I talk frequently about how ignorant most Global North citizens are about the immigration policies of their own and other countries. When my husband and I (Global North citizens of different countries) got married, we had conversation after conversation with people who assumed that by producing our marriage certificate we could simply become residents of each other’s countries— and that we could not be refused residence in each other’s countries, as separating a husband and wife could surely not be allowed.
More interestingly, a lot of people seem to refuse knowledge about immigration, perhaps because it can’t be integrated into some deep and important picture of the world that they have. My parents can’t make themselves believe that my British husband would get in trouble if he overstayed his visa “just a couple of days” in the US, or that I (an American) would ever get deported from the UK, no matter what the circumstances. This is not only because they believe that British and American citizens, as Global North citizens, are specially exempt from the systems that are “meant” to regulate other kinds of people, but also because fundamentally they believe that government and its processes are rational and just. They must believe that government and its processes are rational and just, because otherwise their whole picture of the world— the means by which they understand it— would collapse.
This is all fairly simple and obvious. What is not so simple and obvious is the way that their privileged ignorance, the hothouse resilience of their fantasy world, is part of a mechanism through which the “work of knowing” in our society is outsourced to the underprivileged. (The privileged do not have to know in a way that disrupts their fantasy, because not-knowing has no consequences for them.) This is an interesting dynamic, because many postcolonial theorists (Sara Ahmed, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc) have explored how the Global South is typically portrayed as that-which-is-known-by-the-Global-North, and therefore as not capable of knowing. So what does it mean that the tools of regulation remain in the hands of the Global North, but that the knowledge of regulation is a burden borne by the Global South? There is an element here of knowing as knowing-your-place, for sure— learning to be interpellated as the illegal and the undesirable. The knowing that is happening also constitutes the production of the illusive “just and rational” world that sustains the Global North. I’m interested in the way that the dehumanization of the Global South therefore serves to sustain the rational and just Human and humaneness of the Global North. There’s an abjectification that is necessary for this— as anyone who has experienced universal healthcare knows, more just and equitable care/distribution of resources often means that more privileged people get less-nice things than they have been led to expect, so if they want to continue to enjoy the same standard of living allowed them by unjust and non-equitable care, they must rationalize this somehow. And how does one rationalize having been, by chance, born in the right geographic area? One can’t. One must, instead, believe that this is not how privilege is allotted, which required not-knowing that this is how privilege is allotted.
Charles W. Mills discusses something very relevant to this in his seminal book The Racial Contract. When discussing the types of racial contract that are in place in modern society, he says that white people are signatories of an epistemological racial contract:
“The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular. Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. Part of what it means to be constructed as “white” (the metamorphosis of the sociopolitical contract), part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness, successfully to become a white person (one imagines a ceremony with certificates attending the successful rite of passage: “Congratulations, you’re now an official white person!”), is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities.” (Mills, 1997, page 18).
Now, Mills is not necessarily talking about immigration policies - he is talking about race, and the epistemologies that have been built up around the category of race over the past several centuries, largely in the Western world. But the same principles, I think, apply to other avenues of oppression and subjugation - Mills freely admits that he based a lot of his ideas in The Racial Contract on Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, which is about patriarchy, and I think OP’s post above is a fantastic application of the same theoretical ideas to the global north / global south divide (which has significant overlap, but is not 100% contiguous with, race). Wherever there is systemic injustice of such severity that full knowledge and awareness of it would destroy its claim to legitimacy even in the eyes of those who perpetuate it, the beneficiaries of the injustice must, in order to continue tacitly supporting the system, adopt an “epistemology of ignorance”.
