As an attendee of the World Social Forum, held in Belém, Brazil, in late January 2009, I had the opportunity to observe and converse with a literal “multitude” of actors who were grappling with ways of narrating the ongoing financial and political crises then rattling financial markets across the planet. Participants in those conversations comprised an extraordinary assemblage of political actors. Described variously as a congress of the global Left and “an open space” in which radical global democracy can express itself, the World Social Forum (WSF) comprised a rich cohort of writers, activists, members of NGOs, workers, and students, most of them seeking to strategize, network, and burnish their critiques of neoliberalism and corporate overreach across the planet. Although no single group, cause, or ideological vantage dominated the 2009 Forum, Belém was chosen to host the annual meeting in order to highlight three interrelated challenges that only the port city for the Amazon River could do: protecting the rights of migrant poor people who have moved to cities like Belém, defending the claims of indigenous peoples whose livelihoods upriver are threatened by corporate development, and halting global warming, which preservation of the Amazon Rain forest necessitates.Footnote 2
Opinions about the origins of the recent financial crisis diverged at Belém, but virtually all actors framed it as one of a series of interlocking crises demanding our attention. As the Declaration of the Assembly of Social Movements put it at the conclusion of the Belém meeting, the heart of “the international capitalist crisis,” generated by the pervasive “commoditization of life and the exploitation of labour and nature,” threatened our common “food, finance, the economy, climate, energy, population, migration … and civilization itself.”Footnote 3 Precisely because the current crisis was international in origin and scope, local actors across the planet possessed common purposes, however disparate their specific causes. Linking the multitude of actors at Belém was not only a critique of neoliberalism, but also an effort to make visible connections between common protagonists, forging ties between struggles for social and environmental justice at every turn.Footnote 4 Two of the most prominent such protagonists were migrant workers and global commons, both of them exploited and endangered by corporate “governance” and the failure of nations to protect the rights of nature and noncitizen migrants.
In virtually all conversations about migrant workers and global commons, the transnational mattered. But there remained fundamental questions about what exactly the “transnational” was and what work it accomplished for those who invoked the term when discussing climate change or immigration. Were the transnational and global commons objective things—empirical facts like credit flows, undocumented migrants, or migrating birds—which when researched generate politics that transcend nation-centered analyses and histories? Or were they political concepts, utopian imaginaries of how justice might function globally or conversely a critique of capitalism and the damage it has wrought on workers, migrants, and the natural world? Or were global commons and the transnational better thought of as methods of knowing, vantages that might change how we analyze relations between migrants, nature, and states?Footnote 5
In the following essay, I do not offer definitive answers to these questions but instead locate starting points for analyzing the work that notions of the transnational and global commons perform in conversation, whether at the World Social Forum or in the scholarly work of North American environmental and immigration history. First, I survey efforts to link struggles on behalf of migrants and global commons at the 2009 WSF meeting, considering how activists sought to create common conceptual and political ground around struggles to defend them. Next, I examine recent historiographies of immigration and the environment in North America, seeking analytical starting points for better understanding the historical relationships between migrant labor and commons landscapes. Finally, I consider the advantages of linking migrant workers to global commons, using my research into the history of human trafficking from the nineteenth century to the present. I argue that the transnational and global commons are best understood as analytical vantages that elucidate the relationship between migrant workers and nature. As inevitable trespassers of both national sovereignty and property claims, migrant workers' journeys help reveal a global commons that is, like them, migratory, fleeting, and often illegible to the state authorities who seek to govern migrant workers and global commons alike.Footnote 6
Global Hopes, Local Transactions
To understand how migrant workers and global commons intersected as topics at Belém, we need first to consider the diverse meanings that global commons possessed. For most participants in panels on climate change, “global commons” referred to the atmosphere, to rain forests, or to water resources beyond the confines of any individual nation or company's capacity to capture or own. Global concentrations of carbon dioxide, Arctic sea ice, and the Amazon River and its basin were variously mentioned as things or naturescapes that signified the global commons. As such, there seemed little, if any, overlap between migrant workers and global commons, despite universal sympathy for these actors. At the same time, the global commons also denoted the political work of global commoners, the multitude assembled in Belém.Footnote 7 Because there could be no global commons without global commoners, virtually all attendees were at least implicitly connected to migrant workers and the commons they traversed. Exactly how migrants interacted with commons remained unclear, however. Commons referred to at least two seemingly disparate naturescapes in Belém: the resolutely local commons that local people sought to protect against the intrusions of transnational capital; and “global commons” that circulated beyond the confines of any individual nation-state. Linking both was a shared set of antagonisms with nation-states, which violated the norms of all “commoners,” whether indigenous activists or global environmentalists fighting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
References to the transnational likewise expressed disparate topics and cohorts. On the one hand, “transnationals” were shorthand for multinational companies, the actors against whom transnational activists were fighting. But the transnational also described the efforts of activists to stop the work of globalizing capital across national boundaries. Conditioning virtually all references to the transnational, whether dystopian critiques of the violence that neoliberalism had wrought or utopian imaginings of a more peaceful and just planet, was the notion that the transnational conferred a sense of moral agency as well as urgency. To see oneself as participating in a globalized cause inspired a sense of moral universality in the organizing work, whether or not it actually developed across national boundaries. The transnational was thus vitally important to the experience and significance of both global commons and migrant workers, but in ways that were primarily moral rather than analytical in form.
Understanding what political work the transnational performed at the WSF, then, depended on the context of the conversation and the explicit efforts that participants and panel organizers put into making connections between different sites of struggle. Occasionally, the transnational conferred both moral universality and practical guidance. In one panel, sponsored by the Transnational Institute and staffed by their volunteers who performed all of the vital work of simultaneous translation into four languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—I learned of an extraordinary battle to stop the private development of a river in the Amazon watershed that a Spanish bank had “given” to a multinational company, violating indigenous land claims in the process. The protests were indeed transnational, involving protests deep in the Amazon by migrant indigenous actors that slowed but did not stop development, as well as protests and media campaigns in Spain and Switzerland to bank shareholders and concerned citizens who eventually pressured private actors to abandon the development project.Footnote 8
In creating a multilingual narrative “space,” the Transnational Institute not only exemplified the utopian premise and promise of the World Social Forum, but also described how they had performed the salutary work of connecting sympathetic actors into one unified canvas. Migrants, workers, indigenous activists, members of NGOs, and socially conscious investors all found common ground in defending a particular commons landscape deep in the Amazon, even if they lived on separate continents. For the Transnational Institute, imperiled commons' landscapes in nature can only survive within a global frame, a narrative strategy that links local stakes to transnational or global ones at every turn. For the Institute, the “transnational” is not only a set of things—here the connective ties between local and extralocal activists as well as multinational corporations—but also a method of setting those things in relation to one another, an analytical vantage that creates the possibility for what might be understood as utopian longings for cooperation between locals, migrants, nature, and sympathetic partners around the planet. All local commons are global ones, in the Transnational Institute's framework. The goal of activists seeking to defend them is to make those connections visible and powerful. To stop the “transnationals” and save the commons in the Amazon, all actors had to become transnational, even if their work remained resolutely local.Footnote 9
The semantic richness of the transnational and global commons produced many of the most interesting and productive conversations at Belém as the Transnational Institute's panels highlighted. At the same time, however, notions of the transnational and global commons also generated confusion and frustration among a diverse host of participants. Most transnational conversations fell short of expectations at Belém for a variety of reasons, some pragmatic others more conceptual and political. Most of the scheduled sessions were monolingual events, creating a Brazilian Social Forum accessible only in Portuguese.Footnote 10 The idea of the transnational may have conferred a sense of moral urgency to Brazilian Forum presenters and to residents of the large Youth Camp, but absent effective translators, much of their work and play did not move beyond national linguistic boundaries. Complaints about the lack of translation were ubiquitous, especially by participants from countries like Greece and China who had hoped to rely on English or French to understand the discussions.Footnote 11 Perhaps the only thing more maddening to some attendees than an English-only transnationalism was a Portuguese transnationalism, highlighting the paradoxical ways that exchanges at the WSF stimulated national antagonisms as well as transnational imaginaries.Footnote 12 Perhaps it is naïve to have expected to find a utopian transnational imaginary fully realized at the WSF. Given the contradictory range of transnational imaginaries transported there, we should not be surprised to find anything but tensions among participants. But rather than responding to these tensions with ever more strident repetitions of the utopian possibilities of transnationalism, we might instead consider the advantages of the transnational and global commons as analytical vantages rather than utopian aspirations. To that end, I turn to the historiography of immigration in North America.
Migrant Workers, National Vantages
What might North American historians of migrant workers and global commons have said to attendees at Belém, assuming they could speak Portuguese? The answers are harder to discern than one might expect. For many North American scholars, as for attendees of the WSF, aspirational hopes for the transnational have coexisted with remarkably durable nation-bound assumptions about migrant workers and the commons' they inhabit. When the transnational first emerged in scholarly discourse in the 1990s, it seemed part of an effort to transcend national frames and imaginaries. With the end of the Cold War, many on the Left surmised that nationalism itself was on the ropes. Yet such utopian hopes have not been even remotely realized. Several scholars have noted the paradox that a discipline ostensibly devoted to “transnational” inquiry should have produced one of the most nation-centered genres of historical writing. Writes Matthew Jacobson, “[F]or immigration studies in the era of ascendant ‘transnationalism,’ the nation state is the gum from the side-walk that we can never quite seem to scrape from our shoes.”Footnote 13 Jacobson ties that methodological nationalism to the outsized influence of one of immigration history's nationalistic founders, Oscar Handlin, who famously wrote in his classic text, The Uprooted, that “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”Footnote 14 As historian Donna Gabaccia has also noted, US immigration history has been, at its core, a story of American exceptionalism, of how and why immigrants from across the planet came to America because of its unique economic and political virtues. That conceit, Gabaccia and Jacobson point out, has been central to both the older “uprooted” immigration history and to more recent transplanted scholarship. Missing from both strands of US immigration historiography, until recently, has been the larger global circuitry of migration from which American immigrants emerge. Not only is the United States just one of several destinations for European, Asian, and African migrants, but a great many opt to return to home destinations rather than staying put and becoming “American.”Footnote 15
Kevin Kenny has explained the enduring power of a methodological nationalism within immigration history in part by correctly noting that too often transnational studies have actually been comparative in form and design. Kenny's observations about the “Global Irish” help explain why even though immigration scholars might see the United States as permeable and porous, they nonetheless reify nations because their comparative methods grant national cultures a kind of fixity.Footnote 16 But while the methods that historians employ certainly do shape the kinds of narratives we tell—and the way we see and comprehend topics like the nation and the transnational—it would be misleading to presume that all comparative case studies of immigration necessarily produce reified national stories. Kevin Kenny's own pathbreaking and painstaking research into the history of the Molly Maguires, for example, exemplifies the virtues of combining comparative and transnational methods. What makes a method “nationalist” is not simply whether it examines migrants in one place, then, but what assumptions historians make about the nation-state. For Kenny, the transnational functions as an analytical frame rather than any utopian desire for transcending nations, allowing him to keep careful track of how Irish radicals' national affiliations became enriched by experiences of migration, class, and nativism in two locales, an evolution in which Americanization meant, tragically, death by hanging for the immigrants known as “Molly Maguires.”Footnote 17
For historians aware of these pitfalls within US immigration history, the transnational has been deployed or imagined as its antidote. Matthew Jacobson's fine essay, “More ‘Trans-,’ Less National,” for example, suggests that “trans” and “national” are to a degree at odds, with the latter obscuring the former even as nations lose their power. “There has been a creeping realization,” writes Jacobson, “that more and more of the world's peoples now inhabit social, political, and economic realms where the psychic salience and the real and symbolic power of the ‘nation’ are losing ground.”Footnote 18 Jacobson explicitly eschews ignoring “the nation-state as a unit of consideration in our inquiries,” but suggests studying topics that transcend national borders such as multinational corporations. Jacobson describes the waxing and waning significance of the transnational and the national respectively by comparing them to animals, “corporate elephants” who “dance among the national chickens.” For Jacobson the transnational is primarily a thing—global capital—and, as such, it demands our sustained attention. Certainly the Transnational Institute would laud Jacobson's call that immigration historians “recover the corporation as a significant force in the lives of individuals.”Footnote 19
But whether or not the Transnational Institute would laud Jacobson's presumption that nations are fading in power and significance is another matter. There are at least three problems with Jacobson's formulation. First, the nation and the transnational are best understood not as discretely sized things, annoying chickens or transnational elephants, but as related categories of analysis whose relationship reshapes the contours of national borders across the planet. Jacobson is surely correct to note that globalization is hardly new, but he fails to point out that national sovereignties have long been crafted as instruments for policing traffic and the mobility of transnational people, ideas, and things. To recognize that fact is to realize that in the present and the past there have been no states without transnational migrants and objects.Footnote 20 For the Transnational Institute to imagine that nation-states and their policies are receding in importance would be utopian at best, foolhardy at worst. The transnationals they oppose—and which Jacobson correctly calls to be studied—thrive precisely in their capacity to use, corral, and constitute local, national, and international forms of state power. There is no pure past in which nations were just nations and the transnational did not exist. To be sure, the forms of global movement and exchange have expanded dramatically since the Cold War, but then again global exchange and conflicts also created and constituted the Cold War.
Second, Jacobson's call for more studies of corporations, while certainly well-intended, neglected some of the very best work in immigration history which had done precisely that. Leon Fink's pathbreaking book, The Maya of Morganton, for example, exemplifies the advantages of seeing corporate, immigrant, and labor history as Kevin Kenny did, from the outside looking in. Unlike many US labor historians, Fink began his research by learning Spanish and traveling to Guatemala to understand the context from which Morganton's migrants departed and returned. Fink located the emergence of Mayan workers' labor militancy in the 1990s by studying how and where they learned solidarity: in the recent civil wars in Guatemala during the 1980s and in the funeral customs that Mayan workers brought to Morganton.Footnote 21 Equally important, Fink revealed how the local union succeeded by reorganizing such transplanted traditions. Writes Fink, “the union … was simply the latest means of maintaining a moral order within a traditional community.”Footnote 22 For Fink, globalization described a process by which “the costs of transportation and communication” had dramatically declined, enabling “people, ideas, products, and finance capital” to “literally circulate around the globe.”Footnote 23 That process brought migrants to and from Morganton, North Carolina, and Aguateco, Guatemala, but did not diminish the power of nation(s) to shape and even determine the outcome of local struggles in either locale. While Fink cited literature that equated the emergence of “transnational affiliations” with the ebbing of national sovereignty, a process described as “deterritorialization,” he remained acutely aware of the impact of US labor law in containing, matching, and ultimately defeating the solidarity of Mayan workers.Footnote 24 Case Farms avoided unionization not because it was a “transnational elephant,” as Jacobson put it, but because US labor law made virtually any union strategy in Morganton bound to fail as the company could refuse to negotiate in good faith and pay its modest NLRB fines, Mayan solidarity be damned. The national chicken has been more resilient than Jacobson and many others had hoped.
Jacobson's animal metaphors exemplify a final shortcoming, namely the omission of nature or the commons from virtually all North American immigration history. That omission is striking given the importance of the commons to many conversations at the WSF and especially to the rights of migrants, whose lives intersect so conspicuously with endangered commons landscapes across the planet. While food emerges within Fink's fine monograph, both as a commodity that Mayan immigrants manufacture and as a source of global culture that they have brought to Morganton, Fink gives little attention to where commons are or why they matter within Guatemala, Morganton, or on the journeys that immigrants took between these landscapes. If nature and the commons are largely absent from even the best immigration histories, they are nonetheless present as a framing device because of the work of sociologist Michael Piore, whose book Birds of Passage directly compared migrants to migrating waterfowl.Footnote 25
One reason the analogy of migrant workers to migrating birds has persisted is that the phrase does have certain narrative and conceptual advantages, especially for scholars interested in transnational migrations. For a great many immigrants, after all, migration is not a one-time movement from their country of origin to the United States.Footnote 26 Rather, like migrating birds, agricultural migrants remain members of several communities simultaneously, moving back and forth across national boundaries without expectations of becoming American or ceasing to be Mexican or Guatemalan. Seeing all migrant workers as Americans in the making would be like expecting barn swallows, migrating from Central America to summer nesting grounds in Ontario, to become “Canadian.” Indeed, one wonders why we should even describe Canada Geese as national migrants, when so many have begun wintering and summering in lakes, rivers, and ponds throughout the United States. The point here is that the phrase “birds of passage” is useful because it highlights the importance of seasonality in shaping the migrations of literally millions of people. Recognizing the salience of seasonality in labor markets not only confounds certain Marxist presumptions about how capitalism “annihilates spaces by time,” but also highlights the enduring importance of nonhuman nature in defining the terrain and timing of human labor, whether in sweet potato fields, blueberry bushes, Christmas tree and fruit tree farms, or cucumber patches, as thousands of Mexican migrants experienced while passing through North Carolina last year.Footnote 27
But if the phrase “birds of passage” offers certain narrative advantages, it is an imprecise analytical tool at best and a misleading and condescending one at worst. Indeed, there is a danger when using phrases like “Birds of Passage” that we naturalize what remain fundamentally historical relationships. There is, after all, nothing natural about how and why certain immigrants cross borders. Their migrations are created, managed, and defined not by seasons as much as by political relationships between people who facilitate, stimulate, and commodify immigrant workers' migrations. How much money does it take to cross the border if you are undocumented? Which human interloper, be it a “coyote,” a consul, or border agent, do you pay? What happens when the promised job turns out to have a very different pay rate and look? How much does it cost to move between seasonal jobs in the United States, and who controls access to them? Does the right to quit, or to flee, even exist if you do not have access to alternative jobs, do not speak the language, and have no friends for hundreds of miles distant?Footnote 28
Questions about the commerce of migration and the business of human trafficking, which we will return to in the final section, not only suggest how manufactured global migrations have been, but also how salient the power of animal nature remains in narrating such movements. Labor contractors along the US-Mexico border, the men and women who commodify migrants' passages, are known as “coyotes,” aptly capturing the predatory nature of their work but also naturalizing it. “Birds of passage,” meanwhile, are imagined as passive victims, who move not out of choice but because they are instinctually driven to move. Michael Piore's description of seasonal migrants captures well the passivity he imagined when applying the term “birds of passage” to them. “The migrants themselves … typically cannot speak the language of the host country,” Piore writes. “Often they are unschooled and illiterate even in their own language; they sometimes come from backward rural areas with little contact with the kind of urban industrial environment where they work and live.”Footnote 29 Even if the broad brushstrokes of Piore's claims about language were accurate in 1979, Piore's interpretation of migrants' backwardness made it easier for him and others to see them as an undifferentiated mass of migrants or a flock of birds flooding across national borders.
Rather than thinking of immigrants as “birds of passage,” we might instead ask how nonhuman nature, and especially commons, shape and sustain migrations to and through nations and continents. Our challenge should not be to find a better metaphor in nature to describe border-crossers—are elephants actually more transnational than chickens?—but to explore the connections to nature that foment human migrations in the first place. Beginning in basic terms, where does the food and water come from that sustains migrants while on the move? Who controls that food, and who supplies it? What kinds of access, if any, do migrants possess to commons' landscapes and how do they shape the contours of coercion and freedom in migration? For answers, I turn to the work of environmental historians, who have more directly engaged the challenge of historicizing the commons and the many human and nonhuman actors who inhabit them.
Transnational Migrants, National Commons
At first glance, North American environmental historians have made important strides towards writing a history of commons' landscapes and the many “commoners” who occupy them. Although Frederick Jackson Turner did not call the frontier a “commons,” he did conceive of it in terms that Garret Hardin would have recognized: as a landscape of unsettled “free” land from which all inhabitants drew sustenance. The problem with Turner's commons formulation, of course, was that he also effaced one of the great crimes in Western history: the violent expropriation of indigenous people from the commons, a process of conquest he called a triumph of “civilization” over “savagery.”Footnote 30 In Turner's version, Native peoples also expressed the fate of anyone who resisted the “progress” associated with privatizing the commons. The tragedy, if there was one in Turner, was not conquest itself but the end of a frontier commons that had long defined the US nation's character.
Garret Hardin was one of the first to describe Turners' progressive narrative as a tragedy. He was followed by a generation of “new” historians of the West who also reversed Turner's progressive telos, debunking the nationalistic assumptions that pervaded his narrative. Perhaps the most pointed and brilliant critique of both Turner and Hardin was written by historian Louis Warren, whose book The Hunter's Game examined the consequences of transforming local commons into national ones. For Hardin, the “tragedy” of the commons was a product of democratic access, a circumstance that could only be rectified with “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” For Warren, by contrast, the tragedy of resource depletion began as a problem of theft within the commons, as powerful national actors dispossessed local ones, who continued to resist state and national law with acts of arson and poaching. Warren's arguments about the connections between environmental and social “tragedies” were given fuller explication in Karl Jacoby's prize-winning book, Crimes against Nature. In the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon, Jacoby linked the creation of a “national commons” to a longer history of enclosure and class conflict within nature.Footnote 31 Warren and Jacoby both used what were pervasive moral sentiments at the World Social Forum—that the problems of poverty and environmental destruction were intimately related—to complicate any progressive narratives about the creation of a national commons in the United States. There were no easy heroes or villains in Warren's or Jacoby's complex narratives, but instead a host of local and extralocal actors seeking to claim, occupy, and possess commons' resources.Footnote 32 Once dispossessed by conservationists, commoners could become murderers and destroyers of game, even if their grievances were “moral” in terms that E.P. Thompson might recognize.Footnote 33
One can imagine a variety of responses to Warren's and Jacoby's work in Belém. On the one hand, their insistence on the inextricability of environmental and social injustice would have resonated among most attendees, as would their critique of Garret Hardin's Malthusian assumptions and Turner's ethnocentrism. Warren's and Jacoby's awareness of the strengths and limits of national commons also illuminates the tensions that emerged between indigenous activists and Brazilian environmental authorities as well as the forum's ambivalent relationship to politicians. At the same time, WSF activists might have expressed disappointment with Jacoby's and Warren's national frames of research and analysis. Part of that resolutely national focus reflects methodological assumptions at the heart of the discipline, as well as conceptual assumptions about where “commons” nature resides. Environmental historians have traditionally sought to make nature visible by examining fixed landscapes where nature does not move. Jacoby makes his story a national one using a comparative method, building careful comparisons of three different kinds of landscapes vital to the nation's commons: forests, mountains, and deserts. In each case study, however, commons and most commoners do not migrate or travel. Migrants are conspicuous in Warren's story, by contrast, especially in the book's opening chapter, which features Italian workers who killed game warden Seeley Houk in Pennsylvania. But like Jacoby, Warren focused on a fixed locale and the class conflicts that creating national commons generated.Footnote 34
More recently, environmental historians have begun to grapple with nature that moves or which traverses national boundaries, opening up new kinds of narratives. Sam Truett, for example, has written a beautiful environmental history of one portion of the US-Mexican border that effectively views the political work of the border from both sides of the line, restoring nature to its primary importance across national borders. Lissa Wadewitz similarly explores the political mischief that accompanied efforts to divide a single salmon fishery on the US-Canadian border. Kristen Wintersteen, in turn has written an outstanding dissertation examining the competing national legal claims to fisheries in the Humboldt current, the rich cold water upwelling that nurtures one of the richest estuaries in the Pacific Ocean. Joseph Taylor, meanwhile, has examined environmental historians' efforts to bend terms like the transnational to their narratives, considering how migratory species do and do not explode national boundaries, as has Douglas Sackman in an excellent overview of environmental historians' longstanding efforts to foreground the transnational in their narratives. Such efforts do not purport to make “another world possible,” but they do underscore the need to investigate a history of commons that is not national or local in character. None of these environmental historians explicitly discuss a global commons, but their work begins to investigate one of the central imaginaries in Belém: a commons that extends beyond national confines and indeed transcends any particular local interest. But what role commoners or migrants might play in shaping, managing, and even creating a global commons remain largely unaddressed topics in even the most transnational environmental history.Footnote 35 As in most immigration and labor history, the topic of a global commons and its relationship to migrant workers remains only partially imagined and researched.Footnote 36
The challenge of linking global commons and migrant workers within either immigration or environmental history, then, is both empirical and conceptual. On the one hand, historians have frequently deemed global commons and migrants as empirically distinct topics: Migrant workers ostensibly have little to do with Arctic sea ice. But the greater challenge has been conceptual. Commons have been historicized largely in cartographic and national terms, as nation-bound landscapes whose nature and commoners are fixed in space and place. Although there are important exceptions to that generalization, such as scholars who study fisheries, the dominant debates about the history and future of the commons revolve around fixed landscapes within political boundaries of nations. The commoners that have been at the heart of Garret Hardin's tragedy and of Elinor Ostrom's brilliant recasting of that problem, for example, have all been local actors who do not move. Indeed, the main threat to the commons in Ostrom's account arises solely from transnational migrants, markets, and institutions that threaten the capacity of locals to protect commons' resources. Given that conceptual tension, it seems virtually impossible to see any common ground between global commons and migrant workers. To understand how we might rethink the apparent disconnection between them, I return to the WSF as well as consider the history of human trafficking.
Trespassing Migrants, Global Commons
To better understand how we might conceptualize a global commons that migrant workers see and use, I turn to the work of political and literary theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, whose books have been inspired by World Social Forums and in turn have shaped the strategies for sustaining and growing the multitude that attends each year. In Common Wealth, Hardt and Negri use a notion of the common to link disparate ecological habitats and political struggles across the planet. For Hardt and Negri, the common is not a plural subject but a single holistic center, comprising not only the nonhuman nature that has remained uncommodified, but also the community of human actors that have managed and renewed these naturescapes.Footnote 37 The common wealth generated by commoners does not happen spontaneously, but rather flourishes when a multitude of actors succeed in nurturing and managing commons' resources. For Hardt and Negri, the common includes not only uncommodified or “first nature,” as William Cronon puts it in Nature's Metropolis, but also portions of “second nature,” the built landscapes and public infrastructures that comprise cities.Footnote 38
By mapping a common that effectively traverses first and second nature as well as necessarily links commons to commoners, Hardt and Negri identify important starting points for conceptualizing how migrant workers use and shape global commons. First, global commons are intrinsically connected to the habitats that migrant workers traverse and occupy, however briefly. When workers migrate, they do not become “birds,” but rather, by trespassing boundaries of property and national sovereignty, they make visible landscapes that are in practice common to a host of human actors, local and extralocal alike. Many of those landscapes have public uses—roads, thoroughfares, railroad lines, and parks, for example—but many more are officially private or nationally exclusive. But because many migrant workers trespass to survive, they expand the boundaries and contours of what might be seen and understood as common. Second, migrant workers connect the local commons they use into a broader patchwork of naturescapes linked not only by global commoners, but also by the species, foodstuffs, and things they transport. Corn, blackberries, pigs, and weeds of various kinds have each spread across the planet not only by a process of ecological conquest discussed by Alfred Crosby and others, but by migrant actors who were compelled to trespass boundaries of nation, sovereignty, and property in order to reach their destinations.Footnote 39
To recognize that both people and nature move in ways that have been historically intertwined does not mean migrant workers and global commons have also transcended national borders and boundaries, making nations unimportant or immaterial. Rather, it is to see nations and national commons as migrant workers and even migrating species do, from the outside looking in, as political landscapes they are obliged to trespass and occupy for the temporary or longer-term shelter they provide. Nations remain material political facts for both human and nonhuman actors. For every undocumented migrant within the United States, the nation matters not only when crossing its borders, but also when residing within it, as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has inexorably stepped up deportations by deputizing local authorities to apprehend undocumented peoples.Footnote 40 Recognizing trespass as a hallmark of migrant workers' experience privileges a transnational vantage upon both migrant workers and global commons, making visible relationships between migrants and nature that are frequently obscured by boundaries of property and nationhood. Locating a global commons, then, is not so much a utopian imaginary of finding a world without borders, but a project of seeing how and where migrant men and women use, find, and create commons that are indispensable to their movements and communities, even if they must trespass to locate these elusive and transitory “commons.”Footnote 41
Rather than valorizing trespass or defending migrant workers and the global commons they reveal in utopian terms, we do better to investigate the histories of migrant workers and the commons they have used to survive. To understand how trafficked migrants and commons have been intimately related in the past and the present, we need to consider how commons have at distinct moments both facilitated and subverted the power of human traffickers to control migrant workers' journeys and labor. For a great many migrant workers in the arid North American West, the commodification of their mobility between jobs and across space have not only created remarkable forms of coercive power but have also been rooted in the character of local common landscapes. When Greek worker Louis Lingos quit his padrone-controlled job in Nevada in 1912, he walked for fifty miles through the desert without water or food, burning his luggage to stay warm. When he arrived back in Salt Lake City, weeks later, he paid his labor agent compatriot another $20 to get a job building municipal sewers. Here the politics of immigrant workers' labor mobility was both expansive and coercive: Mobility fueled padrone profits and bondage.Footnote 42 It was not only immigrants' access to commons landscapes that mattered, but also what they encountered in them: a commons of rock or of plentiful wild game?
For many trafficked migrants, what the common contains has not been self-evident, but a matter of discovery under necessity. In the fall of 2002, I interviewed an undocumented migrant in a former sharecropper's shack outside of Smithfield, North Carolina, where he was living with seven other coworkers picking cucumbers.Footnote 43 Juan's story of how he had arrived there made the current accommodations—a leaky structure without running water, no toilet, moldy mattresses on the floor, and a single naked light bulb—seem grandiose. Juan was trafficked even before leaving his native village in Monterrey, Mexico, where he paid a coyote several thousand dollars to cross the border into the US. Upon arriving in North Carolina, Juan discovered that he had to pay additional money to a crew boss just to receive his subminimum wage job. When Juan had managed to pay off his debts, a remarkable task given how much the crew boss charged him for food and board, the crew boss held a gun to Juan's temple and told him he could never quit. Juan endured the oppressive work a little longer until the crew boss decided to pay his crew not with scrip but with crack cocaine. Juan dug a hole through broken floor boards and under the barbed wire that the crew boss had placed around their shack and ran for four days through the farms and fields of eastern North Carolina, trespassing and foraging for food and water at every turn. He left during blackberry time and was fortunate to find food in scattered garbage cans and dumpsters on the edges of small towns. Juan eventually found compatriots near Raleigh, fifty miles later, who were members of the Farm Laborer Organizing Committee (FLOC) and who clothed and fed him, beginning a new journey as an undocumented union man in North Carolina.
For many trafficked migrants, past and present, finding or even seeing commons have been an essential part of what might be called the political ecology of migration. At the dawn of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, many of the first working-class subjects were orphans, trafficked out of urban parishes in London to factory districts in Yorkshire and Leeds. One of the most powerful personal accounts of these journeys is the story of one Robert Blincoe of St. Pancras Parish in London, who was sold by his parson to a Yorkshire cotton factory in 1799 and put to work in the spinning room at the young age of eight. At the center of Blincoe's published biography are visions of commons closely connected to his quest for freedom. He was initially tricked into leaving the St. Pancras workhouse by promises of roast beef every day and breaks for berry picking in the summer. Upon discovering gruel three meals a day, Blincoe ran away, searching for food along roadways and begging from strangers. He found respite and brief comfort from one family, who fed him bread and pudding and put him to bed, only to sell him back to the mill owner for a handsome reward the next morning. For Blincoe and thousands of poor British children and tenant families like him, by 1800, the British commons had been definitively enclosed, though memories and aspirations of access to them endured.Footnote 44
Promises of access to a blackberry commons highlight the importance of seasonal food resources that have long nurtured migrants' aspirations as well as their actual journeys. Blackberries represent an especially interesting example of a food commons that has been truly globalized, thriving as they do along thoroughfares, railroad beds, fence lines, and forest edges across several continents in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. Native to Northern Europe and North America, blackberries have thrived on the ecological disturbances that intensive agriculture, animal husbandry, urbanization, and human migrations have generated. Equally important, they represent one of the most significant forms of a domesticated plant which has “gone wild” and become integral to the diet of a number of wild bird species as well as common mammals including possums, squirrels, and even bears across several continents. As such, they represent an unusual example of the resilience of commons' nature, how it can in effect resist the tragedy of the commons so well told and rehearsed by Garret Hardin and others. The more blackberries are picked and eaten, whether by human or nonhuman actors, the more they proliferate in edge habitats, thriving precisely because of their capacity to feed, sweeten, and nurture migrant people and wildlife. Like the migrant men and women who consume them on the go, and spread their seeds in the process, blackberries have not declined as better known and more visible commons have been enclosed. To the contrary, they have proliferated precisely because of their adaptability and symbiotic relations with the tastes of several migrating species, human and nonhuman alike.
Conclusion
Activists at the WSF or theorists writing about it might have a hard time recognizing blackberry patches as viable commons. Thinking of global commons without a clearly legible group of human actors regulating access to them seems to contradict the central premise of how Ostrom, Hardt, and Negri find solutions to the “tragedy of the commons,” the shared or informal governance of the commons that only local actors generate. Moreover, recognizing the opportunism and success of weed species like blackberries in adapting to human-generated disruption seems to naturalize the environmentally destructive practices unleashed by global capitalist development. But to insist that only local communities can or should shape the commons imposes a utopian expectation on our vision of global commons, one that like idealized notions of the transnational, obscures how migrants and commons have continually shaped each other in the past and the present. Indeed, to ignore the power of migrant people and weedy nature in transforming global commons is to miss some of the most powerful ironies and redemptive story lines that environmental history provides us: how edge habitats along fences, roads, and railroad lines have provided sanctuaries for both native and exotic species and starting points for environmental renewal. The reforestation of New England is just one example of the power of fence species to reclaim abandoned farmlands as forest faster than many observers ever predicted.
Rather than insisting on unitary definitions of the transnational and global commons in order to reflect utopian aspirations for how “another world” might be made sustainable, we are better served by thinking of both terms as analytical vantages that open up research topics and political challenges that desperately need our attention. Seeing commons and nations as trafficked migrant workers do compels historians and activists alike to recognize the power of unintended consequences within environmental and human history. Although migrant workers may not seem like effective managers of endangered habitats or wildlife, their creative strategies for survival on the road, whether conveying seeds or foraging food in private landscapes, have dramatically transformed what grows and flourishes in commons nature across the planet. To exclude them from discussions of commons nature because they are not “local” hampers our capacity to see how commons nature remain essential to workers' mobility and to the complex ecological change associated with it. The global commons that migrant workers of necessity discover through trespass is not a pristine wilderness inhabited by exclusively native species, but a polyglot of weedy hybrids. Recognizing the historical messiness at the heart of global commons' nature may seem to challenge its moral status or even sanction the continuing exploitation of commons' resources. But the trespasses of migrants across boundaries of nation and property also illuminate the limits of enclosure and the enduring adaptability of nonhuman nature, the “blackberry commons” that flourish not in spite of migrating people and nature but precisely because of them.
Seeing such fragments as a commons worth defending remains a political and moral challenge that must be placed alongside other pressing commons that are indeed imperiled by global capitalist development. To understand the political implications of these global commons, however, we must first see them as such, a challenge that many migrants themselves only partially recognize. After first reading about Robert Blincoe in the British Library, I took a walk toward the King's Cross railroad station in London, endpoint for the new chunnel service that is bringing thousands of new migrants to the city, many of them trafficked “slaves” according to British tabloids. I remember thinking that the modern politics of labor mobility seemed divorced from any sense of ecology, of any possibility or promise of “berry time.” Where, in London, after all, was a visible commons, let alone one that might be connected to global migrants and their needs? I kept walking, turning north and west. Crossing back over the massive railroad tracks a mile later, I encountered a small parish church named St. Pancras, the very place where Robert Blincoe's journeys had begun two centuries earlier. Not fifty yards from the back entrance to the parish graveyard stood an embankment next to the main railroad line. The season was late summer, and to my surprise I realized it was also blackberry time, as I saw a massive set of bushes covered with pints of ripe black fruit. I paused, thought about Blincoe's aspirations, then ate to my heart and stomach's content. The next day I returned, this time with a container, and encountered a traveler from Eastern Europe, lying in his sleeping bag near the back entrance to the parish. I told him about the berry patch, and he joined me in the harvest until a policeman passed by and chased both of us out of the berry patch, claiming we had endangered train traffic.Footnote 45
Is a global commons a source of freedom for migrants or an illusion? When immigrant workers become coerced, is it because they don't see a commons or because they have no option but to trespass? How public or privatized (and expensive) are the thoroughfares that carry migrants to and from varied landscapes? Here indeed are tensions that define the contemporary political ecology of migration: conflicts between public commons and private trespassing; between legal and illegal status; between cultural familiarity and political isolation, with lives existing in the shadow of laws, rights, commons, and freedom. But if a history of trafficked migrants and global commons can be put together, it suggests that commodification and the enclosure of commons' nature are incomplete processes at best, an insight that WSF participants would welcome or already understand, especially those living deep within the Amazon River basin. While migrants like Robert Blincoe and Juan may have suffered searching for a food commons, the blackberries along back roads of North Carolina and on the railroad tracks at St. Pancras suggest such commons remain alive, if scattered, seasonal resources for migrants and locals alike. Control over migrants' journeys and the traffic in bodies that migration has created are not permanent facts. Whether reversing the commodification of mobility means traveling “into the wild” or foraging urban blackberries, we do well to recognize the historical power and significance of migrant workers' trespasses and the global commons they have located and occasionally defended as citizens of the world.
