Communities of Resistance Migrant Organizing and Transnational Campaigning Past and Future

This volume discusses how the ‘migrant’ identity is unstable and ill-defined. And yet often, together with its companion terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’, it becomes a focus for organizing. In this context, the fuzziness of the term ‘migrant’ can be in productive tension with ideas of ‘national communities’, as it establishes connections between people who experience immigration controls and who come from different countries. Moreover, migrants embody and facilitate connections between multiple issues, from extraction to dictatorship, that stretch across borders. What this means in practice is explored in this interview with Brid Brennan, who coordinates the Corporate Power project at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. She has a long history of organizing with migrant workers across Europe and participates in the Facilitation Work Group of the Transnational Migrant Platform – Europe (TMP-E). Bridget Anderson held this interview with Brid in November 2023.

Q: Brida, you’ve been an active campaigner for the rights of migrants and refugees in Europe for more than 40 years. Can you start by telling us how you came into this field, and what the context was?

I entered this field through engagement with the Commission for Filipino Migrant Workers (CFMW), established as an international foundation in the Netherlands in 1979. It was a response to Filipino migration to Europe, that had really picked up in the 1970s. This was the time of the Marcos dictatorship or, as it was then called in the Philippines’ liberation movement, ‘the US–Marcos dictatorship’. Marcos developed the export of labour as a major pillar of the Philippine economy – which it continues to be to this day. This meant Filipino migrant workers, like seafarers, construction workers, medical staff and domestic workers, became major actors in the restructuring of the global labour supply, especially in Europe, the US and the Middle East.

At the same time, Europe became home to Filipino political refugees fleeing persecution. Many of these were organizers, and they became involved in establishing the international solidarity networks of Philippines support groups alongside volunteers and missionaries who had returned from the Philippines after being active in civil society organizations there. Together, they started supporting the organizing of migrant communities. This began with pilot programmes in Rome and London, which fought for resident rights and against deportation and the compulsory remittances demanded by President Marcos’ Executive Order 508. These campaigns then linked up with grassroots initiatives and migrant groups in other European countries. In 1985 the International Office of the CFMW was established in Amsterdam.

It’s worth saying that the Philippines is a highly diverse country with more than 120 languages, so even though I talk about the Filipino community, I don’t want to suggest it is a homogenous group. Indeed, it was in the Netherlands in the context of the seafarers’ migration that Filipinos from Luzon and Visayas met and collaborated with Filipinos from the Muslim Bangsamoro region in Mindanao, where for many years there had been struggles for independence and autonomy.

The CFMW wanted to facilitate the organizing and networking of Filipinos especially, but not only, in London, Rome, Barcelona and Athens, where there were many Filipino migrant workers. We collaborated with the Philippine Seafarers Assistance Programme to support Filipino seafarers often working on the huge ships docking at Rotterdam, Hamburg and Piraeus. That was my introduction to the migrant scene, starting in the 1980s when I was a member of CFMW’s Women’s Committee and supported the publication of the monthly Kababayan newsletter.

This combination of international solidarity work and migrant organizing was not without its tensions. Migrant workers sometimes felt that their struggles as workers or their role as political activists were not sufficiently acknowledged, and refugees could be impatient that migrant self-organizations prioritized organizing and campaigning around their rights in Europe above campaigning for solidarity with the Philippines’ democratic struggle. Conversely, some migrant organizations, while drawing on the Philippines’ rich organizing tradition, shied away from being extensions of Philippine political movements and parties. But overall, both strands of work were complementary and drew on a strong tradition of Filipino community and political organizing, remaining deeply connected in their different ways with the political situation in the Philippines.

And this connection with politics in what we now call the Global South was not confined to the Philippines. I realized this when I worked for a time in the CFMW London office. In the UK in particular, activists and community organizers from the 1950s onwards had taken colonialism’s legacy as central to their work. They were highly attuned to the connections between empire and the politics of race and migration. ‘We are here because you were there’, as Ambalavaner Sivanandan used to say. For migrants and those working in solidarity with them, the connection between immigration law and racism was direct – immigration law was racist and there was a continuity between colonialism and immigration controls.

Q: So how did the migrant organizing develop after the establishment of CFMW? And can you tell me some of the achievements?

The CFMW had a clear class focus, but the specifics of organizing varied depending on the challenges faced by migrants in different countries. In the UK, for instance, the issue of migrant domestic workers was very much to the fore – in fact that was, as I recall, how you and I first met! Domestic workers were not given visas independent of their employers, and if they left their employers, even in cases of severe exploitation and abuse, they were forced into illegality. So there was a self-organized group of domestic workers, and a support group set up to campaign for a change in immigration law and policy. We had strong allies in the trades union movement, especially TGWU,1 today’s Unite. This campaign was a good example of how Filipinos started to organize with other migrant and refugee communities, as this was a campaign for the rights of all migrant domestic workers, not only Filipinas.

The 1980s was a formative decade in that respect. The experience of the workplace was a transnationalized space where workers from all continents worked and lived the same exploitation and precarity of migration status, so migrant workers discovered the importance of organizing and acting together. Filipino migrant organizations were well linked with other migrant and refugee communities. So, in the Netherlands there was a lot of collaboration with Moroccan and Turkish migrant workers – in Italy, with Eritrean migrants and refugees, and in the UK we worked with groups like the African Refugee Housing Action Group and the Refugee Forum.

A very vibrant and active migrant community – what I would call a protagonist community – developed, which was alive to the importance of cross-community initiatives. One event I particularly remember was the Communities of Resistance Conference in London on 11 November 1989, co-convened by the Institute of Race Relations with other migrant, refugee and anti-racist organizations. The CFMW participated alongside groups based in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark and other countries, and we launched a Communities of Resistance campaign across Europe to contest the establishment of Fortress Europe and to demand equal rights and have this community recognized as a star on the EU flag.

In the 1980s, there was a lot of finding of common ground across different nationalities around struggles such as anti-deportation, anti-racism and for regularization, but by the late 1980s and early 1990s we were seeing the emergence of Fortress Europe and a new common language of racism and borders, and it was clear we needed cross-community organizing across Europe and not only at a country level. By the 1990s, Filipino migrant organizing had three components – organizing and campaigning around conditions of work, immigration status, and security and conditions of stay; campaigning for freedom and democracy in the Philippines; and building communities of resistance with other migrant communities. We’d also chalked up some victories, both individual anti-deportation campaigns and structural changes – like the UK migrant domestic worker campaign, which was won in 1997.

In November 1997, a Europe-wide conference was convened by the CFMW in Athens which launched the integrated Filipino Migrant Agenda for Europe and the Philippines, calling for equal rights in Europe and participative democracy and development in the Philippines. The conference established the Platform of Filipino Migrant Organizations in Europe, which had representation from Filipino migrant self-organizations across 14 countries on its council and the CFMW as its facilitating secretariat. One particularly important initiative was Panahon Na! meaning ‘The Time Has Come!’, the global campaign for the right to overseas voting and dual citizenship. Panahon Na! formed the International Coalition for Overseas Filipinos’ Voting Rights, which sent three international delegations – from Europe, the US and the Middle East – to lobby the Senate and House of Representatives in the Philippines. The campaign was the first time the collective, cross-continental voice of overseas Filipinos reverberated in the country’s political arena, and in the Philippines it gave high visibility to migrants as significant actors. It also got attention from other migrant communities who built on it and launched similar campaigns towards their own governments. The campaign was won and the law was enacted in 2003.

What I am highlighting here is that the development of Filipino migrant organizing was a process that had roots in particular political contexts – in the Philippines, in specific so-called host countries and in the EU – but that crucially Filipino migrants were active protagonists. They were engaging with other migrant communities and with citizens’ organizations, and through this transnational activism, they were enriching Filipino political culture and demands.

Q: What you say about the global networking is really interesting. Has this global organizing continued? What are its aims and who does it direct its demands to?

We need to set migrant global networking in the context of global networking and movement building more generally. I’m thinking particularly of the World Social Forum (WSF) and its affirmation ‘Another world is possible – let’s build it!’ Participation in the WSF and its regional gatherings exposed migrant and refugee organizations to new political horizons and a wide range of political traditions and struggles. One of the key developments arising from these experiences was the co-convening of the TMP-E in 2008. This was set up to bring together diverse migrant communities and build transnational alliances. As we’ve already seen with the Filipino community, when migrant and refugee people move, they bring their political, cultural and religious roots with them and plant them in new ground. They also connect different kinds of struggles – against dictatorship, extractivism, climate change, conflict and war. So the TMP-E draws on knowledge, experiences and capacities – being a migrant/refugee, taking on the struggles for resident rights, labour rights, against racism; relations with family and community and through this a direct, lived connection to political developments in their country of origin; and the capacity to forge transnational community relations with other nationalities, including with citizens in the country of residence.

In 2016, the TMP-E called a Europe-wide conference in Amsterdam with representatives from migrant and refugee networks in the African and Latin American communities, the Europe Platform of the Moroccan Organizations, and the network of the CFMW and Platform of Filipino Migrant Organizations in Europe. Also involved were trade unions – the Belgian Christian Trade Union, ACV/CSC; and SOC-SAT,2 Spain – and La Via Campesina (LVC), a global movement of peasant and rural workers struggles. The LVC became involved through their organizing of migrant rural workers, such as the Moroccan women in vegetable production in southern Spain, those at the US–Mexico border and internal migrants in the rural economies of Bangladesh and India. This is proving a very positive collaboration. There has been a lot of learning and sharing of organizing strategies. The LVC takes an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist approach to its analysis and organizing, including articulating very specific strategies on corporate issues and the development of alternatives on the ground. Working with a global movement active in both the Global South and North is very generative for migrant workers’ struggles, at the same time as working with migrants is generative for LVC. The partnership is an example of demigrantizing and finding common ground with engaged citizens, including around the current economic model and corporate domination.

The Amsterdam meeting was called to develop a strategy addressing the EU’s immigration policy, captured in Sarkozy’s statements on zero tolerance for illegal immigrants,3 and to challenge the European response to the forced displacement following the Syrian war. We also wanted to strategize about the international direction of the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and Global Compact for Refugees, which were then in development. The key international body leading these global compact initiatives was the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). While some migrant organizations had participated at the beginning of the GFMD process, there were growing concerns about its nature. It is led by states but has non-transparent partnerships with corporations and the private sector and although it operates under the umbrella of the United Nations, it has no clear lines of accountability. Moreover, we saw this as encapsulating a shift from internationally binding human rights instruments to non-binding global compacts.

After two days of lively debate, the Amsterdam conference concluded with two resolutions – to initiate a process with the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal and to challenge the proposed global compacts on migration and refugees.

Q: Can you tell me a bit more about the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) and what it meant for migrant organizing?

The PPT’s founding document is the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, adopted in Algiers in 1976, which demands the freedom of all peoples in the face of new forms of imperialism and domination. It was a response to the threats to the achievements of decolonization processes and the efforts to establish the New International Economic Order. The PPT was founded in 1979 at the last session of the Second Russell Tribunal on dictatorships in Latin America, convened by the Italian senator Lelio Basso, who had also been a key player in the development of the Algiers Declaration. It is a permanent institution that listens to peoples who are forced to deal with the absence of law and the impunity of the powerful. It highlights state and corporate violations in economic, ecological and systemic crimes by organizing sessions, or hearings, where an international panel of experts listens to witnesses. It isn’t only – or even mainly – about the hearings though. What is key is that it brings people together around particular issues and introduces groups to new networks and struggles. It creates a meeting space for practitioners, people’s organizations, lawyers and activist scholars to engage in new analysis and strategizing. It is a kind of organizing and mobilizing tool that builds new relationships. Leah Bassel has written very interestingly about this in her article on the London PPT hearing.4

The PPT was known to some of the migrant and refugee organizations and movements convening the Amsterdam conference, as it had a history of engagement with peoples of the Global South. From the perspective of the TMP-E and the participant organizations and networks, the PPT was an opportunity to project a public voice that could contest the dominant policy discourse and challenge the role of law in legitimizing the violence of the migration and refugee policy regime of the EU and member states. The 45th Session of the PPT on The Violations with Impunity of the Human Rights of Migrant and Refugee Peoples, held from 2017 to 2020, was migrant and refugee led and undertaken with engaged citizen solidarity organizations and networks. Several of the organizations who participated in the Amsterdam 2016 conference agreed to be co-convenors. This meant developing an overarching framework and an indictment as well as a strategy of mobilization and outreach communication, but also organizing the hearings, finding resources, and coordination. Communities were encouraged to come forward and request a hearing, and in the end seven hearings were held, two in Barcelona, and one each in Palermo, Paris, London, Brussels and Berlin. Some 500 organizations, networks and movements participated, with organizing committees at city and national level undertaking the preparation of specific hearings, and a PPT Working Group, anchored by the TMP-E, that facilitated preparation, communication and follow-up. One of the overarching aims was movement building, so it was important that the individual hearings were not separate events but part of an organic process that built on what had gone before. That meant connecting different hearings, but also respecting the specificity of each hearing and using this to strengthen the capacity of organizations in the different cities and countries and to support the development of alliances across issues and across borders.

The hearings confirmed the systematic and widespread violations of human and people’s rights and identified system crimes in the implementation of the EU immigration, securitization, externalization and militarization of borders policy.5 The PPT process helped expose the systemic nature of the oppression of migrants, but it also highlighted the protagonism of migrant resistance and facilitated the building of migrant transnational communities together in collaboration with engaged citizens. It was very enriching for strategizing and developing a strong sense of migrant and refugee organizations as human rights bearers and defenders. Indeed, one of the most significant outcomes was an understanding and a recognition by the PPT that migrants and refugees are a people – a people imagining a more just world, taking an active role and seeking partners to begin to build it and move from inequality to equality and from injustice to justice, not only for migrants and refugees but for all peoples.

Q: What is the PPT countering? What is it responding to in terms of debate?

We can read the movement of people, whether as migrant or refugee, as a great global protest against the unsustainability of the current neoliberal capitalist world order. It is also a stark reminder of how deeply unfinished the decolonization process is and how this has been prolonged by the false solutions of trickle-down development. The movement and presence of migrant and refugee people create a significant learning opportunity and a chance to forge new relations, knowledge and strategies. Migrant and refugee people individually and collectively are a reservoir of rich politico-social experiences that demonstrate not only resistance and resilience, but also the creativity and transformation capacity so urgently needed to reinvigorate the movements in the Global North.

But in the face of this opportunity, we are confronted with a loud babble that places migrant and refugee people outside even when they are inside European society. By babble, I mean conflicting voices all speaking at the same time. You have the official speak that says migrant and refugee and Black and Brown people are not fully persons and not deserving of social support or legal assistance. They are represented as criminals or terrorists or people smugglers, and a threat to the security of Europe’s citizens. Exceptions can be made for Ukrainian refugees or for highly skilled – for which read, middle-class – people, but even people in these categories shouldn’t assume that they will be secure in the welcome extended. Then there’s the media speak – headlines and interviews about disaster and death, frequently without context and implying people are irresponsible when they bring their children on precarious journeys or are the victims of exploitation. And there’s the everyday forked tongue speak – ‘We need you to do the dirty work, but you have to work for a pittance, or without a contract. And please no cooking of your own food in our neighbourhoods – it smells ghastly!’ Of course, there is also the voice of solidarity and welcome, and those speakers can risk criminalization themselves when they rescue or provide sanctuary.

However, the voice we heard in the PPT process was of organizations refusing to be bound by the representations of migrant/refugee as problem, as criminal, as terrorist. It asserted instead, as Gianni Tognoni, Secretary General of the PPT, put it, ‘migrant/refugee as human person, as human rights bearer, as defender of democracy’. I was struck by one of the witnesses who spoke at the London hearing. She was called Clara, and was an activist with the RMT6 trade union. She explained how Shell operations in Nigeria were implicated in impoverishment and displacement, leading people, including her, to seek work abroad. Describing her struggles as an undocumented woman, and the racism and abuse she experienced both from individuals and systemically, she denounced: ‘You can’t be a robber and call me a thief!’ At the launch of the PPT in Barcelona in July 2017, another witness represented the Senegalese street vendors of Barcelona, constantly pursued by police clearing the streets of illegalised vendors. They formed an association, trade union and livelihood cooperative, and successfully transformed their street-sheet into a label asserting that ‘No one is illegal’ – it promised those who bought from them that they would be doing so in solidarity with undocumented workers and those displaced by global capital. One of their leaders insisted that ‘We are all migrants and refugees – it is not a crime to migrate or seek refuge’. I was reminded of him when I read your introduction to this volume, as we can see this as exemplifying demigrantizing and claiming the right to be a worker in a worker-run cooperative.

Q: So where now for migrants in Europe?

I previously mentioned the GFMD. Midway through the PPT hearings, the GFMD presented two non-binding global compacts at its Marrakesh Summit – a Compact for Management of Migration (GCM) and a Compact for Refugees (GCR). This was a rubicon moment for migrant and refugee people’s organizations. As I said, some had originally engaged with the GFMD process, but became convinced that the GCM/GCR were just more of the same. Quite a number of civil society organizations welcomed and continue to engage with the global compacts, but those of us involved in the PPT process saw them as a legitimation of those same killing fields that were documented and identified as system crimes in the PPT hearings.

The LVC convened a People’s Summit at the Marrakesh Summit with participation from the TMP-E and migrant organizations, particularly from the Maghreb region and dealing with the Europe–Mediterranean borders. The People’s Summit made a strong statement that rejected these initiatives and proposed an alternative, a Global Pact of Solidarity for the Rights of Migrants and Refugees, premised on rights not profits or state and corporate interests. As well as a rejection of the state–private sector partnership to control migration envisaged by the global compacts, the Global Pact of Solidarity recognized the importance of popularizing a new narrative of migration, one that rejected criminalization and victimhood. We rejected the idea that migration is a problem and that migrants need to be helped by NGOs, and migrants insisted that they are protagonists who bring political opportunities and networks and new narratives to the places they move to. One of the ways we think about it is the demand and rallying cry to ‘Look with us not at us! Stand in our shoes and see our viewpoint to build a better world’.7

The Global Pact of Solidarity is a call to action that stretches into a future that migrant people will build together with citizens. It has become a popular organizing framework across borders and movements, particularly by helping link migrant and refugee struggles with efforts to fundamentally transform our social and economic relations across the planet. It’s also a living text, to be further developed in the light of new events and struggles. So, for instance, it was rewritten and commitments were reinvigorated with the introduction of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, 2020 – a European version of the global compacts. This specifically Fortress European version of the Global Compacts – EU legislation since June 2024 – is a priority campaign for the TMP-E related networks. With a horrible irony, this pact was announced at the very moment of the devastating fire at the Moria Camp in Lesbos, a catastrophe that underlined the normalization of the violations of the rights of migrants and refugees confined in sites without rights.8 At the time of this conversation, the EU pact is in the phase of finalization for full implementation, but there is considerable alarm on the ground that the model of Fortress Europe is being imposed now on Tunisia with disastrous consequences for the people of Tunisia and their relations with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.

All of which is to say that the Global Pact of Solidarity that was reiterated at the final hearing of the 45th Session of the PPT in Berlin in December 2020 is now taken as the focus of organizing across the network. It is an instrument for reaching out beyond Europe and for connecting with other global struggles for justice and has been the reference point for many summits and convergences. So in answer to your question, where now, I think the Global Pact of Solidarity has started to integrate migrant and refugee people and their organizations into new coalitions for global social justice, connecting migration with many other struggles. The next step is building on this.

Q: Can you be a bit more specific? What are the campaign priorities initiated by the pact, for instance?

We want to globalize the Pact of Solidarity in an action plan that links borders and regions. This was initiated at the Caravana March Summit Brussels (30 September to 1 October 20229) when we decided to hold two Europe-wide campaigns.

First is the campaign on regularization, which coordinates the now multiple struggles on regularization at national level. Its goals include the popularization of the new narrative drawn from the process of the PPT, and the contestation of the categories of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’. This is important, as a key problem with most regularization campaigns is that they remake the legal/illegal binary by their very success. Yes, they widen who is included in the ‘legal’ category, but they typically don’t challenge the binary itself and the border regimes that exclude and illegalize people. An alternative approach is to simply demand ‘work, housing, papers and rights’, as articulated by the Unione Sindacale di Base (an Italian trade union) – a demand that could equally be made by impoverished citizens across Europe, especially given austerity and the cost-of-living crisis of the past decade. The campaign led by migrants therefore reaches out to trade unions, cost-of-living crisis networks and climate movements.

The second campaign focuses its efforts against the militarization and externalization of borders. These can join up different anti-border and no borders campaigns in three regions – Europe, Africa and the Middle East; the US and Mexico; and South-East Asia and South Asia. For example, there were important commemorations organized for the first anniversary of the massacre of at least 37 migrants and the deliberate injury of more than a hundred others on 24 June 2022 at the Nador–Melilla10 border, including at Nador and in Melilla. Organizations from across the region participated, including a big mobilization of the Association of the Relatives of the Dead and Disappeared, which is becoming a significant organizing and mobilizing space. Commemorative sites of killing fields and sites without rights – places of mass deaths at sea, land or desert, and massacres of migrant and refugee people on the move, such as Nador–Melilla and Cutro – are also becoming sites of transnationalized protest and struggle.

We see campaigns as spaces to deepen our analysis as well as invigorate our action, and as ways of helping to develop new networks and solidarities. Part of the new narrative we promote is to recognize the connective capacities of migrants. This is particularly important in a context of fragmentation across progressive social and political movements, some of which have become issue based or identitarian. Migrant organizing pushes against identitarianism, by its very nature – who counts as a migrant is, as you say in your introduction, not sharply defined and it is most definitely transnational. It also offers possibilities for developing joint strategies and convergence across the borders of states, interests and communities.

Q: What are your thoughts on migrant and scholarly collaboration?

The PPT was a great example of how the expertise of lived experience can be enriched and analysis deepened by perspectives of engaged academics. We learned more about the international economic and development model, the global restructuring of labour, gender, racism, international law and the law of the sea. Academics also served on the multidisciplinary bench of jurors. Through dialogue with scholars and experts, we generated new ways of framing migrant issues that came from grassroots experiences. For instance, we started thinking about how migrants can be confined in sites without rights, and that these are not only camps and detention centres but also workplaces, such as the domestic hells of live-in workers and the agricultural glasshouses for growing Europe’s fruit and vegetables.

The challenge for academics, especially those engaged in migration studies, and those still designated in our societies as migrants and refugees is to collaborate not only in contesting categorizations and the processes and relations that construct them – racism, nationalism, colonialism and imperialism – but in co-generating new strategies to win a more just and equal world. I appreciate that many migrants are academics and many academics are activists, but very often the questions posed to migrants and refugees are still designed principally to provide evidence-based arguments on the wrongs and impacts of migration policy. We can do better than that by drawing on migrants’ own understandings and analyses of their experiences of exploitation, barbarism and necropolitics. Perhaps we can blur the borders between academia/public scholarship and solidarity/activism11 so that the conceptual work done by migrants and refugees is recognized and the politics of the academic/public scholar is acknowledged.

Final note from Brid

This interview owes much of its insights to the collective knowledge, activism and art-ivism of colleagues and comrades, practitioners, experts and activist scholars in academe over decades of migrant organizing in social and political struggles. These initiatives and campaigns have been mainly, but not exclusively, in Europe and organically connected with struggles in different regions of the Global South.