Structure and agency

The previous chapters demonstrate the battle waged by each of us, by our communities, and by forced migrants all around the world as we try to survive and, as far as possible, to thrive and reach our potential in the face of structural barriers. By structural barriers, we mean political, economic, social factors in our countries of origin, exile, and transit. Political factors include policies, laws, ideologies, international relations, and of course, the existence of conflict. Economic factors include employment opportunities, wage differentials, and the costs of migrating. Social factors include culture: whether there is a culture of migration in society, whether migration is viewed negatively, is there a shared language or history, the degree of ethnic, religious, or gender equality or discrimination.

When our parents left Afghanistan, they fled conflict between warring groups, persecution because of their ethnicity or religion, and poverty that was due both to economic underdevelopment and discrimination. They were driven out by forces they could not control, structural forces. Peaceful, stable, wealthy countries that do not discriminate against sections of their populations do not produce large numbers of forced migrants. Afghans, by contrast, constitute one of the largest populations of forced migrants in the world (UNHCR, 2024).

And yet, not everyone left. It could be argued that there was an element of choice. Many Hazara stayed in Afghanistan even during the worst of times. All of us have family members in Afghanistan who did not want to leave or wanted to leave but could not. Some people did not even have the minimal resources necessary to travel to, or to cross, the border. People move but not in circumstances of their own choosing. We exercise agency, but that agency is shaped and limited by structural factors. And we in turn shape those factors, altering the culture, pooling resources, resisting policies.

While we were victims of global forces, we were not passive: we pooled resources to send individuals to safety. When visas were unattainable, like Abdullah we found guides to take us across borders; faced with limited access to education, Hazara in Iran and Pakistan set up their own schools or, like Atefeh, insisted painstakingly on her right to attend university in Iran. Our families supported us and provided us with the social capital necessary to overcome some, but not all, structural barriers, and as a result, our generation of Hazara exiles built social capital that permitted us greater mobility and safer routes than experienced by our parents.

Migration has long been a survival strategy for Afghans in times of crisis (Monsutti, 2005). When conflict or natural disasters made survival impossible, people moved to neighbouring areas until the crisis passed, and they could return and rebuild. When poverty or entrepreneurship pushed people to leave, they travelled across the Asian continent, buying and selling goods, working as labourers, studying, seeking opportunities that could not be found at home, returning when they could to families left behind (Hussaini et al., 2021). But structural factors also shaped where people went. In general, and especially when forced to flee as family groups, people seek out the nearest safe place so that they can return easily, because it is less expensive and because it is familiar.

Afghanistan’s borders did not always exist: Iran and Afghanistan were once united and continue to share a common religion and language. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is relatively recent and, until recently, was easily crossed. Both countries host large Afghan diaspora that offer support and refuge in times of trouble, even in the face of hostility from host states. Though our accents and dialects set us apart, as previous chapters demonstrated, we can understand each other. This made surviving in exile possible, as there was work for us to do.

Like migrants everywhere, we served as a reserve army of labour, doing the jobs disdained by Iranian citizens, and for lower wages. States have welcomed us for political and economic reasons: generosity to us meant aid from the international community was controlled by the Pakistan government; our fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons were used to fight by the Iranian government or to fill labour shortages. The legal structures that excluded us from the citizenry, confined us to low skilled sectors of the labour market, limited our access to education, racialized us as inferior shaped our migration experiences in neighbouring countries, and taught us that we would never belong. But our communities were not content to remain labourers, carpet weavers, tailors, and porters. Forced to make a living in sweatshops and building sites, some of us are also poets and painters (Olszewska, 2015).

Our ‘return’ to the country of our citizenship, if not our birth, has also been shaped by our ‘host’ states, who have forced us, as in the case of Khadija and her family, to leave countries that we were not allowed to call home for a homeland that felt alien. In the following sections, we examine in greater detail the concepts of return and reintegration, and the serial racialization experienced by our communities.

The decision to seek safety and a new home in the Global North was forced on many of us. Hundreds of thousands of Hazara decided that since we could never be 2nd or even 3rd class citizens in Iran and Pakistan, and since there was no safety, employment, or equality in Afghanistan, we would have to travel beyond the neighbouring countries. We four have within our close family circles relatives who chose to defy those structures that limited their horizons and their mobility and risk their lives in the hope of finding somewhere that they could build a life and realise their potential. All were aware that they would have to overcome obstacles placed in their way by hostile states, but all believed that they had the necessary luck, determination and autonomy to make it to Europe or Australia. Fewer were aware that laws, policies, and state institutions would exact a price for the audacity of claiming the right to move, a price that in some cases included their lives (Abbasi, 2016).

The barriers put in place by states increase the cost and risk of these journeys. Increasingly, people who have no choice but to move, whether from home or a place of exile, are forced to use facilitators who may be honest brokers, as in the case of Abdullah’s cousin, or brutal criminals. The increasing restrictions on mobility, especially from the Global South, have turned smuggling into a lucrative and global business. A clear illustration of the role of states in creating and maintaining this business was what followed Angela Merkl’s response to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015. When the German Chancellor announced ‘Wir schaffen das’ (we can manage this), borders in and around Europe opened. Afghans, fleeing escalating conflict and insecurity (see Chapter 1), were suddenly able to travel through Turkey and into Greece relatively easily. A journey that could take years and tens of thousands of euros could now be accomplished in 14 days for less than 1,000 euros without recourse to smugglers. When the borders slammed shut, and people found themselves stranded along border fences, batted back and forth between different border patrols, the smuggling business came back with a vengeance.

One consequence of the high price exacted for entry to the Global North is that return to one’s community is made, if not impossible, then very difficult. Given that the only way for many Afghans to reach Europe is by investing months and years of one’s life and the family’s resources, and preserving the hopes and dreams of the family, giving up is not an option. We are forced to remain in states where we cannot feel at home (Schuster and Majidi, 2013, 2014).

Abdullah, Khadija, and Reza had travelled to Europe as students, as participants in conferences and workshops, but the final departure was not chosen but imposed. Our decision to leave, to give up on hopes and dreams of a future in Afghanistan, was in response to discrimination, persecution, and the threat of violence to us and our families, experiences common to many Afghans, especially Hazara Shia. However, unlike most of our community, we had the advantage of speaking English, of an education, of having contacts in the UK, Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe, and most importantly, we were not forced to travel overland or by sea without documents and without resources. Compared with most of our community members, we were lucky, though it did not always feel that way.

The global north is not generally very welcoming to forced migrants and in recent decades has put filters in place in countries of origin. For example, European embassies in Kabul closed their consular divisions, so that when Afghans wished to apply for visas, we were obliged first to apply for an Iranian or Pakistani visa, travel to Tehran or Islamabad, and make our applications there. In Reza’s case, he, his wife, and three children spent six weeks in a hotel room in Islamabad waiting for the British embassy there to decide whether or not to grant them a visa. Had they refused, the time and expense of that journey would have been stolen from them (Khosravi, 2018). Khadija too had to travel to Islamabad, missing the opportunity to visit her family home in Daykundi.

These restrictions move European borders far from European territories and ensure that access is reserved for those who can pay or who are prepared to risk their lives crossing mountains, seas, and militarised borders as undocumented migrants. As in the Global South, those without documents find themselves vulnerable to exploitation, forced to work cash in hand, for lower wages and without access to the social protections enjoyed by those in regular employment. Without documents, forced migrants are especially vulnerable to the threat of deportation and so hyper-exploitable (De Genova, 2002). This vulnerability is a product of state policies towards forced migrants.

Our stories demonstrate that, even when forced to move by real and imminent threats to security, we decide to move though not in circumstances of our choosing. This blurs the conceptual boundaries between voluntary and involuntary mobility (Bakewell, 2008; Hyndman, 2012; Monsutti, 2008).

Migrant categories

Undocumented migrant, economic migrant, labour migrant, refugee, student, highly skilled migrant—together we four have at different times occupied all of these categories and some of them simultaneously. Migration is a process with different, though blurred and overlapping, stages in which gender, legal categories, skills, networks all play a role. It is very difficult to untangle the different phenomena which make up our experiences and which are woven through the different chapters. In telling our stories, we have tried to convey the complexity of forced migration, a complexity that cannot be captured by simplistic or rigid categories. Acknowledging this complexity is vital in gaining an understanding of the myriad experiences of migrants around the world.

In this book, the importance of legal categories is clear. Such categories are constructed, predominantly by states, and imposed on those who move, largely for the convenience of receiving states. They are not ‘natural’ and are not a true reflection of how we migrants see ourselves. They exist to facilitate the decision-making of states and their representatives, and key to making those decisions easy and efficient is the erasure of our humanity. In the previous chapter, Khadija describes the humiliation and pain of trying to fit one category, highly skilled migrant, only to be stripped of everything but her status as a woman with a weak claim to asylum.

Since many states have acknowledged a particular obligation to admit those who are refugees, or close family members, but recognise no legal or moral obligation to admit anyone else, they have created definitions, or ‘ideal types’ to which real people only occasionally conform (such as the definition of a refugee contained in article 1 of the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees), and these serve to filter those who would enter. States have created particular kinds of gateways into their territories, and migrants are forced to try and fit into matching categories if they want to gain entry and/or residence, as Khadija found when trying to apply for asylum. However, many migrants move through these categories, crossing between ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’, switching from being refugees to students to workers, undocumented migrants to asylum seekers, temporary to permanent migrants and often fitting more than one category simultaneously. As Atefeh found, in order to become a university student in Iran, it was necessary to stop being a refugee, return to Afghanistan and apply for an Iranian student visa. These categories hide the fact that refugees need to work to support themselves and their families, students, or highly skilled migrants find that changes at home mean they are unable to return and must apply for asylum. However, as Khadija found, state officials find it difficult to accept that forced migrants can and do fit multiple categories simultaneously.

These categories are also normative implying, more or less explicitly, judgements about those to whom they are applied, and as such they reveal quite a lot about the person or institution doing the defining. For example, during the Cold War, refugees as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention were seen in the West as ‘good guys’ – defenders of democracy, human rights, and freedoms. In the Soviet Union, conversely, they were seen as traitors. For the Soviet Union, refugees should have been more properly understood as those forced to flee poverty. Later, Afghan refugees in Pakistan were warriors resisting Soviet invaders, only to be classed as terrorists after 9/11. In Iran, we were welcomed as Muhajir, fleeing to protect our religion, but then reviled as criminals and drug addicts, as Afghanis, to be arrested and deported as undesirable.

Categories are important because different types of migrants are entitled to different bundles of rights and are received more or less positively, though these attitudes can change over time. ‘Economic’ or labour migrants may be regarded positively when they contribute to economic growth and reconstruction and fill obvious labour gaps, as we did in Iran in the 1980s. But much depends on the narrative constructed by host states. When Iran decided it no longer needed migrant labour, we were told we had a duty to return to Afghanistan, to rebuild our country. As described by Reza, many young Afghans, born in Iran, were persuaded by those campaigns and the hope of finding a home where they would not face discrimination.

An ongoing search for safety, the Russian doll of persecution

Hannah Arendt writing in response to the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, herself a stateless refugee having fled Nazi occupied Europe, noted that those rights depended on belonging to a state that would protect them. Her assessment rings true for us:

Rejected by the country into which we were born/raised, Iran, and the country of our citizenship, Afghanistan, we were forced to throw ourselves on the mercy of states that, having underwritten the UDHR and the Refugee Convention, confined us in camps while they decided whether or not our rights should be respected.

Until recently, we have not had the protection of a state. Arendt noted that when attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew, not as a German or a bearer of human rights (1986. We four have been attacked as Hazara, as Shia, as Afghans, as refugees and forced migrants, and, in the case of Atefeh and Khadija, as women. We are fighting on so many fronts. The social group to which the four of us belong has experienced serial racialization, and in escaping one form, we have inevitably found ourselves subjected to another.

When we speak of racialization, we mean a ‘continuous process of positioning and identity construction’, a process that puts people into categories that are not fixed or natural (Phoenix, 2005), but where meaning is attached to particular, often physical but also cultural and legal, characteristics, and where these categories are used to justify treating people unequally. In Afghanistan, we have been racialized as Hazara because of our physical appearance, which means that we are presumed to be Shia, presumed to be fit only for low skilled work. A similar process occurs in Iran, but there our physical appearance means we are racialized as Afghani, whereas those Afghans who are not physically different are able to pass, to integrate. In a Shia society, our religion is not relevant, as it is in Afghanistan. Our legal status is important, but often less important than our identity as Afghani , meaning that we can be arrested, detained, and deported despite papers that proclaim our right to be present. To return to Arendt (1986, 296), in a society in which we are excluded from the political community, where we do not have the right to have rights (the case in Afghanistan and Iran), we are excluded even from the possibility of fighting for our freedom and all that is left to us is slavery or flight.

Fanon defined racialization as the process through which differences between Africans are erased by the category of ‘negro’, a process for which Europeans and colonists are responsible (1967). In Iran and in Europe, our Hazara and Shia identities were subsumed by that of Afghani, Afghan, migrant, or refugee. While Khadija found solidarity in the detention centre with other refugee women from Sudan and Sierra Leone (categorised as asylum seekers, they were refugees but without the resources to justify their claims), Reza, volunteering with evacuated Afghans found the different treatment of Ukrainian refugees impossible to explain without recourse to concepts of race and racism. Aside from phenotypic differences, it was clear that these white Christians were racialized as European, while Afghans were racialized as Muslim others.

Though posed to everyone applying for a visa, the nonsensical question as to whether we were affiliated to a terrorist organisation (what visa applicant would respond in the affirmative?) lands brutally with those of us who have fled the Taliban, contributes the humiliation imposed by a system that strips us of every identity, and forces us to adopt the sole position of victim. Khadija’s chapter illustrates the impotence and fear generated by an asylum system underpinned by a culture of disbelief (Jubany, 2017). From a situation in which we are categorised by and reduced to, our ethnicity and religion, we are thrown into one in which we have no identity but that of an asylum seeker, to which only negative meaning is attributed.

Khadija and Atefeh both spoke of the restrictions placed on them by their gender. Even before the Taliban returned to power in 2021, patriarchal norms shaped the lives of Afghan women. On arrival in Afghanistan, Khadija’s gendered identity intersected with her ‘returnee’ status, marital status, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic status, and it shaped and influenced her experience of homecoming in Afghanistan where she felt rejected by the country she hoped to make a ‘homeland’. Similarly, Atefeh’s experience illustrated the obstacles she faced in pursuing her passion for studying cinematography as a refugee woman. Her refugee status, compounded by gender discrimination, made her even more vulnerable to systemic and arbitrary barriers. However, it is important to acknowledge how gender expectations also shaped the lives of men. In Iran, refugee men are expected to enter the job market at earlier ages and are therefore exposed to discrimination and deportation, and girls are more likely to get higher education. In Afghanistan, families invest in younger men to migrate to Europe through the dangerous land route and women stay home and pick up new roles and responsibilities.

The Hazara diaspora is growing, and it is conceivable that soon, if not already, it will outnumber those who remain in our traditional homeland. Increasingly, the new generation of Hazara, especially those outside Afghanistan, is insisting on foregrounding our Hazara identity. The extent to which this will remain a diasporic identity, forever associated with forced migration is unclear. We have already seen our population in Afghanistan massively reduced—and given the current regime, it seems unlikely that Hazara or Shia will feel safe in Afghanistan for a long time to come.

Finding a home? Return/repatriation, reintegration, or resettlement

The preferred durable solutions for forced migrants are return and reintegration in the country of origin, local integration in the country of first asylum, or resettlement to a third country when that is not possible. Integration is the expected outcome of each of these solutions, understood as equal access to the resources of citizens—whether in Afghanistan, neighbouring countries or countries of resettlement. This group of authors have between us experienced each of these ‘solutions’, without any of them being an unqualified success.

Local integration should be a means to allow forced migrants to end their exile in countries of first asylum and become full members of their host society, that is, citizens with the right to have rights. And yet, there are few successful examples of local integration. Most often, it is actively discouraged in countries of first asylum and Atefeh’s chapter details the exclusion experienced by Afghans, and in particular Hazara, in Iran. Even when we were welcomed to Iran in the 1980s and allowed to integrate economically and socially, we were excluded politically. For many Hazara, we managed a degree of de facto integration, finding work, renting homes, enlisting the assistance of Iranians to buy those things forbidden to us: sim cards, motor bikes, shops. But without citizenship, our integration was contingent on our usefulness, and we remained confined to particular sectors of the menial labour market, excluded from education, and vulnerable to discrimination, abuse, and forced repatriation.

Voluntary repatriation was in principle the preferred solution to the refugee problem, considered in the best interest of the refugee, and a way of restoring social order to the state that had been disrupted by conflict (Chimni, 2000; Hammond, 1999), but in practice it was rarely possible. From the 1990s, the emphasis continued to be on return, but increasingly from the 1990s onwards states emphasised forced rather than voluntary return (Chimni, 2004), and reintegration was seen as a means to anchor people in their country of origin so that they would not try to leave again. While Reza’s ‘return’ to Afghanistan was voluntary, Khadija and her family were expelled from Iran to Afghanistan. There is an extensive body of poetry by Afghans, even those born elsewhere, that voices the longing experienced by generations of Afghans to return ‘home’ to a place where they are known, where there is a shared understanding, a shared language, familiarity (Alavi Jafari and Schuster, 2019), but as Reza and Khadija show, this longing is often unsatisfied by the experience of ‘return’, leading to re-migration. However, (re)integration is not the inevitable result of return, especially when that return is forced, and when reintegration and assisted voluntary return programmes are little more than fig leaves to justify forced returns (Blitz et al., 2005; Van Houte et al., 2016). Perhaps more importantly, reintegration is not possible when the violence and discrimination that drove us out in the first place remains unchanged, or as is the case currently, is worse.

Given that neither ‘return’ nor local integration are realistic solutions, resettlement becomes a solution for a lucky few. The US, Canada and Australia have resettled forced migrants for decades. Resettlement allows states to screen candidates, to exclude those who would be a burden or a threat, to select those who will be a testament to their generosity, their liberalness, and progressiveness (Schuster, 2004). And for many, resettlement is the gateway to a settled future, one in which our children will have security and a life without violence, though not necessarily without racism.

Migration offers opportunities, but at what cost?

For we four, born/raised in exile in Iran, it is hard to be rejected by our country of birth. Once we leave, we can only ever return to Iran as tourists, and when we return we are not the same people who left. We now have experiences that those left behind do not share and that sets us apart. Though we miss all that was familiar, we do not want to return to a place in which we are not accepted and not treated as equals. We have been forced to leave our birthplaces and the home of our imagination, and now we are trying to make a new home, where we belong. The identity of our generation cannot be defined by a geographical location. More than place, it is our experience that defines our identity; the shared experience of being on the move, of not belonging to a specific place, of being rejected and of having a common trajectory.

As described by Monsutti (2005), we Hazara have always been embedded in transnational social networks, crossing and recrossing borders, creating a transnational space that in turn shapes our lives. In a way, this transnational space has become our homeland, the place where we recognise each other’s suffering (Abbasi, 2019).

Perhaps we will always feel foreign in Europe or North America, perhaps we will never be completely at home, but our children will have the citizenship of countries in which ambitions to be world class scientists, entrepreneurs, or even prime minister are not impossible dreams.