In the next series of posts, I want think through Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program. This series is part of my broader project on Hannah Arendt‘s conception of the rootlessness of refugees, the condition in which refugees are uprooted from their geographic, cultural, and political homes.
In this post, I want to ask a few questions about the conceptual work “the private” is doing in PSR using Arendt’s view of the public/private distinction. In later posts, I want to connect these questions with Arendt’s views of social inclusion and collective responsibility. I also want to engage with others who are thinking about the political belonging of refugees. (Specifically I have in mind Ayten Gündogdu, whose interesting book Rightlessness in an Age of Rights I am reading now.)
Motivated by responsibility
One of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books is Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951. In the wake of the Syrian Refugee Crisis and the rise of populist movements, many people are returning to Origins. For a time in December 2016, Amazon ran out of copies!
In Origins, Arendt identifies the problem of rightlessness for refugees. Nation-states have historically been responsible for protecting human rights. Thus, when refugees lose the protection of their home state, they are rendered rightless and without a political community. Yet Arendt argues that refugees have a right to have rights, a right to political belonging. It is humanity that is responsible for protecting this right.
What does this mean, and how should it shape the way residents of Canada should think about refugee resettlement? This question is in the background of this discussion, and a question I want to return to in future posts.
The example of the Private Sponsorship program
PSR enables people or organizations to pool resources to resettle refugees. It’s a program for which the Canadian government has received positive international attention.
As the Canadian Council for Refugees describes, with the Government-Assisted Refugee program, “the government is fulfilling its international responsibility, on behalf of all Canadians, to protect refugees through resettlement.” With PSR, “Canadians can add to the numbers of refugees given a permanent home” (emphasis in original).
This quotation casts PSR as going beyond Canada’s responsibility to provide asylum to refugees. But, I’m curious about whether PSR might serve as an example of what Arendt means by humanity’s collective responsibility to guarantee refugees’ rights.
What’s private about the Private Sponsorship program?
My starting point for thinking about this is to consider what conceptual work the term “private” is doing in PSR. In her seminal work on political life, The Human Condition, Arendt (in)famously draws a rigid boundary between the public and the private. The public realm is the space for politics, where freedom appears, whereas the private realm is apolitical (or perhaps anti-political).
Key terms: Politics and freedom
Colloquially, “politics” often refers to the government and the way public institutions (e.g., the law, the economy) are organized to regulate matters of the public good, for the benefit of everyone in society. Arendt means something more. Politics is something we do; it emerges when community members come together in shared, public space with their peers to deliberate over the conditions of our shared life.
Relatedly, we often use “freedom” to mean “liberty,” the ability to follow our own view of what counts as a good life (within reasonable constraints to respect the liberty of others). Arendt has in mind something more robust than liberty when she talks about freedom. Freedom is something community members do by coming together in public space, each from their individual unique position, in common cause.
This joint enactment constitutes politics. This is part of why rightlessness is a problem for refugees. As Arendt argues, refugees have lost their political community where they can exercise their freedom and be recognized as fellow community members and also as distinct individuals.
The public dimension of PSR
If we read PSR with Arendt’s notions of freedom in mind, the program seems mis-named. It is a public endeavor in that individuals or groups come together to work toward a common cause. In this case, the cause is to ensure that a refugee family has the supports they need to get started in Canada.
Language like “community sponsorship” seems much more appropriate to how the program functions. Indeed, private individuals or single families cannot sponsor refugees. Sponsorship must be undertaken by community groups or by groups of at least five individual community members.
The private dimension of PSR
Against this reading, however, PSR may reinforce private concerns over public, political ones. The private realm is associated with the household. (Arendt has the Ancient Roman model of the household in mind, which shares many features with the contemporary heteronormative nuclear family.)
In contrast to the way that freedom characterizes the public sphere, the private realm of the household is the space of sameness, inequality, and consumption. This previous blog post introduces Arendt’s critique of the family with a focus on sameness and inequality. Below, I touch upon consumption.
According to Arendt, it doesn’t make sense to talk about freedom at home. The household is where the necessities of life are taken care of: eating, sleeping, caring for dependents, doing laundry, washing dishes, walking the dog. These tasks are consumptive in that they are cyclical, never-ending, always ongoing.
Sponsors promise to support a refugee family in tasks that Arendt associates with ongoing cycles of consumption. For example, sponsors provide living expenses, help the family find health care providers, and assist with navigating banking systems. If focus is put on the substance of what sponsors provide, then PSR seems private. PSR provides a refugee family the foundation they need for ensuring the needs of life are met. But can it do more?
Claiming the political potential of PSR
As Arendt stresses in The Human Condition, liberation from the necessities of life is not the same as freedom. A person can have their needs met and still not participate in building a common world with fellow community members.
Here’s an example of the contrast Arendt is trying to make. Having a comfortable middle-class life where one spends their time watching Netflix is not freedom. A better contender for freedom would be working with fellow community members to advocate that municipal governments and leading community organizations divest from fossil fuels.
The government’s Guide for Sponsors lists a few responsibilities that go beyond providing for basic needs, including this one: Sponsors are responsible for “introducing newcomers to people with similar personal interests.” This support arguably advances the social inclusion of refugee families. But does it advance their political inclusion? Does PSR help include refugees as co-creators of our shared political community?
Towards political belonging
My suggestion thus far is that a private reading of PSR undermines a political one. It is tempting to argue that the performance of a community enacting their freedom by collectively providing support for refugees is more central to PSR than the private nature of what the supports are. But, based on the bureaucracy of PSR, it seems as if it is ultimately a private endeavor. Put another way, PSR is only a partial way of taking responsibility for guaranteeing a refugee’s right to have rights.
The skeptical reading of PSR’s political potential is based on the government’s description of it. However, I suspect that examining people’s experiences of sponsoring refugees might encourage a more fluid boundary between the public and private readings. Can a relationship between sponsors and a family constitute a mini-public, a space where refugees can be recognized for who they are that might serve as a foundation for their greater political belonging?
Future posts will take up this question.
Credits
The feature photo is the French-English-Arabic version of the #WelcomeYourNeighbors campaign sign.
This post is based on a talk I gave at W3 REPRESENTS: A Research Symposium on February 20, 2019.