The War on Migration

By Shahram Khosravi

Early on the morning of 30 September 2025, residents of the South Shore neighbourhood in Chicago witnessed a scene that could have come straight out of a dystopian Hollywood movie. About 300 federal agents rappelled from a military helicopter upon the roofs of residential buildings to chase migrants. This kind of scene has become commonplace in several cities in the United States. While Trump's first presidency focused on the militarisation of borders, his second is turning large cities into scenes of domestic clashes. Trump has described it as a “war from within” and said that “dangerous cities should become training grounds” for the military.[1] Deploying the National Guard in Democratic-led cities is part of his plan to crack down on what he describes as “left-wing terrorism.” Deploying the National Guard against political targets is reminiscent of the tragic deaths of four students at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 during an anti-Vietnam War protest.[2]

Across the globe, states increasingly use similar rhetoric and policies. What appears, at first glance, as the defense of the society has evolved into something far more insidious: a war against society itself. From daily harassments against a part of the people in the United States to the violence against Afghanistani migrants in Iran, and from mass deportations to the criminalization of asylum seekers globally, the logic of migration control is merging with strategies of internal repression. This phenomenon, as Nicholas De Genova[3] argues, resembles a form of “civil war,” where governments mobilize one part of the population against another. War on migration has become integral to the broader war apparatus.

Far from being an isolated development, today’s anti-migration politics must be understood as a continuation of older imperial projects. Borders have always functioned as instruments of domination, but in the current moment they are being weaponized with renewed intensity. Detention and deportation are no longer merely administrative measures: they have become tools of geopolitical bargaining and instruments of collective punishment. As such, the war on migration is inseparable from broader mechanism for imperial domination.

The scenes of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unidentified masked agents who kidnap people off streets with impunity display militarization of public spaces. The war that was initiated against undocumented migrants increasingly targets other groups, such as green card holders, asylum seekers, and even racialized citizens. Similarly, the right-wing politics across Europe has deepened polarization of societies. We can also see how migration becomes entangled with internal repression and geopolitical struggle in other places.

The ongoing catastrophic civil war in Sudan is not merely a domestic conflict; it is partly a consequence of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) ambitions to establish itself as a sub-imperial power in Africa, and partly a result of the European Union’s investment in combating migration. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been responsible for brutal massacres and the forced displacement of civilians in Sudan, receives support from the UAE. In its early stages, the RSF also benefited from EU-funded training and equipment, as it was tasked with cracking down on migration routes passing through northern Sudan.[4]

Another example: Following the US and Israeli military strikes against Iran in the summer of 2025, Iranian authorities intensified their crackdown on dissent. Minority communities, activists and migrant groups became particular targets of state suspicion. Afghanistani migrants who are already among the most vulnerable populations in Iran were scapegoated as alleged collaborators with Israel. Accused of espionage, they faced mass arrests, deportations, and collective punishment. Within a single month, over one million undocumented as well as documented people were expelled. Using Israel/US bombing, Iranian authorities created a moral panic in the society and mobilize one part of society against another. This punitive response reveals a broader dynamic: the more Iran faces military aggression from Western powers, the more it turns violence inward against its own residents. The war on migration unsettles societies and blurs the boundaries between “citizen” and “foreigner,” “neighbor” and “enemy.”

The consequences of this policy extend beyond Iran’s borders. In September 2025, the United Nations warned that the forced return to Afghanistan risks strengthening the militia forces. Deportees under conditions of poverty and insecurity become vulnerable to recruitment by extremist groups.[5] This means aggravation of domestic conflicts inside Afghanistan. Using precarious legal status of returnees or migrants to exploit them in wars has been practiced by the U.S during the Iraq war and by Iran in Syria.

The endless war in the Middle East and the war on migration (or rather part of the society) belong to the very same imperial project. While the former is a debordering project, the latter is grounded on proliferating borders. In September, 2025, Thomas Barrack, the US special envoy for the Middle East, stated that for Israel, borders in the Middle East are “meaningless" and that the Israelis “will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect... their borders”6  At the same time, border walls get higher and thicker for migrants and refugees.

Contemporary imperialism wages war wherever it pleases—wars without end, wars without borders. These interventions bring mass destruction, displace entire communities, and render stable, livable futures impossible. Since 2001, the US-led “War on Terror” alone has displaced an estimated 30 million people.[6] But who are these displaced people? Are they political refugees, deserving protection or “economic migrants,” deserving nothing? 

During his talk at the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September 2025, President Trump dedicated a part of his speech to attack migration and the Refugee Convention, remarks that were followed by his administration’s official who called for a global action against migration.

Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau argued that the 1951 Refugee Convention is outdated and has been abused and “the asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws, and we just have to be realistic about this.”[7] The main argument in the war on migration is that the asylum system is exploited by economic migrants. Who are economic migrants? The poor.

One of the most persistent myths structuring contemporary migration policy is the distinction between the “political refugee” and the “economic migrant.” This binary is not only codified in law but also loaded with moral judgment: the latter is cast as undeserving and opportunistic, the former as legitimately in need of protection. Yet this binary collapses under scrutiny. Poverty is not a neutral or accidental condition. It is often the outcome of deliberate political and economic structures, and can function as a form of persecution in itself.

Even if the 1951 Refugee Convention does not list poverty as an independent ground for protection, poverty has always been structurally embedded in the five recognized grounds: persecution based on race; religion; nationality; political opinion; or membership in a particular social group. Impoverishment is systematically produced through discrimination, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. Poverty does not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of political failure, social exclusion, and deliberate policy, often targeted at specific groups. Protracted poverty is a political project designed to endure because it is profitable.

Racial and religious minorities such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Baloch in Iran, Hazaras in Afghanistan, or the Roma in Europe are not merely victims of violence; they are also systematically denied access to livelihoods, education, and basic rights. Their poverty is a direct expression of persecution.

To ignore poverty in refugee law is therefore to ignore one of the most common and devastating forms of persecution. Persecution does not always begin with bullets or prisons. It begins with the denial of livelihoods, the confiscation of land, the withdrawal of social protections, and exclusion from the labour market. These conditions do not merely precede violence; they constitute it. The poor are those least capable of protecting themselves, least able to flee, and least likely to find legal recourses. Thus, poverty is not incidental to persecution but central to it.

So-called “economic migration” is caused by politics and not merely economy. Poverty is an outcome of corruption, inequality, class differences and unjust resource distribution. In most migrant sending societies, the boundary between politics and the economy is blurred. While drought may be a natural condition, famine is a consequence of political circumstances. People who starve in a famine, in fact, suffer from insufficient entitlement to food; they do not starve because no food is available. They simply do not have the right to have food. This is pre-eminently political engineering.

Fleeing famine in Gaza, or enduring long-term unemployment in Iran caused by decades of US-led sanctions are forms of political persecution. Likewise, fleeing Pakistan because of environmental disasters driven by industrial climate change, largely caused by the Global North, is also political persecution. The same can be said for other nations whose people are directly or indirectly displaced by fossil capitalism or imperial wars.

A war against marginalised migrants is expanding across Europe. The current British government does not even hide the fact that its reform of the UK’s migration system is targeting poor migrants. Member of Parliament Nigel Farage said that the UK should not be “the world's food bank” and that it is not the country’s responsibility to provide welfare for people coming in from all over the world.[8] In order to crack down on poor migrants most effectively, the government is seeking to follow the model employed in the United Arab Emirates, where some of the most cruel policies against migrant workers can be seen. Furthermore, the new financial requirements (increasing the salary threshold to around £60,000 — nearly double the median UK salary of £31,602) could make almost half a million people deportable, despite having lived in the UK for decades.[9]

To preserve refugee protection, international law must evolve, not by abandoning its foundations but by expanding its vision to recognize the structural forms of violence that create displacement. Only then can it respond adequately to the realities of our time, where exclusion and impoverishment have become weapons of war.

Borders today do not merely demarcate territory; they operate as weapons of exclusion, dispossession, and submission. As the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy in the Middle East Thomas Barrack put it in September 2025: “They’re fighting over borders and boundaries. It’s not what they’re fighting over; a border or boundary is the currency of a negotiation. The end result is, somebody wants dominance, which means somebody has to submit.”

The question, then, is about how the very forces and policies that make societies unliveable through division and partition can still frame the resulting crisis as something external—something called migration. How have distorted logics of border security and the empty rhetoric of peace come to dominate political common sense today? How can statements like “to help the “real” refugees we must abolish the Refugee Convention,” or “to avoid a war with Iran we must start one,” pass as credible politics?

Perhaps this is what Ann Laura Stoler calls colonial aphasia, a condition in which colonial and imperial violence is unnamed or misnamed.[10] It reflects not just a loss of memory, but a blockage in language itself: an inability, or refusal, to describe the cruelty and brutality unfolding in plain sight. This aphasia allows imperial power to reproduce itself, masked in the language of reason and humanitarianism. In doing so, it hides the truth of what is really at stake—a war not against enemies abroad, but against society itself.

And yet, even in these days characterized by colonial or imperial aphasia, forms of resistance persist. Those who have lived through displacement and persecution, crossing borders again and again, surviving exclusion and exile, carry with them strategies of endurance, ungovernability, and persistence. Palestinian Sumud, the steadfast refusal to surrender, offers a model for how to resist the logics of domination and push back against the dark forces. If refugee law is to remain meaningful, it must learn from these lived practices, expanding its vision to confront poverty, structural violence, and the weaponization of borders. The war on migration is, at its core, a struggle over control and domination. To defend the right to asylum is therefore not only to defend migrants; it is to defend society itself from the normalization of repression. In recognizing this, we also recognize that the fight against the war on migration is inseparable from the fight for democracy, justice, and peace.

Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Anthropology, Stockholm University. His research interests include the anthropology of Iran and the Middle East, migration, displacement and border studies. Among other works, he is author of The ‘Illegal’ Traveler: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (Palgrave), After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan) and the co-edited volume, Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below with Mahmoud Keshavarz (Pluto Press).

 Sources cited

[1] https://time.com/7321940/hegseth-trump-generals-meeting /

[2] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/may-4/national-guard-kills-four-at-kent-state

[3] De Genova, N. (2025). From border war to civil war: the despotism of the border and full-spectrum authoritarianism. Citizenship Studies 29 (3–4): 135–158.

[4] https://enoughproject.org/files/BorderControl_April2017_Enough_Finals.pdf

[5] https://kabulnow.com/2025/09/returnees-increase-risk-of-iskp-threat-as-millions-repatriated-to-afghanistan/

[6]https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2020/Displacement_Vine%20et%20al_Costs%20of%20War%202020%2009%2008.pdf.

[7] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/25/politics/trump-administration-says-global-asylum-system-broken

[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c930xypxpqpo

[9] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-uk-ilr-immigration-policy-nigel-farage-b2831087.html

[10] Stoler, A.L. (2011). “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France.” Public Culture 23 (1): 121-56.