International migration and political agency: are there factors allowing for the formation of a transnational public culture?

“We’re all migrants” was the main slogan at a recent street demonstration in Naples, Italy, against the closure of Italian ports to Middle-Eastern and North-African migrants escaping war, famine, economic poverty,and political persecution. The UN Global Compact for Migration, just approved by 152 nations, seeks to cover all dimensions of international migration holistically and comprehensively. By these factors, one may conclude that migrants—regardless of their country of origin and their economic status—are a global community, transnational and transitory in nature.
Isolated within the contested field of migration studies the Neapolitan slogan may ring as the perfunctory product of advocacy fervor rather than a reflection of reality or the emergence of a new conscience about international migration. And confronted with the plight of refugee camps and growing masses of asylum seekers pressing on the borders of western countries, one may conclude that migrants cannot be but refugees or asylum seekers. However, migrants are about 270 million worldwide. Refugees andasylum seekers account for circa 25 million of this growing mass of humans. The world population counts 7.8 billion people. That the global debate about migration should be limited to the issues of concern to such fraction of the universe not only produces the current unidimensional approach characterized by securitization but also hinders the development of a discourse where migration is no longer a marginalized condition but rather a constitutive experience of modern humans.
Basing itself on research about the constitutive effect otherness, and about the de-migranticization of the research on migration, this paper proposes that the migrants of the world are a de facto transnational culture and as such they constitute an a-geographic nation as defined by Samuel Huntington and thus have acquired agency in the international debate about the governance of international migration.
Preamble: Does a global community of migrants exist? Does a shared dimension in the migration narrative exist, or is the debate about this facet of the human experience destined to forever be a prisoner of the dyadic representation of either refugee or asylum seeker?
Furthermore, if a de facto global community of the ‘migrants of the world’ does exist, is it rendered such by process of self-reflection or is it instead defined by the interests of the hosting country—and by the dynamics of power inherent to the current system of international relations?
Moreover, if migrants can be grouped into a global community, is this a community destined to be fragmented into national identities competing for resources or is there a commonly shared fold of the collective imaginary which they all inhabit? And if there is a shared space in which their common experience situates them, thus rendering them a community as defined by Benedict Anderson, lacking them a nation this shared space can only take form at the cultural level and be transnational. A culture, one can reasonably construe, that as much as Huntington’s western civilization, Islamic civilization, Sinic civilization, or any of the other civilizations defined by the historian in licized, is construed in the ideational dimension rather than in the mere boundaries of the state and exists among other types of a-territorial communities. Thus it not only represents a new fracture line along which different states’ visions of development can clash, but also empowers a new social subject in the political debate surrounding the formulation and application of agreements, policies, rules, and norms that are currently being discussed about the global governance of migration in the international system. And since this new subject inhabits a transnational and cross-cultural space, it comes with the territory that it makes little difference if the growing number of souls who are seeking harbor into a country other than their own migrate because of security, economic, or environmental threats.
If we adhere to segmenting migration according to the casuistry provided by international bodies and validated by the current literature, we may conclude that there is little linking a Filipino LGBTQ asylum seeker to a Colombian temporary-status grantee or an Indian H-1B visa holder in the Silicon Valley. But this is not the case. But whether modern societies are forced to mutate bythe growing network of cross-border connections among people or by the social impact that diasporas and refugee flows exert both on sending and receiving communities, all these issues need to be positioned in our understanding of this new migratory context. A context which advent has been long coming and which direction is unstoppably moving toward an explosive growth of migration, legal and illegal.
This paper intends to investigate the factors that may provide a suitable platform for the transubstantiation of a different vision of migration, a vision in which a “de-migranticized” praxis about migration morphs into public culture. In that direction, this paper posits that the constitutive effect of “otherness” may provide also the opportunity to satisfy humans’ natural psychic-emotional drive to belonging and their tendency to ratify themselves through appertaining to a community.
This paper also intends to represent that the ongoing failure to connect migration research to the analytical categories of social science more broadly prevents the development of a public culture discourse on migration reflective not just the current but also of future dynamics. Some of these dynamics are already upon us, and they speak only in favor of explosive growth in the number of migrants worldwide both domestically and internationally and within core and periphery countries alike.
Additionally, this paper intends to represent that an approach that is unable to encompass all the diverse facets of migration under a unifying discourse leads to fours pernicious outcomes.
 It prevents policymakers and advocates from developing an effective strategy for the normalization of the phenomenon.
 It contributes (knowingly or unknowingly) to the justification of the current international division of power in which the social majority defines otherness.
 It perpetuates a policy of division and exclusion among people who, by whatever avenue of life, happen to be living in a country other than their own.
 And finally, it prevents the expression of intellectual, economic, and creative forces that could be used to improve international relations among nations, increase world stability and security, from taking form.
The necessity to resolve the limiting outcomes of a less than a systemic approach to global migration is now reflected in the Global Compact on International Migration approved by the UN Assembly.
This paper will also attempt to discuss the unifying experience of migrants on a global level—be it economic, ecological, security, or marital reasons—and establish if from this a common thread(s) emerges which could potentially provide them agency in the current debate on the global governance of migration.