Published by COMPAS 2014

Edited by: Bridget Anderson and Michael Keith

Copyright © COMPAS 2014

Migration: A COMPAS Anthology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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ISBN: 978-1-907271-03-8 (Print)
ISBN: 978-1-907271-04-5 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-907271-05-2 (Kindle)

Cover design: Finbar Mulholland, WeCreate Design

Typesetting: Mikal Mast, COMPAS

Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction - Bridget Anderson and Michael Keith

Beyond Rules

1. The Prayer Labyrinth - Ruth Padel

2. ‘We Want to Hear from You’: How Informing Works in a Liberal Democracy - Dace Dzenovska

3. Deportation - Nicholas De Genova

4. Why Are the Most Vulnerable Denied Employment Rights? - Sonia McKay

5. Marriage Migration - Katharine Charsley

6. Undocumented Migrant Children - Vanessa Hughes

7. The Human Rights of Migrants - François Crépeau

8. Rethinking Migrant Rights for Development - Martin Ruhs

9. Equality for All? - Sarah Spencer

10. Reflections on an Anniversary: EU Citizenship at 20 - Cathryn Costello

11. Framing and Reframing Irregular Migration - Franck Düvell

12. Diaspora Governance - Alan Gamlen

13. Enforcement - Bastian Vollmer

14. Muddied Waters: Migrants’ Entitlements to Public Services and Benefits - Caroline Oliver

15. You’ve Got a Text from UKBA - Les Back and Shamser Sinha

Beyond Contract

1. Migration - Helen Woods, age 12

2. Immigration and Low-Skilled Work: The Pret A Manger Question - Jonathan Portes

3. Interdisciplinarity in the Study of the Law of Labour Migration - Mark Freedland

4. The Economic Impacts of Migration - Carlos Vargas-Silva

5. Child Work and Mobility - Jo Boyden and Gina Crivello

6. Migration, Welfare and Citizenship - Isabel Shutes

7. Domestic Workers and au Pairs - Rosie Cox

8. Subcontracting - Andrew Geddes

9. How to Reduce Migrant Worker Recruitment Costs - Philip Martin

10. Migrant Urbanism in China’s Chengzhongcun - Michael Keith

11. Agriculture and Food Processing - Ben Rogaly

Keeping Time

1. At Sundown - Vivien Urban, age 14

2. Time - Michelle Bastian

3. Generations - Mette Berg

4. Flow - Sondra L. Hausner

5. Naturalisation - Bernard Ryan

6. History, Memory and Immigration Controls - Cynthia Wright

7. Migration Goals - Stephen Castles

8. Global Migration - Dirk Hoerder

9. Waiting - Shahram Khosravi

10. Ageing Futures - Chris Wilson

11. Migration, Death, Islam - Nazneen Ahmed

Representations: Powers and Pitfalls

1. Field Notes from an Icelandic Glacier - Robin Boothroyd

2. Windows: The 21st-Century Migration Experience - Xiang Biao

3. Migration and Culture - Robin Cohen

4. Media and Migration - Robert McNeil

5. Global Networks Revisited - Alisdair Rogers

6. Mixed Migration - Nicholas Van Hear

7. From Communication to Impact - Emma Newcombe

8. How We Laughed… - Ida Persson

9. Reading ‘Super-Diversity’ - Steven Vertovec

10. Stories of Migration, the Migration of Stories - Nazneen Ahmed

11. The (Un)Bearable Precariousness of being a Lifestyle Migrant - Roger Norum

12. The Limits of Research - Liza Schuster

Troubling Bodies

1. My Children’s Mothers - Frances Nagle

2. How Do you Recognise a Victim of Trafficking? - Bridget Anderson

3. Social Determinants of Migrants’ Health - Hiranthi Jayaweera

4. Skills - Linda McDowell

5. A Global Care Crisis - Fiona Williams

6. Illustrating Migration - Mikal Mast

7. Ageing and Migration - Russell King

8. Body Work - Carol Wolkowitz

9. Racism and Migration - John Solomos

10. The Enigma of Return - Aihwa Ong

Towards Emotion

1. I Don’t Remember - Ismail Akthar, age 12

2. Men and the Emotional World of Immigration Detention - Melanie Griffiths

3. The Dynamics of Settlement - Deborah Phillips

4. Community - David Feldman

5. Diasporic Converging Cultures? - Iain Walker

6. Devotion - Jane Garnett

7. Contemporary Anxiety Towards Irregular Migration - Joaquín Arango

8. Seeking Asylum in Schools - Halleli Pinson, Madeleine Arnot and Mano Candappa

9. Public Preferences for Restricting Immigration: Who, Why, and with What Limitations? - Scott Blinder

10. Comfort Zones - Nina Glick Schiller

11. Transnational Families - Leslie E. Fesenmyer

12. Affinities in Multicultural Neighbourhoods: Shared Values and their Differences - Ellie Vasta

13. Sexuality and Migration - Eithne Luibhéid

Making Politics

1. Bliss in Capetown, 1921 - M. J. Oliver

2. Migration, Suffering and Rights - Julia O’Connell Davidson

3. Amnesty - Linda Bosniak

4. EU Citizenship, Roma Mobility and Anti-Gypsyism: Time for Reframing the Debate? - Nando Sigona

5. A Spirituality of Migration? - Michael Nausner

6. Migration and Population Growth: Future Predictions and Contemporary Politics - Alessio Cangiano

7. Unions, Migration and the Road Less Travelled - Nick Clark

8. Citizenship - Phillip Cole

9. Cosmopolitanism - Sander L. Gilman

10. Ghettos – Deportation Without a Voice - Clara Lecadet

11. The Sunshine and Shadow Politics of Irregular Migrants in Europe - Sarah Spencer

12. Everyday Multiculturalism - Amanda Wise

13. Acts - Engin Isin

14. Recognizing Migrants’ Practices of Citizenship and their Impact - Davide Però

15. Belonging - Nandita Sharma

16. Asylum: Principled Hypocrisy - Matthew Gibney

Rescaling and Re-placing

1. Landing - Claudine Toutoungi

2. Steal Away, Steal Away Back Home - AbdouMaliq Simone

3. Integration - Ben Gidley

4. The Multilevel Governance of Migrant Integration - P. W. A. Scholten

5. Construction, Migration and Urbanisation - Michelle Buckley

6. The Migration of the Rich - John Urry

7. Urban Neighbours - Ash Amin

8. What Drives Human Migration? - Hein de Haas

9. Multiculturally Yours: The Neighbourhood as Lived Diversity - Ole Jensen

10. Mediterranean - Ferruccio Pastore

11. World Wide Street - Suzanne M. Hall

12. Arrivals between Bildungsroman and the City Commons - Michael Keith

13. Housing - David Robinson

14. Diaspora Formation - Nicholas Van Hear

15. The Dynamics of Pakistani State-Building and Balti Migration Practices - Ole Jensen

16. The Hostile Environment - Jonathan Price

Routes and Reading out of this Anthology

Contributors

Nazneen Ahmed is Research Assistant in the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration and Citizenship at the University of Oxford, and Deputy Director of COMPAS.

Joaquín Arango is Professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Madeleine Arnot is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge.

Les Back is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Michelle Bastian is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Mette Berg is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford.

Scott Blinder is Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

Linda Bosniak is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University School of Law.

Jo Boyden is a Professor in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, and Director of Young Lives.

Michelle Buckley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto.

Mano Candappa is Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Alessio Cangiano is Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics, University of the South Pacific.

Stephen Castles holds a Research Chair in Sociology at the University of Sydney.

Katharine Charsley is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol.

Nick Clark is Senior Research Fellow at the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University.

Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor and Former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.

Phillip Cole is Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of South Wales.

Cathryn Costello is Andrew W. Mellon University Lecturer in International Human Rights and Refugee Law at the University of Oxford.

Rosie Cox is Reader in Geography and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

François Crépeau holds the Hans and Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at McGill University.

Gina Crivello is Research Officer in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Nicholas de Genova is Reader in Urban Geography in the Department of Geography, King’s College London.

Hein de Haas is Co-Director of the International Migration Institute.

Franck Düvell is Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Dace Dzenovska is Senior Researcher and Marie Curie Fellow at COMPAS.

David Feldman is Director of the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Leslie Fesenmyer is Research Officer and ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow at COMPAS.

Mark Freedland is Reader in Employment Law at the University of Oxford.

Alan Gamlen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington.

Jane Garnett is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford.

Andrew Geddes is Professor in Politics at the University of Sheffield.

Matthew Gibney is Associate Professor of Politics and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford

Ben Gidley is Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Sander L. Gilman is distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University.

Nina Glick Schiller is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Melanie Griffiths is ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow at the University of Bristol.

Suzanne M. Hall is Lecturer in Sociology and Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Sondra Hausner is University Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Oxford.

Dirk Hoerder is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Arizona State University.

Vanessa Hughes is Research Officer at COMPAS.

Engin Isin holds a Chair in Citizenship and is Professor of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Open University.

Hiranthi Jayaweera is Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Ole Jensen is Research Officer at COMPAS.

Michael Keith is Director of COMPAS and holds a Personal Chair in the Department of Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Shahram Khosravi is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.

Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex.

Clara Lecadet is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Urbaine, CNRS.

Eithne Luibhéid is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona.

Philip Martin is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis.

Mikal Mast is PR and Communications Officer at COMPAS.

Linda McDowell is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford.

Sonia McKay is Senior Research Fellow at the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University.

Rob McNeil is Head of Media and Communications at the Migration Observatory, University of Oxford.

Michael Nausner is Professor of Systematic Theology and Dean of International Affairs at the Reutlingen School of Theology.

Emma Newcombe is Head of External Relations at COMPAS.

Roger Norum is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Leeds.

Caroline Oliver is Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Julia O’Connell Davidson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham.

Ferruccio Pastore is Director of FIERI (International and European Forum for Migration Research).

Davide Però is Lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham.

Ida Persson is Research and Communications Officer at COMPAS.

Deborah Phillips is Visiting Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Halleli Pinson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Jonathan Portes is Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, London.

Jonathan Price is Research Officer at COMPAS.

David Robinson is Director of the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University

Ben Rogaly is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sussex.

Alisdair Rogers is Senior Tutor at Keble College, Oxford.

Martin Ruhs is University Lecturer in Political Economy in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford and Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Bernard Ryan is Professor of Migration Law at the University of Leicester.

P. W. A. (Peter) Scholten is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Liza Schuster is Reader in Sociology at City University London.

Nandita Sharma is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Isabel Shutes is Assistant Professor in Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Nando Sigona is Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

Shamser Sinha is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Youth Studies at the School of Applied Social Sciences, University Campus Suffolk

AbdouMaliq Simone is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

John Solomos is Professor of Sociology at Warwick University.

Sarah Spencer is Senior Fellow and former Deputy Director at COMPAS.

John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University.

Nicholas Van Hear is Senior Researcher and Deputy Director at COMPAS.

Carlos Vargas-Silva is Senior Researcher at the Migration Observatory, University of Oxford.

Ellie Vasta is Associate Professor of Social Inclusion at Macquarie University.

Steven Vertovec is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen.

Bastian Vollmer is Leverhulme Research Fellow at COMPAS.

Iain Walker is Senior Researcher at COMPAS.

Fiona Williams is Professor of Social Policy and International Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Chris Wilson is University Lecturer in Demography and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Amanda Wise is Associate Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University.

Cynthia Wright teaches at York University, Toronto.

Carol Wolkowitz is Reader in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick.

Xiang Biao is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Acknowledgements

The production of an anthology requires far more skills than editing. We would like to acknowledge and thank the outstanding COMPAS communications team, managed by Emma Newcombe, both for the work that has gone into this volume, but also for their work over the years, which has contributed significantly to the profile and accessibility of COMPAS research.

More particularly we would like to thank Mikal Mast, COMPAS PR and Communications Officer, for the layout and design, and for rising to the challenging task of co-ordinating the anthology, managing communications with contributors, copy editors and printers, and keeping us all to time. We thank Finbar Mulholland for designing the cover and the web-based version of this publication.

Roger Norum did an excellent copy editing job, while at the same time finishing off his PhD. We are grateful that he submitted on time. Sophie Martin formatted the bibliography and proofread (while also decyphering some very poor handwriting), Richard Allen also proofread, and Leslie Day photocopied entries and made sure they did not get lost. Ali Rogers, who has always been a stalwart friend of COMPAS, gave constructive comments on the introduction and the bibliography, at very short notice.

Also deserving of thanks are Mette Berg, Dace Dzenovska, Julia Morris, Nick Van Hear and Xiang Biao, all at COMPAS, for their assistance with the bibliography. Ida Persson, COMPAS Research and Communications Officer, managed the annual photograph competition, and Ingrid Pollard, Rachel Jones and Paul Halliday have served as judges in different years.

Ida also managed the two poetry competitions that were initiated specifically for this volume, judged by Keble fellows Erica McAlpine and Matthew Bevis, and poet Ruth Padel. Supported by Keble College Oxford, Erica and Matthew also generously donated their time, skills and knowledge to provide the prize of a poetry workshop for the young people whose poetry was shortlisted. We would like to thank the entrants and judges from all our photograph and poetry competitions over the years. Special thanks are owed to Ruth Padel for permission to reprint her poem, The Prayer Labyrinth.

We thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the ten year research centre grant that has facilitated COMPAS’ work and the creation of this volume. We are also grateful to Oxford University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography for the many ways in which they have supported us, including providing us with accommodation and administrative support. In this vein, our work would not be possible without the commitment of key members of staff, including Victoria Kingsman and Robert McNeil.

Finally, we would like to thank the contributors for the enthusiasm with which they entered into the project, and all members of the COMPAS team, past and present, for their commitment and contribution to the study of migration. We hope that this anthology reflects some of those efforts. As always, those who are unnamed have also provided help, support and inspiration in many different ways.

Introduction - Bridget Anderson and Michael Keith

1. A Decade of Migration

‘Migration’ is a difficult word. Difficult because it encompasses a vast array of interlinked phenomena, none of which are clearly explained by the word itself, and because it is a political, social, economic, historical, anthropological, geographical, demographic and global developmental issue. Furthermore, it touches people all over the world personally in myriad ways. Harnessing public issues and private problems, mass migration in the last decade has attracted political controversy in the global north, been at the heart of vigorous urban agglomeration in the BRICs and the global south, and mushroomed academic analysis and public scrutiny. Its associations with economic growth and development, with security, crime and political conflict, and with changing demographics and communities have excited often furious debate, particularly in what The Economist calls ‘the rich world’. The 2003 Global Commission on International Migration, a UN high level dialogue in 2006, and the establishment of the Global Forum on Migration and Development in 2007 have kept migration on the international agenda. Significant economic changes and shifts in power have themselves given rise to or been facilitated by population movements and the global move to the city. Such moves may be within as well as across international borders. In China, rapid economic development has been fuelled by a massive rural-urban movement of people. While Europe has 35 cities of at least a million people, by 2025 China will have an estimated 225, and India’s number will have grown from 42 to 68. By 2030, some 350 million more people will live in Chinese cities. And though growth in Indian cities is driven more by expanding urban populations and the reclassification of formerly rural land, the move to the city has already restructured traditional social and economic relations. Migrants themselves, internal and international, are increasingly vocal. Migration is set to be a key political issue into the future. The proportion of people that move internationally, approximately 3 per cent of the world’s population, has remained relatively stable for a considerable period of time. Yet it seems that the meaning, significance and constitution of such movement have changed both the way in which we consider our present and the calculus through which we conceptualise the future.

Technology and economic growth has meant that travel has become easier, in Europe particularly for people from former Communist states. Some borders have fallen; for example European Union (EU) enlargement in 2004 and 2007 (and now in 2014) eventually facilitated free movement for EU citizens across 28 member states of the European Union. At the same time, states are ever more concerned to manage migration. In place of the Iron Curtain we have new walls – according to one estimate, 6,000 miles of walls have been built in the past decade to divide territory and population, from the West Bank to India, to the US and to South Africa, oftentimes turning mobility or walking to work into ‘migration’. Walls and borders are not impermeable, however, but rather, to use Balibar’s term, ‘polysemic’. While for some travellers they are impassable, patrolled with guns, detectors and unnavigable bureaucracies, for others these same borders are barely noticeable, requiring nothing more than a nod to a security guard. More particularly, travel for the wealthy has usually been easier than travel for the poor. The 1905 UK Aliens Act did not apply to those travelling first class, and in November 2013 UK Home Secretary Theresa May announced the launch of the invitation only ‘GREAT club’, a fast track premium visa service for elite business executives coming to Britain. This is not a phenomenon restricted to the UK. Several EU states now offer permanent residence to those who can afford to pay for it: in Spain, investors spending €500,000 or more on residential real estate or a portfolio of properties are eligible for the “Spanish golden visa” meaning they and their family can live and run a business in Spain. Portugal and Ireland run similar programmes. In Malta a person who pays €650,000 (plus €25,000 each for any spouse or minor children) can be granted Maltese citizenship, provided they meet due diligence criteria and pass a criminal background check. Cyprus too offers ‘citizenship by investment’.

In the face of ever more diverse attempts to check and to channel flows of people, mobility itself has continued. In 2012 there were approximately 365,000 apprehensions of undocumented migrants by US border agents at the US-Mexico border alone. Such attempts at control can be at terrible cost: 477 deaths at the US southern border in 2012 and an estimated 16,000 deaths at the borders of Europe between 1993 and 2012. Thus, enforcement and control run alongside concerns about the human rights of migrants and abuse of migrant workers: conditions endured by workers in the Gulf States, and by (undocumented) workers in Europe, the US and across Asia, and the treatment of asylum seekers have given rise to a sustained growth of campaigning around the human rights of migrants, against deportation and detention, and in support of mobility. Grassroots activism may be driven by the engagement of migrants themselves. The ‘DREAMers’ movement in the US in recent years drew on the self-selected ‘outing’ that structured the politics of sexuality to promote migrant rights of the children of undocumented residents. Migrant workers have formed their own trades unions – the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants Trade Union (MTU), for example, is a union established for and by migrant workers in South Korea. As well as self-organising, there has been a growth in the numbers and types of organisations working with migrants. Some national trades unions have developed considerably by organising migrant workers and admitting them into their ranks. The gradual softening of attitude by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and their split with the ‘change to win’ trades unions in the US, for example, spurred immigration reform possibilities and new thinking in the American legislature.

2. Beyond the Empirical

Mobility has ineluctably slipped many of its descriptive typologies. This challenges the ways in which scholarship is structured by both analytical lenses and empirical evidence, how we make sense of the world both through gathering ‘data’ and the analytical frames which make such data meaningful. Analyses of migration were for years premised on a distinction between the refugee/‘forced migrant’ and the economic migrant. This distinction was formalised in the 1951 Refugee Convention and key to structuring international policies on the governance of mobility, but in the past decade academic attempts to describe and analyse these phenomena have moved further and further away from the refugee/economic migrant binary. There have also been significant moves beyond old push-pull paradigms. New approaches in the social sciences of the 1990s reconceptualised the building blocks of ‘society’ – transnationalism, super-diversity, autonomy of migration, and a rediscovery of the urban. Conceptual rethinking in turn challenged what it might mean both to dwell and to be mobile, forcing migration studies to transcend a methodological nationalism that once saw the world through a Westphalian lens of separate and discrete nation states (with distinct populations), and to begin to rethink the geometries and temporalities of networks, circuits, propensities and flows of mobility. While these represent very different schools of thought on migration, they all demand a rethinking of the nature of the relation between the individual/family, the state, and the nation; between identity, sovereignty and place, foregrounding questions of citizenship and belonging. The construction of both individual subject positions and collective subjects through rule, law, power and affect demand an understanding in migration studies of the propensity of people to act as well as their demonstrated patterns of movement. The latter privileges an empirical subdiscipline that measures movements in numbers, with data that is invariably flawed and incomplete. The former provokes a social science that takes the very definition of the migrant as problematic and shifts attention on to contested theoretical framings of regimes of citizenship, freedoms to move and the unintended consequences of migration’s externalities. Both are necessary to compose a picture of contemporary migration, but this theoretical turn we suggest moves us beyond the empirical (or occasionally empiricist) inflection of some migration studies scholarship.

For many years, the theory, practice and policy of citizenship was insulated from migration research (though not from the lives of migrants), but the two now inform each other far more closely, with some scholars arguing that citizenship offers new possibilities for the developing politics of migration, and others that it is necessary to think beyond citizenship. This is part of a more general move to break out of the constraints of border thinking, and to embrace the scholarship of the social sciences that constructs individual and collective human subjects through complexities of institutional forms and path-dependent specificity. For example, while in the 1990s the invisibility of gender in migration policy and analysis was rectified by ‘adding women and stirring’, there is a reaching towards the beginnings of theorisation of subject making, considering how queer migrations disrupt gender binaries and categories completely, and interrogating the different ways that gender is constructed at borders.

The arrogation of powers to keep people ‘in place’ – from historical regimes of serfdom, to contemporary measures to regulate movement, to modern city forms such as the hukou system in China – all define who is and who is not a migrant in relation to regional, national and municipal governance of scarce public goods and ideologies of nation or belonging. However, the mechanisms of state power have long been made more complex through the contingent formations of both the institutions of governance and the subjects of their logics of governmentality. The flow of bodies is regulated through regimes of the biopolitical as well as through the more arbitrary deployment of powers of allocation and coercion by the state. How individuals, families and networks come to consider themselves to be connected, to share a propensity to move, to trigger relationalities between virtual exchange and chains of mobility reflect particular configurations of technology and regulation.

The externalities of the migration process may be priced or regulated through state arbitration but, as Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom remarked, the challenge of common pool resources is made much more complex in the context of new arrivals triggered by migration flows. For example, moral categories of eligibility for welfare may inadvertently favour or discriminate against the migrant. Systems that are based primarily on a contributory contract – that those deemed worthy of welfare support must have paid in before they claim – inevitably favour those who have remained in a single nation state. Systems that allocate resources – be it schooling, subsidized housing, unemployment insurance or public and private health – principally according to measures of social need, may favour the new arrival more. At times this can be contentious – as when new arrivals with vulnerable children claim access to scarce resources, such as school places, subsidized shelter or social housing. At other times it can hide alternative rationalities. Public health concerns over communicable disease may trump categories of rationed access to medical care when it becomes in the interests of all to prevent major outbreaks of ill health rather than differentiate between the eligibility criteria of migrants and local people. The promotion of competitiveness at the scale of the city may sit in tension with national or regional policy, or regulated freedoms of locational preference. The institutional foundations of comparative advantage may generate varieties of capitalism that structure markets and valorize migrant labour differently. Trade-offs between the openness to admitting migrants and migrant rights in liberal democracies may in turn structure potential flows of people and the possible as well as the actual phenomena of those who stay or are left behind, as well as those who move.

In each case, the data that is so essential to critical judgement and becomes grist to the mill of scholarly inquiry can mislead, as empirical inquiry potentially slips into empiricist scholarship and the positivist fallacy that to measure all is to know all. Migration, like all fields of human and social sciences, demands a careful balance between a scientific measurement of data and a nuanced understanding of the institutions that structure human behaviour.

3. Migration and the Social Sciences

As the study and analysis of migration becomes more open to social science and to the humanities, so it challenges the way in which we think of some of the foundational concepts of the social sciences and the humanities.

Conceptually, conventional academic disciplinary boundaries and a language of national economies and nation states look increasingly limited in a world characterised by flows of people as well as capital. The large majority of humanity continues to stay in a single state for most, if not all, of their lives, but in this new context, how do we understand economic performance and sustainable growth, and how do we theorise sociologies and economies of the nation state in an era marked by geographical mobility of ‘non-citizen’ workers, free flows of Foreign Direct Investment and by organizational forms of transnational corporations? If one high-tech worker moves between jobs for a limited time within a single corporation in two different international spaces, and another moves between two companies operating online in a virtual global space while living in the same country, which is the migrant? What does this mean for the obligations of one country to educate future generations in a national context when significant fractions of the labour force might have been educated elsewhere? How does economics prioritise the development of human capital and the support of national workers and companies, whilst maximising the comparative advantage of a flexible economy attracting the ‘best and brightest’ and competing for global investment? How do strong affiliations to both local neighbourhoods and global diasporas reframe what we mean by ‘the social’ and ideas of political community? How are the arithmetical calculations of social policy that structure logics of rationing scarce public goods challenged by international mobility? How are welfare nets made politically legitimate in the context of newly mobile demographics across the medium term? What challenges do migration-driven diversities pose to the creation of the good society? What do new transnationalisms (and complex new configurations of the field in anthropology) mean for ideas of ‘culture’, and how do they relate to new conflicts and intercultural dialogues? How do legal and democratic institutions respond to and shape these drivers of economic globalisation and diasporic identities, which are influencing behavioural norms and gender relations, and informing interventions?

Practically, new social science paradigms must address questions arising from the globalisation of mobility. How will new cartographies of development structure future patterns of migration? What is the relation between migration and the management of global markets? How does massive urbanisation reframe our understanding of the social, the economic and the political? What do migration’s challenges to sovereignty and territoriality mean for the relation between (non-)citizen, state and nation? How do changes in the way we think about the future reconfigure the geometries of collective wellbeing?

In formulating policy interventions, the UK faces particular challenges. The 2011 Census has revealed the growth of super-diverse local areas and neighbourhoods ,but integration and cohesion remain major public concerns, placing emergent identities of ethnicity and faith at the heart of social policy concerns. In contrast to most other countries, demographic changes in the UK in the last decade have been driven principally by international migration. How does the UK promote the interests of workers and companies, particularly when they act globally? How does international migration structure public debates about the UK’s place in the EU, the evolution of nationalism, and devolution? What are the options for Britain in a Europe where the free movement of people is a fundamental right? How do we shape political community to reflect the plural scales of neighbourhood, municipality and nation? How do we organise an understanding of citizenship that recognises the obligations of international law, the principles of human rights, and the geographical and historical realities of mobility?

Policy agendas across the rest of the world reflect this combination of generic pattern and geographical/historical specificity. Liberalisation of trade sits uneasily, at times, with the development of local human capital: brain drain is offset by remittances which may diminish with time, flight and exit may serve as an alternative to political reform and local social movements. Diasporic politics can create new geometries of political engagement across transnational networks of influence. Gender relations, kinship, and the family may be stretched and reinvented for better or for worse in time and space through the process of movement. Quantitative national measures of social mobility, which mark how one generation fares in comparison with the next, are potentially undermined by migration. If first-generation migrants occupy positions where they are commonly overskilled – engineers driving New York cabs, doctors cleaning floors in the financial districts of Europe – their own class position and their childrens’ may be hard to define. Social capital may trump objective class or status position, juxtaposing problematics of social and geographical mobility.

4. The Rationale of the Anthology

To understand mobility we have to transcend boundaries:territorial, disciplinary and professional. Post-war 20th-century scholarship tended to privilege a study of migration as movement between free standing nation states, with a once and for always commitment to a new country, notwithstanding the complexities of free, forced, family, temporary and permanent flows that long characterized the complexity of the process. But for the study of the contemporary moment we need to think across different geographical scales and temporalities, recognizing that geography generates plural geometries and relationalities, and that history might run backwards as much as forwards, faster at some times than at others. This involves moving beyond the analytical register of the nation state, beyond the Eurocentric focus of the ivory tower, and beyond a privileging of the empirical field.

In this anthology, we start from a recognition that the sense in which the conceptualization of migration as a singular process (itself always a simplification) is increasingly nuanced by the manner in which mobility is increasingly qualified. It is qualified by the complexities of its geographies and the plurality of its histories – the selective permeability of destinations, and the rights and freedoms of places of origins and arrival; the contingencies of the future home, the presence of past elsewheres, and the multiple allegiances of diasporic and transnational imaginaries. It is typologised by routes, networks and circuits. The reasons, aspirations and purposes of those who move and reactions to their movement are similarly variable.

The publication corresponds with the 10th anniversary of the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, which opportunistically – if slightly arbitrarily – offered the chance to look backwards and forwards simultaneously, linking the publication to a conference held in the University of Oxford in February 2014. Entries are drawn principally – but not exclusively – from the work of researchers who are or who have been based at the Centre over the last decade. Their work is supplemented by invited contributions from a range of scholars who have collaborated with and/or been admired by the team at the Centre. Pieces were commissioned on the basis of previous work, but often contributors responded by saying that they would like to write about quite a different subject that had caught their interest. Thus, we hope to have captured a transformative moment in the decade of migration that is both contemporary and forward looking.

Contributors did not undertake to write on the themes through which we have organised the text, such as ‘Troubling bodies’ or ‘Keeping Time’. The structure of the anthology has consequently arisen from the pieces, rather than the contributions being shaped for particular headings. Many pieces could fit under more than one heading, and the headings themselves are interrelated: how can we separate bodies from representation, or time from place? The style varies, some contributors have extemporized, others have outlined and described. All contributors were asked to make short entries prompting further reading and reflection. Put together we hope that they provoke new insights and suggest new ways of thinking, both about migration and about some of the foundational concepts of social science.

The anthology does not aspire to be a synthetic overview of migration research today, nor to provide a comprehensive range of geographical or theoretical perspectives. Instead, we hope that it might serve as a provocation. We have chosen to publish primarily online (although a limited number of conventional books are available), so that the anthology might work as both an intervention and a resource. Because migration studies shares the sub-disciplinary dangers of the self-referential and the parochial, we hope that the anthology might suggest pathways and routes of future scholarly inquiry that draw on reflections of past research, linking migration as a theme to wider patterns of social change. For these reasons, we have combined academic prose with a selection of photographic images drawn from the annual COMPAS photography competition over recent years, and selected of poems drawn from poetry competitions for adults and children run this year, which were kindly judged by two members of Keble College, Oxford, Dr Erica McAlpine and Dr Matthew Bevis, and by novelist, critic and author, Ruth Padel, who has kindly added one poem to the collection.

Sub-discipline conventions commonly betray disciplinary roots, but we have nevertheless tried to provide a general resource, and to link material to further reading which might be taken up by people inside and outside the academy. In deciding to publish online using principles of a creative commons license, we intend to make material as widely available as possible. We hope that the anthology will thus serve as a resource for teaching and research: a grab bag to dip into as much as a text from which to teach.

5. Towards Provocation

Beyond Rules

International migrants are made, in large part, by laws and the imbricated powers of borders and sovereignty. Migrants are not simply governed by laws, but constructed by them, and immigration controls are not only about admittance but about the creation of particular types of relations. This places the state at the heart of immigration studies. Yet the state has often been under theorised in migration analyses, either treated as a neutral arbiter between the competing forces of capitalism, democracy and nationhood, or as an instrument of brutal coercion, intervening from a position somehow outside ‘society’. However, there is a move towards more nuanced approaches to analyzing the state and its relation to migration, not least as popular hostility to immigration is increasingly invoked as a reason for heightened restrictions, and as citizens are ever more deeply implicated in immigration enforcement. When external borders become more permeable, internal borders are often tightened, and there is increased interest in examining post-entry controls governing welfare benefits, labour rights and the right to settlement and citizenship. This has received particular academic and political attention within the European Union, and rights to free movement of all European Economic Area (EEA) citizens within the EU have run alongside ‘habitual residence’ tests for accessing welfare benefits. This has implications for nationals: in Italy, local residence requirements, which had hitherto been a formality, are increasingly drawn on to police the claims of international migrants in response to populist anxiety. This has had a significant impact on Italian internal migrants, who may be from Italy but who are not ‘local’. So, even as they are shored up, the borders between the citizen and non-citizen are revealed as ever more fragile. The tension between citizenship rights and human rights, or between citizenship and equality, has been the focus of considerable interest in political theory, and looks to be moving centre stage in political debate as detention, deportation and hostility to migrants increases, raising concerns about discrimination and fairness.

Beyond Contract

Immigration controls are not only about the creation of migrants. The contracts of citizenship, of marriage and of work for example are codified at the border: what is citizenship, what is marriage, and what is ‘work’? Are the paints, carried in the bag of an artist entering as a visitor, evidence that she will break her conditions of entry? Workers and labour markets are, like migrants and immigration, constructed in important ways by law. The law does not simply intervene to regulate naturally occurring processes of buying and selling labour, but rather, is key to their construction in the first place. Are there types of labour that should never be classified as ‘work’ (sex work being the most contentious and consistently struggled over with respect to immigration)? Are there groups of people who should never be classified as ‘workers’ (children for example)? Responses to such questions vary by state and by ‘culture’, and how these two domains of work and immigration intermesh, reinforce and undermine each other raises fundamental policy and theoretical questions.

Immigration also raises questions about the nature of ‘free labour’. How is it that while liberal democracies evince horror at ‘modern day slavery’ on Gulf construction sites, they condone sponsorship, precarity and subcontracting? What does this tell us about the relation between labour, freedom and contract, particularly as migrants continue to queue up for the possibility to work in the Gulf and elsewhere? Furthermore, when does being a ‘migrant’ matter, and when and where are the questions of interest addressed that relate to the precarity and insecurity that are experienced by citizens and non-citizens alike?

Keeping Time

How long a person stays or intends to stay is an important qualifier in the distinction between the mobile and the migrant. States not only control migration through refusal or granting of entry, but also through imposing temporal requirements. Liberal democracies can be averse to ethnic citizenship, and often restrict access to nationality through ever more stringent conditions regarding length of stay. More generally, states govern through temporal devices and rationalities. Institutions such as the school, the university, the factory, the city hall, the hospital and the prison sustain temporal logics, turning time into place-specific rhythms. Regarding migrants in particular, bureaucratic procedures are marked by different and sometimes contradictory tempos, with time traps set, in deadlines that are simply impossible to meet. With some notable exceptions, migration research has not typically engaged with theories of time, but equally, work that engages with the social theory of time rarely engages with migration scholarship. Much of the literature on time takes the nation state as an unexceptional container of time, even as histories of mobilities inevitably historicise both state and nation. Departing from an often strongly imagined, if contested, past, nations increasingly look to the future with demographic and cultural anxiety, and states consider the future and how it may be governed through a series of anticipatory actions: ‘pre-emption, preparedness and precaution’ work their way through government.

But time is not only a matter of governance. The bringing to bear of the imagined future and of the remembered past on the contemporary moment is a critical element of human subjectivity and agency. With this in mind, how should we understand, for example, the ‘decision’ to migrate? As the originating point in a series of familiar stages, rationally oriented towards some intended future? Or as a much more distributed, uncertain and emotional phenomenon? What are the costs and possible pleasures of states of uncertainty, waiting and temporariness? What does the spatial process of migration tell us about experiencing and passing time? Futures present map unevenly for different migrants. The horizon of possibility for the skilled worker may involve a calculus of known unknowns, a career that translates professional uncertainty into financial risk through rational optimising of human capital over a multi-year investment in the migration process. In contrast, the future for the low waged and undocumented may be more immediate, the horizon of possibility foreshortened: temporalities of just in time and getting by that generate alternative tactics of the quotidian, choreographies of everyday life that use the propensity of the city to hide the stranger and the freedoms of anonymity.

Representations: Powers and Pitfalls

It is not only rules that define migrants. Social scientists are beginning to acknowledge the ways in which research itself contributes to the making of ‘migrants’. As with many population groups, particularly those identified as sources of social problems, this can make the relation between research on the studied population and government policy extremely delicate. Social science often does not follow state definitions: the subjects of many migration studies on integration and ‘second generation’ migrants are, in law at least, commonly citizens. The burden of representation falls selectively. Qualitative research, in particular, has focused on the low waged, the poor and the excluded. The wealthy and the ‘expat’ have received, surprisingly, little attention: once a non-citizen is well heeled, their migrancy, it seems, is of less interest to both state and science.

There are methodological implications, and migration research requires reflexivity, whether qualitative or quantitative. While ethnographic or qualitative research is associated with interpretivism – with the researcher not separable from reality, and their subjectivity implicated in the findings – survey methods, big data analysis, and certain more quantified social science disciplines tend to be associated with positivism, facts, objectivity and truth. The researcher is separate and observes, and the research object has qualities that exist independently of the researcher. However, the unavoidably politicised and fuzzy definition of the migrant and the lexicon of migration suggests that, like qualitative methods, quantitative immigration research methods are not apolitical and free from bias. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the observation cannot be detached from the experiment. This also has ethical ramifications: once we ask people if they are concerned about immigration, they become concerned about immigration. The more they hear that others are concerned, the more concerned they become.

While representations in current affairs and journalism are often hostile, the migrant as depicted in myth and in story – from soap operas to portraits, films, poems, novels, and religious allegory – is far more complex. Exploration of migration in multiple forms, and a coming together of social science and the humanities in exploring the experience of mobility, mark important new developments. The structures of feeling that such narratives evoke are often invoked most powerfully through creative expression such as the poems and images incorporated into this anthology.

Troubling Bodies

The annual COMPAS photography competition, whose winning entries are to be found in this volume, was initiated partly to support the development of more creative, less stereotyped images of migration. It is surprisingly difficult to acknowledge bodies in migration, because visual representations are freighted with assumptions and anxiety about gender, class, religion, culture, identity and, encapsulating all, race: that is, anxieties about migration and embodiment. Anxieties about the bodies of migrants emerge in concerns about threats to the national body: the pregnant woman accessing health services, the rise of ‘non-white’ populations, the spread of disease, and so on. Part of being a ‘migrant’ is to be marked by one’s body, one’s way of being in the world. When people are not so marked, their migration is more likely to be viewed as unremarkable.

It is a truism to say that migration is about the movement of bodies; the movement of voices and minds through computers and telephones, like the movement of capital, is free of many of the constraints that bind the movement of bodies. Yet it seems that bodies are largely absent from immigration policy (though not anti-trafficking policies), as indeed they are absent from many state policies. Thus, the bodies of migrants and non-migrants are invisible, even as the sustaining of bodies is increasingly becoming a migrant job, creating a global demand for specifically female care workers. So, for all the anxiety about migrants and the national body, in policy the migrant is largely disembodied, imagined as a rational calculator of costs and benefits, though as feminist scholarship in a range of disciplines and sites has demonstrated, liberal disembodiment is grounded in assumptions of male and ‘fit’ bodies as the norm.

Certain skills and experiences are strongly imagined as embodied, and migrants can be in demand as embodied rather than abstracted labour. For example, UK horse trainers claim that they need migrant work riders because British people are ‘too large’, and owners of Asian restaurants claim that customers do not expect to be served by white bodies. This makes migrants’ bodies troublesome for policy to manage, particularly when it comes to labour. Migration and immigration policy reveals some serious contradictions and tensions with this, even as it promotes the idea that anybody/any body can do low-skilled work, which is why low-skilled jobs can be preserved for nationals. There is a longstanding tendency to imagine low-waged labour as disembodied, or as ‘hands’. As far back as his landmark 19th-century explorations of the new industrial metropolis, Friedrich Engels commented that the typical Manchester factory owner ‘cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the operative than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human beings, but hands as he constantly calls them to their faces’ . The moral power and ethical imperative of Levinas to recognize ‘the presence of humanity in the eyes that look at me’ is displaced by the substitution of ‘faces’ by ‘hands’. In this sense, just as the representation of the migrant is never innocent, their corporeal form signifies the intersectionality of identity typologies of gender, class, race and sexuality, all mutually constituted.

Towards Emotion

Technology is facilitating the transnational spread of caring networks, through Skype and through email, with families that monitor each other on screens, where grandparents can see and speak to their grandchildren, and share apps that allow you to kiss online: pursed lips setting off pairs of vibrating smart phones across the planet. At the same time, the disembodied migrant is typically regarded in policy as hiding suspect emotions. Immigration officers must discover motivations and intuit plans as part of their roles. In contrast, the citizen is an emotional subject in their responses to migrants – fear, anger and hostility, but also pity and compassion. Immigration is regularly typified as exciting ‘heated’ debate, yet the relation between the study of emotion and of immigration has been underdeveloped, both in relation to the emotions of the migrant, and the emotions of the enforcer of immigration controls. The emphasis has been, rather, on the requirement for the cold light of reason and of objectivity, yet, according to Weber, a fully developed bureaucracy is dehumanized by the elimination of the personal, irrational and emotional. The question of whether ethics is founded on reason or emotion continues to excite debate in political theory, but is also manifest in political practice around immigration.

Apart from attitudes to migration, an exemplary exception to the lack of interest in emotion is in the study of ‘integration’. While with respect to integration policy, emotion has sometimes been reduced to ‘getting along with one another’, scholarly interrogation of ‘community’ with respect to migrants, citizens and neighbourhoods has practical and political ramifications. Ideas of inclusive communities, unmarked by hierarchies of gender, class and faith, are revealed as complex multi-layered relations of belonging and exclusion. Yet it is through an affective register that many of the qualifiers of belonging are expressed in everyday life – a sense of desire, a fear of loss, the vertiginous moments of insecurity that may trouble and traumatise the new arrival and the seemingly settled alike.

Making Politics

Migration is unavoidably political. It is not just that it is a hot topic used by political parties in liberal democracies, and by other forms of power in non-liberal democracies, in order to achieve certain political ends, but it lies at the heart of social activity and relations. If politics queries the constitution of the good society, then migration amplifies some of its core questions. Who belongs? What do they belong to? Who decides? What rights and obligations do belonging and not belonging carry? These politics cannot be reduced to party politics. Indeed it is noticeable that when it comes to immigration, those on the right may talk about workers’ rights and welfare states, subjects usually associated with those on the left, while those on the left often talk about efficiency and contribution, concerns generally associated with those on the right. The stranger, that is the foreigner and the migrant, has the propensity to generate a mirror dance of political discourse, with left and right uncertain, flipped around or merely a matter of perspective.

Central to the politics of migration are notions of national identity, subjective and collective, and their relation to citizenship. Understanding and identifying oneself as a part of a native group has become an important aspect of the politics of laying claim to social, cultural, economic and political resources, be it land, livelihoods, social service, or a sense of home. Such claims of autocthony, also evident across the political spectrum, are often made against migrants. Those who claim nativity against migrants may be the larger body of citizens, but in certain parts of the world they may also be first-nation sovereignty movements. This suggests that the conventional understanding of colonialism, as a form of foreign occupation and domination, has had major implications for the framing and recognition of immigration and politics.

Rescaling and Re-placing

Migration scholars, such as Nina Glick Schiller, have long pointed out the danger of conceptualizing social science through a lens that studies societies contained within nation states. The fallacies of methodological nationalism reflect the interconnected nature of a world that has, in at least some senses, globalized, but this problematic is particularly pronounced in situations of migration. The consequences of migration play out at different geographical scales. The movement to the city in countries such as India or China commonly involves movements of both cultural and emotional distance greater than most international migrations, and logics of ‘rights’, labour markets and integration that blur the hard boundaries of intranational and international movement. Importantly, people move to places, to streets and to towns. They do not move just to nations, and in the moving to places and communities they also reshape them, often quite literally building places. The imperatives of the small neighbourhood characterized by rapid social change (including processes of migration) are logically different to those of the municipality whose economic growth may be fuelled by migrant labour, or the nation that contemplates its own optimum population.

The turbulence of social change in small neighbourhoods may display strange similarities of suspicion, towards cultural incomers of both gentrification and new migrants from other parts of the same continent. As Simmel argued at the turn of the last century, we should not confuse spatial distance and social distance, particularly as the challenges of diversity do not necessarily respect the passports of the single market. The European Union considers that movements within the EU are not formally covered by policy prescriptions of migrant integration – a policy term reserved for ‘third country nationals’. But such legal typologies and technical niceties may not reflect the social dynamics of life on the ground, where relations between strangers may flourish or generate new kinds of border marking, where a metropolitan paradox may be characterised by both intense intercultural dialogue and nascent xenophobia in the same space.

6. And So ...

Fundamentally, the very category of ‘migrant’ has been opened up. Who has not been a ‘migrant’? Who does not have mobility written into the histories of themselves or their loved ones? But if everyone is a ‘migrant’, if the category or subject is so broad, how can it be analytically useful? What is the difference between migration and mobility? And what does using the lens of mobility/migration bring to our understanding of human relations: political, social and economic? These questions bring migration to the core of the social sciences, and raise dilemmas and trade-offs that are both ethical and scientific. The scholarship of migration inevitably invokes questions of the ‘ought’ as well as of the ‘is’. How we consider the cognitive framing and utility optimising of neoclassical economics or contemporary political science, alongside the charged dilemmas of moral obligation, international law and the weight of historical injustice challenges researchers and the public alike to consider how commensurable these very different policy goals and structures of scholarship might be. Migration questions the fundamental relations between people, our obligations to the stranger as well as the familiar, and implies a political economy and a research agenda that speaks both to moral sentiments and the hidden hand of market imperatives. In this sense, this anthology aims to provoke a thinking that is simultaneously analytical and normative, recognizing the logical and epistemological differences between the two, but encouraging an endeavour that strives to be up close and then at a (critical) distance from its subject matter.

Of course, this indicates an entire research agenda rather than the subject of an anthology, but we hope that the following pieces can suggest some ways in which the field can be opened up. We have included an annex of further reading as a resource to help map some routes out of the anthology. This combines the canonical, the eclectic, and important COMPAS contributions for those readers who are interested in rediscovering key texts or starting new lines of analysis and inquiry. We hope that it will encourage you to author your own contribution, and to share it with others by adding to our online version of Migration: a COMPAS Anthology.

Beyond Rules

The Prayer Labyrinth - Ruth Padel

She went looking for her daughter. How many

visit Hades and live? Your only hope

is the long labyrinth of Visa Application

interviews with a volunteer from a charity

you’re not allowed to meet.

You’ve been caught: by a knock on the door

at dawn, hiding in a truck of toilet tissue

or just getting stuck in a turn-stile.

You’re on Dead Island: the Detention Centre.

The Russian refugees who leaped from the fifteenth floor

of a Glasgow tower block to the Red Road

Springburn – Serge, Tatiana and their son,

who when the Immigration officers

were at the door, tied themselves together

before they jumped – knew what was coming.

Anyway you’re here. Evidence of cigarette

burns all over your body has been dismissed

by the latest technology. You’re dragged

from your room, denied medication

or a voice. You can’t see your children,

they’re behind bars somewhere else.

You go on hunger strike. You’re locked

in a corridor three days without water

then handcuffed through the biopsy

on your right breast. You’ve no choice

but to pray; and to walk the never-ending path

of meditation on not yet. Your nightmare

was home-grown; you’re seeking sanctuary.

They say you don’t belong. They give you

a broken finger, a punctured lung.

From The Mara Crossing by Ruth Padel, published by Vintage, reprinted by permission of the Random House Group UK

‘We Want to Hear from You’: How Informing Works in a Liberal Democracy - Dace Dzenovska

The UK Border Agency (UKBA) conducts raids during which it arrests persons deemed illegally resident or illegally working. In order to undertake such raids, the agency relies on the public’s willingness to report. Apparently, ‘over 100,000 allegations are received per year from members of the public’ by ‘letter, email or telephone’ about ‘individuals living in their community’ (Vine, 2010). The agency’s website addresses the British public as follows: ‘If you suspect that someone is working illegally, has no right to be in the UK or is involved in smuggling, we want to hear from you.’

For someone like me who grew up in Soviet Latvia, and who analyses socialist legacies and postsocialist transformations, it seems paradoxical that government institutions in a liberal democratic state like Britain rely on citizens informing on individuals living in their community. How is it that the informing machinery that the Communist Party deployed is commonly thought of as a feature of a totalitarian state, whereas the informing apparatus crafted by the UKBA is an acceptable technology of government? How is it that in the Soviet Union individual informers were either victims or collaborators, whereas in Britain they are virtuous citizens? Is it because the Soviet state is thought to have governed through arbitrary power whereby everyone was living in fear that tomorrow they too could be informed on, whereas the British state is thought to govern through transparent power whereby the public receives clear guidelines on how to inform and on whom? To put it another way, is it because the Soviet state used informing to govern its own, whereas the British state invites citizens, that is, ‘us’, to inform on foreigners, that is, ‘them’? But is informing not still informing, regardless of who is informing on whom, as Ivan Krastev has argued with regard to spying (2013)?

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 set into motion a myriad of re-bordering practices. Former internal boundaries between Soviet republics became external borders between new nation states and for some, such as Latvia, they became borders between the European Union and Russia. The interests of the renewed Latvian state converged with those of the European Union, as both aimed to strengthen the external border in order to regulate the movement of variously defined foreigners. The initial period of transformations was somewhat chaotic, since border control procedures and technologies were not yet standardized. The Latvian border guards did what they thought appropriate in order to meet the goal of strengthening the border. Border guard officers explained to me that one of the techniques used to reach this goal was to approach people on the street if they looked as though they did not belong.

In the process of further EU integration and border standardisation, the Latvian border guard was tasked not only with strengthening the external EU border, but also with becoming civilized, that is, with protecting borders while observing the basic human rights of border crossers. Approaching people on the street without any intelligence could be deemed discriminatory. The border guard shifted to other strategies: they collaborated with the police, employment agencies and hotels, and asked government institutions and businesses to report on suspicious persons or activities. The border guards went on raids, but most raids took place because the border guard was tipped off. Hotels and guesthouses reported when guests did not pay or looked suspicious, people reported when they got angry with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Informing turned out to be a crucial strategy for controlling the territory in conditions of freedom. Nobody made a connection between the Soviet and post-Soviet practices of informing. In Latvia, like in Britain, it was now clear who needed to be informed on, which made informing acceptable.

There are important differences between the informing apparatus of the Communist Party and that of the UKBA. Whereas in the Soviet Union everyone could be considered under suspicion, in liberal Britain, it is mostly certain bodies that are targeted by informing practices. While the Soviet state used informing to exercise repressive power over its citizens, the British state uses informing to produce virtuous citizens willing to report on their neighbours. If the Soviet informing apparatus aimed to maintain the power of the Communist Party, the UKBA’s informing apparatus aims to allocate rights. People are asked to report on those who seem like they do not have the right to be present or to work.

Rights-based thinking, then, might be at the foundation of the liberal democratic practice of informing. If one thinks of political life in terms of rights granted by the state – who has the right to be present, to work, to be housed and to receive assistance, then the distinction between those who have rights and those who do not becomes a constitutive feature of the polity. In conditions when polity-making is about the accumulation and distribution of rights and when rights-based resources are thought to be scarce, informing on those who do not have a right to be present or to work becomes a civic duty. And rights-based resources are often thought to be scarce in the UK, as is evident by the sustained ‘moral panic’ in public and political life (Hall et al., 1978). Moral panic translates into the emergence of the virtuous citizen who makes that phone call and writes that email to inform on individuals living in their community.

Surveillance is a modern technology of government deployed by totalitarian states as well as liberal democratic states. However, the difference between them lies in the power of freedom to blind us to the effect of power on ourselves, our ethics and our politics. Perhaps the Soviet state and its traces can still be useful for bringing a critical lens onto the late liberal workings of power.

References

Hall, S. et al. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: MacMillan.

Krastev, I. (2013) ‘The Transparency Delusion’, Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-02-01-krastev-en.html

Vine, J. (2010) ‘Preventing and Detecting Immigration and Customs Offenses: A Thematic Inspection of How the UK Border Agency Receives and Uses Intelligence, http://icinspector.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Preventing-and-detecting-immigration-and-customs-offences.pdf

Deportation - Nicholas De Genova

Deportation is a term that has no distinguished pedigree in the history of political ideas and legal concepts. Unlike citizenship, for instance, which derives from a hallowed history of philosophical debate and political practice concerned with the proper relationship of individuals to the public life of a larger community, deportation has no such exalted genealogy. As a figure of law-making and law enforcement, of course, the practice of deportation will always be found to have a history. But there is something distinctly nondescript about the term, perfunctory even, which underscores its status as a kind of understated, largely unexamined fixture of statecraft.

To de-port is suggestive of an undoing. In effect, etymologically, the word’s origins would indicate a carrying away, a removal, a disposal. A still more euphemistic and sanitized contemporary bureaucratic synonym for deportation is, indeed, removal. When conducted on a mass scale, deportations have historically been similarly euphemized as ‘population transfers’. With this proliferation of banal language to describe what can only be experienced in fact as a rather coercive if not violent dislocation, however, we begin to appreciate that we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt famously designated ‘the banality of evil’ (1963).

As is well known, Arendt invoked this notion with regard to the unsettling ‘normal’-ness of the high-profile Nazi technocrat Adolf Eichmann, during his trial for ‘crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes’. ‘It would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster…. The trouble with Eichmann,’ Arendt explains, ‘was precisely that so many were like him … neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal’. Devoid of any ‘diabolical or demonic profundity,’ Eichmann’s very pedestrian thoughtlessness ‘predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals’ of his epoch. This was possible, furthermore, because, in Arendt’s account, despite Eichmann’s evident culpability for repeated and systematic criminal acts, ‘he had no motives’ apart from ‘an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement’ within a large-scale bureaucratic organization dedicated to administrative mass murder and genocide, for which criminality and injustice had become ‘legal’. In other words, the banality of Eichmann’s particular evil derived from what Arendt deemed to be ‘the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy’: the dehumanizing reduction of individuals into ‘functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery’.

Notably, given his instrumental role in the perpetration of the so-called Final Solution, the particular evil in question was precisely inseparable from Eichmann’s superintendence of the mass deportation of European Jews to their eventual extermination. Indeed, this is what chiefly characterizes deportation in its more contemporary connotation as the prosaic and procedural (individualized) expulsion of non-citizens – that it is pervasively institutionalized as a merely administrative measure. Hence, something that can only be experienced by the non-citizen subjected to it as a profoundly punitive iniquity operates as an utterly routine and mundane recourse of states ‘removing’ (or disposing of) their ostensibly unwanted, undesirable, unwelcome foreigners. Thus, deportation has the air of a purely administrative corrective: some people are deemed to be ‘out of place’; they must be ‘removed’.’

Ensnared within the pompous gestures of ‘national’ sovereignty and a state’s prerogative to enforce its own legal order, the desultory deportation of non-citizens sustains a dissimulation of the more elementary fact that some people’s lives are plainly judged to be disposable. This may not ordinarily take the form of deliberately and forcibly shipping people off to their literal deaths, but neither is that consequence an implausible or improbable result of some deportations. In a recent study of deportation in the United States, for example, legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom provides case histories of immigration judges who can be found to explicitly admit that they are sometimes sending medically vulnerable deportees to almost certain death simply because ‘that … is the law of this land’ (2012). More generally, however, deportation always entails the enforcement of a dire and usually abrupt separation of an individual non-citizen from all the material and practical coordinates of her day-to-day circumstances, the actual life and livelihood that she has been engaged in sustaining and cultivating, as well as all the immediate and affective human relationships of which these are made.

A non-citizen’s susceptibility to deportation – her deportability – therefore involves a deeply existential predicament that is defined by the grim prospect of being coercively removed from the space of the nation state where she has otherwise sought to make a life. The always unpredictable possibility of deportation becomes a defining horizon for her life. This prospective disposability within and across the bordered spaces of states, furthermore, enforces a protracted condition of vulnerability to the recriminations of the law, and consequently, a complex and variegated spectrum of ways in which everyday life becomes riddled with precariousness, multiple conditionalities, inequality and uncertainty. In this respect, deportability is also a temporal predicament that renders one’s way of life and one’s life projects to be always relatively tentative and tenuous, vexed with precautions and often overshadowed by a diffuse but persistent terror – the fear of detection, apprehension, detention, and expulsion. Yet, these more or less torturous conditions of life for those who are compelled by circumstances to make their lives beneath the horizon of the possibility of deportation have been made ever increasingly normal – ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’ (to recall Arendt’s phrase) – within our modern global ‘deportation regime’ (De Genova and Peutz, 2010).

References

Arendt, Hannah (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin.

De Genova, N. and Peutz, N. (2010) The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, Durham: Duke University Press.

Kanstroom, D. (2012) Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Why Are the Most Vulnerable Denied Employment Rights? - Sonia McKay

I want to address a fundamental question of deregulation, namely the exclusion of migrants without documents from employment rights. Martin Ruhs and Bridget Anderson, in their innovative work on compliance (Anderson and Ruhs 2010), show how workers fall into non- (or semi) compliance as a result of the operation of immigration rules and that it is the law, rather than the migrants themselves, that determines migration status. The consequences of this are particularly relevant in the application of employment law. Though the origins of the common law doctrine of illegality of contract are unclear, by the middle of the nineteenth century it was being used in the courts to declare contracts unenforceable where there was an issue of illegality, either in the construction of the contract or in its operation. Initially, it was not applied to employment cases, but by the middle of the 20th century this position had been reversed, particularly in cases where there was tax or national insurance avoidance. It was inevitable that it would be applied to undocumented migrants who generally are not able to pay taxes since they are not registered, and judges have denied some migrants employment protection simply because they are non- (or semi) compliant. This means for example, that migrants in these categories have no right to be protected during maternity, nor even the right not to be discriminated against. This is important because these rights are otherwise generally applicable to all workers and, in the case of maternity and discrimination, are also protected under European law.

The common law interpretation of contracts where there is status irregularity is exceptionally harsh in a period where tightening immigration controls have restricted lawful entry, particularly for those in low-skilled jobs. It is increasingly difficult for non EU workers to enter the country with permission and the law then privileges employers who are aware of the weak position of the undocumented. This not only makes the undocumented a ‘cheap’ workforce but it means that they have no legal redress, however poorly they may be treated. It cannot be right that the law should operate so as to encourage abusive treatment, as in the recent case of Zarkasi v Anindita and another UKEAT 0400/11 (2012) where the courts denied the right of any employment protection to a vulnerable young Indonesian woman who had been brought to the UK to work in her employer’s home. She had been promised generous terms and conditions, but the reality was very different, and she suffered abuse at the hands of the employer while being paid just £150 a month, well below the national minimum wage. The fact that it was her employer who had brought her to the UK knowing that she would not have a legal right to work was deemed irrelevant.

While both the current coalition and the previous Labour governments have asserted the need to eliminate what they describe as ‘illegal work’, the truth is that their policies have served to make the vulnerable even more so. The government points to the use of sanctions against those employing undocumented migrants (and in 2013 proposed to increase them from £10,000 to £20,000 per worker) but immigration authorities appear to focus on ‘easy’ targets such as employers in ethnic enclaves, identifying them as the main offenders. Undocumented workers are present in most low paid sectors, but outside of the ethnic enclave employers know that they are very unlikely to face immigration raids or to be prosecuted.

It cannot be right or just that employers can get away with exploiting vulnerable workers in this way. Effectively the common law doctrine encourages the exploitation of those without documents and, as our research on undocumented migrants has demonstrated (see Bloch et al., 2013), the employment conditions of those who are undocumented worsen when the only option is no work at all.

Is there an alternative? I would argue that the first duty of the state is to ensure the enforcement of minimum employment standards, regardless of immigration status. This protects not just those who are undocumented, but benefits all workers who do not face being undercut or having their terms and conditions reduced to ‘match’ those offered to the undocumented. Indeed, governments could go further. If their policy aim was to eliminate exploitative working conditions (a legitimate public interest) they could legislate such that those undocumented migrants who blew the whistle on their employers’ exploitative conditions would be given additional protection, in particular the option of regularisation. If this is considered a step too far in the current political climate, then surely as a bare minimum we should be arguing for the regulation of all employment relationships and the guarantee of at least the minimum statutory employment protection, in keeping with EU and international standards. We urgently need an alternative model which guarantees the separation of immigration and labour law, to validate labour law as a fundamental guarantor of rights in the workplace.

References

Bloch, A. et al. (2013) Undocumented Migrants, Ethnic Enclaves and Networks: Opportunities, Traps or Class-based Constructs, ESRC project, http://www.undocnet.org.

Ruhs, M. and Anderson, B. (2010) ‘Semi-compliance and Illegality in Migrant Labour Markets: An Analysis of Migrants, Employers and the State in the UK’, Population, Space and Place 16(3): 195-21.

Marriage Migration - Katharine Charsley

Marriage and movement have long been intertwined. In many societies, brides move to their husband’s household upon marriage (and less frequently vice versa), but in contemporary marriage migration the distances involved can be substantial and may span national borders. This transnational border-crossing is nothing new: British brides sought by 17th and 18th-century British men in colonial India, Japanese ‘picture brides’ chosen from photographs for Japanese immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century, and the ‘war brides’ leaving Europe to join their GI husbands after World War II all provide historical examples of international migration on the basis of marriage. However, with increasing international migration and travel and the ready availability of communication technologies, transnational unions and international marriage migration occur with increasing frequency.

Contemporary marriage-related migration is diverse. International migrants may bring a spouse from their country of origin to join them; established diasporas sometimes maintain connections to ancestral homelands through marriage; in parts of Asia women move from poorer to wealthier nations to fill rural bride-shortages; tourists, international students or business travellers meet future partners during overseas sojourns; international dating websites facilitate online relationship formation, whilst companies offer men from developed countries introduction services and ‘romance tours’ to meet prospective brides from eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. Gendered imaginaries of place underlie some unions. One suggested tension has been between some men’s search for a more ‘traditional’ spouse overseas, and women’s hope that an international marriage will provide a more progressive partner. Assumptions of hypergamy – that women are often marrying ‘up’ the international hierarchy – may be complicated by the sometimes marginal status of men who seek a foreign wife. Migrant wives are often viewed as vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, their isolation amplifying patriarchal control, but where husbands migrate (often against a virilocal norm) they may encounter new gendered challenges in the inversion of conventional domestic relations of power.

Governmental perspectives on marriage-related migration also vary. In Europe, southern states have conventionally viewed family reunification in a positive light, as facilitating migrant integration (see European Council Directive 2003/86/EC) whilst northern European countries have more often seen family migration as an unwanted side-effect of earlier labour migration. As this latter view suggests, marriage can pose a fundamental challenge to governmental attempts to manage migration, given that spouses are generally selected by individuals (and/or families) rather than the state. In this context, the ‘right to family life’ has become hotly contested. Some types of transnational marriage, however, attract more political attention than others. Marriages between individuals from developed countries are seldom problematic. In contrast, the vulnerability of so-called ‘mail order brides’ has been a topic of concern in the US, while in Europe the ‘homeland’ marriages of some ethnic minorities have become a high-profile political issue, in the form of debates around forced marriage, problematic integration and immigration fraud. Some regulatory instruments have been developed which disproportionately affect such groups, whilst allowing others to continue to enjoy marital mobility. In the UK, the Primary Purpose Rule (1985-97) required would-be spousal migrants to demonstrate that the primary purpose of the marriage was not immigration. This was seen as targeting South Asian arranged transnational marriages, where evidence of a long standing romantic relationship would not be available to demonstrate alternative motivations. Current minimum income requirements for those applying to sponsor a spouse’s immigration have more impact on groups whose average incomes are lower, including ethnic minority groups in which transnational marriage has been common. Denmark’s ‘Combined Attachment’ requirement presents a particularly ingenious response to the impulse to sort immigrant spouses according to hierarchies of socio-economic and cultural desirability: couples must demonstrate a combined attachment to Denmark greater than to another country, something which has proved particularly difficult in the case of inter-ethnic ‘homeland’ marriages.

Emphasis on transnational marriages as motivated by opportunities for migration, evident in much policy and scholarship in this area, has often been at the expense of a more rounded understanding of these relationships. Such models are of limited use in explaining cross-border marriages between partners from developed countries occurring in globalised marriage fields. But even in the arranged marriages between British Pakistanis and cousins from Pakistan, which have been the subject of my own ethnographic research, the opportunity to migrate is only one contributing factor in marriages that often help reconnect families to much-missed kin in Pakistan. Transnational marriage must be understood in the context of broader transnational relationships. A focus only on the ‘migration’ in ‘marriage migration’ can blinker appreciation of the broader value and meanings of relationships to those involved. In order to maintain marital relationships in the face of increasingly restrictive immigration policies, some couples have found equally ingenious ways to be reunited with their spouse. The ‘Surinder Singh’ route involves taking advantage of the rights of European Economic Area (EEA) citizens exercising freedom of movement to be joined by non-EEA spouses, whilst in Denmark, significant numbers of Danish Pakistanis now live lives which are doubly transnational – becoming frequent commuters on the so called kærlighedens bro or ‘love bridge’ between Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden, where their Pakistani partners have been granted permission to reside.

Thus, the growing interest in marriage-related migration reflects a belated recognition that, rather than being a marginal topic for migration studies, this is an area in which issues of crucial importance are brought to the fore, including the gendered nature of migration, the diversity of contemporary international mobility, the centrality of relationships for understanding migration motivations, experiences and patterns, and tensions between human rights and immigration control.

Undocumented Migrant Children - Vanessa Hughes

In the UK, undocumented migrant children are a diverse population. Over half of the estimated 120,000 were either born in the UK or have spent most of their life there. They come for a variety of reasons, from a number of different backgrounds, migrating independently or with their family, with diverse pathways into their precarious immigration status (Sigona, 2013). Their experiences are accordingly heterogeneous: in terms of their journeys, which can range from a several months long, arduous, cross-country passage to a short ariline flight; interactions with immigration authorities and other state institutions (such as schools and healthcare professionals); and their everyday life. What unites most of them, however, is their position at the intersection of immigration and children’s policies and legislation. This policy and legal framework creates a space of limbo for these children. On the one hand they are de facto non-deportable, while on the other, despite legislation that turns them into ‘citizens in becoming’ (Sigona and Hughes, 2012), their possibilities of regularisation are limited, thereby trapping them in a ‘no way out and no way in’ situation. Children have always been part of migration, but despite increasing literature and research in this area, little remains known about undocumented migrant children, their experiences and how their precarious immigration status impacts their lives.

The legal status of undocumented migrant children can be understood as a complex and dynamic combination of relations vis-à-vis the state, embedded in the policy and legal framework, public services and their own plans, expectations, histories and position. Or, as Willen (2007) argues, ‘migrant illegality’ can refer to a legal status, a socio-political condition and a ‘mode of being in the world’. Furthermore, ‘illegality’ is not a fixed status. Rather migrants, as non-citizens, move through a range of statuses and can simultaneously inhabit both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ spaces in relation to different institutional or policy arrangements, so that their legal status becomes more or less visible at different points in time. While children under 18 years remain relatively protected, the transition to adulthood often also marks a transition to full visibility of their irregular status, leading to a certain loss of control over their future. Sigona (2013) thus suggests a shift in scholarly scrutiny towards precariousness of immigration status, rather than focusing exclusively on ‘illegality’.

Precarious immigration status affects migrant children in a myriad of ways and on a daily basis. While there are many differences in their migration history, danger of deportation and family or household situation, some similarities can be observed. Undocumented migrant children usually live in poor housing conditions and experience high housing mobility, insecure incomes and destitution. Legally, undocumented migrant children are entitled to access education and healthcare in the UK and are mostly able to access these public services; indeed, schools often represent a safe place for many children (for a US comparison see Gleeson and Gonzales, 2012). However, local variations remain and difficulties in access emerge over time, in particular in connection with increasing restrictions of migrants’ access to public services.

While in Europe undocumented migrant children have so far received little attention in public policy and research, a view across the Atlantic shows a different situation. Despite an increase in the number of deportations under Obama (Lopes and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2013), or perhaps because of it, the voices of young undocumented migrants have become loud and clear over the past decade, declaring themselves as ‘undocumented and unafraid’. The political movement around the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) demanding a pathway to legalisation and citizenship for themselves and their parents has so far led to Obama’s executive order suspending deportations for some under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Whether more comprehensive reform will take place remains to be seen, but so far abjectivity and illegality has motivated some young undocumented migrants to engage politically and and to resist being defined by their legal status.

Contrary to the US, deportation numbers have been declining in Europe and it is highly unlikely that children will be deported from the UK (Sigona, 2013). Counter to the deportation trend, however, the potential changes in immigration reform currently under debate make a permanent future for young undocumented migrants more tenable in the US than in the UK. Either way, undocumented migrant children are likely to be a continued reality and, as such, it is important to better understand how they are affected by their legal status.

References

Gleeson, S. and Gonzales, R.G. (2012) ‘When Do papers Matter? An Institutional Analysis of Undocumented Life in the United States’, International Migration 50(4): 1-19.

Lopez, M.H. and Gonzalez-Barrera, A., (2013). ‘High Rate of Deportations Continue under Obama Despite Latino Disapproval’, FactTank, Pew Research Centre.

Sigona, N. and Hughes, V. (2012) No Way Out, No Way In, Oxford: COMPAS.

Sigona, N. (2013) ‘Constructing Precariousness: Understanding the Experiences of Undocumented Children Beyond Deportability’, Paper presented at the conference ‘Illegality, Youth, and Belonging’, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Willen, S. (2007) ‘Towards a Critical Phenomenology of “‘llegality”: State Power, Criminalisation and Abjectivity among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, Israel’, International Migration 45 (3): 8–36.

The Human Rights of Migrants - François Crépeau

Migrants face very specific human rights challenges. Vulnerable groups, such as women, aboriginals, ethnic minorities, LGBTQs and prisoners have won formal citizenship. They now fight for their rights from their position as citizens. Migrants are not citizens: they don’t vote or get elected. They fear being arrested, detained or deported; they rarely mobilise or protest. Some migrants have more resources to defend themselves: the highly skilled labourer and permanent resident are often treated as a citizen. But for many others, including ‘low-skilled’ labourers and irregular migrants, when something bad happens (an employer refuses to pay them, for example), their best option seems to be ducking and moving on, as they have learned to fear encounters with authorities.

Migrants rarely participate in public debates on migration policies: they are the objects of debate, rarely subjects or recognised interlocutors. Migration is one policy area where politicians can make outrageous statements without facing any consequences at the polls – indeed they may benefit from them. Despite years of research to the contrary, repetition by politicians and the media means the public still believes that migrants take jobs from locals, create unemployment, bring crime and illnesses, or come to the global north with the intention of syphoning social budgets. The culture of impunity around anti-migrant rhetoric remains because migrants are not, and will never be, politically represented at the national level, as they are not citizens. Migrants face a structural limitation of electoral democracies. Politicians, even those with a moral compass, have little incentive to protect migrants’ rights, if by doing so they risk losing the polls. The toxic immigration debate in many parts of the world reveals the extreme instrumentalization of migration and the malleability of an uninformed, often hostile public opinion.

Yet migrants have rights. With two narrowly defined exceptions (the right to vote and be elected, and the right to enter and stay in the country), under international human rights law (and often constitutional law), migrants – including irregular migrants – benefit from the same human rights guarantees as do citizens, by virtue of their common human dignity. Human rights are not only citizens’ rights – they are for ‘everyone’. The two international covenants on human rights explicitly include ‘national origin’ among the prohibited grounds of discrimination in the enjoyment of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. Enforcing this prohibition in law and practice is a key challenge in ensuring the protection of the human rights of migrants at the national level. This does not imply that migrants have the benefit of all the same government entitlements that citizens or even long-term residents, as not all benefits represent the implementation of a fundamental right. The question is whether the distinction between individuals can be justified, and immigration status does not justify just any distinction.

Migrants face an increasing culture of systemic rights violations by states in both the global north and south. Because migration is related to borders and is politically sensitive, states consider migration policies to be a component of their discretionary powers relating to territorial sovereignty, and accept very little control or oversight over their policies and practices. The past decade has witnessed the securitization of border controls and migration policies. Even though crossing an international border without proper documentation is at worst an administrative offence and should never be considered a crime, irregular migrants face arrest, deportation and detention, often in appalling conditions. The procedural maze facing the migrant on any legal issue is generally undecipherable without help, and judicial assistance is rarely available. States have often set up systems of administrative detention for migrants that result in long-term detention, with scant or pro forma periodic review. Facilities range from purpose-built centres to ad-hoc camps, police stations and even containers, and are often not well regulated, supervised or monitored. Alternatives to detention are almost nowhere available.

Migrant children, unaccompanied or not, are often detained and deported like adults, with no legal guardian, or legal representative. They rarely undergo a proper ‘best interests of the child’ determination, and access to school or health care is often illusory.

Victims of human trafficking (for the sex trade or forced labour) are often treated as irregular migrants, without benefiting from the specific protections they are owed under international law.

Temporary migrant workers should have the security of regular status and a work contract. However, their foreignness, lack of language skills, social isolation and categorization as ‘low-skilled or unskilled’ make them vulnerable to exploitation such as confiscation of identity or travel documentation, wage theft, poor housing, dirty, difficult and dangerous working conditions, lack of health care and so on. Additionally, unscrupulous recruitment agencies can request egregious fees, forcing them into long-term debt.

State policies often increase vulnerability. Some work permits are tied to the immigration sponsor, who then wields enormous power, as he can have the migrants deported the moment he terminates their contract. Most countries have unrecognised labour needs and do not adequately repress ‘irregular employment’, tolerating underground labour markets where undocumented migrants are exploited. Access to citizenship is often denied, even to long-term residents, often resulting in statelessness.

Like all human beings, migrants need a strategy of empowerment to fight for their own rights. In particular, meaningful access to justice (courts, administrative tribunals, national human rights institutions, ombudspersons, labour inspectors and so on), freedom of association and the right to organise and join unions, and support from civil society organisations are crucial elements of such strategy. Public discourse relating to migration also needs to change: the media must be much more accurate on migration issues, politicians need the courage to reject the scapegoating of migrants, and public opinion needs education about migrants’ rights and the benefits of diverse societies.

The author thanks Anna Purkey and Bethany Hastie for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Rethinking Migrant Rights for Development - Martin Ruhs

In early October 2013, the UN General Assembly debated the global governance of international labour migration. This meeting was particularly timely, as it came on the heels of reports of numerous deaths among Nepalese workers on World Cup construction sites in Qatar.

But as they gathered in New York, policymakers once again overlooked one of the hardest questions in this debate: how to manage the trade-offs in immigration policy between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights migrants are granted after admission.

Qatar and the other Gulf states are examples of countries operating a ‘high numbers/low rights’ system; they have very open admission policies but place severe restrictions on migrants’ rights. At the other end of the spectrum some countries of northern Europe offer migrants comprehensive rights but admit relatively few migrant workers.

There is a clear trade-off to be made between these two models, but international policymakers are yet to design a strategy for migrant rights with this in mind. The failure to deal with this issue has to end. A coherent approach to the global governance of migration requires that this difficult issue is explicitly and openly discussed.

The liberalisation of immigration policies in high-income countries is supported by many low-income countries and development organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme. There have been particular calls for the rules governing admission of lower-skilled workers to be relaxed. This section of migrants currently face the most restrictions, but it is where migration could easily lead to large gains in income and development. The World Bank, for instance, believes that more international labour migration is one of the most effective ways of raising the incomes of workers in low-income countries.

At the same time, workers’ rights organisations, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), demand more equal rights for migrants. Activists around the world have called for more countries to ratify the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers, which lays out a very comprehensive set of civil, political, economic, and social rights for migrants, including those living and working abroad illegally. To date, fewer than 50 countries, none of them major migrant-receiving nations, have ratified this convention.

The dilemma is that it is not always possible to have both ‘more migration’ and ‘more rights’ for migrant workers. After examining labour immigration policies in over 45 high-income countries in my recent book The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration (2013), I found an inverse relationship between openness and some rights for migrants. Greater equality of rights for new migrant workers tends to be associated with more restrictive admission policies, especially for admitting lower-skilled workers from poorer countries.

The tension between ‘access and rights’ applies to a few specific rights that are perceived to be costly for the receiving countries. The right of lower-skilled migrants to access certain welfare services and benefits is particularly affected. The implication of this trade-off is that insisting that new migrant workers get the same rights as citizens can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies. Equal rights can protect the few migrant workers admitted, but reduce the opportunities of many more to benefit from work available in richer countries.

Few migrant-sending nations insist on full and equal rights for their workers abroad, for fear of reduced access to the labour markets of higher-income countries. Witness, for instance, the muted reaction of the Nepalese government to the deaths of their citizens in Qatar. With the current arrangement suiting both nations’ economic interests, the two governments even held a joint press conference to say migrant rights were ‘fully respected’.

International debates about the global governance of migration have almost completely ignored the trade-off between openness and rights. Global migration debates such as those at the 2014 Global Forum on Migration and Development in Sweden should open up the discussion. We need a reasoned debate between organisations that advocate more migration to promote development, such as the World Bank, and those primarily concerned with the protection and equality of rights, such as the ILO.

So if there is a trade-off to be made between openness and rights, what is the solution? This is a question with no single answer. But there is a strong case for liberalising international labour migration, especially for low-skilled workers. This could be achieved through temporary migration programs that protect a universal set of core rights and account for the interests of nation states by restricting a few specific rights that create net costs for receiving countries, and are therefore obstacles to more open admission policies.

We should start discussing the creation of a list of universal ‘core rights’ for migrant workers. Exactly which rights would be on this list is still up for debate, but it is a debate that should be at the centre of upcoming discussions on the global governance of migration.

A ‘core’ list would include fewer rights than the 1990 Convention, but more countries would be likely to accept it. Most significantly, this would include those countries that admit large numbers and currently have minimal incentive to seriously improve conditions. Thus, given the large numbers involved, overall protection for migrant workers would be increased. It might be a counter-intuitive conclusion, but it is one grounded in reality: when it comes to protecting migrant rights, it turns out less is more.

References

Ruhs, M. (2013) The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

This article first appeared in The Conversation on 2 October 2013

Equality for All? - Sarah Spencer

Equality is, one might have thought, an inclusive principle. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights commits nations to protect ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, while closer to home the British Conservative party speaks of equality of opportunity for ‘every single individual in this country’.1 Equality is not, however, the intention of any government for one section of society: migrants. Their conditions of entry spell out the terms of their inequality, imposing limits on their right to access jobs, public services, social assistance and participation in elections.

These departures from the equality principle are not seen as discrimination but as a legitimate part of immigration control. Few would indeed suggest that migrants should be able to make their way to the benefit office or polling station on the day they step onto the tarmac at JFK or Charles de Gaulle. Yet there are other rights – such as freedom from torture and to a fair trial – where migrants’ equality with citizens is, in a liberal democracy, taken as read.

That divergence raises a fundamental question: when is it legitimate for a state to impose restrictions on migrants as part of its sovereign right to control its borders, and when should that right be trumped by the principle of equality for all within the territory? As Linda Bosniak puts it: when is it legitimate for the border to follow the migrant inside (2006)? If it is legitimate to restrict some of the rights of some migrants in some circumstances, what are those circumstances, and when do the restrictions amount to illegitimate discrimination? Is there a workable test we can use to decide where to draw the line?

Academic and policy discourses have toyed with various criteria as the basis on which migrants should acquire equal rights: the strength of the individual’s social ties; length of residence; contribution. All have strengths but also flaws; for example, contribution may not be within the migrant’s control (if still a child or barred by discrimination), or their existing affiliation may be weak but their need for protection strong. Basing access to equality on such criteria, moreover, reinforces exclusion rather than building capacity to overcome it. Nor is it clear how affiliation or contribution should be measured and hence at what point equality in civil, social and political rights should be granted.

Rather than criteria for earning equality, the question should be ‘on what grounds is it justified to exclude?’ The majority of states have signed up to human rights instruments, like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), in which equality is the default position from which states have to justify any departure.

The ECHR provides protection from discrimination in relation to the rights in that Convention ‘on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’ (Art.14). Not every difference in treatment amounts to discrimination – only if the less favourable treatment has no objective and reasonable justification. To be non-discriminatory, the restriction must pursue a legitimate aim and there must be a reasonable relationship of proportionality between the restriction and the aim that it is intended to achieve. So the Convention provides a clear test against which any restriction must be judged.

In decisions binding on the 47 Council of Europe member states, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that these provisions include protection from discrimination on grounds of nationality, immigration and residence status. Austria’s denial of unemployment benefit to a tax-paying Turkish national on the basis of his nationality was, for instance, discrimination in the enjoyment of his right to property. The Court said a government would have to provide ‘weighty reasons’ before it could regard difference of treatment based exclusively on nationality as compatible with the Convention (De Schutter, 2009; 2011). The absence of a stable residence permit was likewise not sufficient reason to deny the right to family reunion to a refugee whose marriage post dated his arrival, when other temporary residents (workers and students) are allowed to be joined by their spouses. The UK justified this on the grounds that it needed to provide an incentive to workers and students to come. The court thought this a legitimate aim but did not consider the difference in the treatment of refugees to be justified and proportional on those grounds. It is not sufficient to claim restrictions are necessary for the purposes of immigration control or to protect the public purse. There must also be evidence that the restrictions are necessary and proportional to that end.

That test provides more than fine points to debate in court. It is an operational yardstick public authorities can use to consider when it is legitimate for a right to be restricted and when the equality principle should prevail. It brings into play a broad range of economic, social and personal considerations when weighing up the necessity and proportionality of the restriction.

European governments have not yet felt any need to spell out their reasons for the restrictions they impose or the evidence on which they are based. Recent COMPAS studies had difficulty tracking down any rationales for many restrictions in place except where, retrospectively, they had been challenged through a parliamentary process or in court (Pobjoy and Spencer, 2012; Oliver, 2013). If challenged, governments may find the impacts of restrictions poorly evidenced, suggesting a new research agenda. If the aim is indeed not equality for all, then inequality for whom, and on what grounds?

Notes

1Teresa May, Shadow Home Secretary, Second Reading Equality Bill, May 11, 2009. Col 565. UN Declaration: author’s emphasis.

References

Bosniak, L. (2006) The Citizen and the Alien: The Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

De Schutter, O. (2009) ‘Links between Migration and Discrimination’, Thematic report, European Network of Legal Experts, European Commission.

De Schutter, O. (2011) ‘The Prohibition of Discrimination under European Human Rights Law: Relevance for the EU Non-discrimination Directives – an Update’, Thematic report, European Network of Legal Experts, European Commission.

Oliver, C (2013) ‘The Impact of Restrictions and Entitlements on the Integration of Family Migrants’, Final report of the IMPACIM project, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Pobjoy, J. and Spencer, S. (2012) ‘Equality for All? The Relationship Between Immigration Status and the Allocation of Rights in the United Kingdom’, European Human Rights Law Review (2): 162 -177.

In this analysis I draw significantly on my work with Jason Pobjoy at the University of Cambridge and acknowledge with gratitude his contribution.

Reflections on an Anniversary: EU Citizenship at 20 - Cathryn Costello

I am writing this 20 years to the day after the Maastricht Treaty entered into force on 1 November 1993. ‘Economic and monetary union’ and ‘political union’ (coordinating foreign policy and ‘justice and home affairs’) were the main events. The Treaty also grandly announced: ‘Citizenship of the Union is hereby established’. The status was for those ‘holding the nationality of a Member State’. The rights attached were largely pre-existing and politically underwhelming. Without great fanfare, the weightiest of political concepts was uploaded into the EU Treaty, apparently an afterthought.

EU citizenship status is Janus-faced, drawing on existing rights, but promising much more. The original European Economic Community (EEC) (1957) was a common market, aiming to liberalise not only trade in goods and services, but far more ambitiously, the movement of capital and persons in the capacity of economic actors. The drafters didn’t anticipate the next moves: having created a court with real clout, it got to work quietly but effectively. ‘Free movement’ for workers between EEC states, while not availed of in massive numbers, was legally enforceable. The Court insisted that migration was not subject to executive discretion, but a right, with few bureaucratic hurdles. Governments lost many early cases (a common pattern in Euro-law), failing in attempts, for instance, to keep public sector work out of bounds to EEC migrants. ‘Work’ was broadly understood, and no income or skills tests permitted. The Treaty freedoms embraced the mobile student and guaranteed her equal treatment in some domains, in particular fees for tertiary education (a right a US citizen cannot expect on moving residence from, say, Texas to California). Other equality rights followed, with legislation interpreted generously and exceptions strictly construed. In a community of just six or nine countries, migration of ‘fellow Europeans’ seemed untroubling.

When Greece, Spain and Portugal joined, transitional periods were included, a precursor to the more controversial transitional constraints accompanying the enlargement of 2004, which brought an additional ten states, with almost 75 million people, into the EU. For many migrants from these countries, EU enlargement meant instant regularisation and greater security of their rights of residence in the countries where they were already living. Many left and went home, safe in the knowledge they could return. The EU is the world’s circular migration laboratory.

With the creation of EU citizenship came expectations. Why should transnational free movement be the central right? Isn’t it odd to put leaving one’s country as a prerequisite for citizenship rights? Why valorize leaving over staying? Even within the ‘free movement’ frame, the privileging of the ‘economically active’ sits uneasily with citizenship’s inherently egalitarian inclusivity. Requiring health insurance and ‘sufficient resources’ to enjoy residence rights seems to privilege the already privileged, and suggests that equality with national citizens was elusive. An awkward compromise is reflected in current legislation and case law, with full entitlement to social benefits being accrued over time. The freshly arrived job-seeker or student cannot claim all that the local welfare state offers its own, notwithstanding populist scaremongering about ‘benefit tourism.’

In the larger EU, free movement has become more fraught. EU migrants are subject to anti-migrant sentiment. For all its legal robustness, EU citizenship has failed to protect the most marginalized. The ongoing forced evictions of Roma (including EU citizens) from France and Italy defy legality, both EU and human rights. Initial reports of mass expulsions of Roma were met with horror, but no legal actions were taken.

No less troubling are tensions between EU citizenship and nationality law. Leaving it to states to decide who gets EU citizenship paradoxically asserts national sovereignty. Indeed, for those who seek to understand the EU as a polity, it begs confederal analogies. EU citizenship is capable of exerting a restrictive pull on nationality law. For example, Ireland removed the constitutional right to citizenship for children born on the island of Ireland, partly in response to concerns about the ‘abuse’ of this provision by families seeking EU citizenship for their offspring. Suggestions that the EU should have common standards on naturalization are consistently rejected, in favour of a much less secure denizenship type status created by EU directive. The EU remains a polity in which not all of its long-term residents participate equally.

Meanwhile, nationality law has become a means for member states to seek out the migrants they want, and repel others. So when Italy confers nationality on EU migrants drowned on its shores, making them posthumously Italian, the gesture is not so much empty as restorative of statist order. And while Malta is condemned by the Strasbourg court for detaining asylum seekers who arrive by boat, it simultaneously announces that it will expand ‘investor citizenship’. Bulgaria too sells EU citizenship to investors, without even a maintaining a pretence that they will actually live there. It is easy to obtain EU citizenship for some, at a price. There are hints that these practices will prompt a legal reaction in EU law, but thus far, the EU has largely obscured underlying questions of who is a citizen.

The most energized legal shenanigans have concerned non-EU (so called third-country national) family members of EU citizens. EU law allows EU citizens to reside together, irrespective of the family members’ nationality. That this has become the most litigated of EU citizenship rights reflects the restrictive national turn, when family formation migration of states’ own citizens was seen to involve too many ‘others’. EU law came to the rescue for many, giving them a right that trumped domestic immigration control. Governments sought to restrict the EU rights, and much litigation ensued.

For some wishful thinkers, EU citizenship is the ultimate in post-national status. The EU Court speaks of it as ‘destined to be the fundamental status.’ However, citizenship remains predominantly transnational, although no longer intractably so. The tensions are best exemplified in the EU case of Zambrano (Case C-34/09, 2011). The Zambrano children’s EU citizenship status (by virtue of their birth in Belgium), created EU rights for their parents (or at least for their father on whom they were financially dependent), not just to live but also to work in Belgium. The Zambrano children’s rights did not depend on their having left Belgium to enter the EU legal space. The parents had lived in an all too familiar legal limbo, as rejected asylum seekers with precarious humanitarian leave to remain. The scope of the ruling continues to be litigated. The Belgian response: restrict nationality so children in that scenario would no longer become Belgian by virtue of birth in the territory. Without that nationality, EU citizenship is irrelevant. In this respect, EU citizenship is revealed as not post-, but hyper-national.

Framing and Reframing Irregular Migration - Franck Düvell

The concept of irregular or ‘illegal’ migration dates back to the 1930s; it was occasionally applied during the 1970s before becoming popular from the late 1980s. It is related to the emergence of the modern nation state, but its current version is associated with the social transformation from modernity to liquid modernity, from Fordism and Keynesianism to neoliberalism and globalisation, resulting in the new flexibility, mobility and precarity in risk societies. These changes have given rise to new forms of geographic mobility; nation states conventionally perceive these as challenges if not threats to their sovereignty, and continue to tightly regulate mobility and migration. But often tensions arise between demands for labour and immigration restrictions, between institutional goals and individual aspirations, between state definitions of persecution and individual perceptions, and between flexible lives and inflexible immigration rules and bureaucracies. These tensions bring about irregular migration.

Irregular migration only exists because policies determine which types and levels of migration are permitted and which are not. Thus, irregular migration is a social, political and legal construct. This is not a mere intellectual statement, for legal constructs can be deconstructed, meaning that what was once declared illegal can also be declared legal. For instance, in 2004, ten states joined the European Union. The borders of the EU shifted east, and irregular migration from states such as Poland and the Czech Republic became regular. Regularization programmes have given some 4 million irregular migrants legal status. When, in 2010, Greece abolished visa requirements for Albanians, illegal entries dropped dramatically. Thus, irregular migration can be reduced or prevented by changing, or reconstructing, the political status of the citizens of another country (as with EU enlargement), or the political status of foreign nationals already (irregularly) residing in a country (regularisation), or immigration modalities.

Irregular migration is typically perceived to be a major and increasing problem. However, irregular immigrants only account for around 0.5 per cent of the global population of 7.1 billion. Globally, there are an estimated 30-40 million irregular immigrants, around one fifth of all international migrants. In the EU, however, research has found not only that numbers are lower than previously estimated, but also evidence that they are decreasing from an estimated 3.1-5.3 million in 2002 to 1.9-3.8 million in 2008, around 10 per cent of the EU’s immigrant population. Estimated annual inflow decreased from its peak of 151,000 in 2008 to 73,000 in 2012. This decrease in stocks and flows is due to EU enlargement, large scale regularisations, improved entry and border controls, intensified law enforcement and the economic crisis. In contrast, in the US in 2008, the stock of irregular immigrants was 3.6 per cent of the total population, and over 25 per cent of the immigrant population were irregular. Over time, stocks have increased from 9 million (2000) to almost 12 million (2012) whilst inflows seem stable with around 550,000 annual apprehensions. Tighter border controls and lack of regularisation policies result in this population accumulating.

Hence, the overwhelming majority of migrants move, reside and return within the conditions set by law. This suggests that current policies are rather effective, though the EU is faring significantly better than the US, calling into question the level of attention and resources allocated to repressive measures.

Conventional discourses and media reports suggest that irregular migration is a border control and border security issue. But research has found that clandestine entry – often of individuals who subsequently successfully apply for asylum – only accounts for around 10 per cent of irregular migrants in the EU (in contrast to around 40 per cent in the US). In the EU, legal entry and overstaying or working in breach of visa conditions are the main paths into irregularity. Another important path is related to refused asylum seekers who either do not return, are not removed and/or are de facto non-removable. Equally relevant are overly bureaucratic or inefficient visa, residence renewal and appeal procedures, and withdrawal or loss of status. Impractical legislation and laissez faire practices also facilitate irregular immigration.

Migration is inherent to fluid modernity but current polities are ill-equipped and unwilling to accept mobile populations. As a consequence, irregular migration is constructed. Numerically, irregular migration is a minor phenomenon; however, normatively it is a major social problem. For the individual it can be a disaster. Irregular migration illustrates some of the shortcomings of our society, and the exclusion of certain mobile populations represents a major injustice at the beginning of the 21st century.

Policy options such as introducing legal migration channels, including refugee resettlement programmes, improving legal and administrative practices and (re-) regularisation combined with border controls and law enforcement could efficiently prevent, reverse and reduce irregular migration.

This article is based on a paper presented at the Metropolis conference on 12 September 2013.

Diaspora Governance - Alan Gamlen

Migration is often equated with immigration, but every immigrant is also an emigrant with ties to a place of origin. With the help of modern technologies such ties are growing broader and deeper, and diasporas – communities dispersed across borders from a professed place of origin – are becoming a more conspicuous force in global affairs. They act as filaments for the cross-border flows of money, goods and ideas that established authorities at every level, from the global to the local, are struggling to govern. Diasporas are thickening. How is the international system adapting?

Diaspora governance is a multi-layered matter, involving not just national and international but also local institutions and processes. In theory a jealously guarded prerogative of national governments, migration policy often falls in practice to local institutions: the colleges, hospitals, banks and law enforcement agencies dealing with the absence of their own people or the presence of ‘others’ in their communities. At this level, diaspora governance involves, for example, migrants’ transnational enterprises and Hometown Associations working with consular representatives of the origin state, municipal actors in both regions channeling migrants’ money into public good projects, and destination regions fostering ethnic-based support networks and improving migrant access to local education, healthcare, and legal and financial services.

The border-crossing nature of such activities is of increasing interest to an international community that is seeking ways to cooperate multilaterally over the management of international migration in the absence of a centralized global migration governance framework akin to the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organization. Though aware of their interdependence over international migration, states see it as an issue over which they, and no international bureaucracy, should exercise sovereignty. In lieu of an international institutional framework, efforts are underway to link migration to the established international development agenda, which is one of the few areas of global governance where widespread consensus exists, and therefore a powerful vehicle for mobilizing the international community.

Diaspora governance in the international arena therefore centres on humanitarian and development organizations helping migrants to contribute to the country of origin, and on the efforts of states – facilitated by multilateral institutions such as the International Organization for Migration and the Global Forum for Migration and Development, and various Regional Consultative Processes – to build dialogue, shared understandings, and cooperative approaches amongst states linked by international migration. A central problem for those seeking to collaborate in this way is that migration policy has traditionally fallen mainly to destination states, where migration is most immediate. They have found themselves without institutional counterparts in origin states where, until recently, no one was tasked with managing people who had spatially exited the national population.

But this governance gap is rapidly disappearing as origin states evolve formal institutional mechanisms to ‘engage’ their diasporas. Up from a handful of states twenty years ago, now around half of all United Nations members have such an institution, often housed within the Foreign Ministry, that is responsible for coordinating relevant policies across government. They sometimes promote return, but more often build diaspora communities and help them contribute positively to the homeland, for example by establishing networks, honouring ‘model’ expatriates and monitoring dissident exiles, as well as encouraging emigrants and their descendants to retain ‘national culture’ and refrain from embarrassing or undermining governments.

Often this kind of ‘paying court’ entails addressing diaspora grievances, supporting their struggle for legal protections abroad or property rights, social security and electoral participation at ‘home’. Meanwhile, diaspora institutions work with and through – and occasionally against – diaspora networks to monitor cross-border recruitment and crime, and to facilitate remittances, investments, philanthropic donations, technology transfers, and connections to the centres of world power. Once a violation of the territorial basis of international politics, diaspora governance is now becoming a normal form of political organization.

Three interlocking explanations help us to understand why the forms of governance described above are proliferating at such a remarkable rate. From one perspective, patriotic loyalties give origin states leverage over the formidable material resources of migrants: their money, their scarce skills, their connections to global decision-makers and opinion-shapers abroad, their hybrid identities and chameleon-like cultural competencies that make them ideal intermediaries between nation states. From this perspective, states see diasporas as the cultural lubricant greasing the wheels of globalization.

A second strand of explanation focuses less on national interests than on ideas of ‘nationality’ that constitute these interests in the first place. Is it the case, for example, that racial states – where citizenship is contingent on ethnicity – are inclined to embrace their emigrants just as they malign their immigrants? Or do liberal democratic regimes also seek to incorporate a multicultural diaspora within the origin state? Is diaspora governance an expression of right-wing, long-distance ethnic nationalism, or a brand of post-liberal democratic citizenship? Either way, from this explanatory perspective, national identities, rather than national interests, matter most for diaspora governance.

A third and final perspective on diaspora governance suggests that states are driven not only by national interests and ideas, but also by international expectations. From this perspective, the rush by migrants’ origin states to establish diaspora institutions reflects wider efforts by sections of the international community to find cooperative solutions to the shared challenges of managing international migration. Viewed in this way, states’ diaspora initiatives are part of wider international efforts to govern global migration. Advised and urged by experts in think tanks and international organizations to seek ‘migration for development’, they are steered towards an appreciation of how engaging diasporas furthers their own interests. What began as a good idea gathers the moral force of convention.

Diaspora governance, then, is part of wider efforts to govern globalization by incorporating cross-border communities into the existing international system, and by adapting that system to a transnational world. By extending states’ authority and infrastructural power beyond their territorial jurisdictions, diaspora governance disrupts the neat, traditional symmetries of place, power and identity that bind the modern system of nation states, giving inklings of a post-Westphalian world. Whose utopia is being created?

Enforcement - Bastian Vollmer

Enforcement makes law real. Without enforcement, laws are empty words written down in official documents after undergoing a democratic process that gives these rules and regulations the legitimacy to exist. The law is usually enforced by state authorities such as police forces, border guards or military personnel. People who enforce law have – so long as they are ‘on duty’ – a range of powers. Thus, they represent the executive power of the state. Montesquieu argued in The Spirit of the Laws (with reference to Locke’s Second Treatise of Government) that these powers should be administered separately from the other two functions of ‘government’: the legislative and the judicial. With this separation of powers, one branch can check the other and a sort of balanced power is created.

Different groups in society perceive enforcement and enforcement staff differently. For some people, dealing with the executive power is nothing exceptional. Enforcement staff are seen as keepers of order or as friendly auxiliaries. For others, they can represent an authoritative threat that restricts their actions or behavior, or even questions their legal existence. This last may seem impossible. And yet, it is possible. The legitimacy of a human being on a territory with a certain jurisdiction requires recognition and permission by the state. This is not an easy matter. It is attached to a highly complex legal framework and a philosophy of citizenship that is then acted upon by enforcement officials.

This enforcement action is increasingly practised in liberal democracies. It demands the identification and the tracking down of persons with an ambivalent legal existence, so-called ‘illegal immigrants’. Although at first sight this practice raises liberal tensions and contradictions, hegemonic public and policy discourses at different levels (national, regional and so on) have generated an effective discursive platform that legitimizes this enforcement, not only in the UK, but across Europe and beyond.

Hirst (2000) referred to the UK system as being particularly endangered by Carl Schmitt’s prophecy of motorized legislation, whereby executives run the legislature and where laws do not ‘aim at the citizens but at officials in their capacities as regulators of citizens’ activities’. By this, ‘professionals have great discretion as to whether or how to use and to interpret’ laws and, despite contemporary talk of the ‘retreat of the state’, ‘enforcement becomes something of a lottery’. Putting this claim into the context of intrusive enforcement such as ‘stop-and-search’ or ‘spot-checks’ practices taking place in liberal democracies like the UK or Germany, by which the legal existence is per se questioned and controlled ‘on the spot’, it recalls Schmitt’s mysticism of the soil (in Ordnung und Ortung) where ‘a concrete truth is never utopian; it has a piece of earth under it, a soil, from which it emerges; it is located in the full sense of the word’ (1995).

We have here not a noveau ancien regime (Beccaria, 1995) perhaps, but a development of enforcement practices that do not suit liberal democracies and point to post-liberal societies. It leaves a puzzle which addresses the ethics of existentialism, not only in liberal democracies but in an universal sense: How to define the existence of a person?

References

Beccaria, C. (1995) ‘On Crimes and Punishments’ and Other Writings, Bellamy, R. (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hirst, P. (2000) ‘Statism, Pluralsim and Social Control’, British Journal of Criminology, 40(2): 279-95.

Müller, J. (1997) ‘Carl Schmitt - An Occasional Nationalist?’, History of European Ideas, 23(1): 19-34.

Schmitt, C. (1995) Staat, Grossraum, Nomos, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Muddied Waters: Migrants’ Entitlements to Public Services and Benefits - Caroline Oliver

In 2013, I was told about a North African woman who lived in a British city and was experiencing severe domestic violence. As a result of the regulations on migrants’ access to public services, she faced a stark choice between staying in the violent relationship, leaving the country, or jeopardising her own legal right to remain in the UK. Unlike migrants entering on the ‘family route’ as partners’ spouses, she fell into a ‘gap’ in the rules because her partner was a European Economic Area (EEA) national, meaning she could not apply for immigration status under the Destitution Domestic Violence Concession. The concession would have supported her accommodation at a women’s refuge and given her a chance of an independent residence, had she been in a partnership with a British citizen or ‘settled person’. She could not leave the country as her partner had stolen her papers. At the same time, she had no access to a short-term welfare safety net – other than some NGO assistance – to escape the devastating situation she found herself in.

While much attention in migration studies focuses on the regulation of entry through bordering practices, much less scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which post-entry rules and regulations influence migrants’ experiences. However, access to state services and welfare support has become a subject of renewed interest within western liberal states in the current climate of ‘austerity’. For years, at least in a comparative historical and geographical sense, migrants’ rights have expanded, due to human rights and equalities concerns (Soysal, 1994). However rhetoric and policies curtailing legal migrants’ access to state support are growing, apparently emerging from a concern to regulate the costs of public welfare provisions. A narrative of welfare chauvinism develops to protect the welfare state ‘from those who have paid nothing into it’.

In practice, few migrants can rapidly access social housing and benefits in the UK; only refugees legally granted status and some EEA nationals may be entitled, with a much longer list of migrants excluded from eligibility. Yet still this narrative is propagated at the highest level. The current UK Prime Minister David Cameron recently called for a purge on ‘benefit tourism’, claiming that ‘ending the “something for nothing” culture is something that needs to apply in the immigration system as well as in the welfare system’.

Within migration studies and social policy, it is encouraging that recent research has insisted on the importance of attention not only to entry regimes, but of documenting and understanding the ‘incorporation regimes’ of European welfare states that give differential access to welfare and public services depending on migrants’ entry category (Sainsbury, 2012). The current line of inquiry speaks to the broader theme of how borders are increasingly inside national territories, through the differential treatment of legal, documented migrants for a significant (and extending) period of time after entry.

Attention to this within the UK shows that – arguably more so than in many other European countries (Oliver, 2013) – there is a growing complexity to the regulations faced by migrants once they enter state territory. As the case of the North African woman demonstrates, policies tread a fine line, attempting to balance conflicting ends, from a need to ‘protect’ state resources to concerns around safeguarding public health or preventing domestic violence. The outcome is an astoundingly complex web of regulations, rules, exclusions and addenda around the eligibility of migrants to a range of public services and benefits (Jayaweera and Oliver, 2013). ‘Complexity’ is a word that repeatedly crops up in interviews with local officials and voluntary sector workers. The opaque rules and legalistic formulations of eligibility are simply not understandable for most service providers. As a result, it can be easier for GP receptionists, admissions tutors in colleges and Job Centre staff to refuse migrants access to services rather than risk making the wrong decision. Access to services can be a ‘postcode lottery’ (Oliver and Jayaweera, 2013).

In this sense, although attention to migrants’ rights within incorporation regimes is an important focus of scholarly attention, rights in law are just one part of the story. The growing complexity of regulations creates a barrier in itself to the ability to exercise rights. Such restrictions, within contexts that seek to limit entry only to economically self-sufficient migrants, have been implemented without understanding their impact on individuals and on wider social cohesion and migrant integration.

Thus, in addition to the well-known ‘vectors of subordination’ of race, class, gender and ethnicity and their intersections with which most social scientists are well-versed, there is an urgent need to consider the ways in which ‘immigration status’ itself becomes a state-legitimated division with consequences for the opportunities and outcomes individuals face. This may occur as a result of the legal rules created to regulate access to services, or the indirect effects of the accompanying complexity itself.

References

Jayaweera, H. and Oliver, C. (2013) Mapping the Conditions of Stay and Rationale for Entitlements and Restrictions in the UK, IMPACIM Working Paper, Oxford: COMPAS.

Oliver, C. (2013) The Impacts of Restrictions and Entitlements on the Integration of Family Migrants: A Comparative Report, IMPACIM Project Report, Oxford: COMPAS.

Oliver, C. and Jayaweera, H. (2013) The Impacts of Restrictions and Entitlements on the Integration of Family Migrants: National Report. The United Kingdom, IMPACIM Project Report, Oxford: COMPAS.

Sainsbury, D. (2012) Welfare States and Immigrant Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Soysal, Y. (1994) Limits of Citizenship. Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You’ve Got a Text from UKBA - Les Back and Shamser Sinha

Christian’s mobile phone vibrates as he settles into his seat for the flight to Montenegro. Two weeks ago, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) informed him that he no longer had leave to remain in the Britain, and asked him to provide flight details of when he planned to leave the country. On Facebook he informed his friends in Montenegro that he was coming home. Before turning his phone off for the flight, Christian looks down and checks his new text message. To his surprise it is from UKBA, and reads: ‘have a pleasant journey’.

The politeness of the British immigration officials that have questioned and scrutinized him is somehow the hardest thing to take. In a hyperconnected world, border control and regulation is taking more complex and technologically sophisticated forms. Christian’s story is emblematic of the new reality that technologies of border control are as mobile as the people get on and off of airplanes.

In 2010, it was estimated that there were 214 million international migrants in the world, representing an increase of almost 40 million in the first decade of the 21st century. One in three of these migrants are young adults. The regulation of youth migration is producing new hierarchies of belonging that order and rank the life chances of a globally mobile generation.

It is not only that young people are moving, but that the border is moving also, because while it exists at the extremity of the EU and UK, internal immigration controls now proliferate everywhere – from the lecture theatre, to the workplace, to the crèche – filtering by immigration status who can move through what spaces. The border itself is being multiplied (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2008), and the practices required to police it are being moved into communities and neighbourhoods.

This year, the controversy about the Home Office ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ van campaign raised public concern about the damage done to Britain’s cosmopolitan cities. The campaign invited overstayers to text ‘Home’ on 7870, and the Home Office used Twitter to offer a running commentary on the van campaign. Anti- immigrant racism and xenophobia is given official public license in both off line and on-line worlds. It is not just that young migrants face institutionalised forms of marginalisation – without leave to remain they cannot work or have recourse to public funds – they also have to live with a sense of insecurity enhanced by the mobile phone in the palm of their hand.

What is also interesting is that while the mobile phone is now an instrument of border control it is also a connecting device. Salle, as a child in Tirana, Albania, was obsessed with telephones. He took old telephones out of the rubbish bins and took them to pieces only to re-assemble them again like little mutant telecommunications Frankensteins. His obsession with phones was in part due to the fact that the telephone was his link to his elder brother, who would phone home every month or so with news of his life in London. Today, he is still obsessed with phones, but now with mobile ones.

In 1999, as a result of the Serbian persecutions, 7,500 Kosovans fled into Albania, and guns were circulating in Tirana. Salle’s parents were relatively well off by Albanian standards – his mother was a nurse and his father worked as a forest ranger. A kidnap economy developed where relatively well off children were held to ransom. Salle was afraid, and his brother paid £4,000 to a pair of smugglers – a man and couple posing as a family – to secure Salle’s passage to London. His passage through Europe is a remarkable story: he eventually sneaked himself into the back of a truck full of beer and was picked up by the Kent police. He was 12 years old.

He lived with his brother in Barking and ended up in a school in Dagenham in Greater London. It was only when Salle met Harbahajan, a builder and a non-religious Sikh with Marxist leanings, that he found his footing. As he put it, “All the people in the building trade hate the Eastern Europeans but I love ‘em.” His building firm is made up of Rastafarian painters and decorators, Polish labourers and Albanian plumbers. Salle’s fortunes changed when he connected with Harbhajan’s business which itself was built on a kind of multicultural labour market in a sector of the economy that is fraught with racism and resentment.

Salle’s immigration status now is stable and, unlike many, he can move freely around the world and return to London without fear of being held or deported. He works mainly repairing and restoring the properties of London’s super rich and middle class. His mobile phone is his way to stay connected with his family in Tirana, his multi-ethnic networks in London, and the young Albanians who arrange to meet via text message every Friday night at a pub in east London.

The technologies of the digital age are changing the experience of living across national borders. In John Berger’s extraordinary study of migration, A Seventh Man, the immigrant’s sense of missing home is described as the ‘double pain of absence’. Writing in the 1970s, Berger explains: ‘He misses everything he feels to be absent. At the same time, that which is absent, continues without him’ (Berger and Mohr, 1975). The migrant experience of this kind of absence today has been transformed.

Through the mobile phone and virtual social networking, migrants can be technologically connected to the life ‘back home’ that is unfolding without them. They sit in a cafe in London and keep track of the lives of loved ones left behind, and even participate remotely through text messaging and email. Charlynne told me recently that she speaks to her relatives in Dominica all the time. “I can talk to my nephews for 45 minutes on Skype but I can’t put my arm around them,” she says.

Technological connection does not lessen the pain of absence: quite the contrary, it can exacerbate it. This was demonstrated by the case of a young asylum seeker called Clifford, who participated in a study of young adult migrants with my colleague Shamser Sinha. Clifford’s life was effectively on hold while his immigration case was being processed – he could not work legally or plan for his future. Every day, he kept up with his friends in Ghana who were working, falling in and out of love, and building their lives. The fact that through his iPhone he was in contact with the unfolding lives of friends and loved ones – in real time – exacerbated his own sense of being trapped in the present. His immigration status meant he was unable to move forward or back. Clifford’s experience shows how the digitisation of social life has transformed the relationship between here and there, without lessening the insecurities of being caught in-between.

It has been well established that the relationship between time and space is radically transformed through technologies like airplanes, smart phones and the internet. The hyper-connected nature of our world goes hand in hand with the proliferations of bordering practices. These no longer only happen at Heathow or Calais when we fumble for the passport in our bag. Rather, border control is being ‘in-sourced’. Doctors, health visitors, teachers, and university lecturers are all being asked to pass on information about migrants, through monitoring their student attendance or documenting visits to their homes. Willingly or not, they are enlisted as affiliates of immigration control.

Successive British governments have claimed that the UK points-based immigration system arbitrates on the basis of what young people can do rather than who are they are. This is little more than an ideological gloss concealing the thick lines being drawn within a generation of globally mobile young people. Here, the terms of inclusion are set by where you are from, how much money is in your bank account, and whether or not you will be granted leave to remain as a result. The border itself moves, nets, captures and expels unwanted or unneeded people. This becomes visible chillingly when Christian receives a text message from UKBA: ‘have a pleasant journey’.

References

Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1975) A Seventh Man, London: Penguin Books

Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2008) ‘Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor’, Transversal - EIPCP multilingual webjournal, March http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en.

This article is an excerpt from a book with Shamser Sinha entitled Migrant City to be published by Routledge in 2015.

Beyond Contract

Migration - Helen Woods, age 12

Migration is a flock of birds

who leave the last shrill calls of summer

leave the trees and nests

that cupped them like a hand

while they waited for their hearts

to grow big enough to fit

the whole world in. Their wings

sing of a bright new future.

They pass the sound of the sky

feather to feather, beak to beak.

But wherever they land, far away

in the winter that glows gold,

somewhere, back there,

the prints their tiny feet

left behind are still etched.

They are waiting

for the ghost of a bird

to brush the ground.

COMPAS Schools Poetry Competition 2013 First Place

Immigration and Low-Skilled Work: The Pret A Manger Question - Jonathan Portes

There is much empirical evidence that suggests that, in the UK, immigration has little or no impact on employment or unemployment overall. But there’s an unfortunate tendency for dialogues on this topic (oral or in response to economists writing about this topic) to go something like this. First, a respondent points to an example – they personally, or someone they know, has lost out on an employment opportunity to an immigrant. Or they note that a particular local business or sector seems to employ mostly immigrants – Pret A Manger in London is a frequent target. For this reason, David Metcalf, who chairs the government’s Migration Advisory Committee, frequently talks of the ‘Pret A Manger question’.

We economists usually respond to the question by saying that this is ‘anecdotal evidence’, sometimes (although I myself try not to use this phrase too much) referring to the lump of labour fallacy, and explaining again what the evidence says about overall or average impact. The respondent then concludes, perhaps understandably, that economists live in a statistical world which has little or no connection with reality; and worse, that when confronted with reality we are not interested.

I’d like to try to explain why ‘anecdotal evidence’, in this specific context, is indeed irrelevant, not because it is anecdotal, but because it is a partial rather than general equilibrium concept. That is, by definition, it tells you only the local or partial impact of something, which may or not be offset by developments elsewhere in the economy, which – by definition – the anecdote cannot tell you anything about.

To illustrate this I think it is helpful to look at a different example; not immigration, but inflation. Suppose that the price of goat’s cheese goes up, as it is doing now, because of a Europe-wide goat cull (yes, for some of us this is a crisis). Now, what can we say about the impact on overall inflation?

- In the short term, consumers will adjust. They may buy less goat’s cheese and more of other things;

- over time, so will other variables. The exchange rate may fall slightly (our terms of trade have worsened);

- the Bank of England, in accordance with its mandate, will adjust interest rates to ensure that the impact is not to push up inflation target in the medium term.

Most economists will therefore agree on the following points:

- There may be some impact on inflation in the short term. This will be less than one might expect just from the price rise, and the magnitude and persistence of the impact will depend on how the adjustment process works;

- there will be no impact at all on inflation in the medium to long term.

Now suppose you want to know how quick the adjustment is – does the adjustment take a week or a year? This is an empirical question for which need empirical evidence, and there are various ways you might think about finding that evidence. But the key point here is that the fact you’re paying more for your cheese doesn’t tell you anything about the answer to the initial question – the impact on inflation overall in the economy. It is not just that the price of cheese is ‘anecdotal evidence’; it is that the anecdotal evidence about cheese tells you absolutely nothing about the question you are actually interested in, which is about the speed of the adjustment process in the wider economy.

The interesting and difficult question is not what happens in cheese shops or supermarket cheese aisles, but in all shops, for all prices. The adjustment could take a week or a year, but looking at the price of goat’s cheese alone – no matter how many shops you go into – can’t tell you. This is because inflation is a general equilibrium concept; it is determined by the overall levels of demand and supply in the economy, and looking at one price – a partial equilibrium concept - can’t tell you anything.

The same is true for immigration and employment. Theoretically, it is quite possible that sandwich shops hiring immigrants increases unemployment for Britons in the short term, and it is equally possible that it doesn’t. But the point is that establishing whether it does depends not on what you observe in the shops themselves, but what is happening in the wider economy – it depends on the wider adjustment process. The number of Britons employed in sandwich shops is a partial equilibrium concept, but the number employed overall – which depends not on sandwich shops, but overall levels of labour supply and labour demand, in addition to other factors – is a general equilibrium one.

So we need to know what happens to the Britons who are not employed in the shops, what happens to employment in other shops and sectors, and what happens to overall levels of wages and of consumer demand. Those are the factors that will determine the impact on unemployment. No matter how many sandwich shops you go into, and how many ‘anecdotes’ you accumulate about Poles working in them, this tells you nothing about the question that you are actually interested in.

So the point is not that anecdotal evidence is always invalid or irrelevant, or that it is not quantitative; it can often be very useful. Going into sandwich shops and talking to management and employees about how the industry is organised can tell you a lot about the employment practices of that specific industry, and how that might impact on migrant and native workers. And indeed there are many high quality research studies that use systematic and structured qualitative methods to do exactly this type of research. It is not just condescending, but wrong, for economists to dismiss all evidence that doesn’t have numbers attached to it. But, when looking at economy-wide variables – inflation, unemployment – there is simply no alternative to looking at developments in the economy as a whole.

Interdisciplinarity in the Study of the Law of Labour Migration - Mark Freedland

When I embarked, many years ago, upon the study of the law of the contract of employment, I looked at the legislation and case law concerning settlement in parishes by annual hiring, because it provides one of the most important sources of early law concerning the contract of employment. Many years later, I’ve become extremely interested in the modern law of labour migration.Most recently, I have come to realise that we need an imaginative understanding of the long history of legal regulation at the point where concerns about labour migration, anti-social behaviour and poverty intersect. Us and Them? (Anderson 2013) powerfully sums up this intersection to argue that legal regulation makes divisions between community and alienation, and that these things evolve and mutate, over time framing different categories for persons who are perceived to be alien and therefore undeserving of support by the community.

This book, looking back through British legal history, shows how the idea of the alien and undeserving migrant has shifted towards the non-citizen of the state as a whole, having in earlier times been focused on the ‘vagrant’ who wanders from town to town or rural parish to rural parish, perhaps seeking casual work, perhaps begging, but above all seeming to represent the presence or the threat of social and economic instability and disorder. It gives an historical survey of the long story of the control of ‘vagrancy’ and of the labour market itself in England from the time of the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, tracing the strings of a cat’s cradle of regulation which connected up efforts to control the supply and mobility of labour, and to put pressure upon the wandering poor. As a lawyer, I found it interesting to consider the evolution of this, our elaborate body of law and administrative practice, and to be reminded how various terminologies that to us now sound rather quaintly Shakespearian – ‘sturdy vagabonds’ and the like – become technical legal terms, upon the nuances of which depended criminal or quasi-criminal liability to sentences of whipping or sessions in the stocks or the pillory.

These of course, as Anderson suggests, are, then as now, all ways of differentiating others from ‘hard-working people like us’. Indeed, largely from the later 18th century onwards, much of that differentiating between ‘them and us’, another great axis of differentiation, came to consist of control of immigration in general and labour migration in particular. Primarily it was from elsewhere in the British Empire, and then in due course from the world at large, as that Empire or Commonwealth progressively ceased to represent a zone of even partial inclusion in British subject-hood.

In Anderson’s book, this historical platform is laid out in order to construct a multi-dimensional tableau of the modern law and culture of treatment of migrants as somewhat conjoined with ‘failed citizens’, failed in that they can, for example, be regarded as ‘benefit scroungers’. Far from being without contemporary relevance, the chapters in this book that describe the old law of vagrancy and settlement in parishes and the early history of migration controls illuminate issues that we grapple with today. Consider the proposals apparently taking shape in the Department of Work and Pensions as I write this late in 2013, that would further tighten the rationing of welfare benefits in a new system which, it seems, might include such mysterious prescriptive notions as ‘persons too committed to work’ and ‘persons not working enough’. Reading Us and Them? thus encapsulated for me one of the special pleasures and privileges of pursuing my own research work in Oxford, namely that I often quite unexpectedly and serendipitously derive inspiration from colleagues working in totally different and disparate disciplines.

References

Anderson, B. (2013) Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Economic Impacts of Migration - Carlos Vargas-Silva

A well-known economist joke starts with an economist walking alongside a non-economist (in some versions of the joke it is an anthropologist, in others a sociologist). Suddenly the non-economist stops, looks down and says “There’s a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk!” The economist, who has been trained under the notion of ‘efficient markets’, does not bother to look down and simply says: “That’s impossible, if there had been a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk somebody would have already picked it up.”

The efficient-market hypothesis was developed by Eugene Fama, who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing his theory. Designed for financial markets, it essentially states that it is not possible to obtain excess returns in financial markets (in other words, easy money). In plain terms, it reflects the notion that there should not be opportunities for big gains at small costs; that is, unless there is an exogenous restriction leading to a failure of economic rationality.

The estimates of several development economists, such as Dani Rodrick, suggest that a minor reduction in the barriers to labour movement from poor to rich countries could lead to an enormous increase in global welfare. However, even in the face of this potential gain, there is very little appetite for reducing restrictions to immigration in rich countries. This fact, together with the joke introduced above, has led to Michael Clemens, another development economist, using the phrase ‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?’ as the title of one of his papers. Clemens’ estimates suggest that emigration of less than 5 per cent of the population from the poorest countries of the world to the richest countries of the world would expand the global economy by several trillion dollars.

If there is really so much to gain from more immigration, the trillion dollar question is: Why do rich countries maintain such strong restrictions to the movement of labour from poor countries? One of the reasons is that most of the welfare increase that results from additional immigration goes to migrants themselves. Still, we would expect migrant-sending countries to benefit from remittances, while host countries benefit from a cheaper labour force and increase productivity. On the surface more immigration could be seen as a win-win-win situation or, at least, as a Pareto improvement (in which one person is better off without making any other individual worse off), since the migrants and the home and host countries would all benefit in economic terms. However, the positive economic benefit in the home and host country, while likely to be true on average, is not true for every single person. Some people in home and host countries are likely to be worse off as a result of migration. If winners could use some of their gain to compensate the losers perhaps migration could be a Pareto improvement. However, there is no clear existing mechanism that can deliver this compensation, which in turn suggests that there will be no consensus to decreasing barriers to labour movement. In sum, keep looking down in case you happen to find a few of those bills on the sidewalk.

References

Clemens, M. A. (2011) ‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25: 3-106.

Rodrik, D. (2002) ‘Feasible Globalization’, NBER Working Paper 9129, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge MA.

Child Work and Mobility - Jo Boyden and Gina Crivello

Writing about children and ‘the politics of culture’ at the end of the 20th century, Sharon Stephens (1995) characterises the modern world in terms of ‘transnational flows of commodities and people; by vast numbers of refugees, migrants, and stateless groups; by state projects to redefine the threatened boundaries of national cultures [...]’. Children are typically cast as unwitting and passive subjects of these shifting global forces, rather than active participants who experience, challenge and reshape the world around them. Boys and girls who migrate alone attract particular attention internationally as victims whose rights have been violated, thus triggering an array of protective policy and programmatic responses. Yet the extreme economic, social and political inequalities that commonly underpin this trend remain largely ignored.

Prevailing ideas about independent child migration reflect recent efforts globally to re-set the boundaries of what it means to be a child; these efforts increasingly define and govern children’s use of time and space. Growing attention is given to children’s vulnerability, their learning needs and dependence on adults, with emotional attachments formed in the context of stable nuclear family structures being regarded as central to their development and wellbeing. In this expanding paradigm of childhood, the young are portrayed as learners rather than earners. Global initiatives such as the Education for All campaign and the associated expansion of formal schooling have played their part, as boys and girls everywhere are expected to attend school full-time until well into their teens. Relatedly, child migration for work is taken as a threat to schooling and a sign of family breakdown or mistreatment and is often confused with trafficking. As a result, the everyday experiences of migrant boys and girls are overshadowed by a focus on street and trafficked children, child sex workers, or child refugees, with no consideration of the absence of viable options for young people locally.

But then ideas about appropriate childhood are peppered with contradiction. Children growing up in rapidly changing societies find themselves balancing multiple, often inconsistent expectations regarding how and where they should spend their time. So, even though work-related child migration is widely condemned internationally, leaving home to earn an income is what makes schooling possible for some children, enabling them to save for school utensils, uniforms and the like. Despite the intense gaze on work-related migration, boys and girls relocating to access better or higher status schools has thus far escaped critical scrutiny; it is even applauded in some quarters. The recent rise in school-related child migration responds to a dramatic escalation in educational aspirations across the globe. Among social elites it facilitates access to selective education, whereas among populations in poverty it is driven by local service shortfalls. Increasingly, schooling is seen as a means of becoming somebody of wealth and social significance, a way out of rural poverty and the drudgery of occupations like farming, and of releasing the young from the hardships endured by the parental generation. Even though there is no guarantee of an economic return, many families make major financial sacrifices to cover the direct, indirect and opportunity costs of school-related migration, for example by selling their land or animals.

Thus, independent child migration can be developmental rather than detrimental, and children migrate under differing social and material circumstances and with varied outcomes for themselves and for their families. In weighing up the costs and benefits of children migrating we must consider young people’s own motivations and accounts. Young people often explain how much they appreciate the opportunities migration has brought them, enabling them to see the wider world, make new friends and access resources like libraries and the internet. Furthermore, many of the children who migrate without their parents are in practice not alone but accompanied by trusted relatives or peers. Among populations in poverty, children commonly grow up as co-contributors to the household economy and decisions regarding their work, schooling and migration respond to both collective and individual considerations. Child relocation from poorly-resourced to better-off households can mitigate family hardship and, in return for helping out in the host household, enables boys and girls to access learning and care opportunities not available in the natal home. In this way, children’s migration for work may strengthen bonds within extended family groups rather than create a social deficit through their physical absence.

This is not to suggest that children’s independent migration for work or schooling is without risk. Being young and separated from family networks may increase vulnerability in many contexts. Whitehead and Hashim (2005) maintain that, ‘Many of its positive and negative effects do not arise from the fact of migration itself, but depend on what triggers movement, what kinds of circumstances migrants move to and, of course, the distance moved and the length of stay away.’ This points to the importance of assessing the situations from which children leave and their positions within structures of inequality, as well as the circumstances they enter into through migration.

References

Stephens, S. (1995) ‘Children and the Politics of Culture in “Late Capitalism”’ in S. Stephens (ed.) Children and the Politics of Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Whitehead, A. and Hashim, I. (2005) ‘Children and Migration: Background Paper for DFID Migration Team’, Department for International Development, London.

Migration, Welfare and Citizenship - Isabel Shutes

Debates about migration, welfare and citizenship are often framed by questions regarding the exclusion of migrants from the provisions of welfare states. One dimension of those debates concerns the ways in which migrants are excluded from rights to welfare on the basis of the terms and conditions of their legal status as non-citizens. Another dimension concerns the extent to which public support (of citizens) for rights to welfare may be dependent on the exclusion of migrants. While the former addresses the basis for supporting an expansion of universalism, to extend social rights to non-citizens, the latter addresses the basis for restricted universalism, to limit social rights on the grounds that universalism is premised on its exclusivity to citizens within a nation state.

Citizenship is thus both a question of legal status, with respect to the rights and obligations that formal citizenship confers, and a question of normative status, of ideas about who is deserving and undeserving in the provision of welfare. However, debates regarding immigration and welfare have, arguably, been limited by the extent to which they revolve around a binary distinction between citizens and non-citizens. This distinction is partly due to methodological limitations: in the absence of data on immigration status, nationality/foreign nationality is the basis for distinguishing citizens and non-citizens. However, citizens and non-citizens are not unitary groups, legally or normatively. They are divided by class, gender, race/ethnicity, sharing common lines of division which intersect with divisions based on nationality and immigration status. Those divisions underpinned the development of welfare states over the course of the 20th century. As feminist analyses emphasise, social citizenship, with respect to the classic welfare state of the post-war era, was based on the gendered division of paid and unpaid work: citizens (men) were granted rights to social security as paid workers, women were granted rights (that is, to family allowances) as mothers and wives (Lewis, 1992; Williams, 1989). As feminist, along with anti-racist, disabled, lesbian and gay critiques have conveyed, social citizenship was based on a ‘false universalism’ that was both shaped by and implicated in the construction of social divisions and inequalities (Lewis, 2003).

With the restructuring of welfare states, universal rights to welfare have increasingly been replaced with conditional entitlements (Dwyer, 2004). Benefits claimants are not the bearers of rights to welfare, or indeed the active ‘choosers’ of welfare (as they may be conceived of in other areas of re-structured provision, such as healthcare), but the ‘obligated’ who are required to engage in work-related activities as a condition of access to benefits. Analyses of the principles and conditions that underpin access to welfare thus bring to attention the ways in which citizenship is implicated in the stratification of both citizens and non-citizens. Current reforms to the welfare benefits system in the UK reveal parallels with the principle of ‘less eligibility’ of the Poor Law system: the total amount of benefits that a household can claim being capped on the basis that the conditions of benefits claimants should not be more attractive than those of the ‘hard-working’ poor. But they also reveal parallels with immigration policy: the limiting of access to welfare for asylum seekers and other categories of European Economic Area (EEA and non-EEA) migrants likewise entails normative ideas about the ‘undeserving poor’ and ‘welfare dependency’. That is not to say that the principles underpinning conditions of access to welfare are without contradictions across categories of citizens and non-citizens. Lone parents are increasingly required to engage in paid work, including measures to move them from unconditional social assistance (income support) to conditional work-related benefits – underpinned by an ‘adult-worker’ model of welfare. By contrast, (non-EEA) migrant women are granted rights of residence in the UK via family reunion as the dependants of men, as wives, which in turn is the basis of their exclusion from social rights to welfare and their dependence on the male wage – re-instating a ‘male breadwinner’ model of welfare (Lewis, 1992) in the context of immigration policy.

The conditionality of social citizenship thus requires a broadening of the focus of debates on migration and welfare that considers the principles of inclusion/exclusion for different groups, citizens and non-citizens. An historical analysis of the treatment of paupers and criminals, for example, reveals both the ways in which citizens have been excluded from certain legal rights (for example, voting rights), but also the ways in which certain groups are normatively constructed as ‘failed citizens’ or non-citizens in addition to migrants (Anderson, 2013). In the current context, in which the principles associated with state-guaranteed social rights in the provision of welfare have increasingly been replaced by principles of individual responsibility, consumer choice and market competition, it is important to examine the conditionality of social citizenship for citizens and non-citizens alike. This potentially facilitates the basis for making connections between the political activism of different social groups with regard to the curtailment or denial of social rights: the activism of disabled people with regard to current welfare reforms, the activism of low-paid workers with regard to a Living Wage, and the activism of migrant rights campaigners with regard to increasing restrictions on access to permanent residency/citizenship. Those connections might provide the basis for replacing the ‘false universalism’ of social citizenship with a common basis for collective forms of claims-making around social inequalities.

References

Anderson, B. (2013) Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dwyer, P. (2004) ‘Creeping Conditionality in the UK: From Welfare Rights to Conditional Entitlements?’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 29 (2:) 265-287.

Lewis, G. (2003) ‘Difference and Social Policy’, in N. Ellison and C. Pierson (eds.), Developments in British Social Policy, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Lewis, J. (1992) ‘Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes’, Journal of European Social Policy, 2: 3, 159-173.

Williams, F. (1989) Social Policy: A Critical Introduction. Issues of Race, Gender and Class, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Domestic Workers and au Pairs - Rosie Cox

Domestic workers are now the iconic female migrants – paradigmatic symbols of the feminisation of migration and the globalisation of care. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that there are at least 53 million domestic workers worldwide, and the number could be as high as 100 million, 83 per cent of whom are women. As the ILO (2011) puts it, even at the lowest estimate, ‘if all domestic workers worked in one country, this country would be the tenth largest employer worldwide’. Domestic workers are also amongst the lowest paid of all groups, often earning below minimum wage and largely working in the informal sector. They carry out a wide range of household tasks including cleaning, cooking, laundry, childcare and elder care.

While not all domestic workers are migrants, international migration to carry out domestic work has grown rapidly in recent decades. This flow of workers has been encouraged by labour export policies from countries such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka and the immigration regimes of receiving countries that include specific visas for domestic workers, or other arrangements such as the au pair scheme, which allow entry to those who carry out paid domestic labour but restrict their rights as both migrants and workers. Such regulations frequently include the stipulation that domestic workers live in their employer’s home. This gives employers substantial control over their employees’ lives and makes domestic workers particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Migrants are favoured to carry out domestic work, not only because immigration regimes may make them pliant workers, but also because ethnic ‘others’ are often considered appropriate to deal with dirt. Closeness to or distance from dirt is a marker of status, and migrants and members of minority ethnic groups are regularly portrayed as inherently dirtier than more privileged groups and therefore better suited to so-called dirty work. Employers may also treat domestic workers as if they are innately dirty. It is not uncommon for domestic workers who live with their employers to be forced to use different cutlery and crockery from the rest of the family, and not to be allowed to wash their clothes in the same washing machine or to bathe in the same bathroom. The stigma of working with dirt traps them in a vicious cycle that defines domestic work as low status because it is done by migrant women and migrant women as low status because they deal with dirt. At the same time employers of domestic workers are able to enhance their status by displaying to the world their spotless homes, beautifully prepared meals and stress-free lives – all made possible by the labour of others.

Au pairs carry out the same kinds of tasks as domestic workers, yet rather than being seen as dirty, they are generally imagined as young, healthy, enthusiastic, white, middle-class girls having fun in a foreign country before settling down to ‘real life’. Au pairing is constructed as a form of cultural exchange and au pairs are by definition migrants, young and lacking language skills. Despite this image, au pairs often live and work in conditions that differ little from those of other domestic workers. The precise regulations surrounding au pairing differ from country to country, but nowhere are au pairs recognised as workers. Instead, they are ‘part of the family’; the labour they carry out around the home is ‘help’, their pitiful pay is ‘pocket money’ and their employer is a ‘host’. While some au pairs and hosts do use the scheme as originally intended, there are many others who do not, and au pairs are often favoured as the cheapest form of flexible childcare available.

One particularly interesting example of how the au pair ‘cultural exchange’ formulation has played out is in the Nordic countries. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden there has been a rapid growth in au pairing in recent years supported, at least in part, by state subsidies to families to cover childcare costs – part of wider ‘woman friendly’ welfare policies (see Isaksen, 2010). The majority of au pairs in these countries come from the Philippines and take on the role in order to send remittances home, just as other domestic workers do. Yet Nordic countries have rejected the idea of a domestic worker visa and allowing migration for domestic work because such a practice would be out of sync with their egalitarian principles. Au pairing, as a form of ‘cultural exchange’ rather than work, is acceptable and even portrayed as in keeping with ‘feminist’ principles as it supports (some) women’s access to work outside the home.

The study of paid domestic labour has grown in tandem with the growth of paid domestic work itself. Researching paid domestic work is appealing because it encompasses the major structural inequalities of contemporary life. It reveals the home to be a site of waged labour, thereby disrupting the public/private divide; it shows social reproduction to be a form of waged work and one that is affected by globalisation just as much as any form, including manufacturing. It also exposes the subtle intertwining of gender, race/ethnic and class inequalities within a single employment situation, and all within the confined space of a family home.

References

Isaksen, L. W. (ed.) (2010) Global Care Work: Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies, Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

International Labour Organisation (2011) ‘Domestic Work Policy Brief Number 4: Global and Regional Estimates on Domestic Work’, ILO, Geneva, Switzerland.

Subcontracting - Andrew Geddes

Few aspects of modern life remain untouched by the presence of a subcontract. This is not only a key employment relationship for many migrant workers but, more broadly, an indication of the way we live now. Think of the food that is produced and packaged before ending up on supermarket shelves, the hotel chamber maid, the now ubiquitous coffee shop, the construction site, call centres, the hospitality business or IT services. In all, we encounter people employed by agencies that are subcontracted to provide workers. These workers may be migrants and, very often, they are temporarily employed.

Any grand economic scheme or ambition for reasons of both speed and efficiency is likely to depend on some kind of subcontract. Indirect employment via a subcontract can also support direct employment. Take the case of the quest for the high skilled migrant, such as those in working in financial services in the City of London. These people are unlikely to be subcontracted workers, but who cleans their offices? Banks may well directly employ their traders, but it’s likely that their offices will be cleaned by indirectly employed, subcontracted workers who are often migrants.

The issue here is not that migration somehow causes this subcontracting. Rather, the recruitment of subcontracted migrant workers fits with the intensified use of such contracts in liberalised, deregulated labour markets. This is a general trend, but, as is so often the case when we look more closely at some facet of modern life, within a general trend we can also see some specific effects of migration and on migrants. It is this specificity that is often lost in discussions of ‘immigration’. While migrants are often seen and understood as moving into countries, the reality, of course, is that migrants move to specific places and into specific types of employment. To understand and ‘see’ migration we need to understand this specificity. The subcontract helps us to do this.

The point is to know where to look. We are accustomed to thinking that the place where international migration becomes visible as a social and political issue is the border – the land, air or sea port. This is, of course, the point at which the would-be migrant can make a claim for admission for some purpose and for some period of time. However, the subcontract and, more generally, the ways in which labour markets are organised, show us that there are other places where international migration becomes visible as a social and political issue.

International migration and migrants are present in the most mundane aspects of our daily lives. Think of the regular visit to the supermarket and the welcome convenience of washed and packaged vegetables. Think then about the production networks and subcontracting chains that involve the picking, packaging and delivery of these products as they make their way from field or farm to supermarket shelf. At each stage may well be migrant workers.

The convenience that we experience when we shop is not a result of migration, but of long-standing tendencies towards use of causal and temporary labour with workers often mobilised by temporary labour providers, or gangmasters as they are sometimes known. In the 19th century, women and children worked in gangs to pick crops. Later, students often undertook such work.

The little bag of washed salad suddenly attains a broader significance. It can signify the presence of migration and migrant workers in our experience of shopping, and, beyond this quotidian reality, we can also see and understand the ways in which migration and migrants support and sustain aspects of modern life. For the migrant worker in agriculture or food processing, the labour they perform is distant both metaphorically and literally from the ‘end user’ consuming the product and the ‘real employer’, often one of the major supermarket chains.

The supermarket is also a key feature of modern life with effects that extend far beyond migration and migrants. Supermarkets both satisfy and create demands that exert significant pressure ‘down’ production networks to keep prices as low as possible. This then feeds into the recruitment practices of employers who are seeking to shift produce from fields and farms to shelves at the lowest cost. Subcontracted workers employed through agencies allow employers to differentiate pay, working hours and conditions.

How does this work? A temporary labour provider may be a multinational company; but may also be a lone gangmaster with a mobile phone and white van picking workers up in the early morning at a street corner. A gangmaster may also provide accommodation and deduct money from pay for this service. It is, of course, perfectly legal to provide temporary labour, particularly for types of employment that have long relied upon such workers. However, they often work in sectors that are difficult to regulate, and migrant workers may thus be more vulnerable to exploitation. This was brought into stark focus in February 2004 when at least 21 people from China lost their lives while picking cockles on the treacherous waters of Morecambe Bay. They were subcontracted and their death did lead to efforts to better regulate gangmasters.

The subcontract helps us to see and understand how the way we live and the choices that we make all possess a broader significance. Even in the mundane act of shopping we can encounter the presence of migration and migrants. We know that salad is good for us and that we should eat it. But the little bag of washed salad also tells us something about the organisation of labour markets and about the ethical and normative issues that flow from the choices that we make or that are made on our behalf.

How to Reduce Migrant Worker Recruitment Costs - Philip Martin

Recruitment matches workers with jobs, a process that is often complicated by asymmetric information: employers know more about the jobs they are offering than job seekers, who know more about their abilities than employers. Economists have developed a variety of models for explaining how employers screen applicants to find the workers best suited to fill the jobs they offer, and how workers signal their abilities to employers by degrees, certificates and references.

International borders complicate job matching, as differences in language, culture, and job descriptions can make it harder to match workers and jobs. When workers are in one country and jobs in another, job matching is often facilitated by intermediaries, including for-profit recruiters. These ‘merchants of labor’ can play many roles. Some receive job orders from employers and travel to recruit and screen workers, facilitate their move across borders, and interact with them while they are abroad. More often, recruiters in one country pass job offers on to recruiters in another country, relying on intermediaries they may never have met to recruit and screen workers. For-profit recruiters operate in all migration systems, but they are especially prominent in Asia, where they move several million low-skilled workers from South and Southeast Asia into Gulf Cooperation Council countries each year.

Recruiters are paid for their services. Employers generally pay some or all costs of recruitment of highly skilled workers, including managers, health care professionals, and engineers, because there are relatively few such workers and the consequences of a poor match can be costly for the business. However, there are often more low-skilled workers than jobs in occupations such as domestic service and construction laborer, making some workers willing to pay high fees in order to move to the front of the queue.

Low recruitment costs and good worker-job matches result in satisfied workers and employers, and labor migration outcomes that satisfy governments in both migrant sending and receiving countries. However, high costs can prompt workers to violate their permits by taking second jobs and overstaying. Poor worker-job matches can also lead to employers dismissing unqualified workers who are reluctant to return because they have no way to repay their recruitment debts. Workers who arrive abroad in debt are especially vulnerable to mistreatment, since all parties know that these workers are counting on higher wages abroad to repay their debts and return to their home countries with savings.

International conventions call for employers to pay all of the recruitment costs of the migrant workers they hire. However, unless there are complaints, it is often hard to detect the payment of (excessive) worker-paid fees.

Wage gaps of eight to one or more motivate labor migration. Most workers will not give this entire wage gap to recruiters, but they will pay more than the typical one month’s foreign wages that some governments specify as the maximum recruitment charge. If workers have a two-year contract, one month is equivalent to 4.2 per cent of foreign earnings; on a three-year contract, one month is 2.8 per cent. Reducing recruitment costs would yield significant benefits. A low-skilled worker who pays $2,000 in recruitment costs for a contract promising $7,200 over three years in another country may remit $5,000 of these earnings. Cutting remittance costs from 10 per cent to 5 per cent saves $250, but cutting rercruitment costs in half saves the migrant $1,000. Furthermore, lowering recruitment costs can reduce debt peonage, trafficking, and the other violations of human rights that are sometimes associated with international labor migration.

Three concrete suggestions for reducing recruitment costs are standardizing contracts, offering incentives for good recruiter behavior, and encouraging the engagement of established multinational companies as recruiters. Standardization has contributed to the decrease in remittance costs, which can be separated into sending fees, pickup fees and exchange-rate costs. Businesses can standardize each element of the remittance transaction and use technology to achieve economies of scale that lower remittance costs.

Standardizing job descriptions and contracts could help to reduce the cost of recruitment. Agreements on the skills required to be a domestic worker, laborer, technician, or driver could increase both worker and employer satisfaction by getting the right workers in the right jobs. Governments could develop worker-held skill ‘passports’ that record skills acquired at home and abroad, thereby facilitating re-employment at home or a return abroad.

Most countries regulate recruiters by penalizing those who violate regulations. However, enforcement normally depends on complaints, which may not be forthcoming if workers get the foreign jobs they seek, albeit at high costs. Instead of only sticks, offering carrots that encourage recruiters to adhere to regulations may be more effective to protect migrant workers, especially if A-rated recruiters receive faster service from government agencies or pay lower fees, helping them to attract business at the expense of lower-rated recruiters. A-rated recruiters could also be favored to receive job offers from particular foreign countries and employers.

Many recruiters today are relatively small, moving dozens or hundreds of workers annually, without the knowledge or capital to make the business transaction of matching workers with jobs over borders cheaper. The third suggestion is to encourage multinationals such as Adecco and Manpower to move low-skilled workers over borders. Multinationals could speed the development of standard job descriptions and contracts and achieve profits via economies of scale rather than overcharging workers. An alternative to multinationals would be for unions or international organizations to become recruiters, using their nonprofit status to compete with for-profit recruiters while protecting migrant workers.

Moving workers over borders to fill jobs is a complex process of great interest both to receiving governments that regulate who can enter the country and what they can do once inside, and to sending governments that aim to protect their citizens abroad. Recognizing that recruitment is a business where costs can be lowered and protections for workers improved would move policy forward on the often overlooked R-term that links migration and development.

Migrant Urbanism in China’s Chengzhongcun - Michael Keith

Hui settled in Dafen Cun in Shenzhen after studying art in Guangzhou and travelling to Hong Kong and the USA before returning home. He described how he once worked on the production line of an oil painting factory in Dafen, copying old masters and modern classics before setting up a studio and small gallery space from where he now markets his own work. In Dafen today you can buy a crate of Van Goghs or Picassos; the oil painting city is a global hub of ‘original copies’ that decorate the walls of hotels and convention centres across the world. Dafen is one of China’s chengzhongcun (villages in the city) that have attracted much recent academic and architectural attention. They warehouse migrants, sometimes in notorious ‘handshake apartments’ (woshou feng), so close together you can lean out of your window to shake your neighbour’s hand. In the words of one member of Shenzhen planning office, they function as city sponges, saturated with migrant labour in boom times and squeezing people out of the city when not needed.

Their prosperity and flexibility depend on and reflect the rural property rights they sustain. Unlike urban land, where full ownership is reserved by the state with limited use leases sold on the market, villages in the city held on to their facility to own, develop and trade property. When Shenzhen became one of the first Special Enterprise Zones in Deng’s 1978 reforms, 250-300 ‘clans’ or villages developed into semi autonomous economic units, commonly organised as joint stock companies, with families holding formal shares. In Shenzhen, one of China’s fastest growing cities, it is in these villages where most migrants live.

And so one day in 2008 in another chengzhongcun –Guanlan – in the northern district of Shenzhen, we drove to the edge of the village (cun). In the space of a few hundred metres the landscape moves seamlessly from dense residential blocks to a field of barely visible crops and back to brick. We talk about where the cun ends. Sherlock Holmes laughs. Sherlock (his ‘English’ nickname for himself) works for the cun’s management committee. His father had been elected to the committee that month, turning over an old regime in the nascent democratic arrangement of village affairs. He tells a story about the cun’s boundaries that is hard to provenance but revealing.

At the time of Deng’s ‘reform and opening up’, the villages in the city in Shenzhen and other parts of the south were encouraged to develop their own economic growth strategies. Government inspectors had been sent to turn reform principle into economic practice, confirming the cartography of local landholdings. The inspection based cadastre was to regularise those privileged in the first wave of Special Economic Zones. Guanlan itself lay outside the old boundary (guan nei) that separates inside the zone (guan li) from the outside (guan wai) and is still marked by old, barely used forms of passport and identity control. It sits half way to Dongguan, a city famous for the autonomy of its local government, prompting several interventions from Beijing to rein in local government affairs in the 1990s and 2000s. However, proximity to the growth area meant the village had potential to attract investment in manufacturing and the facility to accommodate workshops and factories, a large migrant population, and sweated labour.

The border of the village defined the territory for Guanlan’s potential development, the limits to the property rights of the village ‘clan’. Before the days of GIS and satellite technologies, in the wake of moves to experiment with the growth of Shenzhen, the cadastration process was mapped out by inspectors who stayed as guests of the village’s committee. Because the boundaries of villages owed more to tenure than secure landholdings, each cun was to be defined by the limits of its cultivable area. So according to Sherlock the elders would take the inspector out to formulate the map of the cultivation based on a particular lychee tree. After a long lunch and hospitable dinner the inspectors went to sleep, at which point local families went and dug up the lychee trees in one set of plots and created a new landscape of lychee trees in a different sector. They moved from north to west to south and east, ensuring on each occasion that the cun made a land grab based on the fictitious cultivation of the lychee. And that is why – Sherlock boasted – the boundaries of the cun are so extensive in comparison with most other villages in the region.

The story may be apocryphal but it invokes the balance between local solidarities and suspicion of central authority, and valorises the wit of the local to fool the state bureaucrat. It captures the sense in which Guanlan sees itself as a site of propensity, the possibility of generating affluence resting on the authority to develop, transact and leverage the potential of the land.

The chengzhongcun has become an iconic urban form of contemporary China, bringing together property rights, urban fabric and migrant demography. The particular assemblage of housing supply and cultural flux allows the city to accommodate simultaneously extraordinary flows of migration and the dynamics of urban change, and to allocate the externalities of demographic change through a particular configuration of the metropolis. The villages accommodated massive flows of people into the city, but migrant status is conditional and qualified. The costs of sustaining the migrant driven change (the welfare externalities) are largely displaced to rural districts where children left behind and sometimes wives or (less often) husbands sustain family ties and reproduction at a distance in home towns (huijia).

In Dafen the original villagers were so successful that they moved out of town altogether, creating Da Fen Xin Cun four kilometres away, a gated community with swimming pools, gym, tennis courts and penthouse apartments. Functionally, the chengzhongcun generate an institutional form mediating between the planning needs of Shenzhen and the instrumental drivers of the economy: the joint stock companies that characterise most villages in the city. As Helen Siu puts it in a study of the ‘uncivil urban spaces’ of post reform China, ‘their main livelihood, as a villager puts it, has shifted from cultivating crops (gengtian) to cultivating real estate (gengwu)’ (2007).

On the surface, chengzhongcun have become exemplifications of a flexible city celebrated in the vernacular characterisation of ‘Shenzhen speed’. But the map of property rights can make this surface legible through another calculus – one that sees implicit trade offs between the rational city and instrumental self interest, the logic of the individual joint stock company, the rights of the migrant and the needs of the metropolis; these are the formalities of governance and the informalities of migrant urbanism, China style.

References

Keith, M., Lash, S. Arnoldi, J. and Rooker, T. (2014) China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change, London; Routledge

Siu, H. (2007) ‘Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Post-reform South China’, American Ethnologist, 34b (2): 329-350

Agriculture and Food Processing - Ben Rogaly

I work in your orchards of peaches and prunes

Sleep on the ground ‘neath the light of the moon

On the edge of your city you see us and then

We come with the dust and we go with the wind

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground

From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters come down

Every state in this Union us migrants has been

We will work in your fight and we’ll fight till we win!

Bound for Glory - Woody Guthrie

It was early in the Second World War on the US west coast. Woody Guthrie had hitched a ride with a bunch of travelling workers. When their tyre burst next to some orchards of ripe apricots they thought they would try to earn some money to fund their vehicle repairs so they could become mobile again. Guthrie mixes his own story as a peripatetic musician falling for a young woman in the group with a sympathetic account of the workers as they confront the deeply entwined layers of agrarian capitalism.

There can be no generalizing about migrant workers in industrialised agriculture across space and time. In Guthrie’s example, for example, national solidarity in the wartime US appears to encompass all social classes and both mobile and settled people. Yet the political economy in the story contains elements that are recognizable outside the specific context of its telling. A woman Guthrie refers to as ‘Swedish lady’ because of her complexion drives over to the workers soon after their arrival and explains the distinctions between the different qualities of apricots in terms of price and pickers’ pay:

Three grades of apricots, you know… Now, the plain ones ripen last in the warm weather; anybody can pick the plain ones. Pay so much a box. Selects ripen earlier. Better taste, better shape, less of them. You get a little more money for picking them, about twice as much a box as the plain ones… Moneyed folks want the very best they can get, and the best is the Extra Selects.

The connection between pay rates and the market conditions remains explicit as the story unfolds. The timing of the apricot harvest depended not only on the ripeness of the fruit, itself affected by weather, but also on orders from the cannery, which in this case owns the orchards.

The workers in Guthrie’s story are enticed into a form of indebtedness to the cannery. The broken down vehicle means there are no other employers within easy reach. So they take on the debt, not through naivety, but necessity. For now, they are resigned to the inequality of the relationship. The company man ensures he has identified the owner of the broken down vehicle and that he has signed his agreement to the debt the workers take on in the company store – the first time a worker inspected the store they found that goods were subject to a hefty mark up but there was nothing they could do. The ‘field boss’ then uses the cannery’s statement rather than his own words to announce the delay in the harvest:

Quiet everybody… Won’t bother to read all of this order. ‘DEAR SIRS: DUE TO COLD WEATHER OF THE PAST THIRTY DAYS, THE APRICOT CROP WILL NOT BE RIPE ENOUGH TO BE SUITABLE FOR CANNING. THERE WILL BE A TEN DAY WAITING PERIOD TO ALLOW THE FRUIT TO MATURE. PICKERS MAY STAND BY AND AWAIT ORDERS, AS THE WEATHER MAY TAKE A WARM CHANGE AND RIPEN THE FRUIT SOONER. USUAL CREDIT SLIPS MAY BE OBTAINED BY MAKING THE PROPER ARRANGEMENTS AT THE COMPANY STORE’… Hhhhmmm. Yes. Anybody want to ask any questions?

The cannery/fruit grower thus accumulates wealth not only through production, processing and sale of food, but also through making the harvest workforce indebted. The distribution of land and machinery has a major role in enabling him to do this. Importantly, it is backed by the state which, as legal enforcer, lies behind the effectiveness of the credit agreement that workers sign. This does not mean that the state inevitably acts against the interests of workers. The state can have and, at times, has had a protective role. However, the state may also be called in to crush workers’ attempts at industrial action. One of the women workers remarks:

I’m one that’s shore glad we quit that striking [when war broke out]… cause just ain’t right for one buncha people to up an’ quit work, an’ another bunch to drive down an’ shoot you full of that old tear gas, crops of all kinds-a-goin’ to waste all around.

Guthrie also describes coming across a younger woman planting stones from four apricots she had picked and eaten in the early morning:

I stole four of these big pretty apricots. I had them for breakfast. And now I’m planting them back here by the side of this old store. Grow up some day. Then I can rest easy knowing I paid him back.

Bound for Glory is autobiographical, yet the very nature of the worlds of agricultural workers described – spaces far from conurbations, fleeting associations with particular employers and places of work – makes it impossible to establish how much of the story is invented. It does, nevertheless, serve as an exemplar of migrant employment in the industrialised food production sector, the understanding of which, in spite of its diversity, involves asking a common set of political, economic and cultural questions. What is the structure of ownership and control across food growers, packers, processors, creditors and retailers? To what extent, how predictably, and at what times of year are large numbers of workers required? What role do states and international actors have in reinforcing or challenging inequality and injustice in fields and food factories? How much and in what ways can workers act to improve their working conditions and wages? And, following Robert Thomas’ (1985) exposure of the use of the urban ideal of the ‘farmer’ to obscure the workings of industrialised agriculture, and Geoff Mann’s (2007) detailed deconstruction of the ‘wage’, to what extent is this a struggle over meanings as well as over money, time, bodies and food?

References

Guthrie, W. (1943) Bound for Glory, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mann, G. (2007) Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers and the Political Economy of the American West, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Thomas, R. (1985) Citizenship, Gender and Work: Social Organization of Industrial Agriculture, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keeping Time

Keeping Time

At Sundown - Vivien Urban, age 14

In my country,

I felt the gentle grass

touching my feet

lying under the cherry tree

with flowers white and sweet.

I watched the red plate

of the sun going down.

And, as the shadows grow,

so grew the quiet.

In my other country

I have grown used to the rumbling

sounds of cars.

At night from my window

I watch the stars.

My clock ticks, tick-tock

pushing forward time.

I think of the red plate

of the sun going down.

COMPAS Schools Poetry Competition 2013 Third Place

Time - Michelle Bastian

Watching the sweeping second hand of the clock, a certain kind of time appears. Smooth, continuous, seemingly inevitable. The clock’s face promises much, yet it reveals little of the work involved in producing time. Look more closely and one is forced to confront time’s precarious materiality. In a classic analogue clock, a quartz crystal, shaped into a small tuning fork, creates countable oscillations used to distinguish ‘before’ from ‘after’. Chosen because of their low response to changes in temperature, quartz crystals are laser-cut and set to vibrate at a frequency of 32,768Hz – such seeming precision, but even so, this material configuration represents a compromise between accuracy and cost. Half a second is lost or stolen from every day. Yet even this is still not precise, it is only an average. Each day brings its own variability – the material chosen because of its lack of ability to respond still responds, after all.

The constant battle to transcend the facility for response, a facility inherent within all materials, leads to ever more intricate methods of fine tuning and calibrating. Behind the illusion of the sweeping second hand, our clocks cannot actually operate like clockwork; they cannot live up to the metaphor they have inspired. Unable to escape contingencies, they make time through particular mediators – ytterbium, caesium, quartz, Earth, Sun – each only providing partial infrastructures for managing the varied relations that make up life. The desire to produce a transcendent method of global coordination continues to be balanced against the contingent qualities and capacities of the materials pressed into service.

In our time of migrations, flows and un/settlements, we supposedly know better than to dream of a single common language, of a universal medium of translation. Yet this is belied by the short set of numbers that grace the multiple screens we touch and watch throughout the day. Here the dream is alive and well. Twice a year this dream is disturbed as we make our concessions to the variations of solar time. Yet even this small reminder of the way we humans make time collectively weakens as our clocks shift from our wrists to digital networks that synchronise our displays. We no longer experience the uncanniness of being responsible for making the clock fall back or spring forward. Even fewer of us are called upon to add the irregular leap second that is needed to keep International Atomic Time in synch with Universal Time. The variable Earth, which gives us the time we hubristically call ‘Universal’, is not obedient to the same laws that caesium atoms are subject to. So a second is added here and there. Unnoticeable, it would seem, except for those responsible for IT systems, for whom a second out of place can cause cascades of server meltdowns. Like the elusive ‘mono’ of monocultural agriculture, our attempts to enforce the purity of the one become coeval with the creation of ever more vigorous interlopers, even while most others are pared away.

Looking more closely at clocks, we find that time is not an inert background. Far from encountering a pre-existing entity, we encounter emergent methods for moving with and through the different processes, speeds, delays, mobilities, repetitions, rhythms and transformations that inhere within beings, objects, networks. What is at the heart of time, then, is not gears and oscillators, but something less tangible: the ability to respond. Time is something we make, as our response to finding ourselves always and already entwined in relations that do not all operate in the same way. Yet the method most often recognised as ‘time’, the clock, has spawned the search for materials that respond less and less to variations in context and circumstance. From these we build devices into which we externalise the work of making time, with the risk that we become less and less able to notice the myriad of sequences and successions and to understand how these relate to each other (see Birth, 2012). Our need to respond has become entangled with the pursuit of freedom from response.

Even so, as I read about the delays, the ‘fast tracks’, the arbitrary cut off dates, the stagnant times of detention (see Griffiths et al., 2013), I look up again at the clock and, for just a moment, the second hand wavers. A vibration runs through it, interfering with its steady sweep. Time washes through time. The hand waits, then resumes, but in that moment something is lost. Faith. Faith that the clock will do as it promises and free us from complicated forms of response. Instead, we find ourselves in worlds where clocks aren’t helping us tell the time of our lives and the lives of those we encounter, in worlds where many are forced to experience paralysing delays overlaid with terrifying swiftness, in worlds where perhaps time itself will be driven to respond, after all.

References

Birth, K. (2012) Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

Griffiths, M., Rogers, A. and Anderson, B. (2013). ‘Migration, Time and Temporalities: Review and Prospect’, COMPAS Research Resources Paper, University of Oxford.

Generations - Mette Berg

The concept of generation is central to understanding migration; think of the idea of ‘the first generation’, ‘the second generation’ and so on. In this sense generation refers to migrants and their children, and often assumes that particular challenges are associated with each passing generation: The first generation are said to put up with harsh conditions and low pay in the expectation that their children, the second generation, will have better lives than they themselves do, and that their grandchildren, the third generation, will in turn be fully assimilated into the country of settlement. A voluminous body of literature associating itself with the assimilation paradigm, much of it based on US experiences, has tracked and documented the relative progress of migrant generations, in particular the second generation, which is seen as a kind of litmus test.

Notwithstanding the merits of this body of work, there are problems associated with it. As some scholars have noted, it has tended to assume that migrants will assimilate into a vaguely defined, white, middle-class mainstream, following the example of the Jewish, Irish, and Italian migrants to the US in the early 20th century. Today however, many migrant groups are instead absorbed into an increasingly multi-ethnic, non-white working or under class with few opportunities for upward mobility or even of legalizing their residence. Furthermore, the assimilation paradigm assumes that migrants and their offspring over time will relinquish all ties to their ancestral homeland. Instead, globalisation is enabling more migrants to continue to stay in touch with their homelands through remittances, skype and e-mails, telephone calls and text messages, and visits, including extended holidays for children. Some migrants move back and forth between home and host society without ever settling definitively in one or the other, or move between several different countries. This means that the idea of a neat, straight line toward full assimilation obscures more than it illuminates.

Some scholars have accordingly extended work on the second generation to include an appreciation of their continuing transnational identities and commitments, better suited to today’s migration dynamics and migrants’ border-crossing practices. Their work points to another problem with the conventional use of generation in migration scholarship, namely that of a missing or unacknowledged historical context. Could it be that the use of generation in assimilationist scholarship has erroneously understood the experiences of early 20th-century European immigrants and their descendants as generalizable experiences, when they might be more helpfully understood as particular experiences embedded in the specific historical context of early to mid-twentieth century America?

If this is the case, there are other definitions and meanings attached to generation in sociological and anthropological literature that can profitably be applied in a migration context (Kertzer, 1983). As well as genealogical descent, generation can also refer to cohorts, meaning a group of people who have experienced the same events at roughly the same point in their life course (most often during adolescence). An example would be the post-World War II cohort of ‘the baby-boomers’ in the west. A cohort understanding of generation can help us understand the ways in which pre-migration experiences may continue to influence migrants after they migrate. Thus, migrants who leave their homeland at a particular historical juncture and who arrive in a ‘host’ society at a particular historical moment, may adapt differently compared to those who leave the homeland and arrive in the country of settlement at a different point in time, even if both are ‘first generation’ in the conventional sense.

To give an example, Cubans who left the island for the US in the early 1960s shortly after the Cuban Revolution, and who were given generous US federal support in integrating into the US, have tended to hold strong anti-Castro views, to vote for the Republican Party, and to oppose remittance sending and homeland visits. By contrast, Cubans who left the island in the 1990s after the economic crisis sparked by the demise of the Soviet bloc, and who arrived in the US at a time when financial support programmes for Cuban migrants had been phased out, tend to hold more pragmatic views toward their homeland. They send more remittances than the earlier cohort, even though they are much poorer than them, and they visit Cuba to a degree unheard of among the earlier cohort. Similar differences can be seen among Cubans in Spain, with those who arrived in the 1960s tending to identify more with their peers in the US than with more recently arrived Cubans in Spain. Both cohorts are genealogically defined first generation migrants, yet their stances toward Cuba mean that their interests are often in direct conflict with one another, challenging the idea of migrants from the same country of origin being a cohesive group (Eckstein and Berg, forthcoming).

This cohort understanding of generation sees successive waves of migrants as diasporic generations (Berg, 2011) and situates migrants in their historical context, thereby enabling a better understanding of diversity within migrant groups, especially regarding inter-ethnic relations, host society adaptation and homeland engagement. This does not mean that the genealogical understanding of migrants is ‘wrong.’ In fact, it is a good example of a term that has travelled from the academic sphere into everyday usage, and many people who are descendants of migrants self-identify as the ‘second generation.’ Yet a historically grounded understanding of generation which takes pre-migration experiences and the homeland context into account can provide a richer understanding of migrants in historical context and help shed light on divisions and cleavages within migrant groups that the other approach leaves unexplained.

References

Berg, M. L. (2011) Diasporic Generation: Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Eckstein, S. E. & Berg, M. L. (forthcoming) ‘The Diaspora Generational Divide: Cubans in the US and Spain’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Kertzer, D. I. (1983) ‘Generation as a Sociological Problem’, Annual Review of Sociology, 9: 129-149.

Flow - Sondra L. Hausner

In articulating his notion of the global ‘imaginary’, Arjun Appadurai famously writes of flows, of scapes – medias, technologies, financial worlds – as well as people and ideologies. All these forms flow. Appadurai’s global scapes are powerful – too powerful, perhaps, in the way they mobilize many millions of people in the world to aspire to urban life and to the golden west, where the streets are reputedly (but falsely) paved with money and the way to opportunity. Many a migrant’s tale has soured in the face of reality in a new, much-sought after location that offers more hardship, not less, of a new cultural variety, rather than a diamond-encrusted McDonald’s sign.

Appadurai’s point is that imaginaries are globally shared. True enough, but what about the everyday non-imagined – the thoughts, the raw symbols of the modern world that are not so much about aspiration and hope as about the way the world’s collective thought processes have increasingly converged upon a few choice ideals? Ideals are not imaginaries: they are real (if dynamic) symbols of the way things are, and ought to, work. (One remembers Clifford Geertz’s famous phrase defining worldview: ‘the picture [people] have of the way things in sheer actuality are’.) Things? What things? Oh, things like: religion; the individual; morality; human rights; capitalism: these things are thought to exist, actually, and even eternally, although historians of ideas can rightfully trace them (usually to modernity). We are so taken with what seems real about these seemingly fundamental, contemporary aspects of human life that we forget that they were not always everywhere. That is what culture – in this case, global culture – does: it makes us think the world actually is as we think it is – that there such a thing as an individual, or a religion.

How do these ideas get from one end of the earth to the other, like a storm blown by the wind? They are not imaginaries; they are current global realities: they represent what it means to be human today, for most people, in most places. They did not always. Arguably, many of them came from the west, and somehow got disseminated throughout the globe, as a tacit but perhaps definitive statement of Euro-American dominance or contemporary power: we may no longer be colonialists, but our ideas won (and sometimes via the even sweeter victory of having come back to us by way of you), so there you go. Modernity means that these are now social forms – ethnicity, the market, peoplehood, personhood, free will, choice – that are globally understood, accepted, seen as natural and timeless and definitive.

These social forms have nothing to do with our genes, of course, or our humanity, or maybe even the way we evolved, except by chance or by confluence. Yes, it is possible for human beings to act and to historically construct shared concepts – or to come to collectively embrace concepts that become shared over time and space – that have nothing to do with the evolution of the species, except in the temporal sense. These cultural formations are not natural, or real: they are our collective constructs, now global, having mysteriously dispersed themselves across the world, pan-geographically, as if they got on the planes themselves and got off and sailed through customs: ‘Hello! I am your new global thought form!’ They migrated all over the planet with subconscious ease, unspoken, and yet they are the very terms of global discourse. There is nothing definitive or final about them, and yet they make up the world as we know it, today, at this fleeting moment – movement – in time.

Naturalisation - Bernard Ryan

‘Naturalisation’ refers to the acquisition by individuals of a state’s nationality (or citizenship) through a personal connection to the state established during that person’s life. It is to be distinguished from the acquisition of nationality through a connection to a state at the moment of birth, typically by being born on its territory, or by having an existing national parent. Today, the most common basis for naturalisation is a period of residence in the state, though other possibilities exist, such as military service and marriage to a state’s national.

The use of the term ‘naturalisation’ reflects the historic view that those whose connection to a sovereign dated from birth were ‘natural-born’ subjects. Lacking such a connection by birth, other persons whose association with the sovereign or territory was recognised were being ‘naturalised’. That usage is illustrated by the English Act of Parliament of 1677 ‘for the Naturalizing of Children of his Majestyes English Subjects borne in Forreigne Countryes’ during the 1641-1666 period of civil war and interregnum. Under that Act, if both parents had been born in England, a child would ‘for ever be esteemed and taken to all Intents and Purposes to be and to have beene the Kings Naturall born Subject[ ]’.

The naturalisation policies of today’s European states may be characterised as moderately liberal. Naturalisation is likely to be available in principle to those who meet the requirement of several years’ legal residence, with a large majority of states setting minimum periods of residence of between five and ten years (Wallace Goodman, 2010). There has also been increased acceptance of multiple nationality arising out of naturalisation over recent decades (Faist, 2007). For example, in Germany, which has historically discouraged dual nationality, a legislative reform in 1999 introduced exceptions, particularly for those for whom it is impossible or difficult to divest themselves of another nationality.

The recent trend in Europe has nevertheless been for the introduction of new requirements for naturalisation (Wallace Goodman, 2010). Most states now require applicants to show familiarity with the state’s language(s) or culture, and to satisfy requirements of good character. In a majority of European states, it is also necessary to show that the person is economically active or self-sufficient. The contemporary trend in naturalisation policy is therefore for states to seek to be selective on cultural, social and economic grounds, rather than restricting access to naturalisation across the board.

The desire to select can lead to questionable ideas concerning naturalisation policy. A good example is the proposal announced by the British government in The Path to Citizenship in 2008 to require a longer period of residence prior to the naturalisation of those who could not demonstrate ‘active citizenship’ through charitable or similar activity. While legislation on this point was adopted (in the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009), it has never been implemented, because of the sheer impracticality – for both migrants and voluntary bodies – of a scheme to prove the requisite ‘activity’.

The Path to Citizenship also proposed that those who were eligible for permanent residence in the UK ought to be encouraged to naturalise, as acquisition of British citizenship was ‘the completion of a newcomer’s journey’, and likely to aid their social integration. To that end, a shorter qualifying period was contemplated for naturalisation than for permanent residence. But that proposal has not been acted upon either, presumably because of its inherent unattractiveness to government. As states retain greater freedom of action in relation to the residence and protection of permanent residents than of naturalised citizens, it is somewhat difficult to see why they would make it easier to become the latter than the former.

These two proposals within The Path to Citizenship were based on the assumption that migrants could be asked to take specific concrete steps (voluntary activity, naturalisation at the earliest juncture) to prove that they truly belonged in Britain. Long-term migrants will, however, have their own calculations to make and lives to live. The evidence from around Europe is that migrants from less developed countries are far more likely to naturalise than those from highly-developed counties (see Dronkers and Vink, 2012). The implication is that those who actually naturalise are likely to be motivated primarily by practical considerations, such as the acquisition of a privileged passport, security of residence, and the transmission of nationality to children. Their preferences concerning naturalisation will also typically be influenced by ties to – and identification with – their state of origin, as well as in relation to their state of residence.

Looking to the future, we may ask how naturalisation policy should be arranged in a world in which the migrant experience involves everyday forms of transnationalism. It would seem preferable that politicians dispense with the view that naturalisation can be an instrument for moulding society. Even the claim that ready access to naturalisation is necessary to promote social and economic integration may now be outdated. The perspective which appears most appropriate to contemporary conditions is one which treats naturalisation as an optional means for an individual to protect their rights to reside in a state, and to claim its protection, and nothing more than that.

References

Dronkers, J. and Vink, M. (2012) ‘Explaining Access to Citizenship in Europe: How Citizenship Policies Affect Naturalization Rates’, European Union Politics 13(3): 390-412.

Faist, T. (2007) ‘The Fixed and Porous Boundaries of Dual Citizenship’, in T. Faist (ed.) Dual Citizenship in Europe: From Nationhood to Societal Integration, Farnham: Ashgate.

Wallace Goodman, S. (2010) Naturalisation Policies in Europe: Exploring Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion, EUDO Citizenship Observatory.

History, Memory and Immigration Controls - Cynthia Wright

Can history and memory be mobilized as part of the struggle against immigration controls? If so, how? What does the historical literature have to say about passports, immigration bureaucracies, the international nation state system, and the global regulation of migration? Who is the ‘migrant’? In Deportation is Freedom! The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls, Steve Cohen calls for a Museum of Illegal Immigration to remember those who fought immigration controls, and those detained and deported. It is an intriguing idea, especially when contrasted with existing museums of immigration. Like the historical literature, museums may pre-suppose that migration is a problem, and work to (re)construct sedentary populations – and singular ethnicized identities. They are often nation-building projects, turning potentially threatening ‘migrants’ into ‘immigrants’.

Our historical retrievals, like our social movements, need to do more than remember. Important as that work is, we also need to grasp how controls came to be – and why it is that history is so often naturalized and forgotten. What if we argue that the movements of people – in all their range and complexity – make up the foundation of world history? Julia Clancy-Smith, in her re-conceptualization of Europe and North Africa from the standpoint of people and mobilities, writes against the grain of a long tradition in historical production that has been shaped by a deep sedentarist bias, a focus on the nation state as a primary unit that largely assumes border controls rather than explaining how and why they came to be. The rich classics of anti-colonial historiography – a potentially important resource for conversations on the origins of immigration controls – have not always been able to adequately account for migrant figures that do not fit the binary of colonizer/colonized. There is an important historical literature that exposes the racist, class-biased and patriarchal character of modern immigration regimes, and tracks the administrative strategies for keeping people out of (or in) diverse settings. But it does not necessarily help us understand how exclusion came to be fundamental to modern practices of sovereignty, law, identification – and to notions of modern freedom.

Here is where recent historical research might contribute to re-thinking migrant justice projects – and indeed to troubling the category of migrant itself. While the history of immigration controls on a global scale is complex, they are, in fact, surprisingly recent, and not an inevitable outcome of international arrangements among political communities. Certain kinds of controls over mobility do have a long history, but rulers were initially far more concerned to control exits rather than entries into territories, the better to ensure a source of labour. And there is an important relationship between contemporary controls enacted at national borders and earlier forms of local mobility control aimed at the poor and ‘vagrants’.

Yet, modern immigration controls are of a different character and scale. They were (and continue to be) foundational, for the consolidation of the nation and notions of sovereignty, and for making the boundaries of the international system itself, even including who is imagined as capable of individual freedom and civilized government. Immigration controls arose in the context of Atlantic slavery’s aftermath and in direct relation to complex debates over the indenture of South Asian and Chinese labourers and the meaning of ‘free’ labour and ‘free’ migration. In the process, ‘free’ migrants were distinguished from Asian ‘coolies’/indentured labourers and the enslaved – those supposedly without the self-governing capacity that entitled them to mobility rights. Thus, liberal notions of freedom and of mobility were centrally articulated against the figure of the naturally unfree Asian. Moreover, the association of the enslaved and the indentured with private control and with brokers who assisted their movements, further constituted them as ‘unfree’ as, increasingly, all actors but the nation were de-legitimized when it came to the facilitation (or not) of movement.

Linked to this was the principle that a self-governing nation ought to be able to exercise the absolute right to control who entered and what happened at the border – to draw the line at the so-called uncivilized, the non-white, the economically dependent, and all those in the grip of ‘traffickers’.

Historians broadly agree that, between the 1880s and the interwar period, most of the key elements of the current immigration control regime were developed and extended on a global basis. The post-independence states that emerged soon after World War II largely failed to challenge this regime and often contributed to its consolidation. Today, this state of affairs remains largely taken for granted, and migrants are ‘illegalised’ on a grand scale and often depicted as criminals or trafficking victims – or both. But any historical analysis must attend to how diverse modes of resistance – clandestine migration, smuggling, anti-deportation campaigns, legal challenges, boycotts, use of fraudulent papers, anti-colonial resistance to mobility controls within the British Empire – also shaped the architecture of controls. Within the British Empire, several dramatic challenges led by anti-colonial Asians in the early 20th century had as their outcome the entrenchment of the principle that white settler nations such as South Africa and Canada had the sovereign right to admit or exclude – thereby ending the principle of free movement without a colour bar within the Empire. Resistance to immigration controls frequently shifted how they were administratively deployed, often making them less overtly racist, so that challenging them frontally became far trickier because so much was left to the ‘discretion’ of officials and bureaucracies. By examining the history of immigration controls, together with the fascinating archive of resistance to them, we have a renewed resource for challenging distinctions of ‘legal’/’illegal’ and ‘citizen’/’alien’; for radically re-imagining our relationship to space, place and one another; and for challenging borders, nations and the institution of citizenship.

References

Aiken S. J. (ed.) (2009) Special issue on No Borders as Practical Politics, Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees 26(2).

Clancy-Smith, J. (2012) Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c1800-1900, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cohen, S. (2005) Deportation Is Freedom!: The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

McKeown, A. (2008) Melancholy Order: Asian Migration ad the Globalization of Borders, New York: Columbia.

Torpey, J. (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Migration Goals - Stephen Castles

People migrate for many reasons: to seek work, to escape persecution, for marriage, for education, to find better conditions for retirement and just in search of other lifestyles. In each case, the migrants have varying, complex and often mixed motivations. Here I will only discuss one issue: temporary migration for employment.

In the late 1970s, the German Federal Government commissioned a survey of ‘guestworkers’. Seventy per cent of those interviewed had originally intended to stay in Germany for less than five years. Yet about three-quarters of the respondents had in fact already stayed over five years. Only 17 per cent had not changed their original plans. The survey went on to ask about future plans. The majority said they intended to leave within four years (Forschungsverbund, 1979 cited in Castles et al., 1984). By the 1980s, it was clear that many of those who planned to return home had not done so: former ‘guestworkers’ were settling in for the long haul and bringing along their families. Germany had acquired new ethnic minorities, despite the creation of a whole legal and administrative system designed to keep labour migration temporary and to prevent family reunification.

What does this tell us about the migration goals of the workers concerned? First, that just as governments and employers planned, migrant workers did originally intend to come only temporarily to Germany. They wanted to work hard and live frugally, to be able to quickly save enough to improve the livelihoods of the family back home, for example by developing their farms, by starting a small business, or just by improving their housing, education, health care and nutrition. Second, that it can be very hard for migrants to face up to the idea of permanent settlement, even when they realise that they are going to have to stay much longer than originally expected. Third, that there are many factors that lead migrants to change their original objectives, and that it is very hard for governments – especially in countries with democratic principles and strong legal systems – to prevent this.

To avoid misunderstandings, it is important to emphasise that millions of migrant workers who went to Germany and other western European countries during the boom years of the 1960s and early 1970s did return to their homelands. This applied particularly to those from countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece that joined the (then) European Community, which was committed to evening out economic conditions and implementing democratic freedoms. But many did stay on after the 1973-74 recruitment stop; those most likely to remain were Turks in Germany and the Netherlands, and North Africans in France and the Netherlands.

What are the factors that lead them to change their goals? In the case of Turkey, the 1980 military coup and the repression of labour organizations caused many to stay away. Growing unemployment and the failure of many farms and small businesses meant that many migrants found their savings insufficient to offer security upon return. Return had to be postponed again and again.

A more general factor relates to life-course: most of the early migrants were young men and – increasingly – young women, who hoped to be away for only a few years. They had been attracted by the good wages in western Europe, but had not been informed about high living costs and tax and social insurance contributions. Saving was much slower than expected. It might be acceptable to live frugally in a migrant workers’ hostel for a few years, but as time went on, people wanted to live with their spouses and children. Family reunification and formation – and life itself – got under way. Once migrants’ children went to school and began to speak German (or French or Dutch) better than their parents’ languages, parents realised that if they went home, their children might not come with them. Since giving a better future to their children was a powerful motivation for migration, the idea of seeing the family dissolve was anathema: many parents began to realise that their future lay in the new country.

Today there is a world-wide trend towards temporary labour migration. In the early 20th century, Germany, Spain and other European countries began introducing temporary migration schemes, such as seasonal recruitment for agriculture and tourism, and fixed-term work permits for construction. Traditional immigrant settlement countries, notably the USA, Canada and Australia now have large temporary worker programs. The Gulf Cooperation Council states and Asia’s emerging industrial economies also recruit temporary workers. The European Commission uses the euphemism ‘circular migration’ in its advocacy of such schemes, describing it as a ‘triple win’: destination countries get a steady supply of workers for both skilled and less skilled occupations, without any long-term integration costs; countries of origin benefit from remittances and return of skills; while the migrants benefit from an increase in safe, legal mobility opportunities.

All this sounds too good to be true – and it is. Highly-skilled personnel may move around repeatedly within international employment markets and enjoy cosmopolitan expatriate lifestyles – and they may also decide to shift to permanent settlement, a decision often encouraged by destination states. But governments do all they can to prevent the settlement of lower skilled workers, even though the labour demand for construction workers, hospital personnel and care-workers, for example, is anything but temporary. The lessons from the failure of the guestworker system of the 1960s and 1970s remain relevant: whatever the original intentions of the migrants, a certain proportion of them will change their goals in the course of the migratory process. Some will stay permanently, often leading to a growth in ethnic diversity in the destination country. You cannot have workers without people.

References

Forschungsverbund (1979) ‘Probleme der Ausländerbeschäftigung’, Integrierter Endbericht, Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, Bonn.

Castles, S., Booth, H. and Wallace, T. (1984) Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities, London: Pluto Press.

Global Migration - Dirk Hoerder

Global mobility, said to be a recent phenomenon dating from the 1990s, is currently raising fears among many who want state borders closed and jobs protected. Consider an apparently unrelated recent issue in the media, the decline of coffee prices in world markets. Like mobility, coffee growing, prices, and consumption are global. However, analysis cannot proceed in terms of bordered states but rather in terms of globally spread economic regions. The route from producer to consumer includes the requirement for globally mobile transport workers in container shipping, often men from the Philippines, and also for labour to unload air cargos, often migrant men from regions where wages are low and life projects difficult. At the producers’ end of this commodity chain, peasant families or men and women on plantations lose their jobs or their land. They have to migrate when they cannot make ends meet. On the consumers’ side, no migration seems to be involved. Historically, however, consumption had to be introduced to Europe and elsewhere. Coffee, native to Ethiopia and Yemen, was brought by 17th-century migrant entrepreneurs, often Armenians, who established coffee houses and the coffee house culture with it. With increasing demand, the ‘East India Companies’ – multinationals of the time with migrant personnel from the core – established mass production in the global plantation belt and forced migrant labourers to these worksites.

Global migrations, entwined with investments, imposition of power and regionally concentrated resources, have a long history. Migration and trade across the (known) world dates back millennia – in the Indian Ocean 5000 years, between China and other sections of the Asian world several thousand years. The expulsion of parts of the Jewish population and their diaspora formation began in 70 CE. Those expelling them were powerful Roman administrator and immigrant soldiers. Often overlooked, women were also part of all such moves.

Modern globalization began with the 15th-century linking of the Eurasian-African world with that of the Americas, both of which are criss-crossed internally (across the continent, in other words) by migration routes. Tiny numbers of heavily armed Europeans colonized the Americas and, after population collapse through unwittingly introduced germs, set in motion vast migrations. This Atlantic-centred view, however, is narrow. Large Chinese fleets connected East Asia with East Africa, and Chinese population growth involved vast settlement migrations. In the Levantine and Anatolian regions – the hinge between Asia and Europe – advancing Muslim Turkish armies, settlers, and whole populations established themselves. Into this ‘new’ global world, English and other ‘merchant adventurers’ penetrated as migrants armed with guns, capital, and an overbearing sense of superiority and whiteness. Mass migrations – local, meso-regional and macro-regional – resulted: regionally to plantations and mines and transoceanically to plantation regimes based on the labour power of enslaved African men and women.

By the 19th century, the small numbers of colonizer migrants across the world, and resulting or resource-induced uneven economic development, set in motion five macro-systems of migration: the forced migration of slaves out of Africa continued with the last two million of 12.5 million men and women; some 50-55 million men and women migrated transatlantically, north and south, from 1815 to the 1930s; another 12-20 million moved from European Russia to the Transcaspian and southern Siberian agricultural belt and to the empire’s far eastern cities; another 48-52 million, often labelled ‘coolies’ in racist parlance, moved from the British and other colonizer powers’ Asian possessions in free and involuntary migrations in the 1830s to 1930s; and 46-51 million moved in the north China-Manchuria-eastern Russian migration system during the 1880s-1930s. The 20th century world wars of European origin and the drawing of ‘nation’ state borders through regions of mixed settlement made Europe the largest refugee-generating region on the globe. From the 1950s, state-formation, often resulting from ‘nationalist’ movements in the formerly colonized world shifted a refugee-generation southward. At the same time capitalist neo-colonialism – often in conjunction with local elites – decreased options for sustainable lives or projects for a better future for children, and thus increased global disparities and the potential for migration.

Thus evolved the 20th-century global migrations. In the 1880s, migrants to the vast plains from North America via southern Russia to Australia, as well as to colonized rice-growing Burma, began to mass-produce grains as world market prices collapsed. Family farming in many regions had to be abandoned and the dislocated men and women with their children migrated to urban industrial jobs whether in Harbin, the Ruhr District, or Cleveland. Such migrant and immigrant industrial labouring families lived residentially segregated near factories. With the present growth of the service sector, and gendered domestic and caregiving labour in particular, migrants work across urban spaces in middle-class neighbourhoods. Ever more come from colonized/neocolonized peoples and, in white societies, are thus doubly visible. Rural and small-town migrants in metropoles like Shanghai or Nairobi are equally discernable because of dialect, dress, and class position.

Globalization is not new. Nor are global migrations suddenly ‘feminized’ – women have always been an integral part of migration. Had migration across the globe not always been gendered, immigrant communities with children would not have emerged in British North America, in Spanish and Portuguese South America, or in China’s many cities. All migrants connected their local place of socialization with a distant local space of life-course options. Migration was and is translocal and, in regional socio-economic contexts, transregional. In transnational or, perhaps better put, transstate migrations, borders merely present an additional obstacle in the glocal movements of people.

References

Curtin, P. D. (1984) Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gabaccia, D. R. (2000) Italy’s Many Diasporas, London: UCL.

Hoerder, D. and Kaur, A. eds. (2013) Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Century, Leiden: Brill.

Hoerder, D. (2002) Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, Durham: Duke University Press.

Manning, P. (2005) Migration in World History, New York: Routledge.

Waiting - Shahram Khosravi

Waiting is a particular experience of time. Waiting is inescapable. It is a feature of human relationships. In our daily lives, we wait at airports, offices, and shops. Waiting is a common feature of bureaucracy; when in contact with organizations, individuals wait their turn and officials’ decisions. Waiting is expecting something coming from others. Keeping others waiting is also a technique for the regulation of social interactions. It is a manipulation of other’s time. Waiting, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, is a way of experiencing the effect of power. ‘Making people wait… delaying without destroying hope is part of the domination’ (Bourdieu, 2000). To keep people waiting, without ruining their hope, is an exercise of power over other people’s time. Waiting is a common experience for the less powerful groups in society, producing ‘subjective effects of dependency and subordination’ (Auyero, 2012). The ‘punitive’ aspect of waiting is when a person is ‘kept ignorant as to how long he must wait’ (Schwartz, 1975). Waiting generates feelings of ‘powerlessness and vulnerability’. Marginalized and unprivileged groups, to use Crapanzano’s words, ‘wait for something, anything, to happen. They are caught in the peculiar, the paralytic, time of waiting’ (1985). Another consequence of waiting is the feeling that one is not fully in command of one’s life. To be kept waiting for a long time ‘is to be the subject of an assertion that one’s own time (and therefore, one’s social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait’ (Schwartz, 1975).

The arbitrariness and precariousness of waiting is best depicted in literature. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is about endless waiting for someone who never comes, and for something that never happens. Frantz Kafka’s Before the Law is about a man from the countryside permanently waiting before and for the law. His entrance is deferred, ‘not yet allowed’. This ‘not yet’ illustrates the abstractedness and inaccessibility of the law that keeps people waiting without having their hopes dashed.

Large numbers of displaced people – undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers – spend extended periods waiting in camps, in transit lands, or in search of papers. Lack of information on how long they have to wait, or what exactly they have to do to get their permits, makes their lives unpredictable and uncertain. This is most palpable in the case of asylum seekers, and in detention centres where migrants can often be kept indefinitely before deportation.

Prolonged waiting, for papers or deportation, means ‘not being in-time with others’. For many others, Mondays represent ‘moving forward’, the first day of a meaningful week of work. In contrast, for undocumented migrants, Mondays mean ‘remaining at the same point’. Their time is not that of ‘ordinary’ people. Undocumented migrants use terms like ‘dead time’ or ‘a time of death’ when talking about their lives kept waiting.

In western societies, people approach time in terms of how it can be used most efficiently. Time is associated with success and money. It is presented as a form of capital, which, similar to money, can be ‘counted, saved, spent, lost, wasted or invested’ (Schwartz, 1975). Hence waiting symbolizes waste, emptiness and uselessness. There is a discrepancy between the speed, mobility, and temporalities in modern societies, and the experiences of individuals forced into a prolonged act of waiting. Waiting by the poor, the unemployed, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants or youngsters can result in a weakening of a sense of social function, and of their connections to the larger society, generating a feeling of purposelessness and ‘rolelessness’. Furthermore, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants are constantly waiting for decisions and assistance coming from others: the state, churches, NGOs, legal firms, labour unions or employers. The dependence on others’ decisions and help leads to a patronizing relationship, with the migrant surrendering to the authority of others.

Waiting is often an experience of what Victor Turner (1969) calls liminality, the transitory stage between two social positions, between two stages of life. Undocumented migrants have left their legal status in their homelands and are waiting, hopefully, for a new status. Meanwhile, they are caught betwixt and between, their status socially and structurally ambiguous. The loss of social status and role generates vulnerability. For Turner, there are similarities between liminality and marginality and inferiority.

When liminality is turned into protracted waiting, the underpinnings of social life are temporarily/temporally suspended. Accordingly, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants find themselves in a situation Hage calls ‘stuckedness’ (2009); characterized by invisibility, immobility, uncertainty and arbitrariness. The ambiguity about the duration of waiting generates a sense of uncertainty, shame, depression and anxiety. This can lead to sleep disorders and psychosomatic pain. Dread, angst or guilt are all components of the experience of waiting. But waiting can be an act too, a strategy of defiance by the migrants. Failed asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who wait in hiding may do so in hope of a regularization programme or with plans for moving on. Waiting does not have to mean passivity, and can be an element in a strategy by migrants to improve their situation.

References

Auyero, J. (2012) Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press

Crapazano, V. (1985) Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, London: Random House

Hage, G. (2009) Waiting, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press.

Schwartz, B. (1975) Queuing and Waiting: Studies in the Social Organization of Access and Delay, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Pub Co.

Ageing Futures - Chris Wilson

From reading media discussion of demographic issues, one could get the impression that the ageing of European society is an impending disaster of almost apocalyptic proportions. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that ageing is both inevitable and, in certain respects, desirable. The only ways to avoid demographic ageing are to either greatly worsen health conditions or to have substantial and continuing population growth. Given that most Europeans prefer long lives to short, mostly want few children, and do not wish there to be endless population increase, demographic ageing can be seen as a logical consequence of these preferences, and could be judged a measure of our achievement in extending life. However, Europe will experience a form of ‘super-ageing’ in the coming decades; the baby boom cohorts (born in the 1950s and 1960s) are very large, and when they get old this will greatly exacerbate any problems that ageing generates. What should be the response of European societies? The most sensible goal is to stabilise the base of Europe’s population pyramid, making the number of entrants to the labour market each year roughly constant. If each birth cohort is substantially smaller than the one before, as was the case for the last third of the 20th century, it will be very hard in the long run to sustain the economic base of our present social systems. However, this policy goal is more easily stated than realised.

To some extent, immigrants can fill gaps in the age structure caused by low fertility. A shortfall in births in, say, 1990 can in principle be made up for by recruiting migrants aged 25 in 2015 (and most migrants are young adults, generally aged 15-35). The number of migrants needed for such a balancing trick to work can roughly be gauged with reference to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In the EU over the last 20 years, fertility has been about 1.4 or 1.5 (around two-thirds replacement level. In order for the cohorts born around the turn of the millennium (1995-2005) to be as large as the cohorts of their parents, one migrant would need to be recruited for every two births. This is a much higher ratio than has ever been observed for a sustained period in any large European country. In general terms, migration on such a scale may be possible, but it will require a radical change in policies and attitudes.

Moreover, the long run effect of this approach depends not just on the scale of the immigration but also on how many children the migrants have. The logic of intergenerational replacement applies to migrants just as much as to the native born. Since migrants grow old too, unless they replace themselves more effectively than the native-born population, they do not ‘solve’ the problems of ageing. Only if migrants have higher fertility than their hosts will they help alleviate the consequences of ageing. From this point of view, it is clear, more or less everywhere, that the fertility of migrants tends to converge with that of the host population. The speed of convergence varies but assimilation occurs sooner or later. In short, migration cannot be regarded as a ‘one off’ solution to the problems caused by ageing. In so far as it can help, it can only do so if there is a continuing large stream of immigrants.

It is important to realise, however, that ageing per se is not necessarily a problem. The difficulty arises because Europe’s social and economic institutions are not well set up for coping with it. Particular attention has been focussed on pensions and other age-related welfare benefits. Europe’s welfare state regimes were mostly designed in the 25 or so years between the end of World War II and the first oil shock, and reflect the character of the economy and society at that time. However, this was a most unusual period. The baby boom led to substantial population growth, and economic growth was at record levels. Between 1948 and 1973 the GDP per head in continental western Europe grew by more than 5 per cent a year. This was far higher than ever seen before or since. The long-run trend is about 2 per cent a year, and we have struggled to reach even that level over the last five years. The pensions and welfare state systems that we have today were based on assumptions that both the population and the economy would continue to grow rapidly. Only now, over 40 years after these assumptions ceased to be true, are governments slowly coming to terms with the changes needed to make Europe’s welfare state systems sustainable.

While attention to the impact of ageing has tended to focus on the costs, especially pensions, in a more general sense what matters is the size of the labour force. Pensions and other welfare benefits represent a form of claim on the stream of wealth being created by the people who are at work. Thus, it is the relative size of the working and non-working populations that is most relevant. All other things being held constant, the low fertility of recent decades implies a marked shrinking of the working population over the next 25 years. The impact will, of course, be greatest in the countries where fertility has fallen most. Barring some miraculous discovery of how to return to rapid productivity gains, there are essentially only two ways in which the impact of this shortfall of workers can be mitigated. Firstly, the proportion of the population who are actually engaged in paid employment (and thus are paying taxes) can increase. Second, more workers can be imported by immigration. Neither of these two policy choices is universally popular. The former option involves persuading more women to work (especially in southern Europe) and delaying retirement for both sexes. Such changes may be just as controversial as advocating large scale immigration.

In short, future ageing is not a problem to be solved, but rather a predicament that we must learn to live with, and significant migration flows are likely to be one of the mechanisms that enables us to do so.

Migration, Death, Islam - Nazneen Ahmed

My father is buried in a little cemetery in the heart of Old Dhaka, next to a 400-year-old mosque, surrounded by palm trees and watched over by a little white cat who knows not to walk on the mounds of earth that are the only markers of the graves.

His final journey there, several years ago now, is one that is typical of his generation of Bangladeshi migrants, who, having carved out a life in England for over forty years, still wish for their final resting place to be ‘back home’.

For my father, the consequences of living as a member of a diaspora were key to his thought when, grasping my hand on his hospital bed, he asked me to organise for his body to be buried in the capital of Dhaka. His resting place in Bangladesh should be where he was born: a small village in a tangle of jungle, remote from the capital, on an island in the middle of a river. Instead, he is, quite remarkably, buried in in a tiny urban cemetery in the burial plot of my mother’s family. He wished for this when he first heard his diagnosis, and with great kindness, the imam of this mosque agreed for this prodigal son-in-law to rest with his father and mother-in-law, so that his British born children could visit with ease, and thereby maintain their emotional ties to a homeland that was not their birthplace. My grandmother’s grave is lost. It has been reclaimed by the jungle that spreads lush and green through my father’s village. My father feared the same happening to him, that we would not be able to visit, pray, remember. A Maoist activist to the last, he also wanted to have a Muslim funeral, to rest in hallowed ground, and for my uncles and cousins to visit his burial place every Friday to offer prayers for his departed soul.

Migrant lives, and deaths, are thus woven from contradictory and complex yearnings – for home, for God, for tradition and remembrance. These can also shift with time, and the passing of successive generations. The wishes of male first generation migrants such as my father to be buried back in the homeland are not necessarily shared by the majority of first generation women – or if they are, these wishes are not generally carried out. Nor are they shared by many second and third generation Bangladeshis in Britain, who increasingly wish to be buried here.

As the Muslim community in Britain has grown, increased calls for Islamic burial space provision within Britain have come as a challenge for local authorities, under pressure to find land for new Muslim cemeteries or room within existing burial grounds where graves can be aligned to face Mecca and bodies can be buried without coffins, as the Qu’ran decrees. Responding to the community’s changing needs, fundraising by the East London Mosque and various religious associations resulted in the opening in 2002 of the Gardens of Peace, Britain’s first private, purpose built Muslim cemetery, with space for over 10,000 graves.

We cannot simply attribute this shift in choice of burial location to a generational dilution of attachment to the homeland or to Islam. Rather, this change is happening due to shifts in migrants’ religious practices and affiliations. Muslim clerics in Britain have begun emphasising over the past decade that repatriation is not in compliance with the Quranic requirements for burial within twenty-four hours, arguing that burial in Britain can actually constitute a more purely Islamic death than when a body in embalmed and taken abroad. Here, in the debate about death and migration, the interplay between religion, nationalism and diaspora produces unexpected, unpredictable results.

At the same time, some migrants still wish to be buried back in Bangladesh because they adhere to particular Islamic sects that have locally specific practices which may not be followed accurately in the UK. So, while some clerics in Britain call for burials to take place in British soil, the fact that, in Ceri Peach’s words, the Muslim community is not one homogenous migrant group, but a ‘community of communities’ means that migrant interpretations of a ‘good Muslim death’ are also multiple, heterogeneous and different for each individual (2006).

My father’s burial wishes show him to have been an unusual kind of Muslim, an unorthodox political activist, migrant and patriarch, with deeply individual but also familiar ideas of where he and his family were meant to belong - and what home meant. Each British Muslim’s deeply personal decision regarding their own burial, and the final home in which their body will rest, is similarly informed by his or her own conceptualisation of faith, nation, and family, framed by the experience of migrating from one home and making another elsewhere.

References

Peach, C. (2006), ‘Islam, Ethnicity and South Asian Religions in the London 2001 Census’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31(3): 353–370.

Representations: Powers and Pitfalls

Field Notes from an Icelandic Glacier - Robin Boothroyd

Smooth and blue and creased

like an unironed shirt,

it is for a split second

warming, and then freezing

needles-in-the-palm cold.

I pass through a vault

in the azure ice

into a courtyard of light

and look up to see two

shards almost-but-not-quite

touching: they are meeting,

yet they are also parting.

By the same degree

I am here, in Iceland,

watching a glacier melt

in Katla’s molten glare;

and in my imagination

there, in Kew Gardens,

where Henry Moore’s bronze,

Oval with Two Points,

holds the light in tension.

Which is to say:

‘I am here.’

COMPAS Poetry Competition 2013 First Place

Windows: The 21st-Century Migration Experience - Xiang Biao

If migrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries remembered migration primarily as physical journeys that were marked by the smell of the ship, the sound of the train, and the heat of the desert, their 21st-century counterparts may experience migration as dealing with various windows: the window for visa application, the window at the immigration checkpoint, and the windows on the computer screen for booking appointments, submitting information, and applying for verifications of documents.

Migration is no longer pursued or regulated ‘on the road’, but is done so ‘through the window’. As Adam McKeown (2008) has established clearly, while migratory journeys were the main target of the US regulation of immigration in the 19th century, by the turn of the 20th century the policy focus had decidedly shifted to the migrant’s identity as proved by documents at checkpoints (the window).

In contrast to Georg Simmel’s (1997) meditation which took bridge and door as central symbols of social divide and connectedness, Catherine Liu (2011) suggests that in the contemporary era, ‘disembodied and virtual freedom and trespass have made the window a critical feature in thinking about differentiation and separation’. The physical movement of a body across a borderline may have become a rather insignificant moment in international migration, whereas what happens at the windows can be far more consequential.

Central to such ‘through the window’ management is the idea of multi-two-dimensionality. This form of migration management is two-dimensional in the sense that the interaction between regulator and regulated is confined to clearly defined interfaces, based on information prepared and presented in designated manners, especially in flat forms and tables. The interaction aims to reach an unambiguous conclusion: approve or reject, yes or no. It allows for no contingency or grey zone. Would-be migrants need to ‘flatten’ themselves into a particular shape or shade in order to pass scrutiny.

Two-dimensionality creates a sense of transparency and predictability. Kafkaesque gates, which condemn people to endless waiting in the dark and block communication and mobility, are no longer acceptable in the liberal world. In contrast, windows allow for partial freedom and negotiation space. Windows do not aim to block mobility, but seek to screen, differentiate and channel mobility. In this sense the window may be a more accurate metaphor than the gate for contemporary international borders. Unlike a gate that is either open or shut, the border is both open and closed.

Two-dimensionalisation is not a new phenomenon; it is an integral part of modernity. Bureaucratic forms, legal files and statistical tabulations are all about flattening. Flattening makes individuals legible to the state and governable from the center (Scott, 1998). But the window is somehow different. A window does not flatten the world itself into two-dimensional presentations. A window view is not an aerial view, or a representation of cadastral maps, nor does it ‘collapse the life of each person into a single point, which is connected to other such points by lines’ as lineage trees entail (Ingold 2000). The two-dimensionality of the window is a specific means of interaction in the multi-dimensional world. Instead of fixing fluid reality, windows are like the buttons that engineers press in order to move intricate machines, or dams that are strategically placed on rivers to regulate the unruly water.

The two-dimensionality of windows is always multi-two-dimensionality. Windows have to work with other windows. Effective regulation over mobility must create and monitor the linkages between the passport, the visa, domestic population registration, criminal records, migrant quotas, and so on. The interconnections between windows are systemic yet invisible. It is these connections that shape movements virtually and structurally, unlike what traffic police or border patrol teams do. Microsoft Windows – a system in which one two-dimensional interface leads to another in ways that seemingly follow the users’ free will but are preconfigured – may become the ultimate (and perhaps most apt) symbol of how migration is managed and how we experience migration.

The window is thus not only about two-dimensionalisation. The key is the dialectics between ‘flattening’ and ‘embedding’, or between the processes of two-dimensionalisation and processes of creating multi-faceted connections. Things always start being multi-dimensional; it takes highly complex social processes to flatten them. Furthermore, in order for the flattened artifacts and relations to work, they must be related to each other and beyond in multi-dimensional ways.

The window resembles the Foucauldian notion of power – diffusive, invisible, ubiquitous and capillary-like – but it also gives definite shape to power. Windows are the strategic sites where authority is tangibly presented and power is directly exercised, experienced and negotiated. As such, the window not only presents a particular logic of how mobility is regulated, but also provides us with a methodological window through which power can be examined ethnographically and institutionally at the same time.

References

Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill, London: Routledge.

Liu, C. (2011) ‘The Wall, the Window and the Alcove: Visualizing Privacy’, Surveillance & Society 9(1/2): 203-214.

McKeown, A. (2008) Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, New York: Columbia University Press.

Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Simmel, G. (1997) ‘Bridge and Door’, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds.) Simmel On Culture, London: Sage Publications.

Migration and Culture - Robin Cohen

Why is it important to connect ‘culture’ (such a capacious and abstruse word) to migration? In a long essay from which this entry is partly derived, I argue along with Gunvor Jónsson (2011) that the arrival of cultural analysis into migration studies is somewhat overdue, and a logical outcome of the cultural turn across much of the human sciences. That said, we are at the beginning of a cultural focus in migration studies, which has hitherto been commandeered by demography, sociology, human geography and, more recently, by neoclassical economics. We live in a political climate where anxious politicians, fearful of many long-standing residents’ response to further immigration, demand estimates of future migration flows, often on the flimsiest evidential base. Cultural analysis not only adds a necessary layer of complexity to simple statistical models of migration, but also provides a necessary component to those interested in post-settlement questions.

Western cultures predominantly understand migration as driven by flight or the search for work. However, in the Pacific, oscillating population movement is characteristically seen as sustaining kin relationships over space. For example, Va is an indigenous moral imperative obliging Samoans to migrate in order to sustain a web of social networks and relationships, despite dispersion (Lilomaiava-Doktor, 2009). This is an unusual example, as it illustrates that the connotation of migration to social actors may differ vastly from the meanings and motives ascribed to such migrants. More recently, western scholars have added ‘lifestyle migration’ to the ‘flight and work’ paradigm, wherein movement is predicated on enhancing or perhaps retaining ‘a better way of life’ with richer cultural choices (Benson and O’Reilly, 2009, Benson, 2011).

More amply covered in the literature is the notion of ‘a culture of migration’ or a ‘migration culture’, namely the growth, at a number of levels (family, village, region or nation), of dispositions and predilections that favour migration as a solution to social stasis, unemployment and relative deprivation. In certain communities with long-standing movement, culture and migration have become mutually constitutive. In such settings, migration becomes so deeply rooted that young people expect to live and work abroad, sometimes in complete defiance of known market signals and political restrictions. Cultures of migration have been described in many parts of the world, including Cape Verde, Morocco, Mexico, India and Mali, while many other studies include similar observations, even if these are not explicitly labelled ‘cultures of migration’. We should not assume that such predilections are static. The migration aspirations of young people today are modified by greater global connectivity, and are not just a replica of the ideas and values of previous generations. The existence of sophisticated transport technologies, access to global media, schooling and, increasingly, unequal distribution of income and wealth around the globe, are factors that shape current migration aspirations and fantasies.

The migration-culture nexus is also addressed in the ‘culture contact’ literature, encounters that may antedate, accompany or post-date the migration experience. Migration aspirations arose when people of different heritage learned to speak to others and engage in a range of creolizing social practices. A further crossover occurred through syncretism in religious rituals. Intensifying cultural contact and the subsequent intermingling of peoples, languages and religions were embedded in asymmetries of power and privilege, usually inscribed through racial markers. The enslavement of 11 million Africans provides a clear example. The transatlantic trade deposited Africans in the USA, Caribbean, Mexico and Brazil to work on tropical plantations. Their suffering has been embellished on the consciousness of Europeans and Americans partly because of their historical complicity in owning and exploiting slave labour, but also by the extraordinary success of New World Africans in conveying a sense of their plight through art, literature, music, dance and religious expression. Forced migration has forged powerful cultures of resistance and affirmation.

Early historical and anthropological accounts describing separate cultures have given way to the idea that all cultures have permeable edges and shared traditions arising from history and, more notably, from a step change in connectivity, the set of social changes loosely described as globalization. These changes include the movement of images, ideas, music, goods, money and people – whether as migrants, visitors, tourists, students or football fans. Moreover, the connections (through remittances, by telephone or via the internet) between the stay-at-homes and the movers are now so intense that the experience of mobility, directly or indirectly, affects most of the world’s population. The consequence is that old cultures have become ever more permeable. While many authors have accepted the notion of indeterminate boundaries, James Clifford (1997) suggests that culture itself has become ‘a borderland, a zone of contacts – blocked and permitted, policed and transgressive’.

Migrants construct migrant imaginaries that are spread to surrounding societies and communities. Even people who are immobile are profoundly affected by these imaginaries. Culture itself becomes mixed and creolized. Popular forms of culture travel with migrants, where they become means of authentication, but also mutate, influencing surrounding cultures in unexpected ways and taking on fresh cultural freight from their new ambiance. The origins, journeys and experiences of the migrants are presented, represented, performed and expressed. Novels, film, poems, dances and music and digital media provide a moving wallpaper, a succession of opaque and pellucid screens that surround everyday activities. Because of the possibility of living in bilocal or transnational space, diasporic practices connecting home and away, origin and destination, established or newly acquired cultural practices, can thrive simultaneously. In short, culture and migration have become folded into each other in forms of social behaviour, thus constituting what Mauss and later Bourdieu called the habitus, the nexus of dispositions governing normal social practices and aspirations.

References

Benson, M. and O’Reilly, K. (2009) ‘Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life: A Critical Exploration of Lifestyle Migration’, Sociological Review, 57(4): 608–25.

Benson, M. (2011) British in Rural France: Lifestyle Migration and the Ongoing Quest for a Better Way of Life, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cohen, R. and Jónsson, G. (2011) ‘Introduction: Connecting Culture and Migration’, in R. Cohen and G. Jónsson (eds.) Migration and Culture, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Lilomaiava-Doktor, S. (2009) ‘Beyond “Migration”: Samoan Population Movement (Malaga) and the Geography of Social Space (Va)’, Contemporary Pacific, 21(1): 1–32.

Media and Migration - Robert McNeil

There are few subjects that seem to consistently vex the British press like migration. Conversely, there are few subjects that seem to consistently vex migration scholars like the British press.

But the British press, like migration, is a messy and complicated subject. This short piece is designed to give an insight into the factors that make the British press so antipathetic to migration, and to help migration scholars to deal with the country’s pugnacious media more effectively.

Let’s start with a facile truism: a free press is a necessity for any real democracy. Voters must be informed about current events and developments; institutions must be scrutinised; public servants taken to task on their decisions and people’s rights protected and championed – and this must be undertaken without onerous interference from the institutions or the public servants who face criticism.

These noble ideals can seem a million miles away from the regular outpourings of celebrity scandal and ill-informed, ideologically-charged rants that often seem to dominate the British news media, particularly newspapers.The problem occurs because a free press comes at a price; that price is the abuse of the freedom of the press.

Anyone who reads newspapers in the UK will know that many of the headlines and images associated with immigration are designed to shock and anger. The Migration Observatory’s recent empirical media analysis showed that immigrants are generally framed by negative language – most commonly, as ‘illegal’ – and words associated with migration tend to highlight the costs, pressures and risks associated with immigration (Allen and Blinder, 2013).

The appetite of many sections of the British press for anti-immigration stories is seen by some migration scholars as disingenuous, even egregious. The subject was discussed by the Leveson Inquiry into media standards, and is the subject of considerable discussion on social media.

But the approach taken by the press to migration is a largely inescapable consequence of the business considerations of media organisations, so understanding the motives and approaches of these organisations in dealing with the subject is valuable.

Most news organisations (terrestrial broadcasters aside) don’t have any responsibility to be balanced in their coverage of any issue. They are businesses, not public servants, and their primary responsibility is to sell their content effectively enough to keep the business functioning, and to make a profit.

For a newspaper, this means understanding who buys your product and what they want, giving it to them, and building a relationship where they like and trust the content that you provide. This segmentation of the market means that if newspapers are selling their products to people who are likely to be broadly opposed to immigration they are not going to start challenging their readers’ views.

Instead, they will try to tell their readers what they want to hear, and to help those readers feel that their positions are justified and sensible. Of course, it’s never quite that simple – in order to be ‘trusted’ they will also have to make some (at least cursory) efforts to present counter arguments, and to present some of the shades of grey.

But there is a basic business case for anti-immigration news content. Repeated surveys, including that of the Migration Observatory, have shown that, for decades, a majority of British people have been concerned about levels of immigration (Blinder et al., 2011). So stories that dwell on the negative aspects of immigration are more likely to resonate with readers than stories that push the positive ones.

Of course there are also media outlets that champion liberal policies, but like the anti-immigration ones, they are presenting what will be appealing to their readers. The Financial Times takes a liberal line on immigration because business leaders tend to see immigration as a key tool in a global free market; The Guardian does so because its readers – such as teachers and university staff – are often concerned about human rights.

Reinforcing your relationship with your readers (or viewers/users) is key for media outlets. Bringing them together as a campaigning community allows news outlets to do this effectively. With a campaign to rally behind, this community can feel it is on the side of the angels, battling for righteous goals against a tide of villains and enemies – those who oppose the world view that you (encouraged by your newspaper of choice) espouse.

In one section of the press, these ‘villains’ are often immigrants, but they are also often the opposing media and political camps. For the right wing media this often means wooly-minded ‘Guardianistas’; or the polenta-eating Islington élites of the Labour Party who ‘opened the floodgates’; or the EU apologists of the Lib Dems.

But it cuts both ways: on the other side the ‘villains’ are painted just as cartoonishly. Migrants may be broadly seen as victims, but their place as villains is replaced by the small minded ‘little Englander’. ‘Mail readers’ take the place of ‘Guardianistas’ as a shorthand for people who read the wrong newspapers, and the Labour Party and Lib Dems are replaced as the political bad guys by boorish, fox-hunting old Etonian Conservatives and the middle-management radicals of UKIP.

Anti-immigration media outweighs the pro-(or at least ‘non-anti’) immigration media by a substantial margin because more British people are concerned about levels of migration than not, so it makes business sense for more of the press to capitalise on it.

Will this change? It’s pretty hard to see how, at least in the immediate future, but any migration scholars interested in participating in the media debate on immigration in the UK need to acknowledge the nature of the market and work with it rather than against it.

‘Working with it’ means thinking about the needs, concerns and lives of the people who buy and use different types of media, rather than trying to pander to what you think a journalist or newspaper might want. The uncomfortable truth is that the concerns may well differ greatly from your own, but if you can acknowledge and anticipate them, you may well find that parts of the media that you may otherwise have avoided can be, if not an ally, then at least less of an adversary.

References

Allen, W. and Blinder, S. (2013) ‘Migration in the News: Portrayals of Immigrants, Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees in National British Newspapers, 2010 to 2012’, Migration Observatory report, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Blinder, S. et al. (2011) ‘Thinking Behind the Numbers: Understanding Public Opinion on Immigration in Britain’, Migration Observatory report, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Global Networks Revisited - Alisdair Rogers

Twelve years ago, Robin Cohen, Steve Vertovec and I penned the editorial for a new journal, Global Networks: a Journal of Transnational Affairs (2001). Here, in part, is what we wrote:

Global networks are a hallmark of the evolving world of the early 21st century and in recognition of this fact we are launching an ambitious new journal … We see global networks as constituted by dynamic and flexible types of connection between individuals, groups or organizations that criss-cross the world. The structure of such global networks conditions the interactions, strategies and identities of their members. These networks have begun to burst across territorial borders, further rupturing the degree of cultural and economic integrity once prized by nations, regions, and places. The cumulative impact of these interconnections has meant that societies, along with their cities and regions, have tended to spread outwards so as to merge and become coextensive with other societies. This has vast implications for the way we understand the world and how it is governed.

At the same time, the once clear-cut separation between the domestic sphere of national life and the external or international sphere shows unmistakeable signs of breaking down. Transnational processes present profound challenges and opportunities to states, corporations, cities, and territorially based actors of all kinds. People and firms, places and communities, can be switched in and out of the global circuit board. For those who are beneficiaries of global corporatism or have cosmopolitan preferences, this erosion of the world we have known is to be welcomed. But there is a dark side of globalization and transnationalism beyond the desire for universal humanism and behind the corporate rhetoric. A critical journal should never lose sight of the costs of globalization. But at the same time we acknowledge the many openings and opportunities for human agents to shape or re-direct events and processes.…

… The rise of global networks has both drawn upon and fostered innovative ideals of human solidarity that now often shape world political agendas, particularly surrounding the environment, peace, the status of women, corporate responsibility, human rights, minorities, and indigenous peoples. Some of these actors resist globalization; others find alternatives within its compass. It is likely that new transnational actors will play an ever more important role in shaping the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The choice of our journal title, Global Networks, reflects the movement away from general macroscopic views on globalization towards an intense study of networks and networking as the lineaments of the new world … Though differing and even clashing in many respects, these fields share a sense of networks as human accomplishments, social forms that may be enduring or brittle, according to circumstances. To achieve connections across distance involves the risk-laden mobilization of labour, trust, kinship, and the full repertoire of social and cultural resources…

…Globalization has a long and complex historical geography. In many cases, new networks are layered upon and interwoven with older ones. These networks have been greatly accelerated during the period of increasingly unrestricted free trade experienced during the last two decades. However, whatever the rhythms of global economic change, global networks have begun to assume an autonomous life. They are increasingly organized at a planetary scale, fundamentally transforming the long-established cognitive maps and social conduct of citizens throughout the world.… Is it too ambitious to claim that, just as the twentieth century was an age of international affairs, so the twenty first century heralds an era of transnational affairs?

Looking backwards from the perspective of 2013, at least three thoughts occur by way of self-critique. Network thinking is often supported by diagrams, whose lines and links convey a greater sense of rigidity and permanence than is warranted. One thing obviously understated is the sense of networks rupturing, communication systems collapsing or supply chains snapping. Written during a spectacularly expansionist phase of neoliberal capitalism, there is no hint of the economic turmoil to come. The consequences of the global recession include much more than the selective ’switching off’ of ‘people and firms, places and communities’. There are also systemic tremors and failings, not engineering by those actors resisting globalization, but bred internally.

Second, the word ‘care’ is also conspicuously absent. A great number of the journal’s most accomplished articles concern global care chains, the transnationalization of care relations and the implications of care practices in state, market and family. Some of the most acute insights into the journal’s core themes have been inspired by feminism and post-colonialism. This research has helped place the practices that sustain and nurture bodies of all kinds at the heart of our critical understanding of early 21st-century life. In so doing, it heightens the sense of what we termed, in perhaps overly economistic language, ‘the costs of globalization’.

We wrote then of how networks were ‘human accomplishments, social forms that may be enduring or brittle’. Perhaps this description of social relations is too physical. Networking is never simply a binary matter, strong or weak, on or off. The pulses and modulations of flows animating networks are to some degree better captured by an alternative metaphor or idea of assemblage. The looser sense of things hanging together while retaining some recognisable form is an equally good description of many of the phenomena in which we were, and remain, interested – whether it be global social movements, long-distance family relations or transnational communities.

Global Networks arose from the collision between Castells’s theories of the network society and the new work on transnational communities by anthropologists and sociologists. In my view, its core ideas remain highly generative, but that does not mean to say that nothing needs adding. The fragility of networks (even corporate ones), the significance of care, and the sense of flows as modulating are just three such extensions.

References

Roger, A., Cohen, R. and Vertovec, S. (2001) ‘Editorial Statement’, Global Networks, 1(1) iii-vi.

Mixed Migration - Nicholas Van Hear

Migration today features a bewildering variety of forms and types of movement. The term ‘migrant’ can encompass highly diverse types of people on the move, both within and between countries: permanent emigrants and settlers; temporary contract workers; labour, professional, business and trader migrants; students; refugees and asylum seekers; people who move from rural settings to cities, or from smaller towns to larger ones; people moving for marriage and family reasons; and people who seek safety from conflict within their own countries. Moreover, people often shift between these categories: they may enter a country as students, tourists or visitors, for example, but then overstay, work, ask for asylum, or seek permanent settlement, and eventually become naturalised as citizens. Likewise, internal migrants driven by conflict or in search of opportunity may in time cross state borders and become international migrants. How is this great diversity of migratory trajectories to be made sense of?

In the analysis of migration, a basic distinction is often made between those who chose to move and those who are compelled to – that is, between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ migrants. The distinction is particularly salient in the policy world, where governance of international migration is shaped by the conceptual distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ migration as mutually exclusive categories; this is reflected not least in the different institutional architecture for refugees and other kinds of migrant. In reality, of course, the distinction is far from clear-cut: scholars have long pointed to a continuum between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration (Richmond, 1994; Van Hear, 1998). For those who are conventionally classed as ‘voluntary’, especially towards the lower levels of the socio-economic scale, there may be only limited mobility choices – as is often the case for labour migrants from lower income backgrounds with little option but to migrate to make a living. Conversely, those classed as refugees or asylum seekers – ‘forced migrants’ – may look to expand their life opportunities, especially once they have reached a place of relative safety. In a way they may transmute from refugees to economic or betterment migrants once a measure of security has been found.

Over the last 20 years there has been increasing recognition that much mobility has mixed motivations of these kinds, and that many migration streams include both people who move to escape conflict or distress and those that are seeking better lives (Van Hear, 2009). This is partly because poverty, inequality and conflict often coexist: those who flee a country where conflict, persecution, discrimination and human rights abuse are rife, for example, may also be trying to escape dire economic circumstances – which may themselves feed into such conflict, persecution, discrimination and human rights abuse. People may then move to escape life or death circumstances; they may move to escape intolerable living conditions; they may move to better themselves; or they may move for a combination of these and other reasons. Migration can be mixed in several senses, which to some degree relate to stages of the migratory process: motivations may be mixed at the point of making the decision to move; different kinds of migrants may make use of the same agents and brokers; they may travel with others in mixed migratory flows; motivations may change en route and after arrival; and people may find themselves in mixed communities during their journeys or at their destination.

Increasing recognition of these complex migration dynamics, and the challenges they pose for migration policy, has led to growing purchase in policy circles of the notion of ‘mixed migration’. Managing such diverse migratory populations presents obvious policy challenges. Who should be admitted, and on what grounds? What rights and entitlements should different types of migrants have once admitted? The problem remains that policy regimes still tend to classify migrants by discrete categories based on a single motivation for migration – labour, highly-skilled, refugee, family, student, and so one – and organise entry and entitlements accordingly. As has been suggested here, in reality migration may be driven by a combination of these kinds of motivations – the search for livelihood, for safety, to rejoin family members, for study and so on – which points to the need for a correspondingly variegated policy approach to address them.

References

Richmond, A. (1994) Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Hear, N. (1998) New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities, London: Routledge/UCL Press.

Van Hear, N. (2009) ‘Managing Mobility for Human Development: The Growing Salience of Mixed Migration’ (with R. Brubaker and T. Bessa), UNDP Human Development Research Paper 2009/20, New York, http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2009/papers/

From Communication to Impact - Emma Newcombe

When COMPAS started in 2003, our funders wanted to know how we planned to ‘communicate’ our research. This later became a concern with how knowledge was ‘transferred’ or ‘exchanged’. More recently the emphasis is on research that has ‘impact’. This means not only showing that we have been working with research users and providing them with data and analysis that they can use for ‘evidence’, but also that our work has been of benefit to them. Having an impact beyond the academy is now regularly measured by many organisations funding research in order to demonstrate a practical return on their investment.

The study of migration is not exceptional in this. Indeed, it seems as if those who study it are extremely well placed in this regard, as migration issues are high on policy and political agendas, and are of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including the general public. Asking for usefulness is, in our field, I think justifiable. As someone responsible for communicating research, I have been encouraged by the growing enthusiasm for communications work driven by the impact agenda. I believe migration research (and arguably all state funded social research) should be useful. Indeed, if we are examining a highly politicized subject, it is not unreasonable to expect a contribution to public debates. But the clamour for impact can go too far. What if research doesn’t come up with answers that anyone likes? And how do we prove impact? Can we ever really know if anyone has actually changed their practice because of our evidence? What about the impact we have that we don’t know about? Furthermore, significant impact can result from fortuitous timing or a chance meeting. Proof is fragile, and much gets crushed in its pursuit. Perhaps what we do is not so different from what we were doing ten years ago, only now we spend precious time measuring and proving impact.

These concerns go beyond migration studies to social sciences more generally. The impact model’s roots in the hard sciences could be to blame. For example, it is easy to see how a drug that cures millions of people of sickness can be defended and justified by pointing to its impact – even if it did have to be tested on animals along the way. So is there any particular impact challenge when it comes to research on migration? One problem is the intense and polarised nature of the migration debate, and the way in which any commentator is seen to be on one ‘side’ or another. Research evidence can be considered tainted if the researcher has personal views and affiliations outside their academic work. Researchers may try to remain neutral and apolitical, but this does not protect them from judgemental categorisation that places them as for or against. It is interesting to me that migration is a topic that most people have an opinion on, and yet we expect researchers to remain aloof.

Academic research on controversial topics has the opportunity to impact on public and policy debate, but migration issues can be so highly politicised that data and analysis have limited power to shift debate. Thirty years of polling have always found the UK public to be wary of immigration, and yet this has no correlation with actual numbers of people entering the country, just as public opposition to migration is not focussed on the largest groups (Blinder et al., 2011). Oftentimes, when it comes to media coverage, the academic is wheeled in to respond to a fast, furious and contested argument where complicated, nuanced analysis doesn’t really fit.

Academics working on less attention-grabbing topics might argue that migration studies is lucky to have the impact bandwagon pass its way, because it is often pulling money along behind it. There are dangers that come with this though; for example, it is easy to fall into a state-defined agenda. Take ‘trafficking’, a concept that regularly features in funding calls, political debate and policies. It has been subject to a great deal of intellectual scrutiny and yet remains misunderstood in public debate. The complicated analysis is ignored in favour of the term that can be adopted to fit lots of very different situations. Although there is definitely appeal in a simple story over a complicated tale, it does make you wonder how many devils are being ignored when the details are ditched.

As someone who helps deliver research to potential publics, my job is easiest to do when the research is good, and not blinkered by only trying to achieve relevance and impact. In migration, as in other fields, we should do research that has integrity, is faithful to its sources, aims, methods and evidence, and walks the fine line between relevance and bombast.

References

Blinder, S. et al. (2011) Thinking Behind the Numbers: Understanding Public Opinion on Immigration in Britain, Migration Observatory Report, Oxford: COMPAS.

How We Laughed… - Ida Persson

VIDEO LINK INTRO OF A DELIGHTFUL STORYBOOK, OPENING UP TO REVEAL THE WORDS ‘TALES OF ST PANCRAS BEAR’. LIGHTS UP. A DISHEVELLED, ANTHROPOMORPHISED TEDDY BEAR ENTERS STAGE RIGHT HOLDING A CRUMPLED SHOPPING BAG CONTAINING TAT AND A ‘BOOK’

ST PANCRAS: ‘ello kids. Remember me? It’s your old friend, St. Pancras Bear. Don’t know who I am? Well, I’m not surprised. Bet you know who Paddington Bear is though don’t you?! […] You want to hear a story about Paddington Bear? One sunny day two bears made their way to popular London train stations in the hope of being taken in by a nice family. One of them set off to Paddington station, got taken home by the Browns, managed to secure himself a lucrative book deal, and became the nation’s darling. The other bear [INDICATES HIMSELF] went to St. Pancras Station and was forced to make the best of a bad situation by becoming an independent procurement specialist in the area of urban pockets.

[HE COUGHS VIOLENTLY, GIVES AN AUDIENCE MEMBER HIS BAG TO HOLD, THEN SNATCHES IT BACK]

Now, don’t get me wrong. I wish people well, [SHOUTS] I’m a well-wisher. But the question is, does Paddington deserve the luck he had? […] Who’s the real bear behind the duffle coat? Because you have a right to know just who it is featuring in the bedtime stories of your darling, fat, little children. You want to know the sordid truth about your precious Paddington? Well, he brazenly admits on his own website – that’s right, he’s got a website! It’s pretty good actually – that in order to get to England he ‘stowed away’ on a ship’s lifeboat. Illegal immigrant. Not only that but Paddington is not even his real name, it’s Pastuso! And most shocking of all, Paddington describes himself as originating from ‘darkest Peru’. Racist. [SITS CENTRE STAGE] So Paddington is a racist, illegal immigrant who is living in England under an assumed name. “What other dark secrets might he be harboring, St. Pancras?,” you ask. Well, ever wondered just how Pudsey Bear got that eye patch? Well, he never talks about it. Or anything, in fact. Very troubling. Traces of marmalade found in the wound apparently, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions….

- Extract from St Pancras Bear, by The Dead Secrets, first performed 2013

The disgruntled St Pancras Bear, who feels hard done by the success of his contemporary, Paddington Bear, tries to vilify Paddington by making him the untrustworthy ‘other’ in as many ways as he possibly can.1 The analysis and break down could very easily go on. It’s also just a part of a funny sketch. Comedy is a powerful tool. It can ridicule, deride, degrade and dismiss, and it is important to recognize when a damaging route is taken in comedy. It can also uplift, encourage, and highlight the shared human experience. That is crucial.

All forms of art are capable of transcending the physical by touching the individual on an emotional level and crossing boundaries and differences. There are, of course, aspects of all art, and comedy specifically, where a person’s enjoyment can (and on occasion should) be affected by his or her understanding of language, culture and shared social experiences, all key influences in the migrant experience.

You could argue, perhaps, that although you might enjoy Monty Python’s well-known ‘The Four Yorkshire Men’ sketch, where they compare and try to out-do each other with the social and financial deprivation of their youth, you do not fully understand it without having an awareness of the socio-economic and cultural context. There would be truth in this. But if you enjoy it for whatever reason (quality of performance, your own interpretation of the joke, your understanding of it within your own social or cultural perspective), does it always matter?

The joy of laughter is a shared global human experience. We may all find different things funny, but we all (well, most of us, anyway…) find things funny. Much comedy is universal. Non-verbal physical humour, for example, can in a single moment communicate a ludicrous but shared human experience (the pratfall, the farcical entrance/exit, the run in with a lamp post). There is a reason why quiet but physical characters have often been the most internationally loved and understood, such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean.

A lot of talk about migration is focused (rightly) on the individual experience, and the many differences to be considered (culture, movement, status) when looking at a migrant’s journey. But it’s important, I think, to also remember the shared human experiences and the moments where these can be found. Although much can be said, validly and importantly, about power struggles, perspective and context in comedy, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that a genuine smile or laugh will always be universal. This goes a long a way toward eliminating ideas of ‘us and them’, migrant and non-migrant, and any other divisions - if only for the moment it takes to giggle or heartily guffaw.

Notes

1Something done to great humorous effect by the creator of Paddington Bear himself, Michael Bond, in his book Paddington Here and Now (2008) where Paddington has to decide where ‘home’ really is, based on his immigration status.

Reading ‘Super-Diversity’ - Steven Vertovec

In 2007, I published an article that introduced the concept, or what I called a summary term, ‘super-diversity’. Since then, in both the worlds of academia and public policy, the concept has been subject to some interesting (and some downright weird) interpretations and usages. The following piece traces some of these readings of ‘super-diversity’ across a range of social science literature.

First, to briefly recap the idea: ‘super-diversity’ was intended to address the changing nature of global migration that, over the past thirty years or so, has brought with it a transformative ‘diversification of diversity’. This has not just occurred in terms of movements of people reflecting more ethnicities, languages and countries of origin, but also with respect to:

a multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live. In the last decade, the proliferation and mutually conditioning effects of a range of new and changing migration variables shows that it is not enough to see ‘diversity’ only in terms of ethnicity, as is regularly the case both in social science and the wider public sphere. In order to understand and more fully address the complex nature of contemporary, migration-driven diversity, additional variables need to be better recognized by social scientists, policy-makers, practitioners and the public. These include: differential legal statuses and their concomitant conditions, divergent labour market experiences, discrete configurations of gender and age, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents. The dynamic interaction of these variables is what is meant by ‘super-diversity’. (Vertovec, 2007)

Since 2007, the term has been picked up by a wide variety of scholars from an array of disciplines and fields. (This is shown in a recent review of 300 publications that invoke ‘super-diversity’; see Vertovec, 2014.) These go beyond the expected ones – sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, migration and ethnic studies – to include linguistics, history, education, law, business studies, management, literature, media studies, public health, social work, urban planning and landscape studies. Moreover, while the original article described phenomena in London and the UK, the term has been used subsequently to describe social, cultural and linguistic dynamics in such widespread contexts as Brussels, Venice, New York, Jerusalem, the Baltic states, Italy, Cyprus, Egypt, Nigeria, French Guiana, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Hokkaido, Oaxaca, villages of south-west Slovakia, the German state of Brandenburg, the border province of Limburg, Manenberg township in Cape Town, and the city of Enshi in China.

In a rough typology, we can see at least six ways that ‘super-diversity’ has been read (so far). (1) Some social scientists have understood ‘super-diversity’ as meaning very much diversity, or more pronounced kinds and dimensions of social differentiation – particularly cultural identities. (2) In a more limited way, many writers invoke ‘super-diversity’ merely to mean more ethnicity – that is, that new migration processes have brought more ethnic groups than in the past. (3) Such a reading stands in contrast to another sense in which authors refer to ‘super-diversity’ in order to move beyond a focus on ethnicity as the sole or optimal category of analysis. (4) This understanding is extended by those who describe and elaborate what I would say is the original meaning of the concept, that is to say a changed set of conditions and social configurations which call for a multi-dimensional approach to understanding contemporary processes of change and their outcomes. (5) Recognizing this understanding, other scholars have urged a methodological reassessment of their respective field or discipline. (6) Finally, there are numerous academics who, although invoking the term ‘super-diversity’, actually mean something rather different (though often not wholly unrelated) to what was originally intended: examples include theories of non-linear social trajectories, mixed motivations for migration, broader geographical dispersal of migrants, blurred distinctions of racial categories, multifarious networking, multiple discursive practices and polycentricity of semiotic resources.

Across all of this emergent literature, furthermore, ‘super-diversity’ has turned into an adjective to describe a set of circumstances within which scholars want to describe some phenomena, process or topic with which they are respectively concerned. Hence we can read of ‘superdiverse characteristics of groups’, ‘super-diverse places’, ‘super-diverse circumstances’, and ‘super-diverse settings’; scaled up, some describe one or another ‘super-diverse population’ , ‘a super-diverse society’ or ‘the super-diverse nation’; on yet a broader canvas, still others write of ‘a stage of super-diversity’, ‘the era of super-diversity’, ‘super-diverse realities’, and ‘a super-diverse world’.

What’s going on here? Why has there been so much attention, and such varied readings and uses, of ‘super-diversity’ – leading to what has been called the emergence of a ‘super-diversity lens’ and ‘a super-diversity turn’ in the social sciences? Rather surprised by the wide and multiple readings of the original article, I would suggest that – for a range of good reasons – social scientists are avidly seeking ways of describing and talking about increasing and intensifying complexities in social dynamics and configurations at neighbourhood, city, national and global levels. We are getting better, I would argue, at developing what Nando Sigona has called ‘ways of looking at a society getting increasingly complex, composite, layered and unequal’ (2013). However, we are still struggling to describe it. Indeed, addressing ‘the super-diversity of cities and societies of the 21st century’, Ulrich Beck (2011) suggests that the rise of these are ‘both inevitable (because of global flows of migration, flows of information, capital, risks, etc.) and politically challenging.’ However, Beck adds:

It is in this sense that over the last decades the cultural, social and political landscapes of diversity are changing radically, but we still use old maps to orientate ourselves. In other words, my main thesis is: we do not even have the language through which contemporary super-diversity in the world can be described, conceptualized, understood, explained and researched. [italics in original]

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that a new notion like ‘super-diversity’ has been widely taken up – albeit in a variety of (sometimes unintended) ways. It is likely a – hopefully useful – placeholder until we develop more enhanced terms, theories and perspectives with which to depict and interpret the multiple modes and impacts of current forms of societal complexification.

References

Beck, U. (2011) ‘Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism: How Can we Describe and Understand the Diversity of the World?’, Social Sciences in China 32(4): 52-58.

Sigona, N. (2013) ‘Imagining a New Research Agenda in an Era of Superdiversity’, in Postcards from … weblog, 25 October. http://nandosigona.wordpress.com/2013/10, date accessed 10 December 2013.

Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘Super-diversity and its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024-1054.

Vertovec, S. (2014) Super-diversity, London and New York: Routledge

Stories of Migration, the Migration of Stories - Nazneen Ahmed

Each migrant has a unique tale to tell of the home left behind and the home(s) carved out elsewhere, the people met on the way, the experiences of hostility, welcome, isolation and community. Edward Said wrote of exile (one form of migration, though with no possible return) as producing an awareness of ‘plurality’ that fosters creativity and artistic expression (2001). So it is perhaps unsurprising that migrant tales have provided rich stuff for novels, particularly in the post-colonial era, when many have been written by authors who are either migrants or children of migrants.

Central to novels of migration is the question of what constitutes home and how home is remade. M. G Vassangi writes of home being a gunny sack, comprised of things that are portable (memories, rituals, languages) that can be schlepped from place to place (1989). But is it so easy? Can everything be taken along for the ride? What is lost in translation?

Stories of migration are as old as the journeys themselves. For Jean Rhys, writing in the interwar years, loss and pain are central to the migrant’s experience. Isolation, alienation and the sensation of being out of place characterise Anna’s life in 1930s London in Voyage in the Dark. In this telling, the migrant’s journey, framed by colonisation, is a path to madness and despair. Trapped in colonial London, Anna is Said’s exile, the fragile stranger in the heart of the colonial metropolis, who can never belong or make a home, yearning for the Caribbean, a place of warmth and a home that cannot be returned to. Abandoned by her lover, longing for home and her childhood, Anna spirals into a decline from which it is suggested there will be no return, in which patterns of exploitation and alienation will repeat themselves ‘all over again… all over again’.

In contrast, Sam Selvon’s exuberant stories of West Indians in 1950s London depict young men having adventures, seducing English women, going hungry and looking for work. His novels, written in a joyful patois, celebrate through their very language the positive products of the colonial encounter: hybridity, the meeting and melding of languages, cultures, identities and bodies. Yet his protagonists also struggle in the city, contending with racism, poverty and cold. In The Lonely Londoners, newly arrived Galahad becomes so hungry that in an episode balanced delicately between comedy and tragedy, he attempts to kidnap a pigeon, much to the horror of an elderly white passerby: ‘“I must find a policeman!” the woman screech, throwing her hands up in the air, and she turn back to the road. Galahad make races through the park, heading down for Lancaster Gate.’

Overwhelmingly, post-Windrush London is a male world. But the few women Selvon writes into his stories are very different from Rhys’s Anna 20 years earlier. They are resourceful and refuse to be dominated by men, black or white. Tanty braves the tube and bus: ‘She was so frighten that she didn’t bother to look out of the window and see anything, and when she get off at the Prince of Wales she feel relieved. Now nobody could tell she that she ain’t travel by bus and tube in London’. Selvon’s stories are migrant love letters to the city which, despite all the setbacks his characters face, does become home.

For Rushdie, the process of migration entails a more carnivalesque hybridisation of cultures, languages and identities, so both ‘host’ and ‘traveller’ are forever changed by their interactions. The Satanic Verses is a novel much discussed for events that it provoked, but it is often overlooked as a work of fiction. It is a novel that depicts post-1970s travels to Britain vividly in all their violence, excitement, adventure and pain. Both Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha experience the transformative potential of migration, as well as disorientation and violence. The novel’s chaotic, hybrid English, and its layering of cultural references, pay testament to the ways the migrant encounter forges a ‘third space’ of cultural hybridity, where anything, at least in theory, is made possible (Bhabha, 1994).

Chamcha desperately tries to assimilate rather than celebrate his difference. Alas, his attempts to out-English the English are hampered by his physical differences (transformed into a devil at the start of the novel, he has hooves), which leads to a gruelling interrogation by the police:

“Who’re you trying to kid?” inquired one of the Liverpool fans, but he, too, sounded uncertain. “Look at yourself. You’re a fucking Packy Billy. Sally-who? – What kind of name is that for an Englishman?”

Chamcha’s abuse, and the riots of Brickhall that fictionalise the conflicts between ethnic minorities and fascist gangs in east London, represent a shift from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the relatively ‘polite’ racism represented in Selvon’s stories gave way to physical attacks and systematised racist abuse. The Satanic Verses records how the migrant’s journey is often scarred with incidents of humiliation, violence and unwelcome.

Three novels, and a whisper of the stories that migration has produced, a plethora of tales that, collectively, could be considered a subgenre of fiction. Just as the tellers of these stories have travelled, the stories themselves circulate beyond their places of origin. The positive reception of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in Bangladesh stands in strong contrast to the controversy it caused amongst British Bangladeshis. Amongst the anglophone elite in Dhaka, the novel was received with pride, its author viewed as a daughter of the nation ‘done good’ overseas:

But beyond all these considerations, of course, is the fact that she has openly embraced us. We should embrace her in turn. She is one of us. She is a gifted and sincere daughter of Bangladesh. She has written a novel in English and succeeded at a level the rest of us should aspire to (Islam, 2003).

The transnational publishing market and the development of e-books, as well as the explosion of international literary festivals, further enable migrant fictions to travel ‘back home’ where they are read with interest, as the experiences of distant, scattered sons and daughters of the homeland.

References

Islam, K. (2003) ‘Monica Ali Denied Bangladeshi Visa: On Roots and Moments of Triumph’, The Daily Star, 4(24), http://www.thedailystar.net/2003/06/21/d30621210390.htm, date accessed 25 January 2014.

Rhys, J. (1934) Voyage in the Dark, London: Constable.

Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses, London: Vintage.

Said, E. W. (2001) Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta.

Selvon, S. (1994 [1956]) The Lonely Londoners, London: Longman.

Vassanji, G. M. (1989) The Gunny Sack, London: Heinemann.

The (Un)Bearable Precariousness of being a Lifestyle Migrant - Roger Norum

When I returned to Oxford after a year and a half of doctoral fieldwork in Kathmandu, the jokes began: I had chosen to study a community of western expatriates so that I could have a year or two of holiday; conducting research in bars and restaurants among expats who swanned around in SUVs and earned 40 grand a year was hardly serious anthropology; my formative experience with ethnographic fieldwork must have been really hard on me.

It was all just jestful taunting, of course. But many a truth is said in jest. The presumption my colleagues were playing off was that if you are, as the saying goes in the US, ‘free, white and 21’, then you should have nothing to complain about. Lifestyle migrants, if they suffer at all, suffer from ‘first world problems’, minor frustrations and complaints that are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries. But it may be that, to paraphrase Billy Joel, the good ol’ days aren’t always as good as they seem.

Lifestyle migration has come to encompass a range of different people who move around the world for different reasons: international students, domestic downsizers, backpackers, gap yearers, retirees, corporate expatriates, humanitarian workers, second-home owners, and people who have married across cultures and borders. In fact, many of the authors in this volume are lifestyle migrants, having chosen a foreign land for work – perhaps because we couldn’t find employment in our native countries, or perhaps because we wanted to experience a life different from home. Such people often see migration as a route to a better and more fulfilling way of life than the one they have decided to leave behind – the pursuit of the ‘good life’ (O’Reilly and Benson, 2009). Sometimes this is escapist; sometimes it is due to necessity. Across the UK and elsewhere in the global north, lifestyle migrants: international students and highly-skilled workers – foreign consultants, freelancers, expatriates and other members of the so-called ‘mobile elite’ – currently make up one of the fastest growing migration phenomenon in the world.

But while these people have typically been characterised by high levels of social, economic and geographic mobility, in recent years the opportunities for some have been slipping. Globalised, neoliberal forms of employment have made limited-term jobs and zero-hour contracts – to say nothing of that grand euphemism for free and eager labour, ‘work experience’ – the norm for many. As budgets are reduced and organisations do away with long-term investment in the people that help them function, people who once experienced stable occupational identities and social protections are now encountering novel experiences: insecurity, instability, vulnerability, precarity and risk (Korpela and Nagy, 2013). As responsibilities are shifted from public and private institutions onto individuals, the welfare and wellbeing of workers and their families, still often thought of as privileged and immune to such problems, are often ignored by states, policy makers and organisations. Precarious labour is almost always organised beyond the structures of social welfare and benefit systems. As a result, those who labour often exist outside provisioning for unemployment benefit, social security, health insurance, and mechanisms for maternity and paternity leave. Though they are frequently seen as the drivers and beneficiaries of globalisation, their relatively privileged positions may not shield them from its discontents (Standing, 2011). The ‘precariat’ thus cuts across many lines in society; precariousness no longer discriminates.

The zero-hours contract controversy that rocked many of Britain’s educational institutions in late 2013 drew attention to some of these issues. ‘Highly skilled’, it seemed, was no longer a guarantor of ‘highly paid’. In the ivory tower, of course ,‘highly educated’ rarely implied high pay, but the erstwhile prevalence of tenure track academic posts at least guaranteed a lifetime of employment, if not one of six figures. Today, however, these insecurities may force many people to significantly alter their lifestyle. It may lead foreign correspondents to moonlight as babysitters, under employed academics to work in High Street retail shops, and on-the-bench, thirtysomething development consultants to live at home with their parents as they await being flown off to Addis Ababa for a two-week secondment. Such moves show that the implications of limited work tenure and the expectations of flexibility and mobility run deeper than surface-level categorisations of people might make visible. It also elucidates some of the limitations of how human welfare is often conceived of and provisioned in modern economies. As atypical and irregular work relations such as project or product-based jobs become typical and regularised, the institutional social structures around such work require changing too.

The zero-hours debate also served as a reminder that precariousness in labour, welfare and migration has tended to be discussed in terms of lower skilled workers and low-income earners – people who are clearly also affected by neoliberal changes in society, often to a much greater degree than those who can normally command higher incomes. Still, research into lifestyle migrants and highly skilled workers comprises a unique and important aspect of globalisation that is often disregarded. Such scholarship can serve to contest common presumptions that experiences of the privileged are vastly different from those without access to education, funds or social mobility.

Is this lack of research due to the fact that precariousness among the upper classes in the global north is a relatively new phenomena? Perhaps. But I suspect it is also a result of a distaste among many social scientists for studying so-called like-minded people. Anthropologists, we know, have rarely ‘studied up’ (Nader, 1972) – or even studied ‘sideways’ (Hannerz, 1998), for that matter – and academic engagements with human welfare have often focused on those traditionally understood as underprivileged.

More research on the experiences of precarity and welfare among lifestyle migrants and higher skilled workers would raise a number of interesting comparative questions. For example, in what ways are the determinants of low and high-skill precarity similar or different? How do imagined lifestyles of migrants conflict with lived realities? How do the responses to instability vary among different types of workers across different industries? Do the vicissitudes of globalised ‘neoliberalism’ affect all people low in the labour pecking order in similar ways? And why should we care about the highly skilled anyway if they are more privileged? Considering the roles and positions of those with (perceived) privilege and power would enable us to reconsider what is meant by centre and periphery, and would allow us to better understand how our models of human welfare work. Framed within the rise in the (im)mobile precariat across countries in the global north, these questions also lend credence to the notion that there is value in research into the subjectivities of those who already have, or who once had, a voice.

References

Benson, M. and O’Reilly, K. (2009) Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences, Farnham: Ashgate.

Hannerz, U. (1998) ‘Other Transnationals: Perspectives Gained from Studying Sideways.’ Paideuma, 44:109-123.

Korpela, M. and R. Nagy (2013) ‘Introduction: Limitations to Temporary Mobility.’ International Review of Social Research, 3(1):1-6.

Nader, L. (1972) ‘Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,’ in D. Hymes. (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Random House.

Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

The Limits of Research - Liza Schuster

One of the challenges of research in the social sciences is maintaining boundaries, and this is particularly true when working on asylum and deportation. The following case illustrates some of the challenges faced during fieldwork investigating what happens post-deportation.

My research has brought me into contact with a number of activists and campaign organisations who act as gatekeepers, putting me in touch with young men pre-deportation or recently deported from Europe. In return, I try to provide advice and information that will be helpful to activists and asylum seekers around Europe. I work closely with Abdul^1, a young man, himself recently deported, who has become a deportation activist. Together we meet some of those who arrive at Kabul airport, often alone and distressed.

In November 2013, I received a call from Abdul. He was worried about Asmat, an Afghan deported from Norway in 2012. Since Asmat’s return, he has been moving from one hiding place to another as he is discovered and attacked, and at the time he was in hiding near Jalalabad with a close friend of his father’s, preparing to flee again. Those who have sheltered him have paid a high price: at least one of his own brothers had been killed, two others have disappeared, as have the son and three of the bodyguards of one of his hosts. At least one of the safe houses has been partially destroyed.

I originally heard about Asmat from a Norwegian activist. She had written asking if I could approach embassies in Afghanistan who might grant Asmat a visa to leave the country again, unaware that no embassy would. I had recommended that Asmat try to gather as much documentary evidence as possible, cross the border to Pakistan, and approach UNHCR there, since I knew UNHCR in Kabul couldn’t/wouldn’t help. But the activist told me that Asmat had already tried to get to Pakistan, and had been arrested and held for 15 days before being deported back to Afghanistan. He had to find an alternative place of safety.

The call in November was urgent – Asmat had phoned his supporter in Norway in a state of terror. His hiding place had again been discovered and a large group of Taliban were on their way to seek him out. She had called Abdul to ask if he knew anyone in the province who could intervene. But Abdul’s Afghan contacts were limited – he had been deported to Afghanistan, but in fact he had grown up in Pakistan and had no family or networks in Afghanistan.

I racked my brains – we needed someone senior in the Afghan army or police. Some months earlier, I had interviewed the deputy minister of the Ministry for Refugees and Repatriation^2, and we had stayed in touch. I called him and asked if he knew anyone who could help. I gave him Abdul’s number so he could get Asmat’s exact location to send the security forces. However, in the meantime Asmat had phoned Abdul to say the men had arrived in the village, but then the phone had gone dead. Abdul had no other way of contacting him, and didn’t know from where he had been calling.

Sometime later, Asmat managed to call Abdul again. The Taliban had come in to the house where he was hiding, but didn’t recognize him. They had asked him if he had seen ‘Asmat’ and he said no, he didn’t know anyone like that, but that he would let them know if he found anything. As soon as they had gone, two of his host’s bodyguards took him across the mountain to another village.

When Abdul brought me up to date, he told me that the area where Asmat is hiding is, like many rural areas, completely under Taliban control. Asmat is afraid to leave because of the Taliban checkpoints on all roads leading out of the area. He asked the police for help, but was told, “Look, there are ten of us in this area – what can we do against the Taliban?”

Later, my Norwegian contact emailed me. She had been Skyping with Asmat when the Taliban came. He had put his phone to the window so she could see them, but turned it off when they came to the door. The next time they spoke, he told her he had a gun and that he would use it on himself if they came for him because he is afraid of being tortured. He cried. She sat with him until the connection was broken. For now, there is nothing any of us can do.

Of course, this story will inform my research. And I will use it in expert reports for asylum appeals. But, given the opportunity, I will try to get Asmat out of Afghanistan, and do what I can to help his supporters get him to a place of safety. Boundaries, of whatever kind, may be necessary, but they should not be fetishized – especially not at the cost of human suffering.3

Notes

1Abdul writes a blog under his own name (Kabulblog) and wishes his real name to be used. Asmat’s name has been changed.

2MoRR is responsible for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and the six million refugees who have returned to Afghanistan since 2001. However, it has no resources of its own and relies on international agencies.

3 Following the last attack, the friend of Asmat’s father sent Asmat back to Kabul with a bodyguard. He is currently waiting to leave for Turkey and will try again to get to Europe – this time with sworn documentary evidence that his original claim was valid, and that events since his return give him grounds for a new claim.

Troubling Bodies

My Children’s Mothers - Frances Nagle

We three have never met

but there is always a place

set for you at my feast-days.

One day you will arrive

weary after long years of travel

through the kind of hardship

that begins deceitfully small.

We will sit together

and tell our stories –

of a land struck dead

by a curse, by a baby.

Of an ache – for something

so missing, that the sun

turned its face to the wall

and earth turned to winter.

When it is time for your leaving

I will lend you a child

to light your journey home:

a son to defend you

from the forest phantoms;

a daughter with her

dragon-soothing kisses.

Originally published as ‘Their Mothers’ in Steeplechase Park, Rockingham Press, 1996

COMPAS Poetry Competition 2013 Third Place

How Do you Recognise a Victim of Trafficking? - Bridget Anderson

And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

“How do you recognise a victim of trafficking?” I once asked a senior immigration officer. This person headed a team at that time responsible for the majority of referrals into the recognised UK anti-trafficking support programme. Since I had spent several months exploring the tensions, ambiguities and contradictions around definitions of ‘force’, ‘exploitation’, ‘coercion’ and ‘position of vulnerability’ papered over by the 2000 Palermo Protocol, I was expecting a long answer. I thought she would say something about how difficult it is in practice to distinguish whether or not young women have been ‘forced’ into prostitution, when they are often faced with such limited options. How this is made even more difficult when sex work is so stigmatised that even acknowledging that it is ‘work’ that women and men can choose to do is highly contested. Her response took me aback: “You just look into their eyes,” she said, “and you can tell.” When pressed, my interviewee asserted the importance of experience on the ground, of gut feeling over academic hair-splitting. Practice trumps theory.

Trafficking is a rare patch of common ground where migrants’ rights organisations and states can agree. Even special interest groups and media outlets, generally hostile to migrants’ rights and ‘illegal immigration’, support victims of trafficking, and call for an end to ‘the modern day slave trade’. Indeed, calls for a more nuanced approach to trafficking can sound ridiculously over-privileged and removed when confronted by the heart-rending testimonies of migrants who have endured the extremes of human cruelty and abuse, and who have been ‘rescued’ by the committed graft of NGOs, ordinary people, and immigration officers who genuinely are horrified by some of the situations they come across. It is all very well talking about complexity and definitions, but what are we going to do?

In fact, academic concern with the challenge of definitions is experienced by frontline workers as a challenge of identification. Put at its crudest, when is a migrant woman ‘forced’ to work as a sex worker, and therefore a victim of trafficking, and when does she ‘consent’ to work as a sex worker? NGOs frequently criticise states for not having proper systems in place to identify victims of trafficking, and point to the high numbers claimed in the political rhetoric, and the low numbers actually granted any stay or compensation. For both states and NGOs, identification can be fraught, and it is easy to see how people might be thrown back on ‘gut feeling’. For the fewer one’s options, the more genuinely one will consent to a situation that might be, by others, labelled ‘unfree’. Getting caught up in definitions of ‘consent’ and voluntariness, and identifying whether individuals really were in a position to make certain choices can risk forgetting important questions of justice. That is while questions like “Did Ayesha consent to being a live-in domestic worker in a household where she knew the family abused their employees?” must go alongside, “Is it just that these working conditions offer a relatively attractive option for Ayesha and is it just that these circumstances are allowed to persist?” What is just, of course, is a question that is both theoretical and eminently practical.

Trafficking is an important laboratory in migration studies. Firstly, it demonstrates the importance of theory to practice. Too often, the relation between academics and practitioners is reduced to access and lobbying along such a formula as: you give me access to interviewees and data, and I’ll give you a lobbying document. Trafficking demonstrates that theory matters, and that academics have a responsibility to debate this with practitioners. This is not because practitioners and the general public have no theories. In my interview with the senior immigration officer it was clear that she was deploying theories of embodiment, of contract, of emotion and reason. The challenge was that she did not think that she was deploying any theories at all; rather she felt she was simply stating the obvious. Familiarity with the theories made them unquestionable. It is an important part of academic work to defamiliarise, and the very obviousness of trafficking, its uncontestability, should invite critique. And this relates to the second way in which trafficking is a laboratory. The victim of trafficking is, like the migrant, a policy subject, a figure to be enumerated, a problem to be solved, a bundle of circumstances and relations that is captured and enumerated in data. But a policy subject is not the same as political subject. Acknowledging the political subjectivity of policy subjects can entail challenging those very policies and studies, the ‘formulated phrase’ that defines them in the first place. This is particularly difficult in the case of ‘victims of trafficking’, who are defined by victimhood and by lack of political agency. But it is not confined to this topic. How both to work with the policy subject of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the victim of trafficking’, and challenge the reification of this subject, is a constant challenge for critical migration scholars, for activists, and for ‘migrants’ more generally. “Then how should I begin?”

Social Determinants of Migrants’ Health - Hiranthi Jayaweera

The size and diversity of present day global human mobility have significant implications for population health. According to the United Nations, there are around 214 million people crossing borders to live in countries other than those they were born in, and more than three times this number moving within countries. Migrants, whether workers, students, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, or family members, like people in both sending and receiving countries who do not migrate, are characterised by diverse factors affecting their health status and health needs. It is also important to recognise that the relationship between migration and health is a two way process. While it is more commonly considered that migration impacts on people’s health, health is also implicated in migration motivations and processes – for example, it plays a part in determining who is allowed into or out of a country.

There are two broad interrelated considerations that are important in thinking about migrants’ health. The first has to do with what are the determinants of migrants’ health, while the second relates to the scope within which the health of migrants is considered, that is, going beyond a receiving country perspective to include the entire migration process.

Generally, social – as distinct from genetic or biological – determinants of people’s health refer to the impact of social factors on health outcomes, or on health inequalities/disparities between different groups. Traditionally, the focus has been on an observed socio-economic gradient in health, whether measured by individual socio-economic position or social class, or by area deprivation indicators: for instance, higher and widening obesity rates over time among men and women in unskilled manual jobs compared to those in professional jobs in England; and higher rates of premature mortality for cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and liver disease in areas of social deprivation (Marmot et al., 2010). Considering ethnicity or migration variables (for example, country of birth, length of residence in the receiving society and legal status) in relation to socio-economic factors in health outcomes complicates the picture. As critics have pointed out, simply conflating, say, ethnicity and social class on the basis that once social class is adjusted for in analysis, ethnic inequalities in health often disappear or are reduced, fails to fully unravel the relationship between ethnic (or country of birth) differences, socio-economic position, and health inequalities (Lorant and Bhopal, 2011). In exploring the social determinants of migrants’ health and health inequalities, studies have shown that it is imperative to consider, both conceptually and empirically, the interaction (intersectionality) between a variety of factors affecting health status, health behaviour, and access to healthcare, including:

- Demography – for example, sex, age, age at migration and life cycle stage;

- Socio-economic position – for example, educational and occupational background and present circumstances, income, housing and living situation;

- Place – not just level of area deprivation, but also the importance of social support provided by co-ethnics in the locality: the ‘ethnic density effect’ (see Pickett and Wilkinson, 2008);

- Immigration and integration policies – for example, rules governing entry, access to health and other services, and to economic and social opportunities which impact on health;

- Direct and indirect racism and discrimination;

- Ethnic and cultural background - including religion, languages and health-related practices;

- Migration histories - including sending contexts (see below), length of residence in receiving societies, and transnational connections.

Social determinants of migrants’ health should not be viewed simply from a receiving society perspective. All stages of the migration process – pre-departure, migration journeys, destination, return to sending countries/areas – contribute determining factors for migrants’ physical and mental health, and health and social protection (Zimmerman et al., 2011). The ‘healthy migrant effect’, linking sending and receiving contexts, is one framework that is used in some studies. It explores selectivity in the migration of healthier people that is associated with positive health outcomes, which in turn change/deteriorate over time as migrants adopt ‘risky’ health behaviours (for example smoking patterns or diet) characteristic of receiving society populations, which are associated with a high prevalence of non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes among some first and second generation ethnic minority groups. However, other evidence has challenged the explanatory value of linear health ‘acculturation’ models, which do not take into account the complexity of social determinants, including structural constraints in achieving healthy life styles, health behaviour and disease patterns in countries of origin, and the pre-migration health status of those who migrate, in understanding patterns of migrants’ health over time (Jayaweera and Quigley, 2010).

Overall, evidence suggests that a comprehensive understanding of migrants’ health must be based on a conceptual framework that explores the dynamic interaction of a variety of social determinants within a context that encompasses the entire migration process from origins to destinations and back again.

References

Jayaweera, H. and Quigley, M. (2010) ‘Health Status, Health Behaviour and Healthcare Use Among Migrants in the UK’, Social Science & Medicine, 71(5): 1002-10.

Lorant, V. and Bhopal, R. (2011) ‘Ethnicity, Socio-Economic Status and Health Research: Insights from and Implications of Charles Tilly’s Theory of Durable Inequality’, J Epidemiol Community Health, 65(8): 671-5.

Marmot, M. et al. (2010) ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’, The Marmot Review, UCL Insitute of Health Equity, London.

Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R. (2008) ‘People Like Us: Ethnic Group Density Effects on Health’, Ethnicity & Health, 13(4): 321-34.

Zimmerman, C. et al. (2011) ‘Migration and Health: A Framework for 21st Century Policy-making’. PLos Medicine, 8(5).

Skills - Linda McDowell

The idea that skills are an objective measure typically associated with attributes that are rewarded by market mechanisms is a central argument in conventional economic analyses of the labour market. Skills are regarded as a measure or reflection of competence to perform a particular task or range of tasks, often acquired through education and training, but also by experience during one’s working life. The notion of a skill may also encompass less clearly identifiable characteristics, such as the exercise of judgement or discretion, as well as what have been termed ‘tacit’ skills, such as emotional intelligence.

Skills may be generic or job-specific, and are associated with distinctions in the labour market. Thus, in the UK, it is common to distinguish between skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Indeed, this distinction is the basis for the definition of class positions in industrial economies, and is associated with moral worth. The unskilled – those without recognised credentials – tend to be the lowest paid, and often the least secure, in the labour market. Among their ranks are essential blue collar workers and public employees, from refuse collectors to street cleaners, without whom cities would not function efficiently, as well as what used to be termed ‘factory hands’.

Skills such as judgement and organisational ability, even authority – the tacit skills that are important in the ‘knowledge economy’ – are more typically mapped onto high status forms of work, and so those who exhibit such traits are defined as highly skilled workers. As manual employment in manufacturing industries began to decline in advanced industrial economies from the early 1970s, a claim that older ‘craft workers’ were being deskilled by new technology (as computer-based technology replaced hot metal typesetting in the printing industry, for example) was advanced by Harry Braverman. A nostalgic sense of loss lay behind this claim and behind a related argument about the decline of regionally specific ‘traditions of skill’ that geographers had identified in post-war Britain – skilled metal workers in South Yorkshire, for example, or gifted women textile workers in Lancashire.

The most significant challenge to the notion that skill is an objective measure is found in feminist analyses of the labour process. In studies of the patterns of gender segregation in the labour market in both advanced industrial economies in the north and developing economies in the south, the connections between skill classifications, gender, and low pay have been made plain. Women in economies across the world find themselves undertaking tasks that are classified as low-skilled, whether the ‘caring’ labour of childcare and care of the elderly, of nursing and primary school teaching, or working in shops, cafes and bars, providing ‘service with a smile’ in the USA, UK and other states, or the low-waged work in export processing zones, where women’s ‘nimble fingers’ made them ideal workers for assembling transistors or the components of iPhones. In all these jobs, the ‘natural’ attributes of femininity – empathy, service, emotional literacy, dealing with bodily fluids and emissions, sewing, knitting and weaving – albeit on an industrial scale, make them ideal employees, and as these skills are seen as natural, rather than acquired by training or long experience in the labour market, then they were not well-remunerated. Decades ago, Jane Jenson (1989) captured this differentiation in her argument about ‘the talents of women’ compared to ‘the skills of men’, but recognition of women’s skills in terms of higher pay still remains elusive. As labour market segmentation between men and women is so significant, policies such as equal pay for equal work have had little effect, as women often find it hard to find a male comparator when making a claim for equality. This has been recognised in the UK, for example, in a shift to legislation based on equal pay for equal value work, when it has been argued, for example, that the skills of a female cook match those of a male painter.

The argument that there is an association between skill, value, pay and gender that disadvantages women workers has become increasingly important in the growing dominance of service sector employment, where both the provider and purchaser of a service must be present in the exchange. What is known as interactive employment – undertaken by shop assistants, waiters, airline crew and personal trainers – has been termed ‘emotional labour’ or ‘body work’, to capture the significance of a labour market performance in which the service providers must be attentive to the feelings and demands of consumers. The embodied attributes of an employee, such as facial expression, accent, weight, age and skin colour, as well as deference, must be pleasing to customers so that they will return and repurchase services. By and large, a woman is the typical employee in these jobs.

The recognition that the definition of skill is not independent of the workers who perform different types of labour has been extended into a more general analysis that links gender, nationality, skin colour and migrant status to distinctions between workers on the basis of their ‘skills’. Analyses of, for example, migrant Filipina women working as nurses in Canada have shown that stereotypical assumptions about their docility and deference means that they are often excluded from the training programmes that lead to promotion. Women of colour are often tracked into inferior positions in the care sector on the assumption that they lack skills, and the training they receive often mirrors assumptions about their ‘natural’ capacity to care. As a carer in a nursing home in Chicago once told an investigator, “I am not sure if they are training me to be a nursing assistant or a black woman.”

References

Jenson, J. (1989) ‘The Talents of Women, the Skills of Men’, in S. Wood (ed.) The Transformation of Work, London: Unwin and Hyman.

A Global Care Crisis - Fiona Williams

My Mommy gone over de ocean

My Mommy gone over de sea

she gawn dere to work for some money

an den she gawn sen back for me

one year

two year

three year gawn

four year

five year

six year come

The Arrival of Brighteye - Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

The increase in migration and particularly female migration – half of the world’s 190 million migrants are women – means that care has become a global issue. Caring for children or ageing parents may stretch across continents. At the same time, many women who migrate from poorer regions go into paid care or domestic work, looking after children, older people and households in richer nations. In parallel to these ‘global care chains’ is the increased transnational recruitment of nurses and doctors from developing countries to work in the care homes and hospitals of the health services in the developed world. The care industry has become big international business, as providers move their operations across the globe and, in a countermovement, financial organisations transfer an annual US$500 billion of migrants’ remittances back home. How is it that care has become a transnational commodity? And what are the consequences?

The connection between migration and care work is linked to two aspects of social change. First is the global increase in women’s involvement in the labour market. In developed countries, this is marked by a shift away from the ‘malebreadwinner’ model of family life to one which assumes that all adults, men and women, are in paid work – out of necessity as much as women’s emancipation. In poorer regions of the world, the destruction of local economies, unemployment and poverty have pressed women into assuming a greater breadwinning role.

Second, this means that care has become a central social, political, and economic concern. How can responsibilities for care be reconciled when women are employed? How can support for care be paid for? In the richer regions an ageing society and declining fertility have made these questions critical, along with greater political and financial pressure to cut back on social expenditure costs. These issues of a ‘care crisis’ are no less pressing in developing countries, where at its extreme, in Africa, AIDS, chronic illness, natural disasters and a high child dependency ratio, place enormous burdens on women, who are expected to care and earn with very little infrastructural support. Migration, often into domestic and care work, is one way that women can find earning opportunities, even though this intensifies the caring responsibilities of those left behind.

Increasingly, the employment of migrant care and health workers has become, directly or indirectly, one way in which richer nation states and their citizens can meet their needs for care and work/life balance at lower cost. While this might look like a symbiotic relationship, in effect it reproduces profound problems.

To begin with, care work has traditionally been devalued and considered to be more of a female ‘attribute’ than a skill (in spite of the fact that it often demands considerable people skills and physical strength), and where it involves paid work within private households, it is less open to collective bargaining. This, combined with their relative lack of citizenship rights, means that migrant workers usually command low wages and poor conditions.

This is accentuated by the ways in which, across most developed welfare states, the private market has become a central feature of care provision through contracting out state or local authority services to the private sector, and by providing families with vouchers, cash benefits, or tax credits to meet their household, children’s and older relatives’ care needs through the private or voluntary sector. Care is labour-intensive work, but companies and agencies seek to make a profit through cutting labour costs, often compromising on the quality of care.

In addition, while the immediate problem women face in trying to combine paid work with household and care responsibilities can be resolved by paying women from poorer classes or countries to do that work, this detracts from the wider issue of men’s responsibility to share domestic and care work.

Furthermore, when we consider the fact that states have become global employers recruiting their health care staff from poorer countries, the geopolitical inequalities then become apparent in the draining of care resources from poorer countries. In Norway, almost a quarter of workers in health and community services come from abroad – from places like Poland, Latvia and the Philippines. In the Philippines, structural adjustment policies have increased foreign debt and reduced the state’s capacity to improve its own health, care and education infrastructures. This instability drives migration, along with an export-oriented economy in which nursing and care labor provide, through remittances, the largest source of foreign currency. Yet overall, this situation perpetuates geopolitical inequalities and the gendered inequalities associated with care responsibilities, as well as the devaluation of care as an activity.

Is there an alternative? Global strategies include in 2010 the International Labour Organisation’s convention for the rights of domestic workers and the World Health Organisation’s endorsement of an ethical code for countries to follow in the recruitment of migrant health workers. These are important, but there is a bigger challenge. Common to both developed and developing countries is a logic of policy-making that focuses on productivism, the facilitation of markets, and on drawing women into the labour market on ‘male’ terms, where care needs have to be organized around paid work. Although care is central to national and global economies, and to wellbeing and human sustainability, its activities are subsumed under economic competitiveness and are often invisible in calculations of gross domestic product. Recognising care as a collective social good means prioritizing the needs of care providers and care receivers in political and economic strategies. This would be a start to tackling a global care crisis in which the care needs of households and countries are being resolved through a hidden dependence on the unequal gendered and geopolitical relations of care work.

Illustrating Migration - Mikal Mast

The old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ may be a cliché. Still, web and social media practitioners are encouraged to use images to entice readers to written content. Studies show that web pages and social media posts with images are visited significantly more often than those without (see MDG, 2012). Quite clearly, if we want to promote academic work successfully on the web, we need to use images. But with a complicated subject like migration, an important question arises: which images can we safely use?

In writing for the web we often take our cue from journalism. Attention-grabbing headlines, the inverted pyramid structure (information placed in decreasing order of importance) and short paragraphs can help readers absorb information. When it comes to imagery, however, journalism has a poor record.

Scan the media for immigration stories and you will find a uniformly negative or oversimplified visual representation of migration. The tabloids sensationalise with vaguely menacing pictures of crowds in foreign dress, often with the faces blacked out, ostensibly for privacy reasons, but with the ultimate result of furnishing them with a somewhat criminal look. Also common are images of women wearing the burqa, which obviates the need to censor faces, but helps convey a sense of something foreign and unknown. The broadsheets, by contrast, tend to go safe and boring with pictures of lines at immigration control.

It is often said that people remember only 10 per cent of what they hear, 20 per cent of what they read, and 30 per cent of what they see. Although there is no actual research backing these numbers (Genovese, 2010), the fact remains that images have a powerful impact. Tabloid readers are left with the impression that immigrants are poor and possibly criminal, while broadsheet readers might assume that immigration is merely about border control.

Bias in images is reinforced in newspaper content. Research conducted by COMPAS’s Migration Observatory has demonstrated that there is a textual bias in newspaper coverage of immigration, with ‘illegal’ being the most common descriptor of immigrants across all newspaper types (Allen and Blinder, 2013).

So how do we, as communicators of academic research, push back against this bias? When COMPAS first started, we didn’t use images on the website, simply because we didn’t have access to an image collection varied enough to represent the multifarious aspects of migration. One solution was to source images from the public. In 2008, COMPAS started an annual photo competition. The competition invites photo submissions from UK residents on various themes involving migration, from ‘Life in Motion’ to ‘Traces of Belonging’. Prizes are offered for the winning entries, with the condition that any submission can be used in COMPAS publications and promotional materials. This competition has provided us with a large pool of quality images, some of which are included in this anthology.

Even with this varied collection of images, however, we must still select carefully. An image chosen for a pop-up banner once drew comment from an attendee at one of our seminars. The image was of a white man, and the interlocutor wondered why we had not used an image of a member of an ethnic minority. This person represented a civil society organisation working with migrant groups, and as such was concerned about the general dearth of positive representations of ethnic minorities in the media. However, migration is not solely an issue of ethnicity. In order to present a nuanced view of immigration we need to include ‘invisible’ migrants as well, namely those who are white, wealthy and sometimes even British, and who feature far less prominently in the popular media as ‘migrants’. For example, while London has a larger population of French residents than Bordeaux, and could be considered France’s sixth largest city in terms of the population of French migrants, as of 2010 there were some 44,000 more British migrants living in France than the reverse (Vargas-Silva, 2012).

At COMPAS we try to promote staff research using images that pique the reader’s interest in the ideas expressed, rather than confirming existing bias. We use a wide variety of images, some sourced from the COMPAS photo competition entries, some purchased from stock photography providers. In doing so, we strive to illustrate the complexity of migration and the wide variety of migration research conducted at COMPAS.

References

MDG Advertising Agency (2012) ‘It’s All About the Images Infographic’, MDG blog, 14 May, http://www.mdgadvertising.com/blog/its-all-about-the-images-infographic/, date accessed 13 January 2014.

Genovese, J. (2010) ‘The Ten Percent Solution: Anatomy of an Education Myth’, eSkeptic newsletter, Skeptic Society, 24 March, http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-03-24/, date accessed 13 January 2014.

Allen, W. and Blinder, S. (2013) ‘Migration in the News: Portrayals of Immigrants, Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees in National British Newspapers, 2010 to 2012’, Migration Observatory report, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Vargas-Silva, C. (2012) ‘EU Migrants in other EU Countries: An Analysis of Bilateral Migrants Stocks’, Migration Observatory Briefing, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Ageing and Migration - Russell King

Ask anyone in Britain or Europe to think of a typical migrant and the image that most likely floats into their mind is the Polish plumber or the Somali or Kurdish asylum seeker; or, from an earlier era, the Irish ‘navvy’ or the Turkish factory worker. Images, in other words, of young, mostly male, working-age ‘foreigners’ who are economic migrants, ‘guestworkers’, or refugees. Older or ‘later-life’ people have been excluded from the thinking and the literature on migration, unjustifiably so.

Ageing is less about life-stage and more about process. Whilst ‘age’ is a biological reality that may be measured in years, the meaning and experience of age, as well as the process of ageing, are socially, culturally and historically situated and constructed. In some societies, maturity and old age are related to life experience, being a grandparent, even using a walking stick; ‘elderly’ people may be venerated and looked after by the family circle. Elsewhere, older people are marginalised, rejected, hidden away; or the ‘culture of ageing’ may favour independence, individualism and attempts to remain physically and mentally active for decades beyond any notional retirement age.

Notions of relationality and intersectionality also enter the debate over the conceptualisation of ageing, especially in a context of migration and transnational familyhood. Older people are part of families and networks; intergenerationality is often the keystone of these relational structures of age. Whilst some research has documented the intergenerational ruptures and connections that migration and transnational living entail (King et al., 2006), less work has been done to explore the intersectionalities of ageing, including those brought out in a migratory setting; the ways in which later life intersects with other markers of social difference such as gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, disability, and so on.

We can identify three strands of research on ageing and migration. First, there are older people who are left behind by migration. As younger age cohorts migrate, for work or lifestyle reasons, their parents and grandparents remain in the home country and a cross-generational rupture results within the family and the wider community. King and Vullnetari (2006) used the term ‘orphan pensioners’ to describe the plight of older generations in rural Albania, abandoned by the mass exodus of young adults in the 1990s. The challenges of the long-distance transnational care of the elderly have been thoroughly researched by Baldassar (2007) in the context of post-war Italian migration to Australia.

Second, there are people who migrate in later life, often at or around retirement. International retirement migrants are classic lifestyle migrants, seeking out pleasant rural or seaside locations. From the colder climes of northern USA or Canada, wealthy retirees head to the sunshine states of Florida and California, or further south into lower-cost Mexico. For some, the move is permanent; for others it is seasonal – they are ‘snowbirds’. Parallel flows of retiree migrants exist in Europe: Britons, Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch migrate to the Spanish coasts and islands, or to rural idylls such as Provence or Tuscany (King et al., 2000).

Our third category is those who migrate as younger people and who then age abroad. Given the histories of labour migration in post-war Europe (as well as North America, Australia, and so on), when millions of young men and women migrated to work in factories, on construction sites, and in services during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, this ‘ageing in place’ is currently a mass phenomenon. True, some have return-migrated to countries of origin upon leaving the labour market, but most have stayed, anchored by children and grandchildren who have been born, brought up, educated and socialised in the host societies. But there are other, more problematic, outcomes too. Hunter (2011) has written of the plight of labour migrants who went to France in the post-war decades as single migrants, leaving their families behind in North and West Africa, and who are still living sad, isolated lives in the hostels built to temporarily accommodate them as workers fifty years ago.

These three typologies are not discrete categories, and I return to the Albanian case to demonstrate this. Looking at the evolution of this migration stream, which in little more than two decades has seen more than a million Albanians – one-third of the country’s population – emigrate to Greece and Italy, the following sequenced interactions between age/ageing and migration can be observed (King and Vullnetari, 2006). Early departures – trekking over the mountains to Greece or crowding into boats to southern Italy – primarily comprised young men seeking temporary work. Following ‘regularisation’ schemes in both destination countries in the late 1990s, this short-term, irregular migration evolved into family settlement, leading to the abandonment of the older family members in Albania. Next, migration of the older generation started to occur, for several reasons. Grandparents could undertake childcare and home management, thereby releasing the migrant mother full-time into the Greek or Italian labour market. The three-generation migrant family also kept the Albanian language and culture alive within the household. But the isolation of the older generation then became a problem, as they were dependent solely on their families for social interaction; moreover, as the Greek and Italian-born second generation became older, the grandparents’ childcare role was diminished. Return migration of the older generation to Albania often ensued. Recently, however, the Greek financial crisis has destabilised the family settlement of Albanians in the country, and new necessities of transnational living and return migration are unfolding, lessening the isolation of those older people left behind.

References

Baldassar, L. (2007) ‘Transnational Families and Aged Care: The Mobility of Care and the Migrancy of Ageing’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(2): 275–297.

Hunter, A. (2011) ‘Theory and Practice of Return Migration at Retirement’, Population, Space and Place, 17(2): 179–192.

King, R. and Vullnetari, J. (2006) ‘Orphan Pensioners and Migrating Grandparents: The Impact of Mass Migration on Older People in Rural Albania’, Ageing and Society, 26(5): 783–816.

King, R. et al. (2006) ‘Time, Generations and Gender in Migration and Settlement’, in R. Penninx et al. (eds.) The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement in Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

King, R., Warnes, T. and Williams, A. (2000) Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean, Oxford: Berg.

Body Work - Carol Wolkowitz

Migration and bodies are linked: it is embodied persons who migrate, and who experience gains and tragedies in embodied forms. Our bodies are physical, biologically-based entities, but they are also our way of being in the world and of experiencing ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

Gender analysis has for some time challenged taken-for-granted notions about migration, but we often forget how closely the roots and consequences of gender ideology are linked to gender-inflected racist assumptions about bodies. The lens of embodiment brings out starkly the intractability of the issues facing migrant women, whose paid work is frequently limited to forms of intimate ‘body work’ on and with other people’s bodies (Wolkowitz et al., 2013). The consequences include not just the low wages but the vulnerability – sexual and otherwise – of employment in socially and physically isolating work.

Paid ‘body work’ focusing on the bodies of others includes work in hospitals, nursing homes and crèches, as well as care work in people’s homes, where it blends almost imperceptibly into the defined tasks associated with paid domestic work, pictured quite explicitly in the housewifery training given to Indonesian women before they travel to work as maids in the Gulf, as documented by Susan Meiselas’ photographic essay Costly Dream, produced in collaboration with Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org/features/costly-dream). Migrant women are also recruited into household ‘body work’ through highly commodified forms of marriage.

The constructions of bodies which tie women to most forms of ‘body work’ (and excuse men from participation) can be understood in several ways. There are economic reasons why migrant women are sought out as cheap labour in modern economies. The focus of much reproductive work on human bodies is consequential for how it is organised and the downward pressure on wages (Wolkowitz et al., 2013). Not only is it labour intensive (one person can work on only one body at a time, so economies of scale are difficult), it also has to be performed in the presence of the recipient, so exporting it to lower-waged economies is not an alternative. (The bodies of consumers can travel abroad, as in the case of sex and medical tourism, but this is never going to be sufficient to deal with the care crisis in the global north nor day-to-day reproductive work.) Moreover, employers have few incentives to invest in a higher paid labour force: ‘body work’ output cannot be stockpiled, nor resold at a profit, and customers are state agencies, insurance companies and families seeking substitutes for their own unpaid childcare or care of the elderly.

There are also important cultural assumptions about bodies which render men less suitable for intimate work than women. The ideological roots of racialised migrant women’s association with reproductive labour go back to the Victorian age and beyond. Bodies, especially if they are naked or vulnerable, are coded as feminine, linked to nature, emotions, something to be exposed only in private. Moreover, the construction of male bodies as sexually predatory means that both men and women often prefer to be attended by women.

Below these everyday, relatively conscious assumptions, some argue that the ‘leakiness’ of the human body is a source of unconscious anxiety, especially for men (Widding Isaksen, 2002). Bodily fluids are cast out of consciousness because they trouble both the boundaries of the body and of those of social groups and categories: identity, system and order, as the French psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva puts it. There is considerable tension between the demands of ‘body work’ and the construction of men’s bodies as dry, solid, firm and contained.

However, these psychoanalytical readings rarely recognise that, as Bridget Anderson stresses, our understanding of the body is deeply racialised. From slavery onward, forced and voluntary migrants have been involved in ‘body work’. Anderson (2000) argues that the relationship between ‘hatred of women … hatred of the body … and hatred of racialised groups … is played out in the use of racialised female labour to do the work of servicing the body and in the treatment of domestic workers by their employers’. These assumptions also play out in sex work, and in other workplaces (nail salons, spas) where migrant women’s body labour is at risk of being read as sexual, the more especially when undertaken by racialised women whose bodies are already coded as particularly sexual (Kang, 2010).

Not all features of ‘body work’ are negative, especially as it provides opportunities for highly skilled migrant workers in, for example, medicine, dentistry and nursing. Some intimate ‘body work’ takes place within satisfying long-term, caring relationships - although these may lead to exploitative fictive kinship relations, reliance on gifts rather than proper wages, and incursions into workers’ own time and bodies. The cared-for also have different experiences of bodily interaction. The experience of being ‘cleaned up after’ may confer ‘a certain magical weightlessness and immateriality’ (Ehrenreich, 2003) on the employer, epitomised in beauty salons, where workers are obliged to defer to clients in ways that sustain both the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty and racialised and classed hierarchies. On the other hand, working with low-status clients does not enhance the social power of the ‘body worker’: caring for ageing, ‘leaky’, and disempowered bodies seems only to stigmatise those who care for them.

Gendered and racialised assumptions about bodies also play out in understandings of men’s bodies. For instance, South Asian men building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar face appalling working conditions. Neglect of male workers’ health and safety is connected not only to migrants’ disposability, but also to particular understandings of male bodies (vigorous, capable, and offering, rather than requiring protection) that have long justified employers’ shrugging off responsibility for male workers’ safety.

References

Anderson, B. (2000) Doing the Dirty Work, London: Zed.

Ehrenreich, B. (2003) ‘Maid to Order’ in B. Ehrenreich and A.R. Hochschild (eds.) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, London: Granta Books.

Kang, M. (2010) The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Widding Isaksen, L. (2002) ‘Masculine Dignity and the Dirty Body’, Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 10 (2): 137-46.

Wolkowitz, C., et al. (eds.) (2013) Body/Sex/Work: Intimate, Embodied and Sexualized Labour, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Racism and Migration - John Solomos

From one vantage point, the development of research agendas on race and racism have been inextricably linked to questions about migration, asylum and refuge. Certainly, in the scholarly debates of the past few decades, accounts of migration have also often explored patterns of racialization, racist hostility and xenophobia. In the British context, by way of example, the work of scholars such as John Rex and Sheila Allen encompasses both the study of immigration and the politics of racism. Scholars working in this tradition have tended to see the two sub-fields as closely interlinked, and they have used similar theoretical tools to approach empirical research questions. And yet, at the same time, research and policy debates about race and racism have remained somewhat separate from the growing bodies of scholarship on global migration and movement. In some ways, this separation can be seen as reflecting the trend by scholars within the academy to create space both for the study of race and of migration. It also reflects wider political and policy agendas that seek to separate questions about immigration from those about race and ethnic relations.

Perhaps one way to begin addressing this separation is to seek to understand the focus of studies of race and racism, as compared to studies of migration. The study of race and racism has a historical focus as well as a contemporary research agenda. In particular, it developed out of efforts to understand the social significance attached to social groups that differ in terms of physical attributes that are defined through a language of race. Thus, we have seen a range of studies for over a century now about the social significance of race in the USA both during the period of slavery and in the century and a half since its abolition. In this context, racism as a concept is much more closely tied to the concept of race, and is a reminder that, where members of a society make distinctions between different racial groups, at least some members of that society are likely to behave in ways which give rise to racism as a behavioural and ideational consequence of making racial distinctions in the first place. Within the context of British society, the study of what came to be called race relations grew out of research on immigration and the political and social responses to the arrival and settlement of racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, John Rex’s early attempt to define the study of race relations highlights the positioning of migrant labour as an underclass, unusually harsh class exploitation, strict legal intergroup distinctions and occupational segregation, differential access to power and prestige, and cultural diversity and limited group interaction (1970). This framing of race relations was seen in somewhat different terms from American scholars but was still premised on the ways in which social groups were defined as occupying racially defined social positions.

The study of global migration has its roots in efforts to comprehend the role of the wider context of changing patterns of migration and refugee movements that have done much to reshape the global order that has emerged from the late 20th century onwards. Although the study of migration has longer term historical roots, it has become more significant in the period since the 1960s and 1970s, and has become a more established field of research in recent years. Both the theoretical and empirical focus of migration research is thus different from the influences that helped to shape the study of race relations. Although some accounts of migration emphasize the complex social and political debates that result from processes of migration and minority formation (Castles et al., 2014), major strands of migration research have tended to focus on the experiences of particular migrant communities or sections of those communities. From this perspective, the broad phenomenon of migration and mobility, particularly in all its varied global and geopolitical forms, is a field of scholarship and research that can be seen as differentiated from the study of race and racism in both conceptual and empirical terms.

The development of both scholarly and policy agendas in the period since the 1990s has tended to accentuate a trend towards a differentiation between studies of race and racism and those concerned with global migration. Yet over the same period, it has also become evident that there are important linkages between the study of race and racism and migration. Both race and racism and migration are shaped by, and in turn shape, the changing patterns of globalization and neoliberal economic and social policy agendas that have become evident over the past two decades. It can be argued, in this context, that we need more engaged dialogue by scholars working in these sub-fields, in order to better comprehend the changing role of race and racism, as well as complex patterns of migration and diversity in contemporary societies. Scholars working in both fields can learn from each other by exploring issues such as global economic transformation, political mobilization, multiculture and urban life, and racist movements and ideologies. Such an exploration needs to move beyond a national frame and situate the importance of comparative analysis. In investigating such issues it will also be possible to address the question of the relevance of the conceptual frames that can be used to address both sets of phenomena.

References

Castles, S., de Haas, H. and Miller, M. J. (2014) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rex, J. (1970) Race Relations in Sociological Theory, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

The Enigma of Return - Aihwa Ong

This summer, upon returning to Malaysia, where I was born, I was greeted pleasantly by immigration officers. I was surprised. Previously, former citizens, upon re-entry, could expect thinly veiled hostility for having left the country. Have Malaysian immigration authorities put into practice their motto of ‘Malaysia, truly Asia’, I wondered, by welcoming Asians of all shades, regardless of their citizenship? Things were different in the 1970s when I was a young (ethnic Chinese) Malaysian citizen attending university in New York. During my visits home, my stomach would churn as I approached the immigration counter. The display of my Malaysian passport did not deflect the barely concealed disdain of border officials. The resentment, perhaps, was of my privilege of having gone abroad for higher education. Class hostility was also tinged by ethnic and gender bias. In one startling reception, a customs officer searching my bags ripped open a box of Tampax and scattered tampons across his desk. To avoid possible vile encounters thereafter, I made sure to wear batik dresses and speak Malay when meeting immigration officials. Minimally, such performance of cultural citizenship, a token display to some ideal of nationalism, seemed to ease my transit through Malaysian airports, even after I became a US citizen in the early 1980s (Ong, 2003).

But on my most recent trip back, I was warned by relatives living abroad that ethnic Chinese returnees speaking Bahasa or wearing batik are more likely to incur scorn than smiles, and at the airport, a locally-born ethnic Chinese person acting ‘foreign’ may be more welcome than one acting ‘Malaysian.’ Immigration authorities seem to sift through a constellation of ethnic, legal, cultural and economic forces as they screen ethnic Chinese subjects for multiple associations, some desirable, others not. This politics of ethnic identification and performance at the arrival point induces disorientation in the former Chinese-Malaysian citizen who has to decipher and mirror the shifting perception and reception of the border guard.

As nodes of international passage, airports have a charismatic place in the semiotics of contemporary vertigo. Different accounts tap into a tension between a placeless cosmopolitan freedom of movement, or a site of national checkpoints through which identities are evaluated, vetted, or dismantled. Anthropologists give opposing views on airport arrivals and the experience of identity. Marc Auge (2001) paints a schematic picture of the modern traveller who, after moving through the anonymous ‘non-space’ of the airport, upon arrival regains his identity along with his luggage, and sense of place. Ethnographic attention to specificity, however, reveals that for certain ‘kinds’ of persons, the airport arrival is the beginning of confusion or an unravelling of identity. Sara Friedman (2010) observes that mainland Chinese ‘marital migrants’ to Taiwan are interrogated by immigration officials as to the ‘truth’ of their claims. For travelers perceived to have ambiguous affiliations (for example where ethnicity blurs the link to citizenship), the immigration encounter dissolves identity into an enigma.

In postcolonial upheavals, multi-ethnic worlds created under colonialism were forcibly reshaped into the policed politics of new nationalisms. ‘Ethnic’ categories were re-constituted and incorporated as minority modes of national belonging. More than in other postcolonial countries, citizenship in Malaysia rests on maintaining a particular multi-racial composition, a set-up that still considers the diminishing Chinese minority as a political thorn in its side. In Malaysia, the national structure of feeling, favours, and fortunes is carefully calibrated to maintain and expand the demographic majority of ethnic Malays (bumiputras). The special status of Malay bumiputras makes Chinese, Indian and other racial minorities second-class citizens. Maintaining this ethnic ranking, the immigration regime screens the racial ratios of returns and arrivals. But compared to earlier forms of ethnic intimidation, today we find a slick, perhaps neoliberal style at play when it comes to managing the back and forth flows of Chinese persons.

What to make of the neutral or even cheery reception of previously disdained former citizens? Former citizens of Chinese ancestry once faced an icy welcome at Malaysian immigration counters, but a new calculation of political advantages shapes their welcome now. By emigrating, they are doing the country a favour, by reducing the size of the minority community, and they are welcomed back, not as visitors to a beloved homeland their ancestors played a major role in building, but as bringers of cash. Still judged as never Malaysian enough, the Chinese minority transmutes into a blur, between building a nation as citizens and building its economy as former citizens.

In these global times, Chinese ethnicity is glossed with wealth and recoded as potential human infrastructure for channeling resources. With China looming in the background as an economic giant, former hostility to returning citizens of Chinese ancestry has been supplanted by the welcoming of money associated with Chinese peoples (of various ethnicities and nationalities) from the world over. Next time I visit, I would be sure to bring more dollars, and eschew Bahasa in favor of Mandarin. This intricate maneuver in flexible citizenship (Ong, 1999) illuminates the paradox that the impersonal and international style of airports does not banish the enactment of the personal and the particular required of travellers by immigration regimes.

As I rush through Asia’s supermodern airports, I note that the Malaysian tourist map of ‘truly Asia’ is plaiting together ethnic and investment flows, and is not a political expression of genuine multiculturalism. This window dressing of Asian diversity shapes the ritual performance of ethnic citizenship in airports, while the ethnic belonging to the nation remains in doubt. Envisioning my next return home, I run through options for playing the ‘truly Asian’ game; brace for rejection or misidentifications; project a wealthy demeanor; or display the dubious identity of an overseas Chinese? It is the expectation of such historically-generated stereotypical rituals that strangely de-positions the returning person, thus extending her motion sickness into the existentialist realm.

Notes

1 I humbly invoke V.S. Naipaul’s richly compelling novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1988). In this melancholy memoir, Naipaul ruminates on how the perceptions of the immigrant shape his sensitivity to new surroundings. The mysterious sense of self and belonging for the immigrant is further troubled by his love of a country that has been deeply transformed.

2 For a brief account of that fraught experience, see Ong (2003), xiii-xix.

References

Auge, M. (2001) ‘Airports’, in S. Pile and N Thrift (eds.), Cities A-Z, London: Routledge.

Friedman, S. (2010) ‘Determining “Truth” at the Border: Immigration Interviews, Chinese Marital Migrants, and Taiwan’s Sovereignty Dilemmas’, Citizenship Studies, 14(2): 167-183.

Naipaul, V. S. (1988) The Enigma of Arrival, New York: Viking Press.

Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press.

Ong, A. (2003) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Towards Emotion

I Don’t Remember - Ismail Akthar, age 12

I don’t remember the place

where the only colour I saw was green

where the blazing heat would challenge me –

not even the tall twisty trees

which they tell I used to climb.

I have forgotten

the mangy dogs I used to bark at

or the snakes I waited to pelt rocks at,

the fish I caught by hand-

even the dragonflies I trapped-

also the taste of the just ripe mangoes

which I would climb the trees to pick

and the giant fish which would not fit

in the kitchen; and the chickens

which would be slaughtered

in front of me, and the birds,

sling-shotted out of the sky,

that would all end up in a pot filled with spices

which would soon be empty unless I got there first…

I don’t remember the taste of dried dates

or the mangoes, the peaches, the jackfruit, the pineapples,

the juiciness of it all.

I don’t remember the smells

the market filled with men just waiting for a customer

or the smell of the cut grasses being stored for the livestock.

I don’t remember the view from those

huge hills which were so hard to climb.

Or the eagles soaring high in the sky waiting

to pull something out of the green

the cows grazing on the grass

all year continuously munching, munching away

not even the painted fences standing there in neat rows.

No, I don’t remember the day my life

was taken away.

I don’t remember the fearless boy I used to be.

I don’t remember my country…

Bangladesh.

COMPAS Schools Poetry Competition 2013 Second Place

Men and the Emotional World of Immigration Detention - Melanie Griffiths

The refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees involved in my doctoral research differed from each other in almost every way, except, that is, for their gender. Examining the interplay between masculinity and emotion, and how people working in the immigration system speak of, treat and expect these men to behave, offers insights into the imagery of noncitizen and refugee men, and the place of this within the operation of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). It was meeting one particular detained man that illuminated for me these gendered assumptions, the dissonance between expectations and practice, and the institutionally problematic place of male anger.

In 2011, an Oxford charity asked me to urgently visit a Libyan immigration detainee who I will call Basam. Unusually, Basam had been referred to the charity by concerned IRC welfare officers. I was warned that he was highly emotional and potentially suffering from mental health problems. A day or two later, I went to the centre to meet Basam. As I approached the visits hall, a Detainee Custody Officer (DCO) came over to reiterate concerns over Basam and the hope that my visit might help him. Shortly afterwards, a thin man in his mid-20s came and sat down.

Basam was an intense and agitated individual. He was clearly shocked to be detained, insulted by repeated accusations from the Home Office that he had lied, and deeply afraid of their threats to remove him from the UK. He was also beset with guilt and worry about being far from Libya, a country descending into conflict and whose plight played out on the television in the corner of the visits hall. Lost in his emotional turmoil, Basam gesticulated wildly and spoke in an increasingly loud voice, oblivious to the ripples his shouts caused in the IRC’s anodyne visits hall.

Although I was relatively experienced at visiting detainees, the fierceness of Basam’s fury shocked me. I could feel the stares from the DCOs, visitors and other detainees, and felt pressure knowing I was expected to prevent Basam’s outbursts from escalating. At that first meeting, I could do little more than listen. It was not until the second, equally intense visit that I suddenly realised Basam’s response was not dysfunctional but immensely rational. His family were trapped in a country entering war, he had no legal representation, his asylum claim was failing, he was being called a liar and he had been indefinitely deprived of his liberty. Basam had every reason to be incensed.

In fact, I realised that rather than being shocked by Basam’s furious reaction, I should instead be surprised by how rare such responses are amongst immigration detainees. More commonly, people turn inwards, becoming passive and despondent. So I stopped worrying about the watching eyes and instead reassured Basam that his anger was reasonable. Although I was treating him as an adult with a valid emotional response to an awful situation, I felt guilty. I knew I was expected to quieten Basam, and hoped the DCOs did not overhear my ‘irresponsible’ words.

Meeting Basam and becoming aware of my complicity in a system that needs detainees to constrain their splenetic emotions made me conscious of the institutional fear of angry men. The DCOs seemed genuinely worried about Basam, but also feared he might be a trouble-maker and sought to restrict his anger. They checked on him throughout the day, they apparently encouraged him to take sleeping pills and started each conversation by imploring him to ‘calm down’. Even Basam’s suggestion they move him to a single room, so that he could have some private space in which to shout and let out his aggression, was refused.

However, the same DCOs that constructed Basam as being dangerously angry, also repeatedly emasculated him. After a few weeks of escalating tensions, for example, I arrived at the IRC to be told by the receptionist that I could not visit Basam because ‘he’s been a naughty boy’, telling me, in a patronising tone: ‘he’s had a bit of a protest in one of the yards, had a banner up and a bit of a shout.’ When I later telephoned, Basam explained that he had written down the name of a murdered journalist and had shown this to other detainees, albeit – as he acknowledged – in an agitated state. This had been interpreted as a protest and resulted in him being ‘removed from association’ and the next day transferred to a higher security IRC, before being removed from the UK. His nonviolent but outward focused actions were treated heavy-handedly, at the same time as they were viewed condescendingly.

Basam’s treatment provides insights into the sometimes contradictory gendered expectations and institutional needs operating within IRCs. Managerially speaking, introspective emotions are easier to manage than outbursts. The Foucauldian institutional requirement for docile bodies means small acts of dissent or non-cooperation threaten the wider IRC. There is little room for the anger of detained men.

The problematising of the agency and emotions of migrant men goes beyond institutional concerns, however, to imbue the whole asylum system. As a counsellor I interviewed in 2010 explained: ‘There is very little space [for asylum seekers] to be bad, in a healthy way’, claiming that Social Services regularly referred asylum seekers in the community for counselling because their anger was considered pathological. Men (especially those of certain ethnicities and age groups), are prone to being conceptualised as active agents: capable and strong, but potentially criminal and threatening. This disadvantages male asylum seekers, who imperfectly fit the feminised and victimised imagery generally employed by refugee advocates (Judge 2010).

Despite the systemic fear of the outward display of strong negative emotions from male detainees, however, and although some men are clearly angry about their treatment, depressive responses are much more common. Furthermore, the same discourses that construct refused asylum seeking and detained men as dangerous when angry, are also emasculating, a tension I have explored elsewhere (Griffiths 2013). In parallel to being construed as a ticking time bomb, Basam’s emotions were dismissed and his actions belittled. As such, he was Othered as simultaneously dangerous and infantile. Recognition of detained men’s emotional lives helps illuminate the ambiguity of these spaces, ones in which problematic assumptions regarding gender, age, race and immigration status converge.

References

Griffiths, M. (2013) ‘“Here, Man is Nothing!” Gendered Tensions and Male Failed Asylum Seekers’, Refugee Studies Centre public lecture, University of Oxford. http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/here-man-is-nothing-2019-gendered-tensions-and-male-failed-asylum-seekers.

Judge, R. (2010) ‘Refugee Advocacy and the biopolitics of asylum in Britain’, Refugee Studies Centre working paper, No.60, University of Oxford.

The Dynamics of Settlement - Deborah Phillips

At the college he had to re-learn everything that he knew. He had to learn how to eat in public. He had to learn how to greet people… Yet something strange was happening … Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see – and it was upsetting, at first – that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.

Half a Life - V. S. Naipaul

Migration and settlement are emotive subjects. The migration journey brings hopes, fears, excitement and anxieties, the balance of emotions depending on the circumstances of migration, country of origin and pathway to settlement in the receiving country. Whilst professional new arrivals may find that occupational networks help to smooth the passage of adjustment, those moving as poorer economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, marriage partners or young single migrants such as Willie can often find that the process of settlement, and attendant feelings of security and belonging, are not always easily or quickly achieved. The early stages of settling for the most vulnerable migrants may mean multiple moves, perhaps through transit camps, reception centres, hostels or the streets before arriving at a place with some security. Others, making use of family and other connections, may join earlier migrants in established areas of immigration that offer elements of familiarity, comfort and support, and, for some, a microcosm of the life-world left behind.

To the receiving population, distinctive areas of minority ethnic settlement evoke mixed emotions. They can hold exotic allure, become places of curiosity, entertainment and excursion for curious outsiders; a small world that can be entered, sampled and left at the end of the novel experience. Many western cities have actively sought to commodify their Chinatowns or equivalent of the ‘Curry Mile’ in Manchester, and capitalise on their multi-cultural diversity through investment in newly emerging cultural landscapes. The persistent clustering of minority ethnic groups in areas of deprivation can, however, also generate fears in the receiving population. Such spaces can become symbols of difference and a reminder that migration brings new identities, lifestyles, inequalities and social divisions that can give rise to (often exaggerated) national anxieties around integration, citizenship and nation building.

The pattern, process and outcome of immigrant settlement have all too often become politicised. National concerns about the supposed risks of minority group concentration in particular areas, variously articulated through anxieties around civil unrest, ghettoization, uneven use of services, and the ‘swamping’ of the indigenous population, have promoted diverse state interventions in the settlement process. The regional dispersal of refugees is not uncommon in western European countries and is often linked to welfare benefits entitlements. At the local scale, quotas have at times been used to shape the pattern of allocation of new migrants to social housing, and migrant children have been bussed from their home areas to dispersed schools in an attempt to ‘spread the burden’ of immigration. Fear of the negative effects of residential concentration, for both migrants and the receiving population, is often accompanied by a politicised discourse on the dangers of persistent segregation and the development of disconnected, parallel lives between host and migrant groups that have seemingly failed to learn ‘the rules’. In the post-9/11 era of global insecurity, the clustering of new as well as settled. Muslim minorities in western European countries, for example, has widely been seen as an indicator of poor assimilation and weak citizenship. Popular explanations for segregated lives often rest on immigrants’ apparent unwillingness to adjust and engage in the host society rather than the racism and structural constraints that migrant communities often face. Although scholars agree that the relationship between social and spatial assimilation is contested (and likely to take different forms for different populations in different places), government policies promoting integration and social cohesion have often seen migrant deconcentration and dispersal, as well as acculturation, as integral to their programmes.

Migrants’ lived experiences and geographies of settlement are contextualised and differentiated. They reflect the way that their personal characteristics and individual biographies cross-cut with wider structural opportunities and constraints, and how they are shaped by the dynamics and micro-politics of particular places. In addition, migrants’ own senses of citizenship and belonging are complex and multi-scalar. Transnational connections now enable immigrants and settled minorities to maintain strong ties with remote places they have left behind, to selectively blend socially constructed rules, and create identities rooted in both their old and new homes. However, people’s everyday lives are still greatly influenced by experiences, associations and life-chances at the local scale. Immigration status, the social and political rights accorded to migrants, positive or negative encounters with social difference, an understanding of the migrant’s place in the receiving nation, and individual constructions and imaginings of home will all help to shape the complex pathways to immigrant settlement and belonging.

Community - David Feldman

“We have a right to keep out everybody who does not add to the strength of the community – the industrial, social and intellectual strength of the community,” asserted Arthur Balfour, speaking in the House of Commons in support of the 1905 Aliens Bill, the first modern legislation designed to restrict immigration to the United Kingdom. This imagined the nation as a whole as a community, and immigrants, in this case east European Jews for the most part, as outside its boundaries. Today, too, immigrants are set outside of the parameters of the community. In July 2013, the immigration minister called for stronger controls on immigration, as without them, ‘communities could be damaged.’ He was especially concerned that immigrants were generating overcrowding, anti-social behaviour, and longer waiting times at GP’s surgeries.

In his 1976 compendium Keywords, Raymond Williams writes, ‘unlike all other terms of social organisation’, community ‘seems never to be used unfavourably.’ It is, ‘a warmly persuasive word.’ As he noted, ‘community politics’ suggest a form of organisation not only distinct from national politics but also from formal local politics. In contrast to bureaucratic and hierarchical types of governance and mobilisation, community activists claim to represent the unmediated voice of the people in a particular place. This idea of community, as the expression of authentic bonds which develop from everyday experience, continues to thrive. We have community councils, community care, community centres, community workers, community groups, community spokesmen and women.

It is one indication of the benign, yet vague, meaning of community that governments too have adopted the term, not least when they seek to invest an unpopular measure with legitimacy. In 1990 when the Conservative government introduced a fiscally regressive form of local taxation – when the property based tax, known as ‘rates’, was replaced by a levy placed on the head of almost every adult – it labelled the new and much reviled tax ‘the community charge’. Since 2006, the British government has included a Department of Communities and Local Government. The department’s website attempts to infuse the arid system of local administration with the nurturing juices of community. Its mission, it states, is to support local government and in doing so to ‘put communities in charge of planning’.

These connotations of community run deep. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of ‘community’ to the Anglo-Norman and Middle French term communité meaning joint ownership or association. By the late fourteenth century it indicated ‘a body of people who live in the same place, usually sharing a common cultural or ethnic identity’. These meanings, concerned with ownership, association, culture and ethnicity, do not exhaust the semantics of community – it can describe a body of people practising communal living on religious or ideological grounds, or be applied to a group that follows a sport or hobby, such as the ‘football community’. Nevertheless, in the second decade of the 21st century they remain central and powerful.

These historical roots reveal why the term is so often used in relation to migration and indicate its subtly manipulative qualities. In 1603, Chester City Council objected that “strangers… not only take away… the maintenance and relief which belongs to the poor born in the said but… impoverish the state of the commoners of the said City.” Yet, in early 17th-century England only a minority of people lived and died in the same town or village. The population was a collection of migrants. Moreover, access to common land was far from common. It was distributed unequally and, at times, a point of bitter conflict. The welfare system – parochial poor relief – was discretionary, grudging and sometimes penal, as rate payers strived to minimise their obligations. The language of community was a fiction disguising economic inequality and institutional power. It was also a vital social force when mobilised to exclude poor migrants.

An emphasis on shared ownership and origins can be used to promote a sense of solidarity that is also exclusionary. At this point, community assumes a less benign aspect. In this register, the language of community is liable to place people who have a different culture or ethnicity, or who do not have a pre-existing share in the common fund of goods, or who have not qualified for membership, outside the community of solidarity. The 17th-century complaint – that migrants were draining the welfare system and other collective resources – has a familiar ring. Only now, the complaints are not directed at people who have walked ten or twenty miles, but at the growing number of international migrants who are placed beyond the boundaries of collective solidarity, both as they strive to enter contemporary Britain and also, for those who manage to settle, once they arrive.

There is one other usage of community in relation to immigration that we must mention: namely, the use of the term ‘community’ to denote an immigrant, ethnic or religious group. In the 1960s, many towns established Community Relations Councils as they tried to manage the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia. They expressed an assumption that the immigrant and the established population comprised separate ‘communities’. Their founders were well intentioned people who wanted to promote and manage integration. The same language can also be found, however, in Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered in Birmingham in 1968. Here, Powell condemned ‘the Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain’. The idea that immigrants and ethnic or religious minorities comprise ‘communities’ remains commonplace in the present. It pays no regard to the fractures, hierarchies and conflicts within these populations, nor to the bonds of interest and association, through trade unions, tenants’ associations or chambers of commerce, for example, that might unite immigrants with others born in the country. In this respect, the use of the term community to classify immigrant groups is the regrettable yet predictable counterpart to its use to try to exclude them. In both cases ‘community’ erases divisions of wealth and status, and transforms a potentially unruly and contentious population into an imagined united whole.

Diasporic Converging Cultures? - Iain Walker

There’s a line from an old Tom Waits song – ‘the merging nexus back and forth’ – that often runs through my head as I chase Hadramis across the Indian Ocean. A cynic may say that I’m just suffering travel fatigue, but there are groups of Hadramis who are both particularly mobile, individually and collectively, and well-connected, who could easily be described as nexuses.

In Abu Dhabi recently, I met up with a member of an Hadrami family whose house I had lived opposite when doing my doctoral fieldwork in the Comoro Islands, during which time I came to know several of them quite well. They are descendants of one of East Africa’s great religious leaders, and I meet them in places all over the world: in the Comoros, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Hadramawt, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Paris and London. This sounds more like divergence than convergence, but the fact that they themselves (and there are others like them) have more than one place of attachment, or ‘home’, if you like, suggests that things are a little more complicated than that. Indeed, the last time I wrote about them I called them ‘Comorians’; but I was working on a different project then.

Shifting political economies, as well as religion, marriage and sentiment, prompt people to move; they find themselves in different places at different times, and in different political and cultural contexts. The Hadrami diaspora is scattered across the Indian Ocean, principally in three regions – East Africa, Southeast Asia and the Arabian peninsula (there are Hadramis in India too, but they seem to have dropped out of the networks, and other Hadramis call them ‘the lost people’) – and although links between East Africa and Southeast Asia are limited, many Hadramis in both regions have strong links with those in the Arabian peninsula. Here there are two types of Hadrami: the ‘old’ families, most of whom are citizens, and whose presence predates the oil era, and the ‘new’ Hadramis, who have come both from Hadramawt and other parts of the diaspora, drawn by the economic opportunities offered by these prosperous, oil-fuelled economies. Most of the former are in Saudi Arabia; the latter are also in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.

Wherever they are, Hadramis maintain their culture. This is widely recognised: it is part of the skill of being Hadrami, and time and time again I hear the refrain, ‘we integrate, but we keep our culture’. Hadramis – and we are talking about men here, as the women rarely move in this way – emigrate and take local wives; they send their sons back to Hadramawt for education, but the girls stay behind to absorb more of the host culture. The next generation then intermarries: Hadrami Zanzibari men (for example) marry Zanzibari Hadrami women. Transmission of cultural practices therefore occurs both in the male (Hadrami) and female (Zanzibari) lines and are woven into a culture that sits astride home and host, belonging in both when all is well, but sometimes belonging to neither when cleavages occur. Indeed, if the cohesive character of Hadrami social structures and cultural practices both encourages integration and hinders assimilation, this is as true at ‘home’ as it is in diaspora. The latter seems intuitive: Hadramis, well integrated but still slightly different, always seem to be identifiable as a group, even if only on rather unrefined criteria such as family name or skin colour. But returning to Hadramawt, the foreign-born always remain slightly apart.

In the Arabian peninsula, Hadramis converge. However, since these Hadramis are products of diasporic sites and practices, and although they believe themselves to be Hadrami, Hadramis from Indonesia are not Hadrami in quite the same way that Hadramis from East Africa, or from Saudi Arabia or, of course, from Hadramawt might be. This places certain constraints on interaction, as Saudis of Hadrami origin, despite claims of kinship and shared cultural practice, find that they may not have as much to share with Kenyan Hadramis as they might have thought, while Kenyan Hadramis are more at ease with Somali Hadramis than with kin from Hadramawt. Some members of the community – often those who are more mobile, or whose families have been less ‘localised’, such as my Comorian friend – serve as mediators between different groups, usually belonging (even if only partially) to more than one group.

The weaving metaphor seems apt here: dispersal from a homeland produces divergences, but subsequent mobilities produce convergences, as diasporic groups meet and reinvent themselves elsewhere, and so the process continues. But if it seems intuitive that divergence is a prerequisite for convergence, what I suggest here is that the inverse is also true: divergence requires convergence. The convergence of diasporic groups who believe they have a single identity is a prerequisite for recognising that this singular identity is (and must be) illusory: the cultures therefore diverge. In Saudi Arabia, ‘Hadramis’ from Saudi Arabia, Kenya or Java become (revealed as) Saudi, Kenyan and Javanese Hadramis, negotiating both their commonalities and their differences – constituting a merging nexus.

Devotion - Jane Garnett

Devotional practices and imagery have always been both portable and subject to reinvention in new contexts. They have served not just to define sacred cartographies, but to propel mobile worlds beyond formal institutional spaces. This has been true of different world religions – Christians who re-enacted Jerusalem in medieval Wakefield or near Moscow in the 17th century; Yorkshire Hindus who since the late 20th century have reconceived the River Aire as the holy waters of the Ganges; early medieval Irish monks who, seeing Christian life itself as a journey, kept on the move across Europe and the Atlantic, founding monasteries which became the nuclei of urban settlement; or 21st-century Pakistani Muslim emigrants to Canada who visit a network of shrines in India, London, South Africa and Turkey, reinforcing diasporic connections by carrying devotional material back to North America with them.

In Catholic culture, images – of Christ, the Virgin or the saints – have constituted a rich devotional focus, which at once evoke very particular associations of place and also transcend space and time in the imagination of the individual devotee. These qualities have given them a special significance for migrants shaping new communities and forging links with old ones. Millions of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese migrants to North and South America over the centuries took with them copies of their local cult images, which reinforced spiritual confidence, on small and sometimes much larger scales. Churches in New York, Boston, Rio and Buenos Aires were dedicated to Madonnas of European sanctuaries. Processions with statues marked the bounds of new parishes on patronal feast-days, and migrants set up domestic shrines and carried small reproductions for daily personal prayer. Some cults acquired wider resonance. The Virgin of Guadalupe, rooted in a 16th-century fusion of Mary with a Native American goddess, became a dynamic embodiment of Mexican nationalism from the 19th century, and of Filipino Catholicism in the 20th. Retaining these cultural and potentially countercultural connotations, and providing a point of interconnection for Hispanic and Filipino communities worldwide, the cult has been given universal status by a Catholic hierarchy repeatedly striving to benefit by popular association. A younger, still controversial, and even more extensively diffused devotion is to the Divine Mercy, an image of Christ deriving from visions experienced in the 1930s by Faustina Kowalska, a young Polish nun. Spread initially by Polish post-war migration, the cult, officially banned worldwide from 1959 to 1979, was rehabilitated by Pope John Paul II in a process leading to Faustina’s beatification in 1993 and canonisation in 2000. Now a global phenomenon, the devotion sits alongside established image cults within churches worldwide, drawing both visually and culturally on existing popular characterisations of Christ (such as the Sacred Heart), and structuring the private prayer lives of millions of Catholics. Many of these faithful have not grown up with the devotion, but have encountered it in new contexts, where it has helped them to make different connections, often across ethnic, cultural and sometimes even religious boundaries.

Recent diversification in migration patterns and communication media have complicated, but not fundamentally transformed, the ways in which devotional cultures work. Many cults that once travelled by word of mouth and through print reproduction now move electronically; but Facebook and Skype mirror and complement familial, group and community solidarities and physical displacement. A woman from Sierra Leone now in east London has adopted 3 pm GMT (the time associated with Christ’s death and instituted as part of the devotion to the Divine Mercy) as the hour on Sundays when her dispersed family around the world join in prayer: a modern connective ritual built on very traditional bonds of emotional affinity and shared memory.

References

Garnett, J. and Harris, A. (2013) ‘Canvassing the Faithful: Image, Agency and the Lived Religiosity of Devotion to the Divine Mercy’, in G. Giordan and L. Woodhead, (eds.) Prayer in Religion and Spirituality, Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Garnett, J. and Rosser, G. (2013) Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present, London: Reaktion.

McGuire, M. (2008) Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contemporary Anxiety Towards Irregular Migration - Joaquín Arango

Irregular migration is as old as the regulation of migration itself. Yet it has not always been at the fore of our attention, and it has not always aroused the degree of anxiety that surrounds it today. Admittedly, ‘anxiety’ may seem too strong a word. But ‘concern’ falls short of describing the stance towards irregular migration that prevails in Europe and the United States. The rejection of unauthorized migration often borders on stigmatization and demonization. Some countries have made it a criminal offense. Measures introduced to combat it go as far as the humiliating and demeaning practices of Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona and the threat to confine asylum seekers in camps in Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Non-governmental actors often share in the current escalation, including examples such as a well-known Texan actor’s weekend hobby of picking up a gun to chase irregular migrants, or the debate about whether the fence on the US-Mexico border should be doubled or electrified.

That such obsession is eminently contemporary suggests it might not be genuine. Things were quite different in the past. In the North America of the Bracero Program, during the middle decades of the 20th century, the stance towards undocumented migration was one of benign neglect, if not of Olympian indifference. Similar was the case in Europe of the trentes glorieuses: irregular migrants were as a rule tolerated, when not easily legalized. At that time, immigration was seen as necessary and desirable on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than in substantive shifts in irregular migration, the explanation for the ensuing transition from indifference to demonization is to be found in a dramatically altered evaluation of immigration.

Irregular migration doubtless has deleterious effects. Yet, whether they are sufficient to justify the current climate of opinion and the severity of the measures to combat it is questionable. It certainly implies a breach of sovereignty, but not necessarily more significant than others that are easily accepted by governments. Its negative effects do not generally extend to the economy, as most irregular migrants are workers needed by the labour market, and who lend valuable services to many families, especially in terms of care, which in turn benefits welfare systems. The drastic removal of migrants would be likely to generate chaos.

One reason often mentioned for the harshness of practices which counter irregular migration is that it constitutes a security risk. Were this indeed the case, the reasons for granting irregular migration a high priority could arguably be more understandable and justifiable. But the opposite could also be argued. Irregular migration can be seen as a security risk only if a very broad concept of security is used. There is no evidence of irregular migrants being more likely to commit crime – as long as a distinction is made between immigrants committing crimes and transnational criminal activities. San Diego and El Paso, two US cities with high proportions of irregular migrants, are among the safest large urban areas in the US, according to the FBI. And let us remind ourselves that the major terrorist attacks of the first decade of the 21st century – those of New York, Madrid, and London – were not the deeds of unauthorized immigrants. Irregular flows do have serious impacts in critical entry points, such as Lampedusa, several loci in Greece, the Canary Islands, or Ceuta and Melilla, but this is in terms of emergency situations and local disruption rather than security per se. And most countries are unaffected by such impacts. The relationship between international mobility and security is a complex and delicate one, but a better balance than the present one could be found.

Do the policy correlates of the present state of anxiety lead to reasonable policy outcomes? Are harsher control policies, including those aiming at ‘self-deportation’ effective? The answers are opaque and hard to measure. But the available evidence, both objective and impressionistic, suggests they are not, despite the high and ever increasing costs of control policies. Furthermore, there are a number of unintended consequences, including displacement of crossing points, more casualties, and higher fees for clandestine crossings. Mobility and legal migration may be negatively affected and made more cumbersome, not to mention the moral and political costs and negative impacts on societies that are increasingly inevitably more diverse. The often given justification that severe control policies help contain the rise of the far right hardly resists the test of reality, if the fortune of multiple populist, xenophobic parties and movements that have flourished and prosper in dozens of countries is taken as a measuring rod. In sum, if harsh control policies are costly, generate many unintended effects, and are of limited effectiveness, is the high priority accorded to them reasonable? How many would withstand a cost-benefit analysis?

Do the negative effects of irregular migration really justify the current levels of anxiety and their policy correlates? Do they justify the unprecedented politicization of migration? Do they sanction practices that sometimes impinge on human rights and civil liberties and test at times the limits of democratic politics?

In light of the above, common sense would recommend exploring alternative control strategies, ones that might possibly prove more reasonable and humane, and with fewer side effects than those in vogue at the moment. These might not secure large benefits, but at least they would entail lower costs, whether these be financial, social, or political. They would stem from a revised stance toward irregular migration that would recognize that, while it poses considerable problems, it is unavoidable and not so harmful. Learning to live with irregular migration in a calmer, more civilized way potentially offers considerable benefits. Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.

Seeking Asylum in Schools - Halleli Pinson, Madeleine Arnot and Mano Candappa

Some English people they just don’t like us. If you argue with them they just tell you “go back to your country, why are you in England”… they don’t understand why you’re here, so there is no point of talking about it. - Farouq, Year 10^1

Farouq, an Afghani refugee boy, is well aware of public representations of refugees in the UK. He is an outsider, the ‘other’, and he is unwanted. In today’s world, refugees and asylum seekers are physically and symbolically ‘out of place’ – the ‘other in our midst’, or as Bauman (2004) describes them, the ‘human waste’, the ‘flotsam’ of humanity who are pushed or wafted across national boundaries. They are living what Agamben (1998) describes as a state of ‘bare life’.

Asylum seeking in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe) has become a matter of public debate. The media describe asylum seekers as scroungers and criminals who are flooding ‘our’ country, posing a threat to ‘our’ security, and draining ‘our’ resources; successive legislation makes Britain less welcoming for asylum seekers. Historically, the concept of asylum was associated with compassion. However, growing numbers and the changing makeup of asylum seekers at the doorstep of western countries have led receiving societies to readdress issues of membership, rights and belonging and their moral obligations towards them. The ways in which asylum seekers are defined as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ of state support and protection form a central part of the material and symbolic boundary-making activity of western nation states. The asylum-seeking and refugee child is positioned between this draconian political-economic discourse and the discursive idea of childhood vulnerability, although the UK government has repeatedly ignored the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child when it comes to asylum seeking children and increasingly restricts their access to welfare services.

But what happens when these children enter the education system? Can schools offer a ‘safe haven’? Schools cater for the complex emotional and educational needs of asylum-seeking and refugee children, sustaining their professional duty to educate and care for all children whatever their legal status. From the perspective of teachers, political distinctions between ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ migrant families are anti-educational and irrelevant to schools. The UK Home Office sees a migrant child as first and foremost a migrant, while for teachers, they are children first and thus equally entitled to respect and help. An assistant headteacher in a city school comments:

I don’t think we’ve ever refused somebody admission if we’ve got a place, simply because they haven’t had the right documentation.... Because to be honest even if it turned out that they were here illegally, in a way that’s not our concern.... We would still not refuse because… that’s not for us, the school, to judge.

Asylum-seeking and refugee children are offered different versions of compassion by their teachers. One version expresses compassion as the need to care for and help those who have suffered in their lives and who seek help and shelter. This notion is based on concern (whether empathy, sympathy or pity) for those who are victims of circumstance. Another version of compassion is based on a sense of justice – offering help to those who are in trouble on the basis of notions of equality and human rights and recognising a shared humanity with others. Nussbaum (2001) argues that such compassion occurs at the level of individual psychology and of institutional design. Compassion becomes not just an emotion, a motivation or a form of reasoning, but a form of social solidarity, especially in relation to diversity.

There is evidence for both types of compassion in schools. Here an inclusion coordinator in a large predominantly white school rejects the notion of pity in favour of ‘equal treatment for all’:

...the word pity always has a connotation of almost being condescending, doesn’t it? [...] All the children I work with, whether they have a learning difficulty, a behaviour difficulty, they are just children with English as an additional language, or they’re asylum-seeking and refugee children, or they’re looked after children, or they’re abused children … will come to you with a level of need … and my response is to react to [those] needs ... in the best way I can.

These individualising discourses allow teachers to see ‘a child’ who is entitled to learn and to be safe from violence.

Different compassionate responses result from schools’ first-hand experience of immigration policies, especially detention and deportation. Child deportation reverberates around the school and community and forces teachers to manage crises of grief and loss in the classroom:

…other children [do] not necessarily understand why someone’s gone... well they were happy here, why have they been moved? There’s obviously something wrong with us. Is that why they’ve moved them? (headteacher, predominantly white school)

Such experiences lead certain teachers to be involved in anti-deportation campaigns which bring them into contact with immigration authorities, police, and a range of professional bodies. Such action is morally and politically significant since it unites concerns about child-centred compassionate approaches with egalitarian concerns about peace and fairness. Witnessing the politics of immigration first-hand reshapes the relationship of teachers to the state.

Immigration policy repositions educational institutions which value diversity and which critically engage with the denial of social and human rights. Such humanistic and critically-aware school cultures could easily be made to appear unpatriotic or out of line in increasingly fortress-like nation states.

Teachers represent the front line of a democratic society, creating the conditions for compassion to flourish within young generations. They can validate asylum-seeking and refugee children’s resilience and extraordinary ability to survive by offering them a chance to take control of their futures. This task is not getting any easier.

Notes

1 All quotations are drawn from Pinson et al., 2010. Thanks to Mano Candappa for permission to quote from the book.

References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bauman, Z. (2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, New York Cambridge University Press.

Pinson, et al. (2010) Education, Asylum and the Non-Citizen Child: The Politics of Compassion and Belonging, London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Public Preferences for Restricting Immigration: Who, Why, and with What Limitations? - Scott Blinder

Dating back to the earliest survey research on public attitudes toward immigration, the overwhelming majority of people in Britain have always agreed that there are too many immigrants. In the mid-1960s, opposition to immigration registered between 80 and 90 per cent of those polled. Little has changed on this front: according to consistent findings from surveys and opinion polls, a clear majority of members of the contemporary British public would like to see immigration to Britain reduced. Depending on the precise question asked and the choices respondents are offered, the number favouring less immigration typically falls between 60 and 80 per cent.

But, while the belief that there is too much immigration goes back to the 1960s, the high level of political salience is much more recent. Prior to 2000, immigration rarely registered as one of the issues of greatest public concern. Since then, in monthly polls asking people to name the most important problems facing Britain, immigration has been among the top three.

The belief that there is too much immigration is so widespread that it can be found in virtually every sub-group of the British population. Still, some groups are particularly likely to oppose immigration. There is some correlation with education and income levels, but even in the most educated and highest earning sub-groups, a majority support less immigration. Similarly, opposition to immigration does not run as high among London residents as in the rest of the country (even among UK-born white London residents), but still a majority believe immigration levels are too high.

Sources of news are also correlated with attitudes to immigration, although without further research we cannot say if media use causes people’s views to change, or if people simply select news sources that reflect their views. Nonetheless, the correlations are fairly striking – readers of tabloids and local newspapers, and viewers of ITV news are more likely than others to prefer reducing immigration, and most often would like to see it reduced ‘a lot’ rather than ‘a little.’ But clear majorities of broadsheet readers and BBC TV news viewers are also in favour of reduced immigration.

At least three basic explanations of attitudes toward migration have been researched extensively.

- Contact theory holds that sustained positive contact (such as friendships) with members of other ethnic, religious, racial, or national groups produce more positive attitudes toward members of that group.

- Group conflict theory suggests that migrants or minority groups can appear to threaten the interests, identities, or status of the majority (as a group), and that those who feel this sense of threat most acutely will be most likely to oppose migration.

- Economic competition theories suggest that opposition to migration will come from native-born (or citizen) workers who compete with migrants with similar skill sets, or (conversely) from wealthier locals who feel (or perceive) a financial burden for tax-payers if migrants use public services such as hospitals or schools.

Evidence is generally strong for contact theory, but it does not necessarily account for opposition to immigration. Rather, it suggests that this attitude can be changed by interactions, especially friendships, across group lines.

Group conflict theory has a great deal of support in the academic literature, but it leads to further debate about the nature of group conflict: is it more ‘realistic’ (for example, if it involves competition for scarce resources), or is it more ‘symbolic?’ In the latter version, group conflict is more closely related to a sense of national identity that large scale immigration seems to threaten.

Economic competition theory has found inconsistent support in the literature. Perceptions of one’s own economic security and of migrants’ impact on jobs and wages are related to anti-migrant attitudes. But these perceptions are themselves only loosely tied to individuals’ actual economic position. So, perhaps surprisingly, it is not clear that economic factors are actually driving attitudes for most people.

New research from the US, however, finds that workers in direct competition with migrants appear particularly likely to oppose the granting of visas to migrant workers. Malhotra et al. (2013) examine high-tech workers in the US facing competition from highly-skilled Indian workers; these Americans are particularly likely to want fewer visas granted to these sorts of migrant workers. This supports the economic competition model, but in revised form: these pressures may be highly relevant for migration attitudes, but only for a small subset of the public. Others who lack direct competition with (potential) migrant workers are not affected by this dynamic; their views on immigration are determined by other factors.

My work with Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Robert Ford (2013) points to the importance of anti-prejudice social norms in shaping majority groups’ attitudes toward immigration and the impact of these attitudes on broader political behaviour. We argue that there is a widespread social norm against prejudice in western Europe. The norm coexists with negative beliefs and stereotypes about migrants and minorities, and, we argue, acts as an independent motivating force in shaping political choices and responses to campaign messages and political parties. Its power to shape behaviour, however, varies greatly across individuals and across situations. Some people are more motivated to follow this norm than others; equally important, some political situations place the norm directly at stake, while other situations are more ambiguous and allow greater scope for acting on biases (often hidden or even unconscious ones) without the feeling that one is violating the anti-prejudice norm. Thus, the impact of immigration on politics can be highly complex and volatile. In particular, new anti-immigration political parties founder on these dynamics more often than not. Parties formed with the sole purpose of mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiment usually fail; existing parties with established reputations in other issue domains are more successful as vehicles for anti-immigrant sentiment, as they can campaign on this issue while credibly claiming to be about something more than simple xenophobia.

References

Blinder, S., Ford, R and Ivarsflaten, E. (2013) ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: How the Antiprejudice Norm Affects Policy and Party Preferences in Great Britain and Germany’, American Journal of Political Science, 57(4): 841-857.

Malhotra, N., Margalit, Y. and Mo, C. (2013) ‘Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact’, American Journal of Political Science, 57(2): 391–410.

Comfort Zones - Nina Glick Schiller

“So, are any of your friends Jewish? You know people feel more comfortable with their own kind.” Interested in my life in England where I had settled several years prior, my 93-year-old aunt had begun our conversation by asking about what she felt was the most basic component of feeling at home. Several months later, when I again returned to south Florida to visit, Ida continued, almost as if I had not been away. “You know,” she said, “I only feel comfortable with Jewish people.” She spoke about her simultaneous love of the United States, her ‘country’, and of Israel, ‘her homeland’, whose internal rifts, treatment of the Palestinians, and foreign policy she knows nothing about.

Yet by all conventional measures, Ida is among the assimilated, not the ghettoized. Although her mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant, Ida was born in the United States. She knows Yiddish but she has spent most of her long life speaking English. She spent her childhood in poverty in a New York City multi-ethnic neighborhood, and as an adult lived in a quintessentially middle-class multi-ethnic suburb. She was not religious and her husband, a prosperous lawyer, was an atheist with a wide professional and personal network of people of all backgrounds.

My aunt’s statements cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to current debates about identity, belonging, nationality, and religious difference, because they contain many of the contradictory tensions that pervade contemporary debates about immigration. She narrated her identity to me in the same year that Angela Merkel, Prime Minister of Germany, declared that immigrants in Germany lived in ghettos, and David Cameron stated that British Muslims live in ‘these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values’.

What does Ida’s admission of who she feels comfortable with say about whose comfort zones are highlighted in public debate and how people actually live their lives? Whose comfort zone is typical, Ida’s or my mother Evelyn’s? Evelyn came from the same Russian-Jewish American second generation, and also grew up speaking Yiddish and English. During her New York City childhood her parents’ networks were German Protestants and Italian Catholics as well as Russian Jews. Throughout her life Evelyn had close affective relations with Jews and non-Jews. However, while in her childhood her closest friends were a circle of Jewish girls who formed their own club, complete with motto and jewelry, Evelyn’s adult comfort zone was a group of parents – Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish – who were active in the local primary school. For my mother, as for many others, life cycle changes reconfigured her networks of sociability.

Most rhetoric and policy statements about assimilation, integration and social cohesion tell us little about how immigrants and their children live their lives, including the multiplicities of identities and comfort zones various immigrants and their descendants inhabit. Thinking about the variety of ‘ways of being’ that people who claim, or are categorized by, the same public identity inhabit, allows us to explore the differences among how people live their lives in terms of daily cultural practices, their public identities, and their personal comfort zones. For example, Ida and my mother share forms of dress, speech, culinary preferences, and décor that reflect the regional middle-class culture of the New York metropolitan area of their generation. They also have the same public ethnic identity: Jewish Americans. But they have had different kinds of social networks, which have given them different kinds of social capital, knowledges, and comfort zones.

The concept of comfort zone needs to become part of both the vocabulary of migration studies and daily life. Social geographers have begun to examine the factors that shape a personal identity, best understood as a psychic sense of being spatially at home, rather than ethnicity (McCreanor et al., 2006). However, comfort zones, while influenced by locality, should not be conflated with space. They exist within human social relationships and practices, and can involve particular physical locations, but can also exist within social relations mediated by letters, phone calls, or cyberspace forms of communication from a Facebook page to an email.

Comfort zones express histories of specific childhoods shaped by class, gender, family history and the cultural practices and sensibilities of a particular city and place, as well as intergenerational patterns of belief and custom. Comfort zones also embody life circumstances including, for many people, their past and continuing racialization, stigmatization, discrimination and prejudice. We all have comfort zones: a set of people with whom we like to spend time, and, at times of our day or week or life, we actively seek out.

However, as we live our life and make choices about who inhabits our comfort zone, we learn that not everyone’s choices are equally visible, normalized, or judged acceptable according to national categorizations of belonging and difference. If our ancestors are seen as belonging to the core of the nation, then our comfort zone is not publically visible or remarked upon in public debates, even if we chose ‘our own kind’. But if we are categorized through an ‘ethnic lens’ as different from the national cultural/racialised/religious core and we make the same choices about our comfort zone, we are seen as refusing to integrate and a threat to the social fabric of the nation (Glick Schiller et al., 2005). Moreover, if because of the ethnic lens of national discourse we are seen as the ‘other’, even when our comfort zone is a domain of sociability built on common interests or affinities with those understood as belonging to the nation, social scientists and politicians fail to notice.

Every day and without fanfare, recent migrants to Europe and North America and their children find pathways of local emplacement despite stigmatization. They settle by building comfort zones. Some, like Aunt Ida, settle on the basis of their shared ascribed identities. Others, like my mother, become part of a locality by establishing domains of commonality despite difference. If we put aside the public obsession with cultural difference and recognize that social life is lived by all of us within variations of personal comfort zones, we could reject the anti-immigrant fear mongering of political pundits. Then we could embrace common human concerns… and perhaps also save our planet from environmental destruction before it gets too hot to be a comfort zone.

References

Glick Schiller, N., Caglar, A. and Guldbrandsen, T. (2005) ‘Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation’, American Ethnologist, 33(4): 612-633.

McCreanor, T. et al. (2006) ‘“This is Like My Comfort Zone”: Senses of Place and Belonging within Oruamo/Beachhaven, New Zealand’, New Zealand Geographer, 62: 196–207.

Transnational Families - Leslie E. Fesenmyer

‘Transnational’ families are families who live apart but who create and retain a ‘sense of collective welfare and unity, in short “familyhood,” even across national borders’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). They include transnational couples (for example, migrant spouse/partner and non-migrant spouse/partner), migrant parents and their non-migrant children who remain at ‘home’, and migrants and their elderly non-migrant parents and siblings. They mark the intersection, on the one hand, of individual and familial aspirations and needs, and on the other hand, structural opportunities and constraints. Such families are an inevitable consequence of migration and are hardly a recent phenomenon.

Transnational families cannot be counterposed with those whose members remain in one country. Instead, these families encourage us to problematize (implicit) assumptions about relatedness. For instance, is co-residence a necessity for family-making? And, is physical co-presence the primary means of showing care and affection? If some people migrate in order to make particular lives possible in their country of origin (Sørenson and Olwig 2002), then physical separation cannot be taken a priori to be culturally problematic. Equally, the transnational aspect of families may only be a temporary phase in the lives of specific families, as they ultimately seek to be reunited in the country of destination.

These families offer a unique lens through which to explore processes and experiences of transnational migration. They are often formed through the coming together of individuals with different linguistic, cultural, social, and/or religious backgrounds. In doing so, they may contribute to processes of creolization whereby selected elements from the various backgrounds of family members and the places where they live are brought together in ways that give rise to new identities and cultural practices (Cohen, 2007).

Today, communication and travel across vast distances are cheaper, and technologies more widely available, than in earlier periods of migration. Phone calls, text messages, and emails offer ways to stay in touch quickly, frequently, and easily, while Skype with video allows transnational kin to approximate a sense of physical co-presence. Safer, cheaper modes of travel make family visits more accessible. These technologies have been incorporated into a repertoire of familial practices that enable kin to sustain a sense of relatedness across space. Despite such practices, living apart can be an emotionally painful experience and contribute to a sense of alienation and disconnectedness among both those who move and those who stay. It can also give rise to gendered moral criticism that reflects specific cultural norms around what it means to be a good parent, child, or relative.

Moreover, being able to stay in touch brings with it the expectation of communication. Yet familial relations are complex. Affection can be accompanied by irritation, happiness by anger, and shame by guilt. The distance generated by migration can further complicate the mix of sentiments. Perhaps, for some family members, the physical distance has welcome (if unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable) consequences. Living apart can give rise to a greater freedom and autonomy, as well as opportunities to negotiate obligations and reconfigure familial relations.

Regardless of dynamics within transnational families, these so-called family-making technologies are not equally accessible to every family. (In)accessibility has both micro dimensions that relate to individuals and their families, as well as more macro structural dimensions. Wealthy families can easily travel to meet each other. Yet poorer families may be constrained in their movement not only by limited financial resources, but also by a lack of social capital to, for example, navigate bureaucratic visa procedures. Depending on the country in which they live, families of every social background may struggle to move around the world to visit their kin because of where their country is positioned socio-politically in the nation-state order, or what Massey (1991) refers to as the ‘global power geometry’. Meanwhile, family members traveling from other countries invite less scrutiny. Thus, transnational migration can also be a vector through which social stratification is articulated or compounded.

Much of the preceding discussion could be framed as a debate about translocal families. More specifically, family members live in particular places, whether they are villages, towns, or cities, and relate to each other from those locales, which occupy positions lower on the geographic scale than the nation state. Accordingly, it is important not to privilege a priori the nation state or the ‘national’ when trying to understand the lives of families who live apart.

Nonetheless, the nation-state system can exert a powerful influence over the shape such families take and how they live their lives. State regulations limit who can move (or visit), under what conditions, and for how long. It is important to place the tightening of regulations within a given (particular) social and historical moment, a time when much attention is directed at the issue of (im)migration in many countries around the world. Family reunification is a migration channel over which states have little control. Though the state may be constrained in its ability to stop family members from settling in the destination countries of their kin, such regulations can still interpenetrate their intimate relations such that laws differentiate kin on the basis of their migration status. Increasing state regulation will likely only contribute both to the rising prevalence and to the persistence of transnational families.

References

Bryceson, D. and Vuorela U. (eds.) (2002) The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford and New York: Berg.

Cohen, R. (2007) ‘Creolization’, in G. Ritzer (ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Malden: Blackwell Publishers.

Massey, D. (1991) ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, 38: 24-29.

Sørenson, N. N. and Olwig K. F. (2002) Work and Migration: Life and livelihoods in a Globalizing World, London: Routledge.

Affinities in Multicultural Neighbourhoods: Shared Values and their Differences - Ellie Vasta

Claims that Australian and British social cohesion is crumbling due to ethnic differences tend to highlight worst-case scenarios. In some multi-ethnic and multicultural countries of immigration, there is still an underlying drive for assimilation of people who do not share the same history or cultural traditions of the majority population. Post 9/11 in Britain, three successive prime ministers have publically noted the importance of ‘British values’, implying that some communities’ values are inferior to British values. It has been argued that the loss of common values challenges western democracies and that the promotion of cultural diversity only exacerbates the problem (Goodhart, 2004). Recently, both the British Prime Minister Cameron and German Chancellor Merkel have declared that multiculturalism has failed in their respective countries. In Australia, there have been similar debates around the consequences of diversity, especially for social cohesion, citizenship and national identity. Australian multiculturalism remains highly contested, ambivalent and unsettling, and elicits contradictory reactions. Apart from a citizenship test, Australia includes an ‘Australian Values Statement’ in the booklet provided to people applying for visas to live in Australia.

Such concern about the extent of cultural/ethnic diversity ignores social divisions far wider than those of ethnicity including differences between generations, between religious and secular Australians, between those with differing education and different class backgrounds. Affinities denotes conditions of being alike, based on values, histories or comparable circumstances. This does not mean people are the same, but that they find aspects of their lives which identify a commonality: living in the same area, being migrants, having children, and so on. Values such as self-direction, compassion, conformity and respect for difference are important mechanisms for guiding people’s behaviour and actions. However commonalities might be less about shared values than comparable experiences, circumstances and histories.

The most significant research on values is the World Values Survey (2010-2012). Using this, Inglehart and Baker found both ‘massive cultural change’ and the ‘persistence of distinctive cultural traditions’ (2000). This is apparent when examining differences and changes between the generations of migrant background in Sydney. Whether economic migrants or refugees, the first generation often experience extraordinary levels of uncertainty and must contend with numerous types of risk. People migrate precisely to provide a sense of security and belonging, for themselves and their children. One young Indian Australian claims that in his community there is

a strong emphasis on maintaining your culture, on keeping it strong. The group I come from, there’s a strong emphasis on that … ‘This is how you’re supposed to be’, because they want to protect it, and they want to make sure it survives … And they don’t know how they’ll cope or how they’ll adapt … whereas in the Australian culture, broadly speaking, there’s less emphasis on that because everybody is secure in who they are and what they’re doing, and the people around them.

Those born and bred in Australia have a certain sense of security inherent in that status, where ‘survival is taken for granted, instead of the feeling that survival is uncertain’ (Inglehart, 2000). In addition, Inglehart suggests that ‘age and economic circumstances (rising economic and physical security) bring about changes to value orientations between generations due to different experiences in their formative years’ (2000). This is similar to the findings of Hussain and Bagguley (2005) who report that second generation British Pakistanis draw upon citizenship rights to assert their identity and sense of belonging. Our young Indian-Australian respondent exemplifies how many younger and second generation Australians assert their sense of belonging and Australianness by constructing and claiming certain Australian values and identities, however different from the mainstream, as their own …

So, Australian values – it’s the same values I’ve described before about myself and my community, because I’m an Australian … I’ll tell you how I would like to define [Australian values]. I’d like them to be defined by being a multicultural society of, you know, people being vegetarian or going to a temple or going to a mosque or going to the beach or going for a walk … that’s the sort of Australian values that I hold.

In other words, he highlights ‘respect for diversity’ as an important value that is sometimes forgotten in multicultural Australia.

Family is described as one of the universal values, although it comes in different shapes and sizes. People compared and contrasted their notion of family and family practices with what they thought it meant to other ethnic groups. They mention various ethnic groups they think they may have more in common with. For example, a young Lebanese-Australian Muslim woman claims Christian Lebanese, Greeks, Italians and Macedonians have similar child-rearing practices to Muslim Lebanese and that these are different from Anglo-Australians. Examples she gave included not allowing their children to work in paid-employment while they are studying, not expecting their children to pay rent while living at home and encouraging them to live at home until they get married.

The same Lebanese-Australian woman claimed that although Asian Australians may have different ways of bringing up their children from her community, there was one strong similarity; ‘You know, actually, maybe they are similar because they do value their boys a lot more than the girls’. While child-rearing practices are positively similar to some European groups, the poor treatment and inequality of women has a negative similarity with ‘Chinese Asians’. Indeed, Norris and Inglehart (2002), using results from the World Values Survey, find that contrary to the Samuel Huntington thesis about the core clash of values between western democratic values and Islamic religious values, the cultural faultline is much more concerned with gender inequality.

References

Goodhart, D. (2004) ‘Too Diverse?’, Prospect, 95: 30-37.

Hussain, Y. and Bagguley, P. (2005) ‘Citizenship, Ethnicity and Identity: British Pakistanis after the 2001 “Riots”’, Sociology, 39(3): 407-425.

Inglehart, R. (2000) ‘Globalization and Postmodern Values’, The Washington Quarterly, 23(1): 215–228.

Inglehart, R. and Baker, W. E. (2000) ‘Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values, American Sociological Review, 65 (1): 19-51.

Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2002) ‘Islam & the West: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis’, RWP02-015, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

The research in this article was taken from the Affinities in Multicultural Australia pilot project, 2011-13

Sexuality and Migration - Eithne Luibhéid

How are sexuality and migration shaped and reshaped by one another? Varied definitions of sexuality have made this a challenging question to answer. Until recently, sexuality was frequently conflated with gender, or else addressed under rubrics like crime, deviance, morality, or disease (Manalansan, 2006). Moreover, sexuality was commonly understood as a private matter and irrelevant to the ‘big’ questions about migration. Studies of sexuality were often framed around the modernist belief that everyone has an individual sexual identity – even though this belief is not applicable to other times and places.

Queer theory, which emerged in the early 1990s, challenged these approaches and opened up new possibilities for thinking about the connections between sexuality and migration. Refusing essentialist and transhistorical constructs of sexual identities, queer theory instead explores the production of sexual subjectivities, how distinctions between normal and abnormal get created, and the relations of domination and subordination involved. It addresses sexuality as a regime of power that thoroughly shapes families, communities, state institutions, and economies; and it underscores that sexual norms, struggles and forms of governance always articulate hierarchies of gender, race, class and geopolitics.

Concomitantly, accelerated globalization processes – that extend histories of colonialism and global capitalism – produced a new ‘age of migration.’ The field of migration studies, which had naturalized the framework of the sovereign nation state that controlled its own borders, began to acknowledge the impact of globalization, the fact that migrants often lived transnational lives, the need to question nationalist analytic frameworks, the continuing impact of (neo)colonialism, and the significance of diasporic experiences. It also recognized that immigration policing has multiplied and dispersed national borders both inward into national territories, and outward to extraterritorial locations.

In this context, exploring connections between sexuality and migration often begins with the recognition that today’s global order emerged through colonial processes. According to Ann Laura Stoler (2002), sexual arrangements were never just metaphors, but also material mechanisms, for creating and maintaining racialized, gendered, economic and geopolitical distinctions between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Consequently, ‘who bedded and wedded whom in the colonies… was never left to chance,’ and migration possibilities were organized accordingly (Stoler, 2002). With the shift to a world of nation states that supposedly controlled their own borders, sexuality retained its importance in creating and naturalizing inequalities, this time through constructs of nation, citizenry, social ordering, and economy – and enforced by expanding state migration controls.

These processes variously shaped migration. For instance, sexuality has impelled migration by individuals such as: lesbians, gay men, and unmarried pregnant women seeking to avoid discrimination or stigmatization; married people seeking employment to support children; women and men using marriage as a strategy for legal migration; those going abroad to sell sex; individuals seeking HIV/AIDS treatment; sex tourists; and others. Sexuality also shapes people’s access to social networks that provide the information, resources, and contacts that enable migration. Nation states, in turn, often decide whether to admit or refuse entry to migrants based on sexual considerations that cross-cut racial, gender, class, and geopolitical calculations. For instance, legal admission often depends on fitting into normative definitions of family, kinship or marriage, or claiming fear of persecution that takes sexualized form or is based on sexuality. Conversely, migrants are often denied legal status when they cannot fit into normative definitions of family, or are believed to present sexual danger (for example, as supposed carriers of sexual diseases, or loose women, or men who might sexually prey on others, or sexual ‘perverts’). Migrants continue to be governed in sexual terms after entering the nation state, especially through their interactions with economic, health, welfare, and education systems. Moreover, citizens respond to migrants through a sexualized lens, often seeing them as exotic, sexually backwards/traditional/repressed, highly fertile, bearers of perversion and disease – or as models of sexual and moral values that the citizenry should emulate. Through these processes, binaries of us/them, citizen/migrant, normal/deviant become expressed, mapped onto bodies and places, and struggled over.

Migrants respond in complex ways to prevailing assumptions about their sexual practices and beliefs. Their sexualities are often evaluated in terms of their supposed success or failure in ‘assimilating’ to dominant cultural sexual norms (which are held to be superior to migrants’ cultures), and the presumption that exposure to dominant culture causes change. But new scholarship suggests that gender, racial and economic discrimination; housing and occupational segregation; precarious legal status; language barriers; transnational ties; and migrants’ own creative adaptations provide better explanations for change. These frameworks reorient readers away from Eurocentric models of linear progress and assimilation, toward complexity, multiplicity, hybridity, transnationalism, and multiple modernities – that involve not an uncritical celebration of difference, but rather the negotiation of colonial legacies and power inequalities. The works also provide models of global flows that decenter the west, deconstruct binaries like local/global and traditional/modernity, and rethink what borders do.

Recent studies also explore how individual feelings of love and desire interact with large-scale social and economic structures that condition migration. Analyzing how migrants refashion their selves and subjectivities, scholars have paid particular attention to the role of mass media, virtual flows, and the internet. Scholars have also explored connections between migration, sexualities and the second generation (especially daughters); experiences of migrant sex workers; the politics of migrants’ childbearing; migration and HIV/AIDS; sexuality, migration and asylum claims; experiences of transnational intimacies and families; and to some extent, the lives of migrant gay men and transgender people (lesbians have received little attention).

Given that both migration and sexual controls are intimately tied to histories of colonialism, global capitalism, and slavery, scholars have posed challenging questions about interconnections among sexuality, migration, and struggles to end inequalities. Some explore how the criminalization of unauthorized migrants, the rise of the prison industrial complex, and sexual norms that articulate racial, gender, and class hierarchies, work in tandem to legitimize subjecting diverse populations to exploitation, violence, and shortened lives. Others problematize how global human rights discourses used in asylum cases, including those involving sexuality, may at once reinscribe colonial, racial and gender inequalities but nonetheless present opportunities for change. These and other analyses ask us to question critically how the connections between sexuality and migration may reinforce, or offer opportunities to transform, multiple inequalities at different scales.

References

Manalansan M. F. (2006) ‘Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies’, International Migration Review 40(1): 224-249.

Stoler A. L. (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Making Politics

Bliss in Capetown, 1921 - M. J. Oliver

I done find Jim in dockyard lyin on shed floor.

He look scare, I close door gentle. No worry, I say,

I call Bliss, an I kiss him rose flower mouth.

Pleasure sailor that my job, but this diffrent.

I only fourteen, done forget, he fifteen, sixteen most.

Old sailor done rape him cabin boy every day, he tell me,

so he jump ship. I like you yellow hair, I say.

I bring him string beans an a pear from my step-daddy plot,

cassava an rice from ship I work nights,

a mango, a plum an a small pickle fish one day.

He love Table Mountain peek upside li’l window

wile we eat an laugh lot, roll round. Oh Bliss!

he say, Marry me, then you not do this nice thing

with bad men you not love – never gain.

You mad sugarbush, No! I say an throw him white arm far way.

You desert ship, you got no right, no pass. Law here hang you.

Liberty Belle she in dock an I know she sail tonight. You go.

Soon as dark Jim an me we go quiet from shed we lay.

Crew on waterfront all busy, all girls an boys they say bye-bye.

Jim he fly like mosquito round me, here, there, he kiss me.

Then short time hush, him sweet head in Bliss black hands.

Up gang plank he zig zag. Gone.

COMPAS Poetry Competition 2013 Shortlisted

Migration, Suffering and Rights - Julia O’Connell Davidson

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Musée des Beaux Arts - W. H. Auden

In an essay about suffering which takes Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts as its starting point, David Morris observes that we witness other people’s suffering from a distance, ‘as if through a pane of thick glass’ (Morris 1997). The poem, he says, speaks to the fact that our own lives are necessarily ‘more immediate and absorbing’, and suggests that our capacity for detachment is ‘the outcome of a structural position we cannot help but occupy’. However, Morris continues, there is a difference between this kind of detachment and an ideological blindness to the suffering of those groups of people who are excluded from our ‘moral community’. It is not the same to turn away from news reporting a tragedy affecting people far away and continue to butter the breakfast toast because there is nothing you can do to help, as it is to imagine that ‘people like them’ do not suffer as you would if affected by a similar tragedy. The recognition of a person or group’s suffering is linked to their inclusion in the moral community, Morris argues: ‘Suffering… is not a raw datum, a natural phenomenon we can identify and measure, but a social status that we extend or withhold’.

I was reminded of Morris’s essay when I read about the series of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in October 2013, in which some 400 people are believed to have drowned whilst attempting to make the crossing from Libya to Lampedusa. Media reporting of the disasters noted that humanitarian agencies estimate that 20,000 lives have been lost in similar circumstances over the past 20 years, and that there are many thousands more men, women and children currently in North African countries, waiting to attempt the crossing (Davies, 2013). People in Europe heard this news and continued with the prosaic business of daily life, just as the ship in Auden’s poem continued on its way after witnessing Icarus fall into the sea. The comments sections beneath newspaper articles on the tragedies provide an insight into their thoughts as they did so.

Some certainly recognized the suffering of the migrants concerned, but comments beneath a Daily Mail article included the following: ‘Isn’t it about time these people stayed to sort out the mess in their own countries instead of running away?’; and ‘Hard as it may seem, the only solution is to send all of them (without exception) back to the port where they came from’; and ‘As much as this is a sad story, the UK cannot accommodate the world and it’s wife in such a small island, this is unfair for the population’ (Robinson, 2013). These are not the comments of people simply too absorbed in their own lives to dwell on the suffering of distant people. They express an active resistance against the ethical claim that these migrants’ suffering might make upon the authors.

Suffering occupies an important place in refugee and forced migration studies, for in international refugee and human rights law, those who are understood to have suffered are often afforded special status in terms of rights and protections. But much as the connective tissue between suffering and rights appears as a humane counterbalance to the rather callous comments above, it also presents us with a quandary. Though Morris is without doubt correct to say that the status of suffering is more readily afforded to those who are perceived as members of the moral community, suffering is neither a necessary criterion for community membership nor the usual route to inclusion. Indeed, perhaps what the Daily Mail readers were really concerned to contest is the idea that distant others should be able to secure rights of inclusion in European countries on the basis of their suffering. And on this question of whether rights and recognition as a morally considerable person should be tied up with suffering, I find myself in agreement with them, albeit for very different reasons.

Because suffering is not raw datum, it can be selectively recognized. Thus, states acknowledge that people can be forced to move as a consequence of suffering purposefully inflicted by private or state actors (‘traffickers’, actors who persecute on the basis of political or religious belief, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc.) or consequent upon war and armed conflict, but not as a result of suffering that stems from impersonal factors, such as poverty. Such distinctions even came into play in commentary on the October shipwrecks – the High Commissioner of the UNHCR ‘expressed particular worry that Syrians, who are fleeing a frightening conflict, are resorting to this dangerous route and drowning as they were seeking a safe haven in Europe’ [emphasis added] (UNHCR, 2013).

Unfortunately, it is perfectly possible for states simultaneously to recognize some kinds of suffering as a qualification for community inclusion, but continue to operate the lethal immigration regimes and border controls that both deny and generate other kinds of suffering. In Auden’s poem, the fact that the ship ‘sailed calmly on’ expresses an existential truth. But until rights are afforded on the basis of humanity, not nationality or claims to suffering, even this depressing ‘human position’ is not universally shared. We are not all free to sail on by.

References

Davies, L. (2013) ‘Why Lampedusa Remains an Island of Hope for Migrants’, The Guardian (16 October), http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/16/lampedusa-island-of-hope, date accessed 3 December 2013.

Morris, D. (1997) ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre and Moral Community’, in A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock (eds.) Social Suffering, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robinson, W. (2013) ‘Shocking Image of Hundreds of African Migrants on Raft Bound for Europe as it Emerges 20,000 May Have Died in Past Two Decades’, The Daily Mail (13 October), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2457791/Shocking-image-hundreds-African-migrants-raft-bound-Europe-emerges-20-000-died-past-decades.html, date accessed 3 December 2013.

UNHCR (2013) ‘UNHCR Chief Expresses Shock at New Mediterranean Boat Tragedy,’ UNHRC press release (12 October), http://www.unhcr.org/52594c6a6.html, date accessed 3 December 2013.

Amnesty - Linda Bosniak

The politics of immigration are often fought out through debates over amnesty. Restrictionists seek to delegitimize various forms of protection of irregular migrants by branding them as ‘amnesty’. In contrast, immigrants’ rights advocates talk about amnesty aspirationally to signify the rightful incorporation of previously marginalized noncitizens. Some worry that the concept has been too successfully commandeered by the right and have therefore substituted other terms, including ‘regularization’ and ‘legalization’. Nevertheless, for many progressives, the idea of amnesty continues to represent just and necessary policy.

Arguments over amnesty are about the forms that immigration policy should take regarding responsibility, fault, victimization and accountability. Amnesty shares an etymological cognate with amnesia and is often characterized as a kind of (official) forgetting of a transgression or offence. Inevitably, then, the debate begins with a threshold question: should the act at issue be regarded as transgressive at all? Assuming a transgression, amnesty’s ‘forgetting’ has a variety of valences. Broadly, amnesty arguments tend to come in three versions: forgive-and-forget, administrative reset, and vindication.

The forgive-and-forget version presumes that the recipient has perpetrated an offence, with amnesty then pardoning the perpetrator and erasing the penalty. Notice, however, that granting amnesty performs a kind of expressive indictment, meaning the symbolic cost to the beneficiary may be steep. In some settings, amnesty has been opposed by potential beneficiaries for just this reason. Critics of forgive-and-forget amnesty, in turn, claim that it produces impunity by tolerating rather than punishing offenders’ conduct, is unjust to those who played by the rules and, at the least, must be coupled with conditions or penalties (fines, public apology, probation) to underline that fault still attaches. Others in the transitional justice context object to what they view as amnesty’s ‘enforced forgetting’ altogether.

In amnesty’s administrative reset version, the state likewise views itself as responding to an offence, but instead of focusing on fault, the premise is that the law is unenforceable. Amnesty is treated as a response to administrative failure, and is undertaken in the interests of forward-looking, systemic functionality. This conception is applied in a variety of contexts, both politically charged and mundane, including those of firearms, narcotics, tax collection and parking fines. Associated discourse sometimes suggests that the transgression was not so bad, or its badness was counterweighed by the cost to society of widespread noncompliance, or that de facto amnesty is the unacknowledged policy in any case, and that it’s better to govern transparently rather than inadvertently. Critics complain that the consequentialist approach rewards the activity in question (for example, tax amnesties are said to ‘enrage compliant tax payers’).

A third version treats amnesty as vindication. Here, amnesty is portrayed as protecting victims, rather than indicting wrongdoers (the name of the organization ‘Amnesty International’ conveys this understanding). This approach entails a moral reframing: the claim is that the violated rule was unjust, or that the beneficiaries’ prosecution was not justifiable, and that at the least, the very policies defining the transgression now need interrogation. For example, in debates in the US during the Vietnam era, some supporters of amnesty for draft avoiders maintained that the true transgressors were the war-makers, not the resistors. In this view, prosecuted draft avoiders deserved protection from indefensible penalties imposed in an unjustified war. This was the understanding of amnesty advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1973 essay: In calling for ‘amnesty’, he wrote, war resistors and deserters

… did not mean ‘pardon,’ nor even forgetfulness. Certain of the justice of their cause, they simply wanted their rights recognized. And this could not be done unless the government was to reverse itself publicly, and, so to speak, say, ‘If these men have the right not to wage this war, then we on our side had no right to declare it’.

The point thus far is that political actors argue about matters of accountability through amnesty-talk, and yet the amnesty concept offers no consistent understanding of what accountability entails, and stands for no consistent approach for achieving it.

In the immigration context, the idea of amnesty cuts in various directions. Current debates tend to feature forgive-and-forget and/or administrative reset versions of amnesty. The role of vindication arguments is more equivocal. Most immigrants’ rights defenders, including academics, seem ambivalent about them. On the one hand, amnesty advocates often portray potential recipients as victims of exploitative employers and callous governmental actors, and amnesty as a means of releasing beneficiaries from the vulnerability of unauthorized status. On the other hand, amnesty advocates rarely claim that amnesty emancipates immigrants from unjust border laws – those same laws which defined them as ‘undocumented’ in the first place – nor that immigrants were justified in violating the existing law. It is more common to hear that the immigrants’ earlier ‘wrongdoing’ has been superseded by circumstances – usually, by accrual of time and ties in the receiving state. Such arguments continue to assume that the immigration law was just, and that the initial legal violation was wrong, but that something subsequent has changed the moral calculus. Indeed, advocates often link their call for amnesty with a commitment to heightening the enforcement of borders going forward. This kind of argument, protective in intent as it is, has led more radical immigrants’ rights advocates to repudiate amnesty as a political goal, viewing it as effectively tarring immigrants and legitimizing the border laws that produce their unauthorized status.

However, such legitimation is not inherent in the idea of amnesty. More thoroughgoing, vindicatory amnesty arguments are at least conceivable. The most radical position would be that the state’s border laws are unjust ab initio, so entry without inspection or overstaying cannot properly be deemed a wrong. This argument could be made via a liberal-cosmopolitan Rawlsian critique, a humanitarian ethos-of-hospitality critique, or a left-anarcho-libertarian critique of the kind advanced by organizations like NoBorders. Alternatively, one could make a historically-based argument that, where the receiving state has a coercive or exploitative history with the sending state, exclusionary laws in relation to nationals of those states are unjustified. With all the arguments, the upshot is the same: if the laws are unjust, then the immigrant is not culpable for violating them; instead, the state was wrong to enforce them. An alternative vindicatory amnesty position might maintain that, even if border laws are not themselves immoral, unauthorized immigrants should not be regarded as culpable because their actions are excusable. The excuse position could be expressed in duress terms – by invoking the immigrant’s need to feed self and family, or escape suffering; or in inducement terms – the state was inviting or tolerating immigrant presence (or with regards to demand for labour, failing to enforce the employer sanctions laws); or, in the case of undocumented youth, by invoking incapacity – lack of choice and control – at the time of the illegal act (though note that this last tack ends up indicting the ‘culpable’ parents by contrast).

In sum, ‘amnesty’-talk need not serve as a diversion from ultimate justice questions. It contains vindicatory and emancipatory elements as well as legitimizing ones. There is no true and single meaning of ‘amnesty’; what matters is the uses to which the idea is put.

References

Sartre, J-P. (1973) ‘Sartre on Amnesty’, The New York Review of Books, 20(6).

EU Citizenship, Roma Mobility and Anti-Gypsyism: Time for Reframing the Debate? - Nando Sigona

Given the limited results achieved to date by the EU and EU member states in addressing the multiple exclusion of the Romani people in Europe, it is time to rethink some of the assumptions on which past initiatives have been built. Here I would like to suggest, very briefly, some ways to reframe the current debate on the Roma in Europe.

In a recent article, trying to answer the question ‘Why have the Roma become a target and a scapegoat in France today?’ the French sociologist Éric Fassin reminded us that the ‘object of phobia is not to be mistaken for its source’ and that the ‘explanation of politics is of political nature’ (Fassin, 2010). These remarks suggest that, in order to understand what is happening in the EU today in relation to Romani communities, we must turn our gaze away from the Roma. Instead, we need to examine the broader picture: more particularly, the EU, an institutional and political construction that has undergone two decades of transition, enlargement, and institutional, economic and social restructuring, and that is currently under incredible pressure as a result of the financial crisis and rampant nationalism. We can then try to locate the Roma within these processes.

The Roma are a testing ground and an opportunity for the EU political project. Attempts to portrait them as exotic and other to the imagined EU community hide a centuries long history of bans, forced migration and expulsion, but also cohabitation and conviviality. The Roma are one of the peoples that makes the European Union, much like the Swedes or the Danes (including numerically), and not some kind of alien body from a remote elsewhere; yet they are nonetheless a people without adequate institutional representation. The current attempt to curb their mobility (as well as their right to establish themselves in another member state) challenges one of the key pillars of the European Union and, at a time of major structural tensions, calls into question the capacity of the EU to fully embrace its mandate vis-à-vis the mounting nationalist demands of member states. The Roma ‘threat’ is manipulated and used by Eurosceptic political actors to score points against the overall EU project.

As I have shown in Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe (Sigona and Trehan, 2009) apart from structural tensions resulting from rapid economic transformation, the transition of formerly socialist states towards capitalism has been characterised by a search for foundational myths to redefine the relationship between state and nation. In such a context, nationalist movements have grown stronger, and so have numerous far-right racist and xenophobic groups that have marked out for themselves increasingly large spaces in the political life of most European countries. This overall shift to the right, exacerbated by the existing confusion in the social-democratic camp, has turned the Roma, a minority without significant political representation, into an easy target for racist campaigns that at times culminate in violence.

In contemporary Europe, racism against Roma is not just confined to a few extremist fringe elements. Successive Eurobarometer surveys^1 underline just how widespread prejudice and stereotypes about this minority are. Interestingly, despite this widespread intolerance towards the Roma, terms such as anti-Gypsyism and Romaphobia only entered EU’s political vocabulary in the mid-2000s. To be effective, any solution has to acknowledge the ‘mainstream’ nature of anti-Romani sentiments; this is not the case for example in the EU Framework for national Roma integration strategies.2

The history of Romani communities in Europe is marked by episodes of mass persecution, violence and discrimination perpetrated by both institutional and non-institutional agents. The mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Roma systematically carried out by the Nazi regime before and during World War II was the culmination of a process, not an isolated episode. The construction of the Romani communities as a ‘race of criminals’ genetically inclined to crime was a central component of the ideological apparatus that provided a ‘justification’ for the genocide of European Roma.

To understand the contemporary spread of anti-Gypsyism in neoliberal Europe and the link between the racial criminalization of the Roma and discriminatory policy and practice, we should bear in mind that anti-Gypsyism is not a new phenomenon; nonetheless, in its current configuration, it is inextricably intertwined with the transformations that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, the consolidation of liberal democracies and neoliberal economic principles in the European Union, and processes of pauperisation experienced by many Romani communities.

A new critical approach addressing the root causes of Roma exclusion is urgently needed. This must include an understanding of the Roma history of exclusion within the history of Europe, and place the successful participation of the Roma in European polity at the core of the EU project. This is where the Roma belong.

Notes

1For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm.

2For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/roma/national-strategies/index_en.htm.

References

Fassin, E. (2010) ‘Why the Roma?’, Theory, Culture & Society blog (7 October), http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com/2010/10/eric-fassin-why-roma.htm.

Sigona, N. and Trehan, N. (2009) ‘Introduction: Romani Politics in Neoliberal Europe’, in N. Sigona, and N. Trehan (eds.) Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization and the Neoliberal Order, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

A Spirituality of Migration? - Michael Nausner

Ever since the Enlightenment, the question of whether spirituality is a necessary or even viable aspect of social life has been raised. Faith, understood as a set of beliefs in more or less authoritarian rules imposed from above, has met with increasing suspicion. In a world in which the rights of individuals and democratic social systems were evolving, religious systems seemed to be backward-looking obstacles to the progress of western nations. At the same time, religious systems often supported the colonial and imperial ambitions of western states. They mirrored the construction of the world in terms of ‘the west vs. the rest’, by propagating a world view based on the division of the world into a Christian and a non-Christian sphere.

The strength of the legacy of such a cultural epistemology can be seen in the frequent attempts on the part of theologians and politicians to argue for the protection of a ‘Christian Occident’ or a ‘Christian Europe’. An extreme example of such a mindset was the campaign of the Austrian Freedom Party during the run-up to elections in 2013. All over the country, large billboards broadcast the blue-eyed leader of the party in friendly conversation with healthy people of light skin colour, with accompanying text reading: ‘Love your neighbour. For me this means our Austrians’. Notwithstanding protests by mainstream Christian churches in Austria, the Freedom Party garnered almost a quarter of the votes of the Austrian people. Obviously, for this party known for its aggressively xenophobic campaigning, the trick of ‘positive’ advertising had been successful. The implication seems to be: what is wrong with loving our Austrians? There is nothing wrong with protecting a Christian inside from the migrating non-Christians flooding Europe from the outside.

From a theological point of view, of course, this logic is utterly flawed with respect to the key text on neighbourly love in the New Testament. The parable of the Good Samaritan is still known, I believe, by large portions of the secularized European population. It may still belong to Europe’s ‘Christian heritage’, but it most decidedly is not a story that is attached to one particular religion. It is the story Jesus tells an interlocutor who had asked the question: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The story ends with two surprises: firstly, the person who shows neighbourly love is a migrating foreigner, a hated Samaritan passing through Jewish territory. Secondly, it is not the person rightly inhabiting the homeland, but rather this migrating foreigner, who extends a helping hand. The theological outcome is ambiguous. One aspect, however, can be summarized by saying that neighbourly love materializes not just by providing support to the outsiders, but, importantly, by acknowledging the agency of these outsiders in order to be helped by them. Thus, theologically speaking, to restrict neighbourly love to ‘our Austrians’ is to distort the parable recounted by the ancient Greek writer of Luke’s Gospel.

Religious systems, including Christian missionary activities through the ages, have been misused to deny the agency of the ‘other’. However, using the parable of the Good Samaritan as a point of departure, I would say that a grounded spirituality brings together an expectation of the agency both of the divine and of the human ‘other’. In the case of the Good Samaritan, this ‘other’ was a migrant. Such spirituality has political implications. If a political system takes seriously the notion that the sedentary view is not necessarily the view that best serves the common good, a new openness may emerge towards the multiple ways in which a migrant’s perspective can help to shape a society to be a more constructive part of the global village. A society that continues to understand its relation to migrating people as a matter of unilateral adaptation to an (often fictitious) sedentary culture is missing out on an indispensible political resource: the perceptive quality of the migrant’s vision. After all, as Homi Bhabha (1994) has said in reference to Salman Rushdie’s work, ‘the truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision’.

A spirituality of migration has less to do with ‘being nice to refugees’, and more to do with an awareness that spirituality itself has a migratory character. Taking clues from the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is a spirituality that continuously is prepared to travel, so to speak, into the contact zones between cultures. And in contrast to all attempts of religious empire-building through the ages, it knows that it does not have a ‘permanent dwelling’ in the world, but is looking for a ‘future dwelling place’, as the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament has it. This future dwelling, however, is not to be imagined just as a lofty realm beyond social coexistence. Rather, I understand the imagining of a more just dwelling as a process that is simultaneously spiritual and political. And it needs migrants’ perspectives in order to be inclusive.

References

Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.

Groody, D. G. and Campese, G. (eds.) (2008) A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Migration and Population Growth: Future Predictions and Contemporary Politics - Alessio Cangiano

Although migration policy-making remains mostly driven by short-term economic objectives and human rights frameworks (for example, for the admission of family migrants and asylum seekers), demographic arguments are gaining grounds in migration debates in some of the major immigrant-receiving countries where population growth has been (and is expected to be) largely driven by net migration. In the UK, the rise in immigration levels over the past decade has fuelled the idea that Britain’s demography is not ‘sustainable’. The impact of immigration on population growth has become a ubiquitous issue in public debates about growing housing needs, congested road networks and public transport, loss of countryside to eco-town developments, and public service provision. In the Australian election of 2010, both major parties fuelled a heated public debate about population growth, linked to widespread public anxieties about migration, asylum seekers, and the ‘failure of multiculturalism’. The association between immigration and population growth has also featured strongly in US debates where vocal population control and environmentalist lobbies advocate immigration restrictions.

Without entering into the merits of the costs and benefits of immigration and population growth – a polarised debate that is typically informed by partial and highly contested evidence – it is legitimate to ask whether it is desirable to prioritise demographic objectives in migration policies. And, if so, is it feasible to use migration policies to achieve predetermined levels of net migration and thereby manage population growth? Taking the achievement of a particular population size as a goal of migration policies is beset with practical and ethical challenges, and there are numerous constraints on attaining a net migration target.

Demographic sustainability is a notoriously imprecise concept and demographic objectives (for example, a ‘desirable’ pace of population growth or a stable age structure) only make sense when their broader economic, social and environmental implications are taken into account. Competing priorities exist between these policy domains: for example, a migration policy aiming at maximising economic growth may look very different from one prioritising environmental sustainability. There is no evidence of an ‘optimum’ population size that maximizes general wellbeing. An obvious risk in setting such a number is that a complex series of issues affecting virtually every area of public policy are reduced to an arbitrary, round number.

The scope for managing migration as a policy instrument to meet ‘desirable’ demographic objectives raises ethical questions: not only in the functional logic underpinning the use of migration policies to achieve exclusively the receiving country’s national interests, but also in the risk of putting the blame on migrants for making population growth ‘unsustainable’. It also has numerous constraints. An important challenge for long-term demographic planning is that migration trends are subject to a high degree of uncertainty and are extremely difficult to predict. Governments have little or no control over significant parts of the flows that make up the net migration aggregate. In liberal democracies, emigration of nationals cannot be limited. For EU member states, the regime of free circulation of EEA citizens and non-EEA permanent residents, combined with considerable diversity in demographic trends across the EU, means that it would be difficult to adopt an immigration policy inspired by demographic objectives within a shared system of European migration governance – an argument that is often put forward by far-right anti-immigration lobbyists as a rationale for the UK to leave the EU. Internal mobility, which can have major implications for infrastructure and public service provision, is also difficult to manage in many states, though China, for example, has tried. Some categories of foreign immigrants can be controlled, but not without economic and social costs. Restricting highly skilled workers’ and students’ mobility might have detrimental implications for the competitiveness of the economy and for the country’s geopolitical influence. Limiting rights to family reunification and international protection can undermine compliance with international human rights frameworks and ultimately clash with some key liberal values.

One constructive element of introducing population growth into migration debates is that it marks a move away from a narrowly-framed migration debate focusing on short-term labour market objectives and considering migration in isolation, to a broader, long-term perspective that sees migration as a structural phenomenon and emphasises the need for an integrated policy framework considering migration in relation to other socio-demographic trends. However, given the difficulties both of formulating desirable demographic objectives and of achieving them by managing the net migration aggregate, it is reasonable to wonder whether the emerging rationale to reduce net migration in order to curb population growth is a genuine policy objective or another rhetorical argument to justify exclusionary immigration regulations.

Unions, Migration and the Road Less Travelled - Nick Clark

The British Labour Party, backed by the trade union movement, fought a great, honourable battle in the last century for dignity of labour and fair pay. This is all being lost, thanks in part to the arrival of waves of cheap labour from the east.

- Peter Oborne, 2013

It would ordinarily be hard to imagine a Daily Telegraph columnist as defender of trade unions and their achievements. Harder still when one considers that only four years previously, the same Peter Oborne had praised Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the unions in the pages of the Daily Mail. As Emerson put it, ‘the louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons’ (Emerson, 1860).

But Oborne is pursuing a well-worn strategy of divide and rule. He presents a sort of hierarchy, in which workers are encouraged to identify themselves (and perhaps their unions) as being a step above migrants. This is as crude as religious bigotry in Northern Ireland, which was derided by Eamonn McCann as a ‘tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence’. McCann went on to point out the function of sectarianism, citing former Northern Irish PM Brian Faulkner praising factory owners marching shoulder to shoulder with their workforce, thus guaranteeing themselves, ‘the feeling of security that the wage earners wouldn’t be marching against them’ (McCann, 1986).

Some expect unions themselves to continue to fall for this; in 2007, one Labour leader even called for British jobs for British workers at the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Conference. Trade unions are essentially economic reformist organisations – they seek to organise and represent the maximum proportion of workers in a workplace or industry. This means that they can encompass a membership which has a wide diversity of opinions, but (in reality) a narrow range of economic interests. At the same time, members may expect that, as well as protecting ‘vested interests’ (that is, those of existing members supposedly privileged by their insider status), unions will also act as the ‘sword of justice’, seeking to combat injustice and inequality (Flanders, 1970). The apparent contradiction between the two roles is displayed when it comes to migration. Migrants may be regarded as victims, as competitors (and agents of the bosses), or comrades, and we do not have to look very hard to find examples of all of these in our history.

For example, ex-international West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine worked for the British Labour Ministry during World War II as a welfare officer dealing with black migrant workers in factories in the north west. He reported that the Boilermakers’ union, soured by the experience of post-World War I unemployment amongst their members, were refusing to admit black workers into membership, but went on to report: ‘The electrical unions, on the other hand, were most helpful, and allowed coloured representatives to take places on Union Committees’ (Constantine, 1954).

More recently, the sword of justice was evidenced by General Secretary Bill Morris of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, in his outspoken opposition to New Labour’s introduction of vouchers for asylum seekers, and also in the TUC’s support of the Committee to Assist Refugee Academics’ guide on education for refugees in 2005.

It might be argued that adopting such positions is easier over general principles than over matters of economic competition. A member of the Executive Council of the National Union of Seamen made the reasoning for hostility to migration explicit at the NUS General Meeting in 1958: ‘I am a very democratically minded man; I have no objection to an Asiatic seaman or a West Indian earning a living, but when my own standard of living is jeopardised then it is a different matter’. This is not a million miles away from the position recently proposed by current RMT (National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, successor to the NUS) General Secretary Bob Crow: ‘Free movement within the EU impoverishes workers in a race to the bottom and creates a “brain drain” in eastern European countries, condemning them to a future of underdevelopment and decline’ (2013).

Yet alongside the history of protectionism is another, much more honourable one based on solidarity. Unions in both public and private sectors (including the RMT) have chosen to draw in members from migrant communities, often seeking out organisers and activists from those communities in order to resist the race to the bottom. In this context it is worth noting that in a workplace, the presence of trade union organisation is a better predictor of higher wages and conditions than the presence of migrant workers is a predictor of poor ones.

We are better placed now than we were in the 1960s and 70s with regards to ideas of equality, although further back in terms of the means to deliver them. Unions remain places where ideas and strategy are contested, and who wins those contests matters. A fight against low pay or zero hours will benefit all workers, but cannot be won without the participation of all: not by appealing to what divides, as Oborne does, but to what unites.

References

Constantine, L. (1954) Colour Bar, London: Stanley Paul & Co.

Emerson, R. W. (1860) Worship in “The Conduct of Life”, Fairfords: Echo Library

Flanders, A. (1970) Management and Unions: The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations, London: Faber and Faber.

Hewitt, D. (1958) The Proceedings of the General Meeting, National Union of Seamen.

McCann, Eamonn (1986) ‘The Protestant Working Class’, Socialist Worker Review, 89: 19-21.

Oborne, P. (2013) ‘Immigration: Britain’s Doors Are Wide Open, and We Can’t even Talk about It’, Daily Telegraph (13 November).

RMT (2013) ‘Bob Crow Explains Why No2EU is Standing in 2014 Elections’, RMT website, http://www.rmt.org.uk/news/bob-crow-explains-why-no2eu-is-standing-in-2014-elections/ accessed 14 November 2013.

Citizenship - Phillip Cole

To be a citizen is to be a member of a political community. For the Greeks, the relevant political community was the city, although Diogenes did consider himself to be a citizen of the ‘cosmos’. As the world is currently constituted, citizenship amounts to membership of a nation state, although regional organizations may give rise to other forms. For example European Union citizenship is additional to national citizenship of an EU member state (although dependent on it) and gives rise to additional rights.

Citizenship is defined both internally, in terms of the rights and duties citizens hold as members of the state, and externally, by the rules which distinguish members from non-members. While much debate concerns internal membership, the external boundary of citizenship cannot be overlooked, as it determines who has access to the goods and burdens of internal membership, and defines the journey people have to undertake if they want to traverse the boundary from the outside to the inside.

The external rules of membership vary between states, but there are general features that most systems have in common. The most straightforward method is birth, either being born within the state’s territory (jus soli) or being born to someone who is already a citizen (jus sanguinis). Here, citizenship is not chosen by you or the state you are a member of: you simply find that you are a member of a particular state, and the state finds that you are a member. The other main method is migration: travel from one state to another and the aquisition of residence according to legal conditions for membership. Here, membership is through choice, and the choice can run in either direction: you may be able to choose a particular state to join, and the state may have the choice of whether to accept you as a member. The scope for choice here, though, can be limited. In the end, it is the state which retains the position of power, in that it decides the rules and can vary them in any way it wishes. So when it comes to birth, it can decide whether jus soli or jus sanguinis holds, can define its territory, or can vary the relations you must have with people who are already citizens. When it comes to migration, it can close the door on would-be citizens entirely, or can vary the conditions would-be citizens must meet to qualify, or it can retain the right to choose even when migrants have met all conditions.

Journeys to citizenship can therefore be complex and filled with obstacles and dangers, and it is the migration route that is the most complex, as the would-be citizen negotiates the national border. We tend to think of borders as simple binaries with an inside and an outside, but borders as the external markers of membership are multidimensional, and identify different obstacles and spaces where the journey may come to a premature end.

The first boundary the migrant must cross is to gain access to the national territory as a physical space. In Europe, this part of the journey is becoming more difficult and dangerous, as states put up more barriers to make access to territory harder to achieve. Immigration, especially across Europe’s southern borders with Africa, has become increasingly criminalized, forcing migrants to take ever more perilous routes which, for many, end in death. So one space where the journey may come to a premature end is the sea. Those that do make landfall may find themselves in the space of detention camps scattered across the Mediterranean and southern Europe, a space they may struggle to escape.

If they do escape into the national territory, they may, if they are poor, need to exist within it in a fragile form, as undocumented or ‘illegal’ migrants, inside the territory, but outside legality, vulnerable to exploitation, persecution and deportation. If they establish legal presence within the territory, it may be in a temporary form, as a guest worker or with a limited visa. This is still a vulnerable and unpredictable space, and they may find themselves travelling backwards, away from citizenship, as the presence they thought was legal becomes questioned and revised by the state. If they achieve indefinite leave to remain, they can exist as ‘denizens’ rather than ‘citizens’, but this is becoming an increasingly narrow option, as states continually revise and tighten the conditions attached to ‘denizenship’. This is because it provides the gateway to the final stage of the journey, full citizenship.

Here, we might think, the migrant-citizen has found safety and stability – here we have a predictable space in which they can develop their life stories and enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as their fellow citizens. But there are two challenges that remain. The first is that their ‘belonging’ as citizens may be questioned as they ‘fail’ to fit a national identity, and the state and other citizens refuse to accept them fully. They may suffer harassment and persecution from other citizens and from political authorities who constantly examine and question their presence.

The second is that states are increasingly claiming the right to withdraw citizenship, and the migrant citizen is particularly vulnerable to this. In the European Union, while 14 countries can withdraw citizenship based on behaviour contrary to the interests of the state, eight of them apply this to only naturalized citizens, and seven have no safeguards against this resulting in statelessness. Although the UK does not discriminate in this way, from 2003 citizenship could be withdrawn from those with dual citizenship on grounds of behaviour prejudicial to the national interests, and from 2006, if this is considered to be ‘conducive to the public good’. This power is held by the Home Secretary. Although this can happen to citizens by birth, the majority of people who have had their citizenship withdrawn in this way since 2002 have been citizens by migration, and even where they are citizens by birth, their parents have been immigrants.

The danger is that migrant citizenship remains a distinct space of fragility and uncertainty, rather than an equally valued and secure way of being a citizen.

Cosmopolitanism - Sander L. Gilman

On 25 May 1948, Garry Davis turned in his American passport at the US Embassy in Paris and declared himself a ‘citizen of the world’. He then created his own passport, rarely recognized at national borders, and found that, the more nation states harassed him about his status as a true cosmopolitan, the more publicity his One World Movement received. Six months after renouncing his citizenship, he stormed a session of the United Nations General Assembly in Paris: “We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give,” he proclaimed. “The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.” Davis recreated himself in public as the good cosmopolitan, to no little extent because of the impact that he felt nationalism had had in the world (1961). The viewing of the cosmopolitan, the world citizen and the citizen without borders as corrosive, had been a pillar of Nazi ideology against which Davis fought as a pilot. In 1935, the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg railed against the ‘international swarm of Jewish orators and literati from the cosmopolitan centers of increasingly racially degenerate cities… ’

From the Enlightenment, radical nationalism claimed to be rooted in the land or a people, as a concrete expression of a homogenous society against the rootless nomad. In 1784, the German theologian J. G. Herder defined the nation state as ‘a group of people having a common origin and common institutions, including language’. For Herder, as for most Europeans after him, the Jews personified the rootless nomad. Jews ‘in the land of their fathers, and in the midst of other nations, . . . remain as they were; and even when mixed with other people they may be distinguished for some generations downward’. In fact, Herder suggested that, ideally, ‘if every one of these nations had remained in its place, the Earth might have been considered as a garden, where in one spot one human national plant, in another, another, bloomed in its proper figure and nature’. Cosmopolitanism goes against the ‘nature’ of human beings who are rooted and should be unchangeable. He was of Jewish descent and his call for the elimination of borders simply rejected the fascist idea that borders and peoples were uniform and static (Davis, 2001). The reality is that the cosmopolitan is simply another way of speaking about the potential for movement, for movement across borders, class boundaries, and cultural norms. All of recorded human history speaks of such movement all over the world, from ancient Greek city states to the expansion of the Han at the same period into what is now considered to be China. But must one be opposed to the nation state if one sees oneself, as Davis did, as a citizen of the world? Recently, the philosopher Anthony Kwame Appiah argued that ‘whatever obligation I might have to another, especially a foreign other, that obligation does not supersede the obligations I have to those people most familiar to me’ (2007). Being cosmopolitan does not cancel being national, regional or ethnic in the 21st century, as it did for Davis after World War II. Being cosmopolitan simply means that you have the potential for movement, transformation and change, not that this must take place.

We often think of cosmopolitanism as a form of multiculturalism. But there is a model that sees the nation state as groups of peoples from throughout the world living, functioning, competing, and collaborating with one another. These groups may shift and transform, and may come to speak the language of the nation state (and then in the third generation rediscover the language that their grandparents spoke, and learn it). What cosmopolitanism promises us today is the potential for change and movement, not to spite the claims of the nation state, but to ever renew them, to make them flexible. Garry Davis died in the summer of 2013, still a citizen of the world. But he died in Burlington, Vermont, not terribly far from his birthplace in Bar Harbor, Maine, a citizen of the world but very much a New Englander.

References

Davis, G. (1961) My Country is the World: The Adventures of a World Citizen, New York: Putnam.

Davis, G. (2001) A World Citizen in the Holy Land, South Burlington: World Government House.

Appiah, K. A (2007) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Ghettos – Deportation Without a Voice - Clara Lecadet

On 18 December 2013, Sami Moussa Abdallah died in Bamako, Mali. He had spent many days with a fever, and was so thin and weak that he could no longer stand up. He was young, deaf and dumb. Nothing was known about him other than his date of birth and the names of his parents. These were written on a safe conduct pass issued by the Malian consulate in Jeddah when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia. He had been supported by the Malian Expelled Migrants Association (AME), founded in 1996 in Bamako by Ousmane Diarra, a Malian trader expelled from Angola for helping undocumented migrants (Lecadet, 2012). AME had searched for his parents for months, through the good offices of the Malian authorities in Bamako and Jeddah, but to no avail. However, through their work with him, AME had discovered several places in the centre of Bamako where expelled migrants from Saudi Arabia had settled. Like him, they were ‘Malians’ who had been born or grown up in Saudi Arabia, but who had been expelled as part of the Saudi government’s ‘Saudization’ policy, an attempt to move away from private sector dependence on migrant workers and to restrict employment to Saudis. After expulsion they found themselves in Bamako, rootless and without bearings, and not speaking any of the languages most commonly spoken in Mali. Their inaudible or silent voices belong to their segregated existence.

The day of Sami Moussa’s death, those Malians who had shared a large house in the Kalambancoura area of Bamako went with him to the annual meeting of AME to testify to the appalling predicament in which they found themselves. They spoke Arabic, and almost no one in the room understood their language, but they did understand their anger. In his speech, Amadou Coulibaly, head of social action at AME, deplored the death of this young man. Without a voice and without relatives, he had nonetheless borne witness to the existence of a forgotten group, and by his death had become their emblem:

Mr Moussa’s case allowed us to make contact with other expelled migrants who are here today. These migrants are a special case because they were almost all born in the country where their parents still live. Furthermore, they have been sent back to Mali where the majority of them have no secure family ties. In addition, they don’t speak either Bamanan or French, which are the languages most commonly used in Bamako. These migrants speak Arabic, Tamasheq or Songhay. Their situation forces them to regroup in isolated areas, usually building sites or abandoned buildings.

For all the talk about globalisation, the prerogatives attached to the nation state remain as strong as ever. Expulsion, increasingly standardised and internationally legitimised, can lead to brutal absurdities. Because they had migrated to Saudi Arabia a long time ago, and their families were firmly settled there, these Malians saw their nationality as a mere formality. It was, however, this ‘formality’ that enabled their expulsion without any legal process. Formal citizenship can be an empty shell, and expulsion on that basis leads to whole groups of people being uprooted from their land and isolated from their language.

Bamako hosts many expelled people. Malians expelled from Algeria, Libya and Mauritania wander the area around Sogoniko station, and sleep in cardboard boxes in Bamako Hall, a disused indoor market. Moreover, this phenomenon is not confined to Bamako: in Tinzawaten on the Malian border with Algeria, in Agadez and Arlit in Niger, and in Kye-Ossi on the border of Cameroon with Equatorial Guinea, ruined houses, abandoned or lent by their owners and often linked to people smugglers, provide migrants with temporary shelter.

Amongst themselves migrants refer to these places as ghettos. Unobtrusively hidden away and isolated even when in the centre of a town, these ghettos are stopping places where people are blocked, and the weak – or those driven mad by expulsion, violent treatment and loss – are a hidden, utterly destitute population. Ghettos are marked by exhaustion, lack of resources, illness and sometimes death. However, the abandonment in which many expelled migrants find themselves pushes them to regroup and organise, and ghettos are also places where a collective life can be rebuilt. Those who have financial assistance from friends or family can use them as transit points and set off again, negotiating their journey to a new destination.

Thus, while the proliferation of expulsion across the world is creating new forms of political hegemony, it is also generating new modes and spaces of organising. Ghettos respond to a need for shelter and for regrouping immediately following expulsion, but they also make up an underground geography of places where people organise themselves, amid hardship and ordeals, to circumvent constraints imposed by the state. One could liken this ‘shifting localisation’, used by Agamben to describe the heterogeneous nature of contemporary forms of camp, to a poor form of politics: the ghettos and post-expulsion self-organisation show how expelled migrants rely on the resources of the group and their national identity, that is on the very methods of politics, to endure the rigours of the post-expulsion period and to organise their future mobility. State politics may create ghettos as places of deportation without a voice, yet they are also home to a subversive and demanding language.

References

Lecadet, C. (2013) ‘From Migrant Destitution to Self-Organization into Transitory National Communities: The Revival of Citizenship in Post-Deportation Experiences in Mali’, in B. Anderson et al. (eds.) The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation, New York: Springer,.

Lecadet, C. (2012) ‘Expulsions et Prises de Parole au Mali: Quand le Politique se Récrie en ses Marges’ in M. Agier (ed.)Politiques de l’Exception. Réfugiés, Sinistrés, Sans-papiers, Paris: Editions Téraèdre.

The author thanks Rosemary Masters, who translated the paper from French

The Sunshine and Shadow Politics of Irregular Migrants in Europe - Sarah Spencer

Many studies have highlighted the consequences of the exclusion of irregular (‘undocumented’) migrants from essential services, not least COMPAS’ own research on children (Sigona and Hughes, 2012). Perhaps, however, our surprise should be that, at a time when welfare states are being reined in and migrants most likely to feel the squeeze, those without permission to be here are granted entitlements to any services at all.

We are familiar of course with the idea that while irregular migrants are formally excluded from most services, they may in practice get access through the informal practices of local service providers: doctors who sympathise with their situation or head teachers who think the priority is to get all children into school. When the state itself grants those rights, however, what we see is formal exclusion versus formal inclusion; in effect the state is validating breaches of its own sovereignty (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012). Why would a state do that?

There is a stream of analysis in migration studies that explores the competing imperatives that states face when attempting to manage migration and the trade-offs implicit in the policy choices made (Spencer, 2011). Analysis of the politics of the migration policy-making process itself reveals another insight: that inclusive policies are more likely to be found where a low visibility reform can be made, minimising the risk of blame for an unpopular decision – characterised as ‘shadow politics’ in contrast to the ‘sunshine politics’ of popular measures to restrict immigration (Guiraudon 2004). This suggests that at least part of the explanation for granting entitlements to irregular migrants may be found in conflicting policy imperatives which in effect trump those of immigration control. These decisions may be more likely to be taken when the authorities can avoid the full glare of public debate, even a ‘non-decision’ where practice shifts with no debate at all (Bachrach and Baratz, 1970).

A COMPAS study^1 on official responses to irregular migrants across Europe has found that this is indeed the case: national, regional and municipal authorities are driven by legal, economic and social imperatives to provide services, with those imperatives felt most keenly at the local level. European and domestic human rights legal obligations are among the constraints they face but there are also many pragmatic reasons cited for granting entitlements, including the need to achieve competing policy objectives like public health, social cohesion, crime prevention and a reduction in street sleeping. Furthermore, there is a need for effective management of public services: providing access for an undocumented child to a birth certificate means accurate population statistics, while access to primary health care reduces the pressure on emergency services. Where those decisions can be taken by adjusting the rules, reinterpreting the breadth of an exclusionary provision or by overlooking the fact that the clientele of a service has shifted over time from regular to irregular migrants, inclusion is more likely to be found.

Humanitarian and ethical concerns certainly play their part in the uneven geography of service provision to this section of Europe’s population, helping to explain why the vast majority of states, for instance, do allow access to school education and at least to emergency health care. Recognising the pragmatic necessity of inclusion if an authority’s broader objectives are to be achieved, however, brings us closer to explaining patterns of inclusion to be found at the municipal level.

Notes

1Undertaken under the auspices of an Open Society Fellowship in 2012-2013 and ongoing at the time of writing.

References

Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M. (1970) Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chauvin, S and Garcés-Marcareñas, B (2012) ‘Beyond Informal Citizenship: The New Moral Economy of Migrant Illegality’, International Political Sociology, 6: 241-259.

Sigona, N. and Hughes, V. (2012) ‘No Way Out, No Way In: Irregular migrant children and families in the UK’, COMPAS, University of Oxford.

Spencer, S. (2011) The Migration Debate, Bristol: Policy Press.

Spencer, S (2013) ‘City Responses to Migrants with Irregular Status’, COMPAS briefing B 13-32 http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Publications/Briefings/B-13-32-city_responses_to_migrants.pdf.

In this analysis I acknowledge the contribution of COMPAS researcher Vanessa Hughes to the study on which this draws.

Everyday Multiculturalism - Amanda Wise

… well-grounded and illuminating analytic points flow only from bringing concepts into a relationship with the messiness of ordinary life, somehow recorded.

The Ethnographic Imagination - Paul Willis

Angela Merkel’s 2010 declaration that ‘multiculturalism has failed’ resonated among conservatives across the world. It played into the naive idea that multiculturalism could be discarded in favour of integration and assimilation just by ‘declaring it so’. Those who are different would magically learn to blend in with the dominant majorities in the societies in which they settled. These ideas flourish in the muddled semantic terrain that is multiculturalism. At the state level, multiculturalism is understood as a set of policies and programmes of migrant integration and settlement that allow migrant and minority communities to retain, maintain and develop cultural and religious practices and belief systems. It also signals questions of national identity in settler societies like Canada and Australia. Comments like Merkel’s imply that these policies encourage minority cultures to live un-integrated ‘parallel lives’ to the mainstream, and multiculturalism is to blame for a myriad of social ills from terrorism to urban crime and poor school performance. In part such views gained traction because the everyday lived reality of diversity remained absent from public, political, and scholarly discourse.

Everyday multiculturalism emerged as a concept in the 2000s to mark out the ‘fact of diversity’ as a separate, though related, empirical object. Everyday multiculturalism (Wise and Velayutham 2009) is a situated approach to understanding the everyday dimensions of multiculturalism as it is lived. As opposed to policy-oriented multiculturalism focused on group based rights, service provision and legislation, the everyday multiculturalism perspective explores how cultural diversity is experienced and negotiated on the ground in everyday situations such as neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces, and how social relations and social actors’ identities are shaped and reshaped in the process. While the focus is on everyday interactions, the everyday multiculturalism perspective does not exclude wider social, cultural and political processes, institutions and structures. Indeed, the key to the everyday multiculturalism approach is to understand how these filter through to the realm of everyday practice, disposition, encounter and meaning-making. The term ‘multiculturalism’ is used in favour of ‘interculturalism’ to capture these intersections and avoid the trap of equating interculturalism to interpersonal interactions across difference.

The everyday multiculturalism perspective is both a way of observing and a way of conceiving diversity as it is lived on the ground daily by people. It challenges ‘ethnicity’ as a singular, contained unit of analysis and starting point for research. Instead, everyday multiculturalism research takes an interactional, typically place-situated approach to understanding the dynamic nature of urban multiculture. It incorporates a particular set of qualitative methods where people’s everyday experiences and encounters with difference are placed into the larger cultural, political, economic and social contexts in which they are occurring. Operationalising everyday multiculturalism calls for a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from sociology, cultural studies, human geography and anthropology. Some of the sub-themes explored by those working in this field include the rituals and everyday practices that underpin the development of communities of difference; how (intercultural) habitus and embodied dispositions interact with lived diversity, emotions, affect and the senses; material cultures; everyday cultural exchange and transformation; cultural hybridities; civility and incivility; networks, reciprocity, solidarity and gift exchange; everyday scripts, speech practices, code switching and humour, and their role in drawing and overcoming racial boundaries; how space and place mediate encounters with and meanings made of difference – and how relations of power and wider discourses and politics and institutions interplay through all of these. A focus on the everyday includes documenting positive signs of an emergent openness to difference as well as everyday racisms. Understanding the multifaceted lived complexity of super-diversity is at the heart of this approach.

The sites of study include any domain of life where everyday encounters with difference occur. This includes most prominently studies of how encounters, interactions with, and negotiations over difference occur in the everyday places of neighbourhoods, including urban spaces like shopping centres, high streets, public spaces, parks, markets, public housing estates, public transport, and ‘micro-publics’ like schools, workplaces, sport teams or neighbourhood associations. Resonant terms in circulation include ‘mundane multiculturalism’, ‘commonplace diversity’, ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, and ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’. They share with everyday multiculturalism an orientation towards qualitative methodologies, particularly ethnographic approaches.

References

Willis, P. (2000) The Ethnographic Imagination, London: Polity Press.

Wise, A. and Velayutham, S. (eds.) (2009) Everyday Multiculturalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Acts - Engin Isin

The tragedy of Lampedusa unfolds in three acts. All three are acts of citizenship. A fourth must come.

The first and original act is the embarking on a journey to the other shore. When a group of several hundred primarily Somalis and Eritreans got on board a ship, they became migrants. Why ‘migrants’? By seeking better lives, these Somalis and Eritreans were subjecting themselves to a regime of truth that rendered them migrants because their journey crossed frontiers. This was their act of citizenship. For more than 300 on 4 October 2013, it became the ultimate sacrifice for it. In another regime of truth, they could have been heroes.

The second act was the announcement by Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta that those who lost their lives were to be given posthumous citizenship. He declared, ‘The hundreds who lost their lives off Lampedusa yesterday are Italian citizens as of today’. The day was also declared an official day of mourning for the victims. Was it an act of hypocrisy to give posthumous citizenship to those who were no longer ‘migrants’ but had become ‘victims’? Why not give citizenship to those who survived? Instead, those who survived were now ‘illegal immigrants’ destined to be charged, detained and deported. In another regime of truth, they could have been patriots.

The third act was when the Italian city of Treviso joined a network of 200 cities granting honorary citizenship to the children of foreigners born in Italy. It is an important act ‘to award honorary citizenship in a spirit of solidarity with their neighbours, and frustration with rules that refuse to acknowledge modern Italy’s multiethnic social fabric’ (Davies, 2013). Still, I wonder if this ‘gesture of hope’ falls well short of granting what all those who arrive at the frontiers of Europe themselves hope for: European citizenship. Instead, implicitly this act strengthens the rule of autochthony, birth and status. Yet what it recognizes is the principle that those who remain and establish themselves in the social fabric of the city do have a claim to citizenship.

This may be a symbolic act of citizenship, albeit with far-reaching consequences. Why are Somalis and Eritreans not given what they demand, European citizenship? If citizenship is about a chance to make ourselves anew, what better way to recognize them than with European citizenship? Not Italian citizenship, not Greek citizenship, not Spanish citizenship, not European citizenship as a benefit of national citizenship, but non-derivative European citizenship (that is, not dependent on prior citizenship of one of the 28 member states of the EU). This would be a recognition of the fact that our common humanity deals us citizenship as birthright lottery (Shachar, 2009). Nobody is born under circumstances of their choosing. Somalis, Eritreans and countless others risk their lives for a chance to prove themselves, a chance to make a living for themselves and their families, and overcome what that birthright lottery has dealt them. That one can die in the act is the tragedy, as those nearly 20,000 deaths at European frontiers attests.

If Europe cannot give those who arrive at its frontiers an unconditional citizenship, it can offer a conditional citizenship. Europe has a history of conditional citizenship. The condition is about contribution, taking that chance and making a new beginning. For a long time European cities granted citizenship to anyone who stayed in the city for a year and a day. Being granted citizenship meant receiving the liberty of the city, hence the German saying, ‘the city air makes one free’.

It would be folly not to recognize the complexity of global migration. There are many scholars who study aspects of this complex issue and its equally complex history. There are disagreements about approach, methods, data, findings, and interpretations. There are journals dedicated to migration studies and its many dimensions. There are more books on migration than any scholar can follow let alone read. Yet, can we not summon a fraction of the courage of migrants to draw one conclusion: as global inequality spreads (something to which Europe contributes massively and disproportionately) it creates more pressure on millions of people to migrate. Can we not accept that migrants are people who are seeking better lives for themselves and their families? Isn’t dividing them into economic and political migrants as cruel as dividing the poor into deserving and undeserving (Bosniak, 2006)? Migrants are citizens not by fortune, but by deed (McNevin, 2011). When such pressure is met with frontier security regimes of surveillance, deterrence and detention, the risks of crossing frontiers become higher. The more migration becomes intractable, the more it spawns further security measures (Guild, 2009).

Nation-state citizenship, which the European Union both sanctions and strengthens, is in a vicious death cycle. Unless Europeans commit member states and the EU to reducing global inequality and offering conditional but non-derivative European citizenship, the frontiers of Europe will engender more death, more suffering, and more tragedy.

As a final (redeeming) act of this tragedy, Europeans must now establish a European network of cities that grant European citizenship to those who arrive at the continent’s frontiers. Each city can decide on a period of growing into the social fabric of the city, learning and following local customs, norms, and sociability, and democratic deliberation with the network. This act would honour not only the dead but also the living. It would also honour a particular European history of citizenship.

References

Bosniak, L. (2006) The Citizen and the Alien, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Davies, L. (2013) ‘Italy: Gesture of Hope for Immigrants as Treviso Makes Them Honorary Citizens’, The Guardian (29 October), http://gu.com/p/3kvm4, date accessed 30 October 2013.

Guild, E. (2009) Security and Migration in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity Press.

McNevin, A. (2011) Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political, New York: Columbia University Press.

Shachar, A. (2009) The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Recognizing Migrants’ Practices of Citizenship and their Impact - Davide Però

In a context characterized by the curtailing of migrants’ rights and tighter border controls, migrants tend to feature in the political arena mainly as political objects. They are routinely made into political and policy ‘targets’ to control, count, contain, deter, detain and deport. Their often disadvantaged and precarious conditions favor exploitative and exclusionary treatments by employers and politicians alike, and their representation in public discourse is increasingly hostile.

In this short piece I want go beyond this approach and look at migrants as political actors and subjects of policy. While many questions could be considered in this respect, here I will focus on only two. Firstly, I am interested in highlighting how migrants can articulate their agency in adverse contexts such as the ones just outlined. Secondly, I want to consider the impact of their engagements. Can policies be transformed from below by migrants and their civil society allies (unions, NGOs, social movements and community organizations)?

Despite usually lacking the right to vote and sometimes even the right to stay in the receiving country, there are several indications of migrants’ civic and political vitality, even though these have received scant scholarly and media attention. In recent years, migrants throughout Europe have struggled against irregular status and the vulnerability and exclusion it produces, seeking papiers, papeles and pathways to citizenship (see Mc Nevin, 2011; Anderson, 2010). They have demonstrated in the streets, occupied churches, undertaken hunger strikes, and formed alliances with labour, civic and community organizations. In the UK, examples include the Justice for Cleaners and the Living Wage campaigns where precarious migrant workers joined forces with unions and community organizations to engage multinational companies and big business on the issue of fair pay and conditions (Però, 2014). In addition to fighting exploitation, abuse and discrimination at work, migrants have struggled across a range of other issues such as fairer access to health care and housing. They have also mobilized for respect and recognition. This has been an important element in the struggles of Latin American migrants in London who felt invisible and thus perceived themselves to be an unsupported minority in superdiverse Britain (Però, 2008). Migrants have also fought against the violation of their human rights, as was recently the case in Italy, where a group of migrants sewed their lips in protest at being detained.

Clearly, when examining and assessing migrants’ political engagements, we need to factor in their subaltern and marginalized conditions to fully appreciate their agency and impact. We also need to adopt an inclusive idea of policy change that extends beyond formal changes. As I have argued elsewhere, this more comprehensive idea of policy change should comprise ‘smaller’ changes produced by the everyday practices of citizenship that migrants deploy to cope with, neutralize or resist adverse policies, and to demand the enforcement of favourable policies and laws when these are not being implemented. For example, I have elsewhere discussed how a group of sin-papeles in Barcelona obtained regularization through a combination of hunger strikes and a well organized and supported occupation of churches. While not repealing the immigration policy that had originally illegalized them, these migrants did successfully manage to suspend its enforcement and negotiate an amnesty. I have also illustrated, on the matter of exploitation and rights at work, how a group of new migrant workers from Latin America succeeded in their demand for the application of existing British employment law through establishing a migrant workers’ organization, LAWAs, within the British trade union movement. This initiative not only made a significant number of migrants with a poor command of English aware of their employment rights, but also supported them in demanding compliance from exploitative employers (see Però, 2011).

Given the significance of the kinds of migrants’ practices of citizenship outlined above, it is important for engaged scholarship to pay attention, in research and teaching, to both the practices and their impact. Likewise, it is time for community and labour organizations to represent more systematically the interests of this new and marginalized sector of the population. Finally, as part and parcel of their role as guardians of pluralism and fairness in a context of growing inequality, nationalism and xenophobia, it is important that the liberal and cosmopolitan media give more visibility to the struggles for justice involving these new members of society that we call migrants.

References

Anderson, B. (2010) ‘Mobilizing Migrants, Making Citizens. Migrant Domestic Workers as Political Agents’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 33(1): 60-74.

McNevin, A. (2011) Contesting Citizenship, New: York: Columbia University Press.

Però, D. (2008) ‘Political Engagements of Latin Americans in the UK. Issues, Strategies and the Public Debate’, Focaal 51: 73-90.

Però, D. (2011) ‘Migrants’ Practices of Citizenship and Policy Change’, in C. Shore, S. Wright and D. Però (eds.) Policy Worlds. Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power. New York: Berghahn.

Però, D. (2014 forthcoming) ‘Class Politics and Migrants. Collective Action among New Migrant Workers in Britain’, Sociology. Article accepted 11 November 2013.

Belonging - Nandita Sharma

Belonging is often associated with a search for a sense of being at home. It is, however, more than an individual state of mind: our ideas of belonging connect us to each other, and to the social worlds we inhabit in quite specific ways. The dictionary tells us that to belong, we need to ‘fit in a specified place or environment’. It is not enough to just be in a particular place; one must fit in and, in order to fit in, one must be seen to belong by others. Belonging is, in other words, relational.

Lurking within ideas of belonging, then, is the idea that some do not belong: ‘s/he is a stranger, and doesn’t belong here’. This is especially the case for ideas of national belonging. Nationalism uniquely sets limits to belonging (Anderson, 1991). Nationalism not only creates an ‘us’ with a sense of being ‘at home’, it also creates a sense that there are persons who not belong. David Morley argues that a nationalist discourse ‘allows us to imagine that we do not have to share our space with anyone else unless they are of exactly our own kind by virtue of consanguinity’ (2000). The legitimacy for subjecting those said to ‘not-belong’ to differential treatment under the law or to outright exclusion is created by such ideas. ‘They’ should not, ‘we’ feel, have the things (rights, entitlements or even a sense of belonging) believed to be exclusively ‘ours’. Nationalist ideas of belonging, thus, draw lines of difference. Such lines are drawn not only between nation states but within nation states.

‘Nationals’ and ‘foreigners’ exist not only in separated national territories but, in reality, coexist within any nation state. Nationalist imaginations work to construct hierarchies between people differently classified as either ‘nationals’ or ‘foreigners’ within any given nation state. Those constituted as ‘foreigners’ can include those with varying legal statuses of ‘migrant’ (‘permanent resident’ to ‘temporary foreign worker’ to ‘illegal’) as well as co-citizens seen as not ‘fitting in’.

The process of sorting out who belongs and who does not is not a natural, timeless process. Nor is it random. Nationalist ideas of belonging are historically situated in a global context of capitalist competition, and they are informed by the intertwining of normative – and normalizing – ideas of ‘race’, gender and sexuality with those of ‘nation’. Hence the idea that any given ‘nation’ can best be defined through ‘genealogy’, ‘bloodlines’, and ‘family ties’. The very first national controls were highly racialized, gendered and sexualized. They also favoured the free movement of elites, particularly the bourgeoisie, over workers. Indeed, state restrictions against free human mobility were central to the creation of nation states and to the creation of national belonging (Mongia, 1999). Indeed, it was only as monarchical or imperial states became nation states – a process begun in the late 18th century and, arguably, only secured at the end of World War II – that state sovereignty and societal membership came to be defined by border controls. Consequently, in contrast to new ‘national subjects’, ‘migrants’ came to be thought of as not belonging and, therefore, as not having the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1951).

The growing number of regulations and restrictions against human mobility enacted by nation states over the past century or so have helped to produce the view that human migration is always already pathological. In today’s world of nation states, there is a deep sense that migration – and those classified as ‘migrants’ – produce nothing but crises. Tellingly, this (state) category does not include everyone moving across national boundaries, but usually only those who come to be seen as ‘foreign’ to the ‘nation’, those whose lives have been devalued by the close association of the ideology of nationalism with the ideologies of racism, sexism and heterosexism. Nationalist ideas of belonging are particularly and profoundly dangerous for these persons, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

Such ideas are, however, very helpful to some. Along with producing certain people as national subjects, national ideas of belonging produce a group of persons who can be treated in ways that would be deemed unacceptable – illegal even – were they applied to those ‘belonging’ to the ‘nation’. For example, those categorized as ‘temporary foreign workers’ are tied to their employers in conditions not unlike those of indentured servitude, conditions considered illegal when applied to ‘citizen’. The consequences of denying ‘migrants’ mobility, labour, social, and political rights – and the consequence of the glaring lack of solidarity between ‘migrants’ and citizen workers – is that those classified as ‘foreigners’ receive lower wages and less social services. They are also subjected to a relentless degradation of every aspect of their being. Far from trying to keep ‘foreigners’ out, then, nation-state immigration and citizenship policies are best viewed as a means of ensuring the subordination, oppression and heightened exploitation of those imagined to not belong. From the perspective of the state and employers, ‘migrants’ are best wanted as unwanted (Hage, 2000). Nationalist ideas of belonging do not protect ‘nationals’ or ‘citizen workers’, as they are thought to. The fact is that the global system of capitalist competition depends on there being persons who can be made to work for lower wages or under more dangerous conditions. Restrictions on human migration are one, very significant, way that this competition is organized. It is indeed difficult to overestimate the significance of ideas of national belonging and the differences that they materialize to the capitalist world economic system and the political formation of nation states within it.

The route to ending this cut-throat competition does not lie in the erection of more borders against ‘foreigners’ but in the elimination of borders. We cannot indulge in the fantasy that states (or vigilantes) can stop human migration: there are too many good reasons for people to move, and no amount of walls or guns or vitriol is going to prevent this movement. Instead, by enacting a world in which we all equally belong, we might – all of us – be in a stronger position to protect ourselves from ongoing displacement, dispossession and our resultant impoverishment.

References

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, London and New York: Routledge.

Mongia, R. V. (1999) ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport’, Public Culture, 11(3): 527-556.

Arendt, H. (1973 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Hage, G. (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, New York and Annandale: Routledge and Pluto Press.

Asylum: Principled Hypocrisy - Matthew Gibney

In January 2014, The Guardian newspaper reported that UK Border Agency (UKBA) staff received financial rewards for winning appeals against asylum seekers challenging negative decisions. This generated public controversy, because it suggested that the Home Office had a systematic bias against individuals being granted refugee status. No one who has followed asylum’s travails in western states could have been surprised. Academics have long described a ‘culture of disbelief’ pervading the UK government’s asylum decision-making processes, in which asylum claims are met with incredulity and cynicism. This culture seems merely an extension of the battery of measures and mechanisms – including visa regimes, carrier sanctions, and interdiction – that western states have put in place over the last three decades to stop forced migrants from places like Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria arriving to access asylum. If the UKBA’s offer was remarkable, it was only as the reductio ad absurdum of states’ current restrictive responses.

Yet for all this hostility to asylum seekers, no western state has publicly entertained the idea of doing away with the institution of asylum altogether. On the contrary, the UKBA website lauds Britain’s ‘proud tradition’ of offering asylum for those who need it. Nor is Britain alone. The US, Australia, and Canada all claim to have similar admirable histories. Their claims are not entirely without substance. As restrictive measures have developed across Europe and North America, the legal grounds on which individuals can claim asylum have expanded significantly. Far from confining themselves simply to the 1951 Convention on Refugees, western countries now accept a range of human rights grounds as a basis for asylum, including the threat of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Moreover, EU countries granted refuge (or similar protection) to almost 80,000 people in 2011 alone. Even Australia, surely the cynosure for asylum restrictive practices, granted almost 14,000 refugee and humanitarian visas in 2009/10. What needs to be explained is why, in the midst of antipathy towards asylum seekers, the institution of asylum has not only survived, but expanded.

One possible answer is that the continued existence of asylum helps affirm the legitimacy of immigration controls. Fundamentally, asylum works as an exception – founded on conditions of necessity – to the normal rule that states have the right to decide who can enter and reside in their territory. As an exception, asylum supports the general rule of state discretion. Border controls are intuitively difficult to justify in a world of egregious inequalities between states, where one’s state of birth is likely to determine whether one lives to be 85 (Monaco’s average life expectancy) or 47 (Sierra Leone’s). Justification is harder still because the territorial boundaries of states are typically arbitrary, artefacts of power rather than right. The provision of asylum for those who would face death or persecution takes the edge off these harsh realities, and so helps affirm the legitimacy of a bounded world. In this view, the institution of asylum exists not to limit the prerogatives of states, but to validate them.

A somewhat different explanation for asylum’s resilience is that it reinforces the state as community. Contemporary states do not portrary themselves simply as random collections of people sharing a legal status, but as communities of value, who share some common principles that provide a reason for them living together. The construction of the state as a community facilitates effective rule and makes the division of the world’s population into states appear less arbitrary. One obvious way of affirming such collective values is through exclusion. For example, the practice of deportation illustrates that certain non-citizens are not worthy of residence or membership in the state because, unlike honest, hard-working nationals, they are ‘fraudsters’, or ‘takers’. But the significance of state membership can be affirmed equally well through inclusion. By offering asylum, a state can fashion a vision of its citizens as ‘generous’, ‘rights-respecting’, or ‘sympathetic’, thereby (re)constituting the idea of a national community. Once again, asylum is less about protecting the vulnerable than bolstering a bordered world.

Each of these explanations helps explain why states might need asylum even if they don’t want asylum seekers. But there is another explanation for the current responses of western states, one that takes values seriously. This focuses on the fact that the states we are discussing are liberal democratic states.

Liberal democratic states are simultaneously legitimised through the values of liberalism (with its respect for the individual as the bearer of human rights) and democracy (with its animating ideal of collective self-rule). These values tend to pull in very different directions on the issue of asylum. On the one hand, respect for human rights demands the provision of asylum by the state, for if there are any human rights at all, the right to asylum (which ensures that individuals can meet their basic security needs) is surely one of them. On the other hand, this right is always potentially controversial in democratic political systems, where the demos (electorate) are likely to judge the entrance of significant numbers of non-citizens in need as costly to their own interests (for example, in terms of the job market, housing, and public services). This is particularly true when political entreprenuers (and sections of the media) whip up grievances and racist anxieties against newcomers.

The result is the schizophrenic response evident across western states, where the importance of the principle of asylum is not denied, but the costs of respecting it are resented by the public and often evaded by governments. This conflict is built into the institutional fabric of western states. Courts often find themselves as the defenders of asylum seekers’ human rights because of their role in interpreting human rights law, while politicians – who claim to represent the demos – bitterly criticise judicial attempts to constrain their efforts to deter refugee claims.

Some argue that this conflict is not inevitable. If it weren’t for tabloid newspapers or cynical politicians, the public would accept the value of asylum, and the tension between what human rights require and what the demos wants would evaporate. While there is no doubt that the media and some politicians make the environment more toxic, I believe that the tension is fundamental and close to irresolvable within the international state system as we know it (at least as long as it continues to generate huge numbers of people in need of protection). Ultimately, universalist claims to protection will make heavy demands on democratic communities, and these communities will want to resist them.

This leaves us with a question: how do we reconcile the moral claims of non-citizens in desperate need with a meaningful democratic politics, which requires some degree of closure and a privileging of the claims of insiders over outsiders? I don’t know of any compelling answer to this question, though one can perhaps take heart from the fact that more people (including academics) are now thinking about it than ever before. In the meantime, the paradoxical response to asylum continues: states continue to embrace asylum but spurn the asylum seeker.

Rescaling and Re-placing

Landing - Claudine Toutoungi

Before they emerged from their capsule

they never imagined birdsong or the sound

of the ocean crashing upon the shore.

The jerk of recognition it induced

in the pit of their spacesuits;

so many harmonies courting each other

across the coldest of stratospheres. And even if

it later proved a simulation, designed to reduce

cortisol in the blood-stream of long-haul voyagers,

no-one could explain the salt on their lips,

the soft specks of sand on their lashes.

COMPAS Poetry Competition 2013 Second Place

Steal Away, Steal Away Back Home - AbdouMaliq Simone

“Steal away, steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here,” was the lament of African slaves situated in between the urgency to run away and resignation that spiritual redemption was the only escape. It could also be the lament of many urban dwellers faced with the immanence of dispossession. For slaves, the act of running away was always fraught with dangers, not only of recapture, but uncertain alliances with other marginalized people of all sorts – Amerindians, outcasts, vagabonds, and felons. Hastily assembled kinships, ‘nations’, and roadshows sometimes managed to stay off the radar for long periods of time, but were most usually prone to betrayals and misunderstandings that prompted further dispersal. Still, there was always something fecund in the imagination of such constellations, amplified by the dense entanglements of bodies with diverse rivers, streams, bush, earth, animals, and foliage. Here, sustaining life was not a process of striving and fruition, but an intermixing of decay and generative forces, of inexplicable events and monstrous circulations.

If, as Anna Tsing (2012) claims, the plantation was the initial model for projects that can expand without changing their form and function, the contemporary spread of the mega-development – with its standardized integration of residence, shopping, leisure and services – is its continuation and aftermath. The product is no longer sugarcane, or any product in particular, but rather the control of freedom – the ability to control the process where life can become anything at all. For the mega-development signals the end of the myth that the city was interested in creating particular kinds of persons, particular kinds of life.

Rather, it seizes upon the conceit of self generation, inserts itself as the machine that enables individuals to see themselves as, what Claire Colebrook (2010) calls ‘that which feels and knows itself as nothing other than self-affecting life’. Disentangled from diverse material and social environments, and stripped of the skills needed to intermingle with creatures and formations of all kinds that once circulated across urban spaces, residents must calculate their every move through constant exposure to and enfoldment in proliferating networks, but where these instances of contact do not really affect much of anything. Meanwhile, individuals are encouraged to ‘steal away’ as much as they want. For the only place to circulate is in abstracted, media-saturated exchanges incapable of eliciting either desire or dread.

When people returned to Phnom Penh once the failed Khmer Rouge laboratory had finally run its course, for most it was not really a return home. Emptied of almost all of its inhabitants, the subsequent vacancy was also an erasure of claims, memories and orientations. Bereft of its intricate interweaving of ties, the recuperation of place had little meaning, and with no authority or records to back them up, securing a place often meant uncertain alliances with those whose very continued survival rendered them outcasts of a particular sort. The return to the city was then an extension of running away, and the need to revise expectations continuously was only tempered by the initial period where the Vietnamese ran the city as a camp.

Under such circumstances it was understandable how residents stuck closely to family connections even when these were ridden with mutual suspicions. Family members had to stay close to each other, but also at a distance, so this meant spreading out. If, for example, a family needed to secure a plot in a not yet built up area, it was usually important for them not to carry too many members with them, so as not to be seen to be trying to consolidate too much. Rather, they found a quick way of inserting themselves, staying under the radar as much as possible and scouting for other places on which to take a chance. This did not mean that consolidation was not taking place, that securitizing family interests did not operate through various forms of expansion. Rather, spreading out, as a means of consolidating family interests and ties, was also predicated on subjecting these projects to a process of being affected by those undertaken by others – of being turned around, altered, revised, and redirected. Since not everything the family had was then staked on any one project, if things got out of hand, not all would be lost. One could always steal away.

Sometimes neighbours would silently agree not to interfere with each other’s efforts. Still, at other times, residents would run smoke screens for each other – pretending that certain conditions, events or projects were not underway, when in reality they were, in order to control how much attention outsiders paid to them and to ward off any harmful intrusions. In all of these practices and strategies, more than one thing is occurring at once, and often what looks to be the reality of the situation is really something else. People look like they are cooperating, but in reality they are just acting as if they are doing so in order to win themselves the freedom to do their own thing; or conversely, people may look like they are running all over each other, stabbing each other in the back, pursuing their own strong-willed aspirations when in reality they are implicitly learning from and adjusting to each other, affecting each other without it looking like they are doing so.

The intense demonization of the poor that has been underway in Phnom Penh for the past decade in part reflects the inability of the urban elite to know what to do with all of the surreptitious, inexplicable, and, to them, monstrous circulations and consolidations that have been at work in remaking the city. A population supposedly traumatized by genocide and largely seeking refuge in spiritual quietude nevertheless has carried on constructing viable residential quarters such as in Prek Pra or Boeng Salang. As the Gang of Hun Sen and other oknha (big men) go out of their way to prove that the Khmer Rouge were right about urban life – filling it with mega-developments of dubious economic viability – it is not far-fetched to think about this demonization as a form of capture; a way of breaking up the circulations of effort and experimentation that have underpinned everyday efforts to resettle the city. And this effort towards breakage is not unlike a seemingly interminable preoccupation with demonic possessions, illicit networks, vectors of disease transmission, and dangerous circulations.

References

Colebrook, C. (2010) ‘Creative Evolution and the Creation of Man’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48: 109-132.

Tsing, A. (2012) ‘On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales’, Common Knowledge 18: 505-524.

Integration - Ben Gidley

Integration – the stuff that happens after migration – has an ambivalent relationship to migration studies. The integration question has historically been posed in relation to the context of reception and, therefore, within the disciplinary boundaries of the sociological tradition. The sociological tradition was born with the emergence of the modern city; the question of the stranger within the city – the stranger who comes today and stays tomorrow, as Georg Simmel put it (1950) – has been one of its constitutive problems.

Classically in this tradition, though, the question has been posed in a way that brackets out and renders invisible the migrant journey.

Three problems for the classical sociological approach follow from this. First, it takes a receiving society perspective, as noted by migration scholars developing a more transnational or cosmopolitan perspective. Second, as the national state’s role is redefined by the turbluence of globalisation, an integration discourse which ‘sees like a state’ is increasingly inadequate. And, third, it raises the question of what it is that migrants integrate into.

All three of these problems were present in Emile Durkheim’s reflections at the start of the 20th century. For Durkheim, in an age defined by mass rural-urban migration, without some mechanism for integration, society ‘is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.’ Forms of organic solidarity were required, and the civil religion of the nation was the answer, binding strangers to the abstraction of the state.

The concept of integration was introduced to the UK’s political agenda in the 1960s by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who defined it in a far less functionalist way: ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (1967). This definition emerged at a particular historical moment, that of the Windrush generation of (post-)colonial citizen migrants. This generation’s first struggle was with its designation as a generation of immigrants. Hence the emergent anti-racist movement (and later the academic consensus informed by that movement) rejected the notion of integration as insufficiently distinct from assimilation. Thus the concept was for a long time largely absent from political and scholarly debates in Britain.

This changed in the wake of the mill town riots and terrorist attacks of 2001, and also as a result of European Union debates. This has happened, however, at a time when integration is in danger of becoming a zombie concept, stumbling after its lifespan has passed.

The British integration debate has been characterised by a profound lack of clarity. Too often, politicians and pundits unconsciously freight the term with the baggage of Durkheimian functionalism. ‘British values’ and commitment to the ‘British way of life’ have taken the role of Durkheim’s civil religion of the state, betraying a melancholic nostalgia for a monochrome Britishness that probably never existed. As across Europe, integration debates have had a punitive streak: imagining migrants ‘not really wanting or even willing to integrate’ (as Prime Minister David Cameron put it), politicians have made full participation in citizenship contingent on the migrant duty to fit in.

Sarah Spencer, in her book The Migration Debate (2011), proposes a useful alternative definition: integration refers to the processes of interaction between migrants and the individuals and institutions of the receiving society that facilitate the socio-economic, cultural, social and civic participation of migrants and an inclusive sense of identity and belonging. This definition emphasises the multi-directional nature of integration: it is not something which migrants do, but rather about interaction. It acknowledges integration as a series of processes across a number of related, but ultimately autonomous, domains, at a range of different scales.

This definition challenges the authoritarian drift of an integration debate focused solely on the migrant responsibility to fit in. It presents us with a policy agenda on integration which I will summarise here as seven key questions.

First, how can we go beyond the limits of methodological nationalism to understand the local scale on which integration occurs? Migrants move between countries, but people move between places. Different domains of integration take place on different scales, and most often on a scale smaller than the nation-state. We need to attend better to new geographies of settlement, to local variations in attitudes, to neighbourhood effects, and to local policy.

Second, how can we escape the methodologically nationalist receiving country perspective, to develop comparative research and policy transfer around integration? The nation state is the wrong scale to consider integration, yet the terrain is striated by differences at the national level: definitions of key terms, philosophies of integration, histories of migration, of race and of colonialism, structures of governance. These open up profound translation problems which EU-funded officials and researchers have often glossed over in what Hannah Jones and I (2013) have called a ‘soupy transnationalism’ which glibly boosts putative ‘good practices’ rather than rigorously engaging with difference. We need a more contentious transnationalism to develop more meaningful comparisons.

Third, if integration is a set of processes occurring in multiple domains, how can we understand the intersection of these domains? Both inter-ethnic friendships and feeling at home in a neighbourhood are strong predictors of identification with Britain – but not of each other (Gidley et al., 2012). Similarly, you can be civically active while excluded from the labour market, or residentially segregated while socially integrated. There are multiple paths to integration. Social science understands little about how these different domains influence each other.

Fourth, how do (restrictions to) entitlements impact on migrants’ possibility for integration? Our legal rights and responsibilities are the foundations on which integration – in all domains – is built. Yet policy debates on these rights and responsibilities rarely consider the integration trade-off.

Fifth, what is the responsibility of the public and institutions of the receiving society? If integration is not just the duty of migrants themselves, whose responsibility is it? We don’t know enough about how much public attitudes matter, and what shapes them. We don’t know enough about what difference leadership by public authorities and civil society can make.

Sixth, how can we do integration research without using a reductive ethnic lens? Anthropologists have been accused of methodological ethnicism: the assumption that migrants from a particular nation state or region constitute an ethnic group (‘the Bangladeshis in London’, ‘the Turks in Germany’, and so on) before their identity, actions, social relations and beliefs are studied. Only by shifting our attention from ethnicity to sites and spaces of integration can we overcome this addiction.

Finally, how can we attend to the lived experience of integration? Especially given the gap between what people say in interviews and what people do in real life: there may be deep, meaningful interactions between migrants and settled people in places where the interviews with settled people suggested high levels of xenophobic attitudes (Jensen and Gidley, 2013). This is a methodological challenge, and suggests the importance of ethnographic research, hitherto relatively neglected in the integration field.

I suspect that an ethnographic approach to integration as a mundane, unremarkable feature of today’s complex societies, might reveal – contrary to the politicians’ rhetoric of dislocated communities and migrants unwilling to integrate – that migrants and non-migrants are getting on with it without us.

References

Gidley, B. et al. (2012) Citizenship and Integration in the UK, Oxfod: COMPAS.

Jenkins, R. (1967) Essays and Speeches by Roy Jenkins, London: Collins.

Jensen, O. and Gidley, B. (2012) Diversity, Cohesion and Change in Two South London Neighbourhoods, Concordia Discors Report for the European Commission, Oxford: COMPAS.

Jones, H. and Gidley, B. (2013) Transnational Soup: Translating Local Integration Policies Across Borders, London Urban Salon.

Simmel, G. (1950 [1908]) ‘The Stranger’, in K.H. Wolff (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: Free Press.

Spencer, S. (2011) The Migration Debate, Bristol: Policy Press.

The Multilevel Governance of Migrant Integration - P. W. A. Scholten

Public debate on migrant integration has often fixated on how and why different countries approach migrant integration differently: the German welfare state approach, the British race relations approach and the French assimilationist or Republicanist approach. It has strengthened the idea that migrant integration is primarily national. In their depiction of ‘methodological nationalism’, Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) showed that this preoccupation with the ‘national’ dimension of integration had also pervaded, or was even being reproduced by, academia.

One of the strongest challenges to national models has come more from the local level than from the European level, where the involvement with migrant integration has remained weak and mostly intergovernmental rather than supranational. Big cities have taken a leading role in this policy area and developed their own integration philosophies. From a sociological perspective, this development makes sense, as it is at the local level that migrants meet others, find a job, have children, and so on. It is also at this level that negative as well as positive sides of diversity are experienced most concretely. Finally, we know from research that migrants identify much more easily with the city they live in than with the nation.

It is increasingly obvious that cities in different states have more in common than national models would suggest (see Caponio and Borkert, 2010). Hyperdiverse cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and London embrace diversity as part of the city’s identity and as a positive anchoring point for local policies, sometimes in spite of their respective national models. Industrial cities like Manchester and Rotterdam have connected their traditional emphasis on work and housing to the new challenge of diversity. This supports what the sociologist Benjamin Barber (2013) suggests, that it is precisely the inability of national democracies to develop effective responses to migration and diversity that prompts cities to develop their own strategies with a much greater emphasis on pragmatism, trust and participation.

This local turn in migrant integration policies, combined with the continued salience of the national level and the nascent European dimension, lies at the heart of what policy scientists describe as the multilevel governance of migrant integration (Scholten, 2013). It involves a challenge in terms of policy coordination and policy coherence. If there are different policies at different levels in one single policy domain, this risks conveying conflicting messages to migrant groups. Recent research shows that in several countries local governments feel they have to repair some of the centripetal forces unleashed by national political and policy discourses: politicized debates on the national level can have a performative effect at the local level as well. This multilevel challenge is becoming especially relevant as migration policy is becoming increasingly Europeanized, whereas migrant integration is becoming increasingly localized. European and national decisions in terms of the regulation of migration often have distinctly local consequences in terms of integration.

One way to ensure that policies do not conflict is to establish relations between them that are not simply top-down. Indeed we are increasingly witnessing bottom-up relations, where local governments set political and policy agendas at other policy levels. Take, for instance, the advocacy of the Greater London Authority for a refugee integration strategy, Glasgow’s agreement with the UK Border Agency on dispersal of asylum seekers to the Glasgow area, and Rotterdam’s successful lobbying for a special law enabling it to adopt a more effective strategy toward gentrification. Cities have ventured beyond the role of policy implementer to that of policy entrepreneur.

Cities are also exchanging knowledge and experiences in national and international horizontal networks. Over the last decade, various European networks have developed, including Eurocities, Integrating Cities, Intercultural Cities, and Cities for Local Integration Policies for Migrants (CLIP). These networks have become institutionalized and are an important motor of policy learning. Their definitions of best practices have significant effects on local policies. Interestingly, especially from a multilevel governance perspective, many of these networks are supported through European funding programmes.

There is a welcome local turn in academic interest in migrant integration, but we need a better theoretical understanding and more empirical research on multilevel governance challenges that this local turn produces. Observing that there is a local turn and that this leads to a multilevel policy setting does not mean that we can immediately speak of effective multilevel governance. In contrast, this multiplicity of levels may just as well add yet another dimension to this already wicked policy problem.

References

Barber, B. (2013) If Mayors Ruled the World. Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, London: Yale University Press.

Caponio, T. and Borkert, M. (2010) The Local Dimension of Migration Policymaking, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Scholten, P.W.A. (2013) Agenda Dynamics and the Multi-Level Governance of Migrant Integration. The Case of Dutch Migrant Integration Policies’, Policy Sciences, 46: 217-236.

Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2002) ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 2(4): 301-334.

Construction, Migration and Urbanisation - Michelle Buckley

Who builds our cities, and under what conditions? Over the last few years, this question has been at the forefront of my research as a geographer. Answering it has led me in two broad directions. The first has been to explore the roles that construction workers play in everyday city-building. The second includes the conviction that the question above, while answerable in a whole manner of ways, ultimately requires some engagement with the process of migration, and the lives and livelihoods of migrants themselves to the city. Migrants to cities have very often played a central role in building them. Irish and Italian immigrants of 19th and 20th-century New York formed the backbone of the workforce that produced its skyline. Today, rural migrants to rapidly urbanising Chinese cities comprise a construction workforce numbering in the tens of millions. In addition to bringing crucial skills and expertise to the construction labour markets of many cities, immigrants and temporary migrants employed in the trades have often been important to city-building because they have taken jobs that no one else wants to do – a great deal of construction work has long been, and continues to be, dirty, dangerous and low status.

In cities across the globe, construction is not just a significant sector for the incorporation of migrant and immigrant workers, but a rapidly growing one (Erlich and Grabelsky, 2005; Wells, 2012). This trend has gone hand-in-hand with the deepening insecurity and casualisation of construction work internationally over the last three decades. In Europe and North America, segments of the urban construction labour market such as residential construction have been subject to heavy de-unionisation. The sector both within and outside Europe and North America has also become heavily polarised, comprising highly-skilled professionals such as engineers, cost estimators or construction managers at the top of the wage scale, and workers employed in lower waged and more insecure manual jobs such as concrete finishers or general labourers. In a diverse range of cities, meanwhile, ranging from Kuala Lumpur (Abdul-Rahmana et al., 2012) to Singapore (Debrah and Ofori, 2001), construction sector deregulation has led to increased inter-regional migration flows into the sector and the subsequent emergence of a highly flexibile, insecure and internationalised workforce in the construction trades. Intranationally, urban construction jobs have provided an important income supplement for rural workers in some countries. In parts of India, for example, contemporary pressures eroding agrarian livelihoods (of which urbanisation is itself one) have led both men and women to seek out temporary and seasonal work in urban construction markets. As a result, patterns of seasonal, circular migration between the construction site and the farmer’s field have become increasingly common in countries where rapid urbanisation is fuelling both formal and informal construction markets.

Taken together, factors such as the growing prevalence of long subcontracting chains, ongoing de-unionisation, increasing international competition among contractors, and the casualisation of employment at the lower end of the wage scale have in many cases led to poorer employment conditions and job security in construction’s lower paid occupations. This process has disproportionately affected temporary (im)migrants over the past decade: their work can be unstable and insecure, offer limited rights, protections, and benefits, and allow workers limited autonomy, recourse, or control over their working conditions. This reality was starkly visible following the 2007-08 financial crisis, when construction markets worldwide not only posted the highest aggregate job losses of any other sector, but precariously employed migrant workers were consistently at the forefront of these layoffs.

In addition to waged formal and informal work in construction, urban migrants also take part in many kinds of ‘illegal’, non-waged or non-profit-oriented building activities that play a central role in the physical production of neighbourhoods, streetscapes, marketplaces and infrastructure in cities. With global estimates forecasting that by 2020, over one billion urban and suburban residents in the world will be living in ‘informal’, ‘unauthorised’ and/or ‘substandard’ dwellings, self-built or informally-waged construction activities both by and for new arrivals to the city are some of the most important ways that the cities of tomorrow are taking shape. Within these acts of construction, productive and socially reproductive activities are often closely interlinked; not only does subsistence construction address urban migrants’ needs for shelter, but they also form an integral part of informal construction economies, tying migrants’ building activities to flows of steel, cement and other aggregates, corrugated tin, plywood and other materials in the city. With governments often ‘producing’ informality among urban migrants by designating certain kinds of construction activity as ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’, unauthorized building activities can often cement unequal access to urban resources, infrastructure, and amenities. As a result, illegal or unauthorised construction is often closely connected to the formation of unequal forms of urban citizenship among migrants. In its many different forms, construction by migrants is at once a material and political act, one that has important implications for both the physical and social contours of the 21st-century city.

References

Abdul-Rahmana, H. et al. (2012) ‘Negative Impact Induced by Foreign Workers: Evidence in Malaysian Construction Sector’, Habitat International, 36(4): 433-443.

Debrah, Y. A. and Ofori, G. (2001) ‘Subcontracting, Foreign Workers and Job Safety in the Singapore Construction Industry’, Asia Pacific Business Review, 8(1).

Erlich, M. and Grabelsky, J. (2005) Standing at a Crossroads: the Building Trades in the Twenty-first Century’, Labor History, 46(4):421-445.

Wells, J. (2012) ‘Informal Construction Activity in Developing Countries’, in G. Ofori (ed.) New Perspectives on Construction in Developing Countries, London and New York: Spon Press.

The Migration of the Rich - John Urry

Warren Buffett recently maintained: “There is class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” I describe here how this rich class is indeed waging class war through the striking new strategy of going offshore (Urry, 2014).1

It had been thought, especially in the 1990s, that the massive ratcheting up of movements of money, people, ideas, images, information and objects was economically, politically, and culturally beneficial. Most aspects of contemporary societies were believed to be positively transformed through increased cosmopolitanism and borderlessness. But the 1990s were not the harbinger of an optimistic and borderless future. Migrating across borders are not just consumer goods and new services, but terrorists, environmental risks, trafficked women, drug runners, international criminals, outsourced work, slave traders, asylum seekers, property speculators, smuggled workers, waste, financial risks, and untaxed income.

There are many ‘secret worlds’ of offshored manufacturing work, waste, energy, torture, pleasure, CO_2 emissions, property ownership, and taxation. Offshoring involves moving resources, practices, peoples and monies from one territory to another, hiding them within secret jurisdictions. Offshoring involves evading rules, laws, taxes, regulations or norms. It is all about getting around rules in ways that are illegal, or going against the spirit of the law, or using laws in one jurisdiction to undermine laws in another. Offshore worlds are often based upon secrets and lies.

Offshore worlds have been made possible by the development of new sociotechnical mobility systems, of container-based cargo shipping; aeromobility; the internet and virtual worlds; car and lorry traffic; electronic money transfer systems; the growth of taxation, legal and financial expertise oriented to avoiding national regulations; and the proliferation of ‘mobile lives’.

The offshoring world is dynamic, reorganising economic, social, political and material relations between societies and within them, and more and more resources, practices, peoples and monies are made or kept secret. The global order is the opposite of a simply open world – it is one of concealment, of many secret gardens mainly designed by and for the rich class and its casual patterns of migration.

Since the rise of neoliberalism in the later 1980s there has been an astonishing growth in the movement of finance and wealth to and through the world’s 60 to 70 tax havens, which entail one-quarter of contemporary societies. These tax havens, or ‘treasure islands’, include Switzerland, Jersey, Manhattan, the Cayman Islands, Monaco, Panama, Dubai, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, the City of London, and Delaware. The development of ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ are core to the neoliberalisation of the world economy from around 1980, and the ending of many exchange controls. To be offshore is to be in paradise, contrasted with the high-state, high-tax life experienced onshore. Tax havens are places of escape and freedom, a paradise of low excises, wealth management, deregulation, secrecy, and often nice beaches.

This rich class is the beneficiary. Almost all major companies have offshore accounts/subsidiaries, more than half of world trade passes through them, almost all high net worth individuals possess offshore accounts enabling tax ‘planning’, and 99 of Europe’s 100 largest companies use offshore subsidiaries. As a consequence, one-quarter to one-third of all global wealth is held ‘offshore’. Offshored money has grown from US$11 billion in 1968 to US$21 trillion in 2010, or a sum equivalent to the combined GDPs of the United States and Japan, about one-third of annual world income. Fewer than 10 million people currently own this offshore fortune. This is the source of power and wealth of the super rich who almost all owe their fortunes, in part at least, to the rapid and secret moving of money and ownership.

Offshore is how the world of power now works. Money staying onshore is almost the exception, suitable only for the ‘little people’ still paying tax. Most big money is offshored. Nicholas Shaxson describes how the US is by far the world’s most important ‘secrecy jurisdiction’ (2012). In the diminutive state of Delaware there is a single building which houses 217,000 companies, the largest and most (fiscally speaking) unethical building in the world. The annual loss of taxation is hundreds of billions of US dollars. The offshore world makes it hard for small and medium-sized companies to compete, as revealed by protestors, NGOs and charities who increasingly engage in ‘tax shaming’.

One commentator reports how, for billionaires, ‘you don’t live anywhere, and neither does your money’ Meek, 2006). Place, property and power are intertwined in forming and sustaining such a networked rich class: homes dotted throughout the world, first class travel, private schools, family life structured around episodic get-togethers, private leisure clubs, airport lounges, private jets, luxury destinations, and places of distinction for encountering other super rich and extending one’s ‘network capital’.

Central to these offshore worlds is water. Seven billion humans are crowded onto one-quarter of the earth’s surface. Almost all the ocean world is out of sight. The oceans contain many unregulated ‘treasure islands’; ships sail oceans flying flags of convenience, with conditions of work driven to the bottom; many poor migrants lose their lives in oceans; oceans are a global rubbish dump with the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ twice the size of France. The sea is a neoliberal paradise for the rich class, a vision of the world almost without government, taxes and laws, and where only the powerful ships and their companies survive, with the rest often literally sinking to the bottom. The outlaw sea also subjects humans to heightened unruliness: more intense storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, rising sea levels and flooding.

The social sciences neglect these offshore worlds at their peril. Can what has escaped offshore ever be reshored? Offshoring and the associated lack of transparency is bad for democracy, and for the possibility of societies moving towards a low carbon future.

Notes

1See http://www.morphstudio.co.uk/work/offshoring/ for a short video on offshoring.

References

Meek, J. (2006) ‘Super Rich’, The Guardian (17 April), http://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/apr/17/tax.g2.

Shaxson, N. (2012) Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, London: Vintage.

Urry, J. (2014) Offshoring, London: Polity.

Urban Neighbours - Ash Amin

In days gone, when people lived in settled communities and identified strongly with the locality, neighbours knew each other and were expected to behave in certain ways: if not in a friendly manner or through reciprocal exchanges, then as part of a world with familiarities and ties mediating local animosities and disputes. Neighbouring was a way of life and a compulsion, a habit or a reason to get out, or an ordeal for the outsider. Today, this is not an expectation of neighbouring. People live next to each other largely as strangers, in places that hardly hold together as communities of common fate or interest, without much contact, often moving on to somewhere else. In an age mediated by all manner of real-time intimate contact with people far away, even the most sedentary subjects dwell in worlds of multiple affiliation and feeling. This is what travel, the internet, television, mobile phones and advertising, alongside the intimacies of materialism, religion and ideology have permitted. Neighbours or strangers who find themselves in the same space can ignore each other, avoid being inquisitive except in indifferent or suspicious ways, or even up sticks when necessary.

The neighbour is just the person next door, and neighbouring is no longer a required art of living with others. This is all the more so when private ownership makes people proprietary. The intensity of neighbourly self-interest and indifference is probably particularly high in cities, where the majority of people, living as they do in suburbs, high-rise flats, or inner city areas, dwell in multiple worlds of connectivity, move on frequently, and work hard at negotiating the complexities of urban living.

Should we allow neighbouring to become a culture of self-interest and social avoidance, an ethic of indifference towards cohabitants? The danger here is to court isolationist ways of living with difference, turning neighbourhoods into zones of discipline. Additionally, this way of living provides a further excuse to accept the 9/11 culture of aversion to difference, which tells us to be wary of, discipline, or eject the disruptive neighbour: the asylum seeker, the Muslim, the beggar, the welfare scrounger, the dissident, the immigrant, the one who does not fit. The logical extension of this culture – backed by elaborate systems of surveillance and vilification of the stranger – is that the neighbourhood becomes a place of fear and suspicion of the other.

It is this kind of possibility that has prompted a policy quest for neighbourliness and mixed community, for places where people from different backgrounds can meet and perhaps even build interdependencies. Emblematic of this desire is a policy turn towards mixed neighbourhoods, twinned schools, housing schemes that promote visibility and contact, and projects to build bridges or facilitate contact between strangers. I have my doubts about whether such engineering can work in a society of multiple identities and affiliations. Greater exposure to neighbours could breed more intimacy but also more hate, while designing environments of shared interests and sympathies strays uncomfortably close to the ethos of gated communities that we tend not to like. However, an ethic of good neighbouring that builds sensibilities around real habits of modern urban living may be worth exploring. Three such sensibilities come to mind.

The first is a sensibility of respectful distance. Immediate neighbours who share a garden fence or a common entrance should learn to ignore difference – bodily, cultural and ideological – and also not to expect too much from each other. Instead, they could learn to keep the peace, by understanding that they share a fragile dividing line. A politeness of the party wall or privet hedge can be structured around small things: respectful greeting, taking in the neighbour’s mail, keeping the noise down. Of course, the reality is often the opposite, punctuated by complaints of unruly behaviour, disputes over who pays for common repairs, and sly encroachment. Reversing this is not easy, and bad relations are often a quirk of fate (you cannot choose your neighbours), but the combination of being able to call in the authorities as a last resort, schooling in the manners of the party wall, and social regulation through the two additional sensibilities discussed below, might do the trick. Who knows, respectful distance might even lead to studied care.

The second sensibility has to do with care for the neighbourhood. Bad relations are pushed to the margins when people in a neighbourhood feel strongly about the local patch, especially when they work together to protect it. This is what happens when volunteers work to clean up public spaces, make streets safe, or set up local amenities for children. Through these acts, people take responsibility for their neighbourhood, an ethic that may even turn into studied care for one’s neighbours. Of course, many of the residents will not play ball, and all too frequently it is the same old people who come out. The challenge lies in finding ways of cultivating interest in the local commons among the disinterested, perhaps through the promise of small rewards and projects that capture the imagination.

The third sensibility concerns the aesthetic of place. Architects, planners and social reformers have long understood the impact of good design, green spaces, busy streets, functioning services, low-key surveillance, and human-scale development on civic behaviour. The aesthetic of place comes with no clear guarantees – slums can yield feelings of solidarity, and pristine suburbs strong feelings of aversion. Chances are, however, that in a decent neighbourhood with plentiful signs of social life in public space, neighbourly relations may turn for the better, as people appreciate the commons shared by everyone, nod unthinkingly to the passer-by, come out when the aesthetic is threatened, and think again before making someone’s life miserable. None of this is reducible to place aesthetics, but when such an atmosphere combines with a strong sense of place identification, a new alchemy of living with difference might be catalysed, where neighbours see each other as part of a community.

What Drives Human Migration? - Hein de Haas

Why do people migrate? This is a simple and a difficult question. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to assume that most people migrate hoping to find better conditions or opportunities, such as jobs, higher wages, safety or freedom of expression. This is the implicit assumption underlying the ‘push-pull’ models taught at secondary school as well as neo-classical migration theories. Most migrants have good reasons to move. However, this does not really help us to understand the complexity and drivers of real life migration.

To say that most people migrate to find better opportunities is somehow stating the obvious. Push-pull models usually list factors in origin and destination areas, but fail to make clear how the various factors together lead to migration. They fail to explain why there should be a difference between push areas and pull areas in the first place, and are therefore ‘a platitude at best’ (see also Skeldon, 1990).

Neoclassical migration theories assume that people migrate to maximise their income or wellbeing. Migration is a (temporary) response to development ‘disequilibria’ between origin and destination countries, and will decline through a process of wage convergence. However, migration has been a constant factor in the history of humankind and is not a temporary by-product of capitalist development.Furthermore, the wage convergence assumption naively ignores how power asymmetries usually sustain economic inequalities (Castles et al., 2014).

Both push-pull and neoclassical models fail to provide insight into the social, economic and political processes that have generated the spatial wage and opportunity gaps to which migration is supposedly a response. It is therefore not surprising that the predictions of push-pull models and neoclassical theories are fundamentally at odds with what is seen in real life migration patterns. Most migrants do not move from the poorest to the wealthiest countries, and the poorest countries tend to have lower levels of emigration than middle-income and wealthier countries. It is often said that the only way to reduce migration from poor countries is to boost development. However, this ignores that the relation between development and levels of emigration is fundamentally non-linear. Important emigration countries such as Mexico, Morocco, Turkey and the Philippines are typically not among the poorest. Going against popular perceptions of a ‘continent on the move’, sub-Saharan Africa is the least migratory region of the world.

Analyses of historical and contemporary data show that human and economic development is initially associated with increasing emigration (de Haas, 2010). Any form of development in the poorest countries of the world is therefore likely to lead to accelerating emigration. This suggests that we need explanations that do not confuse individual factors or motivations to move (which, indeed, often refer to better opportunities) with macro-structural explanations of migration processes.

Such rethinking can be achieved by conceptualising migration as a constituent part of broader development and change, rather than as a problem to be solved, or as the sum of individual responses to given (unexplained) geographical opportunity gaps. For instance, in the modern age, much migration within and across borders has been inextricably linked to broader urbanisation processes. It is difficult to imagine urbanisation without migration, and vice-versa. Rather than asking ‘why people migrate’ the more relevant question is therefore how processes such as imperialism, nation state formation, the industrial revolution, capitalist development, urbanisation and globalisation change migration patterns and migrants’ experiences.

For instance, how can we explain why development is often associated with more, instead of less, migration? To understand this, we must move beyond sterile views of migrants as predictable ‘respondents’ to geographical opportunity gaps. Conceptualising migration as a function of people’s capabilities and aspirations to move can help to achieve a richer understanding of migration behaviour. Processes of human and economic development typically expand people’s access to material resources, social networks and knowledge. At the same time, improvements in infrastructure and transportation, which usually accompany development, make travel less costly and risky.

Development generally increases people’s capabilities to migrate over larger distances, but it does not necessarily lead to migration. Migration aspirations depend on people’s more general life aspirations, as well as their perceptions of life ‘here’ and ‘there’. Both are subjective and likely to change under the influence of broader processes of structural change. Improved access to information, images and lifestyles conveyed through education and media tend to broaden people’s mental horizons, change their perceptions of the ‘good life’, and increase material aspirations. Development processes tend to initially increase both people’s capabilities and aspirations to move, explaining why development often boosts migration. Once sizeable migrant communities have settled, social networks tend to reduce the costs and risks of migrating, with settled migrants frequently functioning as ‘bridgeheads’.

However, as societies get wealthier, overall emigration aspirations are likely to decrease because more people can imagine a future within their own country, while immigration is likely to increase. Although it is often assumed that technological progress increases migration, easier transportation and communication may enable people to commute or work from home, while outsourcing and trade may also partly reduce the need to migrate. In fact, from a long-term historical perspective, technology has facilitated humankind to settle down. Ever since the agricultural (‘Neolithic’) revolution began some 12,000 years ago, technology has enabled people to shift from hunting and gathering to more sedentary lifestyles. In modern times, technological progress has certainly boosted non-migratory mobility – such as commuting, tourism and business travel – but its impact on migration is rather ambiguous. This may partly explain why the number of international migrants as a share of the world population has remained remarkably stable at levels of around 3 per cent over recent decades.

It is illusionary to think that large-scale migration is a temporary phenomenon that will disappear once – an equally illusionary – equilibrium is achieved. Such ideas reflect a fundamentally flawed, ahistorical view on the history of humankind. Development itself drives migration. Migration has therefore always been – and will remain – an inevitable part of the human experience.

References

Castles, S. et al. (2014) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edn, London: MacMillan Press.

de Haas, H. (2010) ‘Migration Transitions: A Theoretical and Impirical Inquiry into the Developmental Drivers of International Migration’, IMI Working Paper No 24, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.

Skeldon, R. (1990) Population Mobility in Developing Countries: A Reinterpretation, London: Belhaven Press.

Multiculturally Yours: The Neighbourhood as Lived Diversity - Ole Jensen

Neighbourhood is personal. Rather than a suburb, defined in terms of its distance from an urban centre, neigh (Old English for ‘near’) emphasizes spatial proximity and closeness. And unlike a ward – a means of government that can belong to politicians, demographers or urban planners – a neighbourhood is a geographical space loaded with individual meanings. It is, in other words, socially produced. It is, in the context of immigration and settlement dynamics, also the site of an ongoing everyday negotiation of difference, with us-them distinctions increasingly blurred by diverse stories of immigration and settlement. Accordingly, the neighbourhood doubles as a site of lived diversity and a lens that provides insights into how individuals and groups actually live that diversity.

My neighbourhood, as a researcher and an immigrant, is basically a road in inner Woking, a town 30 miles south west of London. Perhaps indicative of the declining numbers of ‘native’ residents, Woking Working Men’s Club, at the top of the road, has been closed for a number of years, and the Indian-run Polski sklep (Polish food shop) across the road is now the only local outlet selling alcohol. Emblematic of the increasingly diverse nature, the barber shop further down the road advertises itself as ‘specialists in European, Afro Caribbean, Asian & Traditional hair cut’. When the local post office closed down years ago, an Islamic school opened, then a short-lived Brazilian shop, and the building is now divided into a Western Union outlet and a beauty parlour. In this manner, images of the changing street provide insights into how diversity is built into, and continuously transforms, the area. What was there before is unclear, and it is indicative of the area that the two longest-serving local shops are an Italian deli, opened in the 1970s when many Italian immigrants lived in the area, and a Pakistani supermarket, with a board commemorating ‘25 years of service to the community’.

But what is that community about? “We’ve lost the track,” said the woman living opposite us – she herself Swiss-born, but a resident for 30 years. She was pointing to the row of Victorian terraces where we live, recalling days when she could name everyone living in them. I could see her point. When our neighbours moved to France in 2007, they let the house: first an Australian couple moved in; then three house-sharing engineers, two Pakistanis and one Palestinian; two moved on, and the remaining Pakistani then shared with his Chinese wife who moved down from Glasgow; when they bought a house nearer London, a Polish couple moved in, he working in IT. They stayed a year, then moved to Abu Dhabi where she found work; this year, a black British couple from Enfield moved in – still working and attending church in London.

This turnover is, in part, in the nature of the neighbourhood, this being the cheap part of town and thus the point of arrival for newcomers – and increasingly so, with the number of households in private rented, and thus flexible, accommodation in this area doubling in the period 2001-11. It is a process we know as ‘churn’, though that is not a helpful term, as it distracts from the diverse nature of newcomers as well as, in this instance, the resourcefulness that allows them to move on. This is very much in contrast to the unskilled immigrants of the 1960s and 70s, who typically found a local job, moved the family, got a mortgage – altogether actions signalling long-term intent.

Untouched for years amongst all the comings and goings on the road is the glass-covered noticeboard at the roadside, holding messages from a now defunct community association – the notices undated, but faded. Community lost? Evidently, the fluidity and discontinuity characterising the area serves to question if there is anything solid in terms of lasting and inclusive associational bodies. The answer would be no, and it is indicative of the make-up of the neighbourhood that the most well-established organisations are the Pakistani and the Kashmiri welfare organisations, both dating back to the early 1970s. But the absence of neighbourhood-based organisations belies the more sporadic coming together around specific causes. So the local community centre, situated in a Victorian school building, came into existence after a campaign led by local minority groups. Italians, Spanish, Chinese, Pakistani, Moroccan groups established a community association for the purpose. No sooner was it up and running than the association was dissolved.

What constitutes the neighbourhood fabric is rather the dynamics whereby routine episodes become public familiarity and the ‘banal transgressions’ that are part of everyday life and, therefore, often remain unnoticed. It may be the fish curry from our Sri Lankan neighbour down the road, my daughter’s play-date with a Kurdish school mate, the sharing of a joke with the retired Italian shopkeeper who, aged 70, has bought himself a sporty Lamborghini to show for a lifetime of toil.

Overall, my research showed that memories of the past and narratives of the present neighbourhood share a lot of explanatory ground. One was the nostalgic memories of elderly white residents, remembering the past as a coherent, comprehensible era, a neighbourhood underpinned by strong local ties. The other was the experience shared by younger, locally born Pakistanis. Many of them erstwhile pupils in the same school where they later sent their own children, they referred to the neighbourhood as a ‘comfort zone’ where ‘you know the community and the people and everything’.

So yes, neighbourhood is personal. But it is personal in many different ways, characterised by both experiences of local belonging and short-term settlement processes, without any one narrative of community. And it is by observing how these experiences come together in the context of everyday life that we arrive at more nuanced understandings of how diversity is lived and experienced.

Mediterranean - Ferruccio Pastore

The economic and political significance of the Mediterranean for Europe has shifted dramatically from crucial reservoir of labour to deeply problematic border. First came the gradual inclusion of the continent’s southerners – Italy first, much later Greece, eventually Portugal and Spain – into the European Community and the Common Market. This accompanied, and to some extent promoted, their surprising metamorphosis from migrant-sending to receiving countries. In the meantime, and partly as a side effect, it was increasingly the southern and eastern shores – Yugoslavia, the Maghreb and Turkey in particular – which emerged as recruitment basins.

By the early 1970s, active recruitment of migrant labour had officially been discontinued, but it took one more decade for European governments to agree that the ban on low-skilled labour migration needed joint enforcement to become effective. Systematic cooperation and targeted harmonization were also felt necessary to achieve another strategic priority: a common space of economic and civic freedom through the suppression of customs and police controls at ‘internal borders’. What was later to be known as the ‘Schengen Club’ was born, and with it the ‘common external border’. Over 34,000 km of the EU’s Mediterranean coasts soon became the most politically contentious and symbolically charged emblem of ‘Fortress Europe’.

Harmonizing and reinforcing controls towards the outside was the price for lifting internal checks: freedom for insiders was enhanced at the expense of freedom for outsiders. In the meantime, with the collapse of the socialist bloc, perceptions of where the line was drawn between Europe’s inside and outside markedly changed in the course of a few years, and the grand eastern enlargement project took shape: the Union opened up to the east and closed down to the south.

The European border which has been developing since then is a new kind of border. Not any more a neat and simple border line punctuated by guarded checkpoints, in front of which trucks and tourists’ cars queue, but rather a wide (and constantly widening) and complex border zone, itself bounded by blurred borders, where pre-emptive and repressive controls and surveillance activities are performed at multiple stages, through a variety of more or less technological means, and by a heterogeneous plethora of public and private actors. Very significant human and financial resources have been invested in developing ever more sophisticated techniques, methods and infrastructures for profiling persons, scanning vehicles, screening spaces, and detecting anomalies and forgeries. Under the pressure of (alleged and perceived) interdependence and growing anxiety about unwanted migration, Europe has turned into the largest and, by some possible measures, the most advanced laboratory in the world for migration controls, with the Mediterranean as prime testing ground.

According to the letter and the spirit of European treaties, every inch of the external border is understood as ‘common’: established on behalf of all member states and benefitting them all. It is only due to the hazards of geography and territorial sovereignty that each stretch is primarily controlled by the agents of one specific state.

It was a few years after the formal incorporation of such principles in the law of the European Union that the imbalances embedded in such an unprecedented distribution of duties and responsibilities among sovereign nations became clear. Border countries, with Mediterranean ones on the frontline, were called to perform a common function, according to common standards, but using their own means. The distribution of border surveillance costs, potentially heavy, especially in the case of maritime activities, turned into an issue which started to climb up the EU’s policy agenda.

Meanwhile, the borderization of the Mediterranean was proving effective, although sometimes in unforeseen ways. The efforts of coastal EU states, usually with the crucial cooperation of neighbouring transit states, closed down several once prominent irregular migration routes, including the Otranto Channel, the Gibraltar Strait and the crossing to the Canaries.

This successful border upgrade was applauded in politicians’ discourses and in public perceptions, but there were some collateral effects. Given the mixed nature of the deterred flows – where ‘economic migrants’ share boats with minors, victims of trafficking and asylum seekers – externalization of controls implied a substantial thwarting of the international obligation to protect forced migrants. Even more seriously, the more risky smuggling techniques required by enhanced controls had as a side effect a rise in deaths at sea (conservative estimates reach a figure of around 20,000 victims over two decades).

Furthermore, the relative effectiveness of such epochal transformation was integrally related to the authoritarian nature of Europe’s main ‘partners’ operating on the southern shore. The strong and capillary control that so-called ‘moderate Arab regimes’ had over their territories and societies, and their capacity to disregard widespread popular opposition to exit controls and readmission policies, were critical factors in the success of European externalization strategies. This became transparent in 2011, when the collapse of those regimes stirred a wave of anxiety among migration control bureaucracies, amplified by the media, contributing to Europe’s precocious (and to some extent self-fulfilling) scepticism on the destiny of ‘Arab revolutions’.

Such anxiety proved exaggerated or at least premature, because – in a first phase at least – cooperation agreements were quickly and effectively negotiated between key players, as, for instance, between the Italian government and the new Libyan and Tunisian authorities. But the intensification of regional push factors (from the escalation of the Syrian conflict to a new deterioration of the situation in the Horn of Africa), together with the relapse of Egypt and Libya into conflict and instability, are once more showing how fragile is a European migration management strategy which gives priority to the separating over the connecting function of the Mediterranean. The weakness of European responses in the wake of the Lampedusa tragedy of 3 October 2013, and the tensions surrounding what ‘European solidarity’ should actually mean in such circumstances, are another urgent reminder of the long-term unsustainability of reducing the Mediterranean to just a border.

World Wide Street - Suzanne M. Hall

Every year since 2004, I travel back to South Africa to visit family. It is an eleven and a half hour flight, usually made through the night, allowing the traveller to get from London to Cape Town without missing so much as a day. Except, like me, if you don’t sleep well on a plane. Scrunched in an economy seat that perceptibly shrinks with each year, I mark the hours with in-flight movies and a good book. Around 3am I slink past the row of sprawling bodies to walk up and down the aisles, passing seats filled with passengers in various bodily states of oblivion and blankets that have slithered to the floor. Around 5am we are greeted by the full set of lights being put back on, the unpalatable aroma of egg that has been sitting in microwavable foils for the past 24 hours, and the determined cheeriness of the flight attendants. At this point, having refused to take part in the breakfast charade, I resort to the in-flight magazine. I flick past restaurant and city reviews; offers on perfume, faux jewellery and giant packs of Toblerone; and finally, at the back, reach the map. The one element of curiosity offered in the 11 hour flight, contained in a single A4 image of destinations the airline flies to and from. At the click of a search engine we can find all thinkable articulations of our global age, and yet it is this map, full of its pinpoints, continental outlines and flight arcs, that evokes the wonder of it. London to Accra; Singapore to Perth; New York to Mexico City. Millions and millions of families, students, business people, leaders, crooks, writers, artists, doctors, nannies, all traversing the globe every day of every year.

So porous are our city borders that on any one day, airport passengers average 180,000 at Heathrow, 100,000 at Gatwick and 50,000 at Stansted. Six hundred thousand students arrive from outside of London each year, filling the city’s university lecture rooms and libraries with daily attendance. Four hundred thousand tourists peruse its galleries, jostle up and down Oxford Street, and have their pictures taken in front of Buckingham Palace. And that is just on one day. How could we comprehend the accumulation of generations of arrivals and departures in the making of the city? In 2004, I moved into a flat above the Walworth Road in south London. A year later, intrigued by the diversity of people who activate this linear ecosystem of retail and day-to-day convenience, I decided to trace the origins of independent proprietors on the street. I had in mind the connections of that airline travel map, and so, relying on a colleague’s computer skills, we set out an image with a map of the world below and a map of the street directly above it. For two weeks we walked the Walworth Road, engaged in a face-to-face survey of the independent proprietors My colleague Thiresh pinpointed the worldwide origins of the 93 shopkeepers on the mile length street who were willing to participate in our survey, and drew a line to the corresponding shop. I elected to leave out any visual distractions: no colour, just a simple black and white tracing of one point connecting to another. What appeared in monochrome was no less captivating to me than the airline original. On one London street at one point in time, an aggregation of origins of stunning diversity: Afghanistan, China, Cyprus and Northern Cyprus, England, Ghana, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Malawi, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Sierre Leone, Trinidad, Turkey and Vietnam.

A map of the origins and destination of the diverse proprietors on a south London street, surveyed in 2009.

Source: Hall, S. M. (2012) City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary, London: Routledge.

There are many audits and tracings of this kind that one would like to see: workers in the NHS, for example, or London bus drivers, or even students and staff in my own university. I chose the street because it is so commonplace, an everyday urban currency that each of us, no matter where we are from, has a familiarity with. The intention is to reveal what is common to our urban landscapes and how the everyday alters in an increasingly mobile world. Our survey reveals the diversity of people that is integral to the way day-to-day life in our cities works. To deny this commonplace conviviality or the porosity of the world in which we now live, would require holding, at all costs, to another truth. It would require a moral claim for the tightening of borders, accompanied by an expedient pragmatism that allows for a discriminatory system of access to those with high influence and income. To counteract the experience of living in the wider world, we would have to circulate a cynical apparatus of hierarchy based on a singular national allegiance above cross-border interdependencies. To make the distinctions of insiders and outsiders felt, there would need to be vans parading around London neighbourhoods with billboards demanding ‘Go home or face arrest’. But who would go that far down such a dead-end street?

On my return flight from Cape Town to London I pass through the South African border control. Because I am a dual nationality citizen, I am required to travel in and out of South Africa with both passports, a minimal obligation which, on this occasion, I had forgotten to respect. As I handed the border guard my maroon UK passport, instead of my Springbok green-and-gold one, he frowned:

“You have forgotten your passport,” he stated.

“Yes,” I replied sheepishly.

“But you wouldn’t forget this one, would you?” he insisted. “This is the one you wouldn’t forget.”

In today’s world, we are all migrants of sorts. We perpetually travel across borders in airplanes, through mobile phone networks, along internet satellite signals. But as the border guard reminded me, we are not all equally migrants; some are permitted more access than others.

Arrivals between Bildungsroman and the City Commons - Michael Keith

The Athenians believed that the moral imperative was to leave the city a better place on departure than on arrival. The sense that there is a moral obligation towards what comes next, to those who inherit the present, famously informs Aristotle’s description of the constitution of ancient Athens, and is central to the genesis of a political vision of the metropolis as the good city. It prefigures a notion of intergenerational ethics, and foregrounds a sense of obligation towards both the new arrival and the citizen. But it sits uneasily with the way in which the urban age of the 21st century has treated the steady flow of people to the city – of those from rural areas to urban spaces, and as well as of those across national boundaries.

Migration provides a lens through which dilemmas of particular moments of human mobility speak to the human condition. Characteristically, people arrive in one place, more often than not as adults seeking a job, an education, or family ties. They arrive skilled and schooled to some degree already. To the extent that they work, they contribute to the metropolitan economy, even as their arrival may place strains on the commons of the city – the public resources that we share – the ecology, the neighbourhood welfare nets, the competition for scarce land, housing and shelter.

It is possible to see this process analytically as the transitional strains of economic development. The long-term return on the mobility of labour optimises factor resource distribution, powers economic growth, and drives social change – in 21st-century Shanghai and in 19th-century London. But as the city grows, it may undermine its own sustainability through ecological hazards of pollution and traffic, and failures to plan waste, water, and the exploitation of scarce public resources. This invokes a potential tragedy of the commons as the metropolis spirals into decline. Detroit has become the emblematic site of such malaise and post-industrial shrinking. But at times it is also possible to see less the tragedy of the commons than the banality of repertoires of social closure in the face of scarcity. Competition for scarce resources between those who have the least structures logics of intolerance – for example, the responses of an ageing Europe to a challenged welfare state paradoxically staffed by the very migrants who are popularly represented as threatening its survival; sponsored violence against Bihari movers to Mumbai; the heavy policing of African enclaves in the emerging market economy of 21st-century Istanbul.

New urbanisms generate new commons in liminal and restructuring urban spaces and at the rural-urban interface in Europe and the USA, as well as in the emergent economies of China, India and Brazil. As new arrivals make sense of a city that is not their own, the metropolis mutates: ecologies and publics are reconstituted, and the calculus of economic change is resynchronised. These changes inevitably challenge the legitimacy of rule and governance of existing common interests. But which parts of the future metropolis, which spaces and times, should be properly thought of as common pool resources (CPR)? When and how are private rights challenged by the collective needs in the future city? Migration brings such questions to the fore when mayors and municipal decision-makers have to balance the demands of the present and the needs of the future metropolis. This is particularly pronounced in cities where development and expansion are most rapid – in emergent megacities such as Delhi, Shenzhen and Sao Paolo – but also when old metropolises such as Moscow or London reinvent themselves. Optimal economic organisation of the affluent metropolis may sit in tension with a moral calculus of the good city, implying policy trade-offs between what is plausible and what is ideal, and requiring the reconciliation of demographic pressures of settlement with the rational organisation of space, property rights, and popular demands for redistribution: that is, of formal principles with informal realities.

The economics and political science literature on the commons has focused primarily on the rural context. But revisiting the subject becomes more pressing as the world turns urban. Thus in her landmark work Governing the Commons, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom briefly discusses migration as a potential threat to collective understandings of and agreements on use of, and access to, resources (1990). But in her later writing Ostrom oriented her work towards an analysis of the attributes of community with stable resource pooling, including questions that should be asked of the community by leaders seeking to address heterogeneity, generational population shifts, and migration. She synthesised the ethical questions and empirical challenges of migration by incorporating both the putative threat of diversity to legitimacy and also ‘rules of use’ through the following questions to which a shifting community and CPR should be held:

- Is there general agreement on the rules related to who is included as a member with both benefits and responsibilities?

- Do the members have a shared understanding of what their mutual responsibilities are as well as the formulae used for distribution of benefits?

- Are these rules considered legitimate and fair?

- How are the rules transmitted from one generation to the next or to those who migrate into the group? (Ostrom, 2009)

In this set of questions, Ostrom highlights both analytical and normative challenges of migration for the city. Because migrants join communities that may already be tenure-insecure, whether in rural or urban settings, local groups ‘can be quick to abandon or to change ways of tenure in the face of significant migrant arrival, because there can be little reason to continue with rules that others are not following’. The central question of legitimacy, a crucial component of protection against eviction in much of the global south, is complicated, as migrant groups may shift, appropriate, or alter the premises for access to land-based resources. But the question of legitimacy in the city also invokes the ethical obligation to the stranger, in other words, the rights of new arrivals to have rights. It does not isolate empirical diversity from contested ethics of the good life, and instead points toward the inevitable mixing of moral private problems and instrumental public issues.

The contemporary city consequently reframes the sense of arrival. Ethically, we arrive in the present as somehow strangers to ourselves. The facility of the modern is the chameleon-like propensity for change so rapid that vernacular knowledges of place are trumped by the transformation of spaces of the everyday in processes of economic restructuring. We may identify and belong in one place, but owe a debt of obligation to those near and distant in both time and space in the city that is yet to come.

References

Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ostrom, E. (2009) ‘Governing the Commons from a Citizens’ Perspective’, Heinrich Boll Stiftung, http://www.boell.org/downloads/ostrom_governing_a_commons.pdf.

Housing - David Robinson

Migration holds a mirror up to society and prompts reflection about social issues that might otherwise be brushed under the carpet of political and popular debate. So it is with housing.

England is suffering a housing crisis. Rising house prices and restricted access to mortgage finance have put home ownership beyond the reach of increasing numbers of households. There is a desperate shortage of affordable homes. More than 1.5 million households are reported to be waiting for social housing, yet we are building fewer houses than at any time since 1945. Overcrowding is on the rise and more than 600,000 households in England are now living in overcrowded conditions. The rising cost of living is leaving many households struggling to cover housing costs and facing the possibility of repossession or eviction. Homelessness is increasing and more and more homeless families are being placed in bed and breakfast hotels because suitable accommodation is simply not available.

Tackling this crisis should be on the pledge card of every political party. Decent, stable housing provides more than just a roof over someone’s head. It provides a place of safety and security, a healthy living environment and links to community. It promotes health and well-being and life chances. Yet the housing issue rarely warrants a mention by politicians, while press and media coverage merely feeds the public’s appetite for news about the latest house price figures. However, the interest of politicians and the public in the housing crisis can be piqued when a convenient folk devil emerges which they can blame for these miseries.

Housing is one of the key issues around which popular and political debate about the impacts and consequences of migration has coalesced. In England, anti-immigration groups and far-right parties frequently place housing at the centre of their campaigns, criticising the political establishment for failing to protect and provide for its citizens. The housing shortage, rising house prices, and problems of affordability are blamed on international migration. The accusation that migrants are unfairly advantaged in the allocation of social housing is one of the most frequently alleged injustices of migration. Rather than asking why successive governments have failed to ensure a supply of reasonable quality, accessible, secure and affordable housing, the housing crisis has been blamed on migration. The irony here is that migrants tend to be living in some of the worst housing conditions of all.

New migrants typically fill voids in the housing stock left aside or avoided by other households. Consequently, migrants often end up living in unpopular neighbourhoods and in poor quality housing, usually in the private rental sector. Such housing is often overcrowded and in a poor state of repair. Insecurity is a major problem. Difficulties with paying the rent and limited recourse to public funds can increase the risk of eviction and homelessness for many migrants. Estimates vary, but it is possible that upwards of 20 per cent of people sleeping rough in London are migrants.

The fact that many migrants struggle to meet their basic material needs and frequently occupy a precarious position in the housing system is a cause for major concern. The 1951 Geneva Convention specifies the social rights of refugees in relation to housing for good reason. Housing is fundamental to quality of life and critical to the integration process. Housing that provides a place of safety, security and stability provides a home. It improves life chances, promotes health, education and employment. It is fundamental to an adequate standard of living. Of course, this is true not just for migrants, but for everyone. We therefore urgently need to shift the focus of attention away from blaming migration for the housing crisis to solving it, so that everyone can gain and sustain a safe and secure home.

Diaspora Formation - Nicholas Van Hear

Diasporas form in two main ways, the common ground being dispersal of a population across several destinations. They may form gradually by accretion, emerging as a result of ‘voluntary’ or routine migration, or alternatively, be brought about by crisis, involving coercion, catastrophe, expulsion or other forcible movement resulting from conflict or persecution. Dispersal may also result from a combination of compulsion and choice, and diasporas emerge as a result of cumulative processes and crises (Van Hear, 1998). The classical diasporas – Jews, Africans, Armenians, Irish, and later the Palestinians – were scattered following a catastrophic event or series of events that forced them into exile (Cohen, 2008). Subsequently, a much greater number of dispersed peoples have come to term themselves diasporas or have been designated as such: these were often formed as a result of less catastrophic events, or by a combination of migration crises and more routine migration.

The literature on labour migration points to some of the ways in which diasporas form by accretion. In their book Worlds in Motion, Massey et al. (1998) traced ways of accounting for the inception and perpetuation of migration. Their synthesis of migration theories pointed to how explanations of the initiation of migration could be found in a number of approaches: in neoclassical economics, which located the drivers of migration in differences in income levels between countries; in the new economics of (labour) migration; in segmented labour market theory, which held that migration stemmed from labour demand in industrialised societies; and in variants of historical-structural and world-systems theories, which sought explanations of migration in the unequal distribution of power worldwide through a political economy approach. Explanations of the perpetuation of migration could be found in theories about social capital, networks and ‘cumulative causation’. All of these approaches could be applied in different ways to help explain the inception, formation and consolidation of diasporas, but some are particularly relevant. The new economics of (labour) migration approach points to decision-making not just by individuals, but by households and communities, with the object not just of maximising income, but also of spreading risk; this chimes with the behaviour of diasporas in formation, particularly in circumstances of stress. Ideas about social capital and networks are likewise helpful in explaining the formation and reproduction of diasporas, by pointing to ways in which social connections can be drawn upon in the migration context. Likewise, the notion of cumulative causation strikes a chord with diaspora behaviour, by highlighting how each act of migration alters the social context in which subsequent migration decisions are made, often making additional movement more likely (Massey et al., 1998).

While insights from analysis of so-called ‘voluntary’ migration in the 1980s and 1990s helped account for the formation and perpetuation of diasporas, other sources of diaspora formation were found in the increased numbers of asylum seekers moving from the global south to the global north, and also as a result of major forced migration crises associated with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar world from the early 1990s onwards – among them the break-up of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91; the 1990-91 Gulf crisis; the genocide, wars and mass refugee movements in Central Africa from 1994; protracted conflict and displacement in Palestine, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Sri Lanka, Colombia and elsewhere; and more recently the refugee and migratory movements associated with the wars in Afghanistan (from 2001), Iraq (from 2003), and the upheavals in the Arab world from 2011, especially the war in Syria.

Among people fleeing these and other conflicts, a common pattern has been for most to seek safety in other parts of their country, for a substantial number to look for refuge in neighbouring countries, and for a smaller number to seek asylum further afield. Some of those in neighbouring countries of first asylum may later be resettled in other continents, or migrate onward to new destinations, joining those who have gone there directly. If exile persists, complex transnational relations will develop among the different locations of the developing diaspora: that is, among those at home, those in neighbouring territories (what might be called the near diaspora), and those spread further afield (what might be termed the wider diaspora) (Van Hear, 2006). With their dispersal comes the establishment of transnational relations and networks among the dispersed groups, and it is through these networks and relationships that diasporas can exert influence on their countries of origin.

Quite often, diasporas are formed from mixes of refugees and people who move for economic betterment, study, marriage or other reasons – sometimes called ‘mixed migration’. As the international migration and refugee ‘regime’ has become more stringent and access to affluent destinations more limited, class or socio-economic standing, access to resources, and associated elaboration of networks shape the capacity to migrate. Access to more prosperous and desirable destinations are increasingly limited to the better resourced. Put simply, there tends to be a hierarchy of destinations that can be reached by migrants and asylum seekers, according to the resources – financial and network-based – that they can call upon.

Major new diasporas have formed from or been augmented by both economic migration and conflict-induced population movements – or mixes of the two – over the past two decades. These new or resurgent transnational social formations have consolidated, are enduring, have undertaken new or extended existing forms of transnational activity, and are becoming integrated into the global order, particularly in respect of relations between affluent countries and emerging powers in the global south (Van Hear, 2009).

References

Cohen, R. (2008) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

Massey, D. et al. (1998) Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Van Hear, N. (1998) New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities, London: UCL Press.

Van Hear, N. (2006) ‘“I went as far as my money would take me”: Conflict, Forced Migration and Class’, in F. Crepeau et al. (eds.) Forced Migration and Global Processes: A View from Forced Migration Studies, Lanham: Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield.

Van Hear, N. (2009) ‘The Rise of Refugee Diasporas’, Current History, 108(717).

The Dynamics of Pakistani State-Building and Balti Migration Practices - Ole Jensen

Pakistani migration patterns have principally been analysed either in relation to integration and social cohesion in European countries, or in the context of international migration to the Gulf states. There has been little attention to internal migration in Pakistan. In the studies that have been carried out, migrants have been perceived as labour migrants, pushed out from their rural environments due to economic hardship and landlessness, or pulled by actual or supposed opportunities in Karachi and in the cities of Punjab. Whereas present day internal migration patterns in Pakistan have largely evolved since Partition in 1947, there has been little emphasis on how this reshaping of the political landscape has impacted migration dynamics. I will here, based on fieldwork carried out in Thalay, a mountain valley in Baltistan, and among Balti migrants in Karachi, examine the relationship between Pakistani state-building and Balti migration practices.

Baltistan is a high altitude mountain area, covering some 25,000 square kilometres and situated in the Karakorum Mountains. Classified as a mountain desert, with subsistence farming contingent on access to glacial melt water for irrigation, the scarceness of the local resource base has historically curtailed the number of people that the land can support. Early western explorers of the late 19th century referred to the local population as ‘overflowing’, and described chance encounters with Balti migrants [en route to Simla], ‘…clothed in filthy and scanty rags, and of a half-starved appearance’ (Knight, 1905). Since then, the Balti population has tripled, to approximately 300,000 in 2000, with the local population increasingly forced to look beyond the region for means of subsistence.

At the same time, the Balti room for manoeuvre has changed dramatically since 1947. Baltistan is part of the disputed territory of Kashmir, and is located immediately north of the Line of Control dividing Pakistani and Indian-held Kashmir. Due to the ongoing conflict over Kashmir, the Balti population has seen its traditional routes of trade and migration to southern Kashmir cut. Instead, a physical and political infrastructure has emerged that construes Baltistan as an integrated part of Pakistan (though never officially recognised as such).

Most significantly, however, an all-year access route was constructed through the Indus Gorge in the early 1980s, linking the regional capital of Skardu to the Karakorum Highway and the Pakistani plains. A route previously only rarely used, as it passed through territory controlled by Sunni Muslim tribes (the Baltis are Shi’is and Nurbakshis), this has become a lifeline, providing food supplies from down country and a way out for Balti labour migrants who leave during the bitterly cold winter period. This seasonal migration is a recurring move which most households in the valley engage in, typically heading towards the regional centre of Gilgit, an eight hour bus journey away, or to coal mines in northern Punjab. Going away over winter thus becomes part of a subsistence cycle, solidly integrated in the totality of things to do to make a living.

Less recognisable, and only indirectly part of a subsistence strategy, are the long-term moves away from the mountain region – mostly to Karachi, home to an estimated 8 to 10 per cent of the Balti population. Seen from the mountain villages, the moves were explained as long-term investments. Young men would go to Karachi for educational purposes, in order to qualify for a job in government service on their return. The prospect of government service is key here, with many using the same metaphor: “A private job is like the snow; when it is melted, it is over. A government job is a fountain; it lasts forever.” “Forever” translated into the certainty of a monthly salary, a significant lump sum payable upon retirement, and a modest monthly pension. Pensioners – retired from the army or from government service – were living proof of the ‘fountain’. But unemployed graduates were aplenty in the valley, waiting for vacant positions.

The picture looked somewhat different among Balti migrants in Karachi. “You finish studies, you go home, that’s the system,” was how Ali, a migrant from Thalay, explained it to me. Except, he didn’t. 26 years old, Ali had moved to Karachi eight years prior. After finishing his studies, he had been working as a typist, living in shared accommodation with other migrants from Thalay. The pressure was on, however. Like most Balti migrants in Karachi, Ali had married during a visit back home, and his wife and baby son were now living in his father’s house.

Ali would eventually go back to Thalay and take up the job in government service that his father – with good connections and a solid bribe – had secured for him. Others would be in a similar situation, torn between expectations from home and opportunities in a now familiar urban context. “What is there for me to do there?” was what many would argue. Altogether, two-thirds of the 32 Balti migrants I interviewed in Karachi had spent more than ten years in the city, and most of them had eventually moved their families to the city.

But Balti migration to Karachi cannot be reduced to the sum of individual trajectories of return or consolidation. It is also in Karachi – at a distance from the villages and valleys that constitute the primary points of identification – that the idea of Baltistan as a political entity is emerging. Protesting against a status quo where Baltistan is controlled by Pakistan without the Baltis being accepted as Pakistani citizens, immigrants from Baltistan have demonstrated against Pakistani domination and in favour of closer ties with Ladakh, in Indian-held Kashmir.

In conclusion, the mechanisms of Pakistani state-building have clearly impacted the nature of, and motivations behind, Balti migration practices – to the point where these mechanisms are being questioned. So whereas the initial move to Karachi would seem driven by an ambition to avail oneself of livelihood opportunities brought about by the Pakistani state-building process, it is also here, at a distance from Baltistan, that questions emerge concerning Baltistan’s place within the Pakistani state.

References

Knight, E. F. (1905) Where Three Empires Meet, London: Spottiswoode & Co.

The Hostile Environment - Jonathan Price

The offices of local authority social services departments are rarely the most welcoming places, yet it is doubtful that they are intentionally hostile. As a goal of social policy, hostility is reserved for one group of people above all others – irregular migrants – as summed up by Theresa May in an interview with The Telegraph in May 2012: “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” Although restricting access to basic services – free secondary healthcare, public housing, benefits and support from statutory social services – predates the coalition government, Britain’s current government is seeking to consolidate this approach through restrictions to primary health care and the right to rent accommodation in the private sector.

In theory, denying basic rights and services to irregular migrants is supposed to force the issue of return; in practice, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, with many people remaining in Britain in spite of these restrictions. From my experience of working with migrants in social services, many people remain for years, if not decades, often with children born and brought up in the UK. But little thought is given to what implementing this so-called hostile environment means in practice, including for those who have lived unlawfully in Britain for so long. What actually happens when people and their children are in need of basic services such as financial help and accommodation, and what happens when those basic services are refused?

It is not uncommon in the waiting rooms of local authority social services offices to see families from abroad: parents, their children and their suitcases. Homeless children in Britain are ‘children in need’ according to laws governing local authority practice, and they cannot lawfully be left to live without a roof over their heads, in spite of this being an impact of central government immigration policy. Here, then, begins the administration of the hostile environment, a festival of bureaucracy, of lengthy legal justifications for or against the provision of services. It is the site of brinkmanship between a parent and the state, mediated by his/her advocate and the duty social worker. There is a plethora of legal and practical considerations to be made: the best interests of the child, the definition of ‘destitution’, the strength of a family’s claim to remain in the UK. The outcome of the assessment can result in statutory services being provided anyway, an offer of tickets to return to the parents’ country of origin, or a referral to friends, a charity, or a place of worship for the provision of informal support.

In order to understand how fraught this process can be, it is worth looking at what happens to families before they arrive at the offices of the local authority social services department. This narrative cannot speak for the heterogeneity of Britain’s irregular migrant population, nor can it clarify what is often a confused and unquantifiable construction of the ‘illegal immigrant’. However, it illustrates the policy dilemma as it relates to families who have been living unlawfully in Britain for some time, a situation that I saw again and again when working in social services. Up to this point, these individuals have been neighbours, colleagues, fellow pupils, friends, and family members. The bonds families create over the years in their communities, in their place of worship, on their street, in school or workplace, constitute a network of support that can prop people up for years, until a crisis situation (an argument, rent arrears, loss of employment, domestic violence) forces them into precarious housing and living situations and into the offices of their local social services department or voluntary sector advocate.

It is perhaps in court where these issues have been considered in most depth. Many cases have found that the strength of families’ bonds with their communities has the effect of creating a legal obligation for local authorities to provide services. In looking at whether Birmingham City Council had breached article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 – the right to private and family life – in its decision to withhold accommodation and support from a destitute family that had been living unlawfully in the UK for years, the judge in Clue (2010) said:

The right to private life entails considerations far wider than the right to family life. Importantly, private life includes the relationships and the social, cultural as well as the family ties that a person forms.

The case of ZH (Tanzania) illustrates the added complexity of families with ‘mixed status’, in this case relating to children in the care of a Tanzanian refused asylum seeker, but with a British father:

They are British children; they are British, not just through the ‘accident’ of being born here, but by descent from a British parent; they have an unqualified right of abode here; they have lived here all their lives; they are being educated here; they have other social links with the community here; they have a good relationship with their father here. It is not enough to say that a young child may readily adapt to life in another country. That may well be so, particularly if she moves with both her parents to a country which they know well and where they can easily re-integrate in their own community…. But it is very different in the case of children who have lived here all their lives and are being expected to move to a country which they do not know and will be separated from a parent whom they also know well (2011).

The story of people’s relationship with their community, with friends, family, neighbours, fellow worshipers – irrespective of their immigration status – shows that implementing a hostile environment has social as well as legal limitations. It begs the question of whether Britain can be so easily made into such a hostile place after all.

References

Birmingham City Council v Clue (2010) EWCA Civ 460, http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/460.html.

ZH (Tanzania) (FC) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2011) UKSC 4, http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2011/4.html.

Routes and Reading out of this Anthology

Alongside the contributions made to this Anthology, and in addition to the huge body of work produced by its contributors, we decided to provide a bibliographic supplement for readers wishing to read in further depth about the topics covered. We have included a selection of the many insightful and easily available novels and films about migration. We would also encourage those who are interested in engaging with the study of migration to take a look at Global Networks and Migration Studies, two journals that COMPAS has established relations with over the years.

With this bibliography we wanted to achieve four things:

First, we have deliberately avoided conventional reference practices for the academic contributors to the volume, in order both to make the volume more readable and the combination of prose, poetry and imagery more sympathetic.

Second, we hope to help readers who are interested in developing interests both looking back at the growing body of migration studies scholarship that accumulates in the rear view mirror of history and forwards to the challenge of future research agendas. We are attempting to offer eclectic bibliographic trails to follow. Consequently, the scholarship that informs the text contributions is reflected in this bibliography under the sub-headings of the volume as a whole.

Third, we have tried to include a number of pieces that are landmarks in migration studies, without defining a canon of literature as such. For this reason, some of the authors of some of the more canonical pieces have been included in subject areas that do not always reflect the substantive nature of their research focus, or in categories which they might not recognise. This is deliberate and, we hope, a helpful way to rethink their ongoing relevance to new theoretical debates and emergent research agendas.

Fourth, we have attempted to include a disproportionate number of contributions of work from colleagues and researchers past and present at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society in order to give a representative flavour of the much greater volume of scholarly publication over the last decade and in recognition of the support provided in this decade by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Beyond Rules

Anderson, B., Gibney, M. and Paoletti, E. (eds.) (2011) ‘Boundaries of Belonging: Deportation and the Constitution and Contestation of Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, Special Issue, 15(5).

Anderson, B., Gibney, M. and Paoletti, E. (eds.) (2013) The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation, Immigrants and Minorities, Politics and Policy, New York: Springer Science & Business Media.

Balibar, E. (2004) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Banting, K. and Kymlicka, W. (eds.) (2006) Multiculturalism and the Welfare State. Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Betts, A. (2013) Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement, Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Betts, A. (ed.) (2011) Global Migration Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blom Hansen, T. and Stepputat, F. (2005) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Bommes, M. and Geddes, A. (eds.) (2000) Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State, London: Routledge.

Bosniak, L. (2006) The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Castles, S., de Haas, H. and Miller, M. J. (2013) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Fifth Revised Edition, Basingstoke: MacMillan.

Cole, P. (2000) Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Costello, C. (2014) The Human Rights of Migrants in European Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Costello, C. (2011) ‘Citizenship of the Union: Above Abuse?’ in Rita de la Feria & Stefan Vogenauer (eds.) Prohibition of Abuse of Law: A New General Principle of EU Law, Oxford: Hart Publishing.

Costello, C. (2009) ‘Metock: Free Movement and “Normal Family Life” in the Union’, Common Market Law Review 46(2): 587-622.

De Genova, N. and Peutz, N. (eds.) (2010) The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Durham: Duke University Press.

De Genova, N. (2002) ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 419-47.

Dummett, A. and Nicol, A. (1990) Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Düvell, F. (2011) ‘Paths into Irregularity: the Legal and Political Construction of Irregular Migration’, European Journal of Migration and Law, 13(3): 275-95.

Fassin, D. (2011) ‘Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 213-26.

Gamlen, A. (2008) ‘The Emigration State and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination’, Political Geography, 27(8), 840-56.

Gibney, M. (1989) A Critique of Norway’s Refugee/Asylum Policy and Proposals for Change, Oslo: Institute for Human Rights.

Hall, A. (2012) Border Watch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control, London: Pluto Press.

Hammar, T. (1990) Democracy and the Nation State. Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration, Aldershot: Avebury.

Hemerijk A. C., Palm T.P., Entenmann E. and Van Hooren F.J. (2013) ‘Changing European Welfare States and the Evolution of Migrant Incorporation Regimes’, IMPACIM Background Paper, Oxford: COMPAS.

Inda, J. X. (2006) Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kanstroom, D. (2010) Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Kubal, A. (2013) Socio-Legal Integration: Polish Post-2004 EU Enlargement Migrants in the United Kingdom, Surrey: Ashgate.

Morris, L. (2003) ‘Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights’, International Migration Review, 37: 74-100.

Mountz, A. (2010) Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ngai, M. (2004) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Oliver, C. (2011) ‘The Global Governance of Lifestyle Migration’, in Betts, A. (ed.) Global Migration Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press.

Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

Shapira, H. (2013) Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Sigona, N. and Hughes, V. (2012) No Way Out, No Way In, Oxford: COMPAS.

Torpey, J. (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Hear, N. (2005) ‘Diaspora, Immigration and Asylum from 1900 to the Present’, in Gibney, M. J. and Hansen, R. (eds.) Immigration and Asylum, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Vollmer, B. (2012) ‘Making Light of Borders: The Case of the External EU Border’, Migration Letters, 9(2): 131-40.

Walters, W. (2004) ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies, 8: 237-60.

Xiang B., Yeoh, B., and Toyota, M., (eds.) (2013) Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia, Durham: Duke University Press.

Zhang, L. (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Beyond Contract

Anderson, B. and Ruhs, M. (2010) ‘The Origins and Functions of Illegality in the Migrant Labour Market’, Population, Space and Place, 16(3): 195-211.

Anderson, B. (2010) ‘Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Labour’, Work, Employment and Society, 24(2): 300-17.

Anderson, B. (2007) ‘A Very Private Business’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 14(3): 247-64.

Anderson, B., Ruhs, M., Rogaly, B. and Spencer, S. (2006) Fair Enough? Central and East European Migrants in Low Wage Employment in the UK, Oxford: COMPAS.

Bauder, H. (2006) Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Borjas, G. and Doran, K. (2012) ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(3): 1143-1203.

Brace, L. (2010) The Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom and Belonging, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brettell, C. (2003) ‘Migration Stories: Agency and the Individual in the Study of Migration’, in Brettell, C., Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity, Walnut Creek, CA and Oxford: AltaMira Press.

Carens, J. (2008) ‘Live-in Domestics, Seasonal Workers, Foreign Students and Others Hard to Locate on the Map of Democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 16(4), 419-45.

Clemens, M. (2011) ‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(3): 83-106.

Cohen, R. (1987) The New Helots: Migrants in The International Division of Labour, Aldershot: Avebury/Gower Publishing Group.

Cox, A., and Posner, E. (2009) ‘The Rights of Migrants’, New York University Law Review, 84(6): 1403–63.

Dustmann, C., Glitz, A., and Frattini, T. (2008) ‘The Labour Market Impact of Immigration’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 24(3): 478 - 95.

Feldman, D. (2003) ‘Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare from the Old Poor Law to the Welfare State’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13: 79-104.

Goldin, I. (2011) Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World And Will Define Our Future, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hahamovith, C. (2011) No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pieke, F. N., Van Hear, N. and Lindley, A. (2007), ‘Beyond Control? The Mechanics and Dynamics of “Informal” Remittances Between Europe and Africa’, Global Networks, 7: 348–66.

Lindquist, J., Xiang, B. and Yeoh, B. S. A. (2012) ‘Introduction: Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia’, Pacific Affairs, 85(1): 1-7.

Mayhew, K. and Ruhs, M. (eds.) (2008) ‘Labour Migration in Europe’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Special Issue, 24(3).

O’Connell Davidson, J. (2010) ‘New Slavery, Old Binaries: Human Trafficking and the Borders of “Freedom”’, Global Networks, 10(2): 244-61.

Pieke, F. and Xiang, B. (2009) ‘Legality and Labour: Chinese Migration, Neoliberalism and the State in the UK and China’, Geopolitics, History, and International Relations. 1(1): 11–45.

Ruhs, M. (2013) The Price of Rights. Regulating International Labour Migration, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ruhs, M. and Anderson, B. (eds.) (2010) Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sainsbury, D. (2012) Welfare States and Immigrant Rights. The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shutes, I. (2011) ‘Welfare-to-Work and the Responsiveness of Employment Provision to the Needs of Refugees’, Journal of Social Policy, 40(3): 557-74.

Skrentny, J. (2014) After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stark, O. and Bloom, D. (1985) ‘The New Economics of Labor Migration’, American Economic Review, 75: 173-8.

Vargas-Silva, C. (2008) ‘Are Remittances Manna from Heaven? A Look at the Business Cycle Properties of Remittances’, The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 19(3): 290-303.

Steinfeld, R. (2009) Coercion/Consent in Labor, Oxford: COMPAS Working Paper, WP-09-66.

Waldinger, R. and Lichter, M. (2003) How the Other Half Works, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Xiang, B. (2012) ‘Predatory Princes and Princely Peddlers: The State and International Labor Migration Brokers in China’, Pacific Affairs, 85(1): 47-68.

Xiang, B. (2011) ‘A Ritual Economy of “Talent”: China and Overseas Chinese Professionals’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(5): 821-38.

Keeping Time

Adam, B. (1994) Time and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ahmad, A. (2008) ‘Dead Men Working: Time and Space in London’s (Illegal) Migrant Economy’, Work, Employment and Society, 22: 301-18.

Baldwin, A. (2012) ‘Whiteness and Futurity: Towards a Research Agenda’, Progress in Human Geography, 36: 172-87.

Bastian, M. (2011) ‘Temporal Connectivities: a Scoping Study of the Available Research on Time and Community’, Connected Communities Discussion Paper, available at: www.temporalbelongings.org.

Bauböck, R. (1998) ‘Sharing History and Future? Time Horizons of Democratic Membership in an Age of Migration’, Constellations, 4: 320-45.

Berg, M. L. (2011) Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics and Nation Among Cubans in Spain, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Bosma, U., Kessler, G. and Lucassen, L. (eds.) (2013) Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective, Leiden: Brill.

Boyarin, J. (ed.) (1994) Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cangiano, A., Shutes I., Spencer, S. and Leeson, G. (2009) Migrant Care Workers in Ageing Societies: Research Findings in the United Kingdom, Oxford: COMPAS.

Chatterjee, P. (2001) ‘The Nation in Heterogeneous Time’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 38: 399-418.

Cohen, R. (1994) Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others, London: Longman and New York: Addison Wesley.

Conlon, D. (2011) ‘Waiting: Feminist Perspectives on the Spacings/Timings of Migrant (Im)mobility’, Gender, Place and Culture, 18(3): 353-60.

Cwerner, S. (2001) ‘The Times of Migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27: 7-36.

Edensor, T. (2006) ‘Reconsidering National Temporalities: Institutional Times, Everyday Routines, Serial Spaces and Synchrocities’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9: 525-45.

Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) ‘What is Agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 962-1023.

Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press.

Fielding, A. J. (1995) ‘Migration and Social Change: A Longitudinal Study of the Social Mobility of Immigrants in England and Wales’, European Journal of Population, 11: 107-21.

Fortier, A. M. (2000) Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity, Oxford: Berg.

Gidley, B. (2010) ‘Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End’, in Valman, N. and Bar-Yosef, E. (eds.), The ‘Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, London: Palgrave.

Gill, N. (2009) ‘Presentational State Power: Temporal and Spatial Influences Over Asylum Sector Decision-Makers’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(2): 215-33.

Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso.

Griffiths, M. (2013) ‘Frenzied, Decelerating and Suspended: the Temporal Uncertainties of Failed Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees’, Oxford: COMPAS Working Paper, WP-13-105.

Griffiths, M. with Rogers, A. and Anderson, B. (2013) Migration, Time and Temporalities: Review and Prospect, Oxford: COMPAS.

Hägerstrand, T. (1975) ‘On the Definition of Migration’, in Jones, E. (ed.) Reasonings in Social Geography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoerder, D. (2002) Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, Durham: Duke University Press.

King, R., Thomson, M., Fielding, T. and Warnes, T. (2006) ‘Time, Generations and Gender in Migration and Settlement’, in Penninx, M. B. R. and Kraal, K. (eds.) The Dynamics of International Migration and Settlement in Europe: A State of the Art, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

May, J. and N. Thrift (eds.) (2001) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, London and New York: Routledge.

Mountz, A., Wright, R., Miyares, I. and Bailey, A. J. (2002) ‘Lives in Limbo: Temporary Protected Status and Immigrant Identities’, Global Networks, 2: 335-56.

Oliver, C. (2011) ‘Pastures New or Old? Migration, Narrative and Change’, Anthropologica, 53(1): 67-77.

Oliver, C. (2010) ‘Between Time Not There And Time Not Theirs. Temporality in Retirement Migration to Spain’, The Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts, 4(2): 110-18.

Radu, C. (2010) ‘Beyond Border-Dwelling: Temporalizing the Border-Space Through Events’, Anthropological Theory, 10: 409-33.

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Xiang, B. (2005) ‘Working with Uncertainty’, in Parayil, G. (ed.) Political Economy and Information Capitalism in India: Digital Divide, Development Divide and Equity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Representations: Powers and Pitfalls

Anderson, B. and Ruhs, M. (eds.) (2010) ‘Researching Illegality in Labour Migration: Concepts, Ethics and Policy Nexus’, Population, Space and Place, Special Issue, 16(3).

Allen, W. and Blinder, S. (2012) Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, and Identity Language in the British Press: A Case Study in Monitoring and Analysing Print Media, Migration Observatory Report, Oxford: COMPAS.

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Blinder, S. (2013) ‘Imagined Immigration: The Impact of Different Meanings of ‘Immigrants’ in Public Opinion and Policy Debates in Britain’, Political Studies (online version).

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Martiniello, M. and Florence, E. (2005), ‘The Links Between Academic Research and Public Policies in the Field of Migration and Ethnic Relations: Selected Case Studies’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, Special Issue, 7(1): 3-10.

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Portes, A. (2010) ‘Migration and Social Change: Some Conceptual Reflections’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(10).

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Sharma, N. (2006) Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Troubling Bodies

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Towards Emotion

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Making Politics

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Rescaling and Re-placing

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Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction - Bridget Anderson and Michael Keith

Beyond Rules

1. The Prayer Labyrinth - Ruth Padel

2. ‘We Want to Hear from You’: How Informing Works in a Liberal Democracy - Dace Dzenovska

3. Deportation - Nicholas De Genova

4. Why Are the Most Vulnerable Denied Employment Rights? - Sonia McKay

5. Marriage Migration - Katharine Charsley

6. Undocumented Migrant Children - Vanessa Hughes

7. The Human Rights of Migrants - François Crépeau

8. Rethinking Migrant Rights for Development - Martin Ruhs

9. Equality for All? - Sarah Spencer

10. Reflections on an Anniversary: EU Citizenship at 20 - Cathryn Costello

11. Framing and Reframing Irregular Migration - Franck Düvell

12. Diaspora Governance - Alan Gamlen

13. Enforcement - Bastian Vollmer

14. Muddied Waters: Migrants’ Entitlements to Public Services and Benefits - Caroline Oliver

15. You’ve Got a Text from UKBA - Les Back and Shamser Sinha

Beyond Contract

1. Migration - Helen Woods, age 12

2. Immigration and Low-Skilled Work: The Pret A Manger Question - Jonathan Portes

3. Interdisciplinarity in the Study of the Law of Labour Migration - Mark Freedland

4. The Economic Impacts of Migration - Carlos Vargas-Silva

5. Child Work and Mobility - Jo Boyden and Gina Crivello

6. Migration, Welfare and Citizenship - Isabel Shutes

7. Domestic Workers and au Pairs - Rosie Cox

8. Subcontracting - Andrew Geddes

9. How to Reduce Migrant Worker Recruitment Costs - Philip Martin

10. Migrant Urbanism in China’s Chengzhongcun - Michael Keith

11. Agriculture and Food Processing - Ben Rogaly

Keeping Time

1. At Sundown - Vivien Urban, age 14

2. Time - Michelle Bastian

3. Generations - Mette Berg

4. Flow - Sondra L. Hausner

5. Naturalisation - Bernard Ryan

6. History, Memory and Immigration Controls - Cynthia Wright

7. Migration Goals - Stephen Castles

8. Global Migration - Dirk Hoerder

9. Waiting - Shahram Khosravi

10. Ageing Futures - Chris Wilson

11. Migration, Death, Islam - Nazneen Ahmed

Representations: Powers and Pitfalls

1. Field Notes from an Icelandic Glacier - Robin Boothroyd

2. Windows: The 21st-Century Migration Experience - Xiang Biao

3. Migration and Culture - Robin Cohen

4. Media and Migration - Robert McNeil

5. Global Networks Revisited - Alisdair Rogers

6. Mixed Migration - Nicholas Van Hear

7. From Communication to Impact - Emma Newcombe

8. How We Laughed… - Ida Persson

9. Reading ‘Super-Diversity’ - Steven Vertovec

10. Stories of Migration, the Migration of Stories - Nazneen Ahmed

11. The (Un)Bearable Precariousness of being a Lifestyle Migrant - Roger Norum

12. The Limits of Research - Liza Schuster

Troubling Bodies

1. My Children’s Mothers - Frances Nagle

2. How Do you Recognise a Victim of Trafficking? - Bridget Anderson

3. Social Determinants of Migrants’ Health - Hiranthi Jayaweera

4. Skills - Linda McDowell

5. A Global Care Crisis - Fiona Williams

6. Illustrating Migration - Mikal Mast

7. Ageing and Migration - Russell King

8. Body Work - Carol Wolkowitz

9. Racism and Migration - John Solomos

10. The Enigma of Return - Aihwa Ong

Towards Emotion

1. I Don’t Remember - Ismail Akthar, age 12

2. Men and the Emotional World of Immigration Detention - Melanie Griffiths

3. The Dynamics of Settlement - Deborah Phillips

4. Community - David Feldman

5. Diasporic Converging Cultures? - Iain Walker

6. Devotion - Jane Garnett

7. Contemporary Anxiety Towards Irregular Migration - Joaquín Arango

8. Seeking Asylum in Schools - Halleli Pinson, Madeleine Arnot and Mano Candappa

9. Public Preferences for Restricting Immigration: Who, Why, and with What Limitations? - Scott Blinder

10. Comfort Zones - Nina Glick Schiller

11. Transnational Families - Leslie E. Fesenmyer

12. Affinities in Multicultural Neighbourhoods: Shared Values and their Differences - Ellie Vasta

13. Sexuality and Migration - Eithne Luibhéid

Making Politics

1. Bliss in Capetown, 1921 - M. J. Oliver

2. Migration, Suffering and Rights - Julia O’Connell Davidson

3. Amnesty - Linda Bosniak

4. EU Citizenship, Roma Mobility and Anti-Gypsyism: Time for Reframing the Debate? - Nando Sigona

5. A Spirituality of Migration? - Michael Nausner

6. Migration and Population Growth: Future Predictions and Contemporary Politics - Alessio Cangiano

7. Unions, Migration and the Road Less Travelled - Nick Clark

8. Citizenship - Phillip Cole

9. Cosmopolitanism - Sander L. Gilman

10. Ghettos – Deportation Without a Voice - Clara Lecadet

11. The Sunshine and Shadow Politics of Irregular Migrants in Europe - Sarah Spencer

12. Everyday Multiculturalism - Amanda Wise

13. Acts - Engin Isin

14. Recognizing Migrants’ Practices of Citizenship and their Impact - Davide Però

15. Belonging - Nandita Sharma

16. Asylum: Principled Hypocrisy - Matthew Gibney

Rescaling and Re-placing

1. Landing - Claudine Toutoungi

2. Steal Away, Steal Away Back Home - AbdouMaliq Simone

3. Integration - Ben Gidley

4. The Multilevel Governance of Migrant Integration - P. W. A. Scholten

5. Construction, Migration and Urbanisation - Michelle Buckley

6. The Migration of the Rich - John Urry

7. Urban Neighbours - Ash Amin

8. What Drives Human Migration? - Hein de Haas

9. Multiculturally Yours: The Neighbourhood as Lived Diversity - Ole Jensen

10. Mediterranean - Ferruccio Pastore

11. World Wide Street - Suzanne M. Hall

12. Arrivals between Bildungsroman and the City Commons - Michael Keith

13. Housing - David Robinson

14. Diaspora Formation - Nicholas Van Hear

15. The Dynamics of Pakistani State-Building and Balti Migration Practices - Ole Jensen

16. The Hostile Environment - Jonathan Price

Routes and Reading out of this Anthology