In the aftermath of the 2018 migrant caravans, the Mexican government arrested two migrants’ rights activists,1 but not because they gave food or donated clothes to the caravaneros. The transgressive nature of their activism consisted of walking and organizing alongside people whose presence in the country was unauthorized. They were charged with smuggling-related crimes; but they were really “guilty” of solidarity. In this essay, we outline what solidarity entails, what compels various actors to join in, and to what end. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we discuss the “what,” “where,” “who,” and “why” of solidarity. The purpose is to open a new epistemological horizon, providing tools to collectively reflect on the complex issues at the intersection between solidarity, migration, and law.

In this essay, we examine legal and political challenges to solidarity with and among migrants. We begin by describing the disturbing and powerful turn toward de-solidarity, particularly in some Global North countries, that threatens to undermine the global refugee and migration law regime. Politicians seek to capitalize upon racial fears of migrants from the Global South to reject solidarity (with the latter group) as a concept and pursue anti-immigrant laws and policies. We next examine anti-solidarity, as shown by the criminalization of humanitarian assistance as migrant smuggling. Both de-solidarity and anti-solidarity operate through law and race to constrain human mobility and amplify the vulnerability of humans on the move. Yet then, whereas law and politics seek to prevent solidarity, praxis and resistance fosters it. In other words, solidarity toward and among migrants materializes in the very locations where law exerts violent control, despite and arguably because of the troubling, or even abject nature of those spaces. Anti-solidarity and de-solidarity inflict harm on migrants, at the same time that they can lead to resistance and change. Examining solidarity and its challenges from these three different angles (the de-solidarity trend, the manufacturing of humanitarian assistance as a crime, and the shelter-space) we explore the forms of solidarity and support that, in spite of the law, continue to emerge on the migration pathway and refuse to wane.

The criminalization of humanitarianism has become prevalent in the Global North.1 Overbroad definitions of the crimes of migrant smuggling and the facilitation of irregular migration are commonplace in Europe and the United States,2 despite their well-known perverse effects on the rights of organizers and civil society at large. The “crimmigration”3 paradigm is so pervasive that there is little debate across the political spectrum on the legitimacy of a criminal law response to solidarity-based engagements with non-citizens,4 especially those in an irregular situation. Countries of destination have normalized hostility vis-à-vis (irregular) migrants and their allies and firmly entrenched it in the legal regime. By contrast, this essay aims to illustrate how law can paradoxically also serve as a medium to articulate solidaristic action following an egalitarian conception and mobilization of legal norms. Challenging state-centric visions, such forms of action transform law into a space of coming together across power divisions, jointly organizing, and collectively countering injustice.

What is the relationship between solidarity and international migration law? For migrants facing a contemporary politics of nationalism and xenophobia, solidarity offers the potential to transcend borders, reshaping the popular imaginary and potentially the law. This essay presents a conversation between a legal scholar, a solidarian, and a social scientist, exploring the challenges that must be carefully navigated to avoid replicating prevailing power hierarchies and undermining existing humanitarian ethics. It engages with three questions: whether international law can further solidarity with migrants; whether human rights law can address the risk that solidarity will replicate existing power hierarchies; and whether solidarity downgrades existing international legal obligations toward migrants, rendering them optional benevolent acts toward “outsiders” rather than legal duties toward “insiders.” The essay contends that a viable path forward must recognize both the ambivalence of solidarity and international law's shortcomings in enabling solidarity.

This essay explores three approaches to understanding international solidarity in contexts of migration: as a human right, as a shared goal, or as community-driven action. From a legal perspective, international solidarity has been enumerated as an enabling right that facilitates the exercise of other substantive human rights. An international solidarity-based approach to rights expands the range of actors, incorporating civil society groups as rights-holders, and international organizations and non-state actors as duty bearers. A social science lens might foreground a transversal approach to international solidarity, embracing difference in pursuit of equity. In other words, international solidarity can be conceptualized as a plurality of actors pursuing shared goals across different struggles while rejecting homogeneity. From the vantage of activism, international solidarity can be understood as a force that can enable migrants and deportees who have been excluded and invisibilized to connect particular and local struggles to different local struggles and even transnational struggles. It can counteract dehumanization and portend hope by highlighting the ripple effect that social movements and their work can have on a range of disadvantaged communities. In all three approaches, international solidarity reinforces human connection but with a different emphasis: on the expansion of opportunities to exercise rights, on the recognition and valuing of pluralism, and on the collective power that can be leveraged to encourage social change.

Invocations of solidarity often appear to be merely rhetorical. In contrast, in this essay we seek to show that solidarity can be a potent force for systemic change. We focus on a particular kind of solidarity—experiential solidarity—which is rooted in shared and lived experiences. In doing so, we de-center the role of states as targets and agents of solidarity and foreground the communities that are actively “doing” human rights by fostering bottom-up social change and collective self-actualization. Our approach to solidarity recasts human rights entitlements across spatial, temporal, relational, and intersectional scales and brings different duty-bearing actors to the fore, thereby emphasizing the transformative potential of collective action. Our account bolsters the agency of non-state actors in pursuing rights-based protection of migrants, thereby enabling strategic and forward-looking action in a politically and emotionally charged domain.