One of the most intriguing essays I have encountered on matters of movement, transit and migration. Witty, satirical, informative and profound, Farman is a contemporary voice with a deep understanding of the various histories and what connects them.
—Rawi Hage, author of De Niro’s Game

About Clerks of the Passage: The roots of this book are real and full of characters and heroic stories of the sort one might expect from migration tales, evoking border crossings past and present. In Abou Farman’s hands, the stories turn into a larger meditation on movement, conveyed with humour and a subtle irony.

Clerks of the Passage (Linda Leith Publishing) takes the reader on a journey in the company of some strange and great migrants, from the 3.5 million year-old bipedal hominids of Laetoli, Tanzania, to an Iranian refugee who spent seventeen years in the transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, from Xerxes to Milton to Revelations, from Columbus to Don Quixote to Godot.

About the Remix: The author meditates on borders and foreign relations drawn from his book and stemming from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to expel Iranian diplomats.

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Movement is essential to all life. In a sense it is life. That’s what we mean by "animate," the term in which life and movement meet. The opposite, stillness, is death. Which is why restrictions on movement feel so threatening.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems to have recognized this. Freedom of movement was adopted as one of its principle articles. But that freedom is not taken seriously, even in a globalizing world. Perhaps I should say, especially in a globalizing world. Certainly it is not a freedom held up by the liberal West the way freedom of speech is.

Freedom of movement is wilder. It threatens the neatness of borders, the firmness of power. 

On the level of populations—and let’s never forget that populations are made up of individual persons, individual human beings—the shape of movement is mainly determined by states and their borders.

But borders are not just the boundaries of a country. Borders are everywhere, in other countries too: officials at our embassies sit in judgment like St Peter at the gates of paradise, filtering applicants, deciding who is eligible, who is dangerous, who is a liar.

But borders don’t just keep things out. Like membranes, they also let things in, “good” people and “good” goods. In most places, they generally let in much more than they block out: 91 million people, 33 million vehicles, 29 million courier packages, and $433 billion worth of goods crossed into Canada in 2011.

Notice: lots of money. The captains of finance, from the IMF to the boy gangs backing the exploitation of resources all over this country, want the free flow of capital. But they restrict the flow of labor. Or control it. Money should move freely, peopleless so.

This is not just polemics. There was a time when Canada aspired to a modern, humanist ethic, an obligation to protect as many people as possible. We think we’re doing great, but our numbers are anemic. Countries like Tanzania and Iran host six to ten times more refugees than Canada. The ethics of care has been eroded by post 9-11 fear mongering politics (see fears of Islam, see Iranian diplomats) and general racism (see the PQ), but also by deliberate corporate calculation and the takeover of an economistic mindset. Now everyperson allowed into Canada is assessed viz. the balance sheet. Even those who encourage more immigration, like the Globe and Mail, have to justify it in terms of the bottom line. People=$. As it turns out, migrants as well as refugees actually contribute to the economy, but that’s not the point. It’s just the wrong calculation to make. Or else, let’s sit up and admit that we no longer inhabit an ethical sphere, that we don’t care about other humans.

Global inequality was always crucial for the development of countries we call developed. But now it is part of the daily fabric of Canadian life, part of our deliberate, internal institutional politics. The number of foreign temporary workers in Canada is rising dramatically whilst the number of immigrants allowed in has stayed the same. We now accept more temporary workers than immigrants. As filmmakers Marie Boti and Malcolm Guy point out in their new film, End of Immigration?, this is no accident. Pools of low-wage laborers from other countries are brought in to work without receiving any of the protections or benefits that accrue toimmigrants. They are systematically underpaid and exploited, and then shipped back. But the law, as a new report by the Metcalf Foundation shows, is set up such that no one can be held accountable for the abuses. They’re neither protected by Federal or provincial laws, nor by their home countries’ laws. They are, in the words of the report, on “pathways to permanent insecurity”.

This is the new shape of the global regime of movement.

About Abou Farman: Abou Farman is an anthropologist, writer and artist. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, NY, and once worked for the United Nations (DPI). His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Maisonneuve, The Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail and the National Post. He has been awarded a Banff Centre Literary Journalism residency and a George Marshall Fellowship from City University of New York. His film credits include screenwriter on Sound Barrier (Tribeca Film Festival) and Cut! (Venice Film Festival) and producer on Vegas: Based on a True Story (Venice Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival). As part of the duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited installation and video art at the Tate Modern, UK, and PS1/MOMA, NY. caraballo-farman has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a NYFA Fellowship, and residencies at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Art Omi.