism has already demonstrated the subjectivity of labels such as ‘native’ and ‘alien,’ as well as their increasingly inaccurate reflection of our contemporary era of globalization and climate change. Labels and categories, then, are shaped by perceptions, reflecting value judgments of a specific time and place, rather than informed by accurate representations of reality61. While the same language may be used across time, the context in which it is used and the opinion it conveys may shift. Analyzing the representation of refugees and migrants in the media between 2000 and 2012, Terence Wright concludes that much of media coverage “[appears] to have been left in a time-warp[, and despite] the scale of a refugee crisis or humanitarian disaster, […] the visual imagery promulgated by the mainstream media remains largely the same [across situations]”62. The continuity in language, imagery, and classifications across time and space, however, is analytically useful, as Ghassan Hage argues, for “[understanding] the way ‘the Muslim refugee’ is experienced in the West”63 . Hage’s observation underlines the analytical power of language, which is more indicative of perceptions than policies and regulations. For example, according to Zetter, the official, legal distinction between refugees and migrants is increasingly confounded in public discourse and the media, having effectively transformed “the refugee label [into] shorthand for any form of migrant”64 as well as framing the international right of seeking asylum “no longer [as] a basic Convention right, but [as] a highly privileged prize which few deserve and most claim illegally”65. As such, the politicization of the refugee label fails to reflect its legal dimensions and increasingly vilifies the displaced instead of acknowledging the broader structural drivers of migration at play.

The use of arborescent, soil, and liquid imagery

A closer look at the metaphysical and symbolic imagery used to describe migrants and refugees reveals the prominent use of biological terms, as the rest of this section will discuss. The fact that language associated with nature is embedded in discourse surrounding refugees and migrants echoes Liisa Malkki’s discussion of refugee representation in the media. Terence Wright quotes her as explaining that “[the] visual conventions for representing refugees […] have the effect of constructing refugees as a bare humanity – even as a merely biological or demographic presence”66. In this sense, the idea that refugees are stripped down to ‘mere biological beings’ also echoes Hannah Arendt’s discussion of how “the loss of a polity itself expels [a displaced person] from humanity,”67 suggesting that less than human, migrants and refugees are perceived as biotic components. This perception is reflected, notably, in the use of arborescent and soil imagery. Ingrained in the sedentary bias, this imagery is embedded in the notion of attachment, or ‘rootedness’, and is therefore a common metaphor used to talk about identity and nationalism68 . Liisa Malkki argues that “[thinking] about nations and national identities may take the form of roots, trees, origins, ancestries, racial lines, autochthonism, evolutions, developments, or any number of other familiar, essentializing images [but] what they share is a genealogical form of thought, which […] is peculiarly arborescent”69. Closely related, the metaphysical symbolism of soil is embedded in much of the language already used in this essay, including labels such as ‘native’ and ‘indigenous,’ which “have all served to root cultures in soil”70 . Together, these botanical and ecological terms, as Malkki describes them, help further alienate the foreigner, who clashes with this poetic nationalist imagery: the displaced are ‘uprooted’ peoples who have lost their place in this world71. The rooted-uprooted division which is implicit to the use of this metaphysical symbolism, perpetuates the native-alien dichotomy. By emphasizing the need and value of being grounded in this world using arborescent and soil imagery, the label ‘alien,’ used to pejoratively describe non-natives across all species, serves as a striking antonym to the notion of ‘rootedness’ and ‘genealogy’ as it reinforces the idea of migrants and refugees as anomalies in this world, with no attachment to place or people. Combined, the imagery of ‘uprooted aliens’ takes on a deeper symbolism: the displaced are deemed quite literally ‘extra-terrestrial’ in that their roots have been ripped from the soil of this earth around which they now roam as vagabonds. In contrast to this violent and chaotic imagery associated with the notion of ‘uprootedness’, Malkki notes that the movement of expatriates is generally described using imagery of ‘transplantation’72 . Indeed, the privileged mobile class of this world is seen as “[picking] up their roots in an orderly manner”73 in order to replant them peacefully and intentionally in the soil of another country. Nonetheless, while the use of this language may contribute to the negative perception of migrants and refugees relative to expatriates, these examples of arborescent and soil imagery also illustrate the contrasting experiences of mobility across these different categories (namely the degree to which some migrate out of their own volition, out of necessity, or out of precarity). More emphasis is placed, still, on the ‘uprootedness’ of migrants and refugees, through the use of liquid imagery. As Wright points out in his study of media coverage on migration-related topics, “[reporters often] resort to newspaper-style metaphors and refer to ‘the tide of immigration’; ‘floods of refugees’; ‘at first a trickle, then a stream’ ”74. This imagery paints the movements of refugees and migrants not as a clean ‘transplantation,’ but as an unstoppable, all-encompassing, uncontrollable wave75. In other words, this language communicates the impression that refugees and immigrants are “everywhere[, that they] are growing locally while also traversing and overflowing national borders”76 . Given that the majority of migrants and refugees that travel from Africa to Europe risk their lives on flimsy and overloaded boats to cross the Mediterranean Sea, the use of liquid and water imagery is unsurprising: with the overload of images of refugee boats at sea in the media, the Western spectator no longer differentiates between the individuals, nor between the groups and the environment they are in. Instead, human and environment fuse together as one in the spectator’s mind, becoming an “objectified, undifferentiated mass”77. This perception is further strengthened by the insistence on statistics when reporting on refugees, instead of differentiating between their unique lived experiences. On the other hand, the use of liquid imagery, specifically of water, through the use of words like ‘wave,’ ‘tide,’ and ‘flow’ also reflects the perceived invisibility of refugees and migrants, who are compared to a liquid that is colorless, transparent, and boundless in form. This invisibility reflects, notably, the difficulty that displaced persons face as ‘aliens’ in having their international human rights honored and in obtaining recognition, and secure immigration status, from a given nation-state. Finally, the boundlessness of the movements of displaced persons evoked in the use of liquid imagery reinforces their perceived detachment from the world, since this language is not limited to describing refugees and immigrants travelling by sea, but more generally to describe any movement of displaced persons which are ‘en masse’78 .

The use of pathogenic and ecological waste imagery

The use of arborescent, soil, and liquid imagery appears relatively harmless, however, when contrasted with the use of pathogenic and ecologic waste symbolism, which add a layer of threat to the “objectified, undifferentiated mass”79 being described. More than just biological beings, the displaced are now likened quite literally to ‘invasive alien species’, that is, to non-native species which are harmful to the biodiversity they ‘invade’. One of the threats associated with IAS in conservation science, in fact, is that “[invasive] plants and animals may also serve as disease vectors that spread parasites and pathogens that may further disrupt invaded areas”80. While the language of vermine, and its connection to the emergence of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain in the 19th century, has already been discussed, this theme is particularly relevant against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the very beginning, the global health crisis was accompanied by an abundant use of pathogenic imagery and metaphors targeted at migrants and refugees, not only to describe them as infestations and parasites in and of themselves, as was done in the 19th century, but also as disease-carriers and transmitters. Media Matters for America, a non-profit dedicated to monitoring the spread of misinformation in media coverage, particularly by conservative news outlets and journalists, illustrates how coverage of the coronavirus by Fox News, for example, shifted from treating the pandemic as a hoax at first, to “racist fearmongering and perverse victory-lapping about strict immigration enforcement”81. This behaviour and rhetoric was not unique to the United States, however, as nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban also blamed the spread of the virus in Hungary on migrants, claiming that it only spread among foreigners82. This kind of attitude and discourse both further dehumanize the displaced by stripping them down to their biological being, but is also racist and stigmatizing, as it exaggerates the importance of the origin of the virus. While the virus was first transmitted to humans in Wuhan, it has been spread to all parts of the globe through community transmission from person to person83 (who have all acted as disease-carriers and transmitters), and importantly, by the privileged, global mobile class84 .

Furthermore, not be overlooked is the fact that, like the influenza A virus or the swine flu85, COVID-19 originated in animal-human relations: “most cases in China were found to have a direct or indirect link to Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, possibly due to thee zoonotic spill over from wild animals to the humans”86. In effect, by describing refugees, migrants, and people of Asian origin as disease-carriers and transmitters, racial and xenophobic discourse surrounding COVID-19 is quite literally comparing these people to the animals who transmitted the virus in the first place. This implied imagery of animality thereby further dehumanizes immigrants and refugees, who are described as even less than bare biological beings, but even as bacteria and animals, the latter of which (with the exception of pets) are overwhelmingly seen as inferior to humans in the world, with the use of livestock animals for food production. Ghassan Hage, meanwhile, brings up another relevant fusion of language between immigration discourse and biological imagery, notably, the way the Australian government likens refugee boats to oceanic waste87 . Hage writes that “the way the government spoke of the people smugglers who ‘dumped’ refugees in the ocean was very similar to the language used to speak of people illegally dumping toxic waste”88. In producing this parallel, the Australian government signals their perception of refugees as “waste, unrecyclable, ungovernable, [boundless], and toxic”89. Much like the ecological crisis of our era, in which climate change has been inaccurately described as an externally driven, uncontrollable force threatening nation states, by using imagery which compares refugees to ecological waste (and pathogens), displaced persons are perceived as more than just ubiquitous: they are a biological threat, harmful and toxic90 .

In turn, this analogy brings up another striking parallel between the discourse surrounding ‘invasive alien species’ and displaced persons: as ‘alien’ beings polluting the environments or territories they enter. In conservation science, ‘invasive alien species’ are considered a threat to biodiversity because they have the potential to engender global homogenization through genetic pollution91. In other words, by breeding with native species (hybridization), ‘invasive alien species’ are perceived as diluting native genes and reducing the fitness of native species (their ability to adapt and survive)92 . Similarly, refugees are framed as not only ‘polluting’ the oceans and coastlines of North America, Europe, and Australia, but as contaminating the purity of the native populations of these nation-states. Indeed, ‘uprootedness’ clashes with the nationalist ideal of having a homogenous native population without foreigners. Former President Donald Trump’s language, for example, is laden with this sentiment, describing immigration from south of the United States’ border as an “invasion”93 . More fundamentally, however, this imagery of ecological waste also frames refugees and immigrants as such: “[they are] the refuse, the by-product of wars or of social transformations that uproot people from their land and their societies without these societies having the means of re-integrating them”94. Both the ecological crisis and the ‘refugee crisis’ are symptomatic of the demise of colonial capitalism and the by-product of the West’s attempt at domesticating both people and resources (nature) through their instrumentalization and overexploitation95. This domestication is present in the West’s ecological imperialism, in which European colonists successfully instrumentalized and dominated the land and people on the territories they colonized, but also in immigration policies which have been enacted in the West since the 19th century in an attempt to control the movements of displaced persons, and finally, in the regulations aimed at managing the threat of ‘invasive alien species’96. This “dying domestication”97, in turn, has led to a rising sentiment in the West of being ‘invaded’ by these threatening ubiquitous displaced persons and feeling “under siege,”98 leading the West to play into “fantasies of reverse colonization,”99 imagining formerly colonized populations as coming to colonize and domesticate the West100. This sentiment of fear is not only reflected in the biological imagery explored throughout this final section but also materialized through the increasing militarization of borders and the use of immigration detention facilities across the West101.

Conclusion

This essay has explored the relationship between conservation science and immigration politics, notably through the native-alien dichotomy, ecological imperialism, the synchrony of regulations targeting ‘invasive alien species’ and migrants, as well as the fusion of language between the two through the use of botanical and pathogenic imagery. The themes explored, and more broadly the integration of the notion of ‘invasive alien species’ into the study of displacement, has shed light into how refugees and migrants are experienced in the West, notably, as a ubiquitous biological threat. This perception is both harmful and counterproductive as it overlooks the structural drivers of migration, resulting in the overwhelming dehumanization, and continued marginalization, of refugees and migrants. This also makes the resettlement and integration of newcomers into their host country even more challenging. A further exploration of these themes could include an exploration of space, comparing the concept of the national park to the refugee camp as two artificial (extra-territorial) spaces for protecting animals, plants, and displaced persons respectively. These spaces could in turn be contrasted with a comparison of zoos and detention centers, as additional artificial, but also lucrative, sites in which ‘alien’ species and displaced persons are held captive respectively while benefiting the nation-state. With that being said, this essay has demonstrated the importance of remaining critical of media coverage and public discourse, as well as political debate, surrounding immigration and ‘refugee crises,’ as these easily play into the native-alien dichotomy and the framing of displaced persons as biological threats, instead of addressing the structural drivers of migration or the needs of migrants and refugees.

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