The “Migrant Victim Narrative”

For instance, with regards to the Migrant Victim Narrative, migrants and refugees using smuggling services are almost never only victims, because they need to overcome considerable obstacles and need strong willpower in order to bear the costs and risks usually involved in moving. Yet the images and stories of migrants dying while crossing deserts or seas, or of migrants abused and exploited by smugglers and employers, are the ones that dominate the headlines.

Without denying the realities of extreme suffering and exploitation, the problem is that such narratives typically deny human agency involved in most forms of forced and precarious migration or represent them as an irrational act. In reality, people can be victims and exert agency at the same time in an active effort to defy or overcome constraints. Most vulnerable migrant workers, including victims of trafficking, see an interest in migrating despite being exploited, if only because the alternative of staying at home was worse for them. Therefore, they avoid being ‘rescued’ as in practice this usually means deportation and loss of investments, income and livelihood (e.g., Costello 2015; O’Connell Davidson 2006; Weitzer 2000; Parreñas 2006). For this reason, one of the slogans of anti-anti-trafficking activists has even become ‘rescue us from our rescuers’ (de Haas 2023, 311).

The point is not to trivialize abuses and extreme exploitation, but that reducing migrants and refugees to passive victims is simplifying the reality. Crucially, this ignores the rather inconvenient truth that, for most of them, immigration is a rather deliberate investment into a better future, that most ‘victims’ have migrated out of their own will, essentially because leaving was still much more attractive than staying because of the real hope for a better future that migration represents for millions of people around the world, particularly in the form of labour opportunities and the ability to send remittances back home (Agunias 2009).

This is not to morally justify human rights abuses, or to deny states’ responsibilities in upholding the rule of law and preventing exploitation by criminals and employers, but to acknowledge a lived reality in which migrants exert their agency within such severe constraints.

The implicit underlying assumption often seems to be that migrants, particularly when they are perceived as poor, uneducated and non-Western, somehow do not know what they are doing and that they would have stayed at home if only somebody had told them about the terrible circumstances in which they have ended up. On a deeper level, this seems based on often barely conscious, colonial stereotypes of non-Western people as somehow less capable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves (see Said 1978), or to act in their own best interests. In other words, such patronizing, condescending victimhood narratives continue to portray the non-Western and low-skilled other as ‘less rational’ who must be ‘sensitized’ and ‘informed’ about what is best for them: staying at home. . . .

de Haas, H. (2024). Changing the migration narrative: On the power of discourse, propaganda and truth distortion. IMI Working Paper No. 181/PACES Project Working Paper No. 3. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam (accessed online at https://www.migrationinstitute.org/publications/changing-the-migration-narrative-on-the-power-of-discourse-propaganda-and-truth-distortion)