Migrant City

Les Back, Shamser Sinha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415715416
• eBook ISBN: 9781134709755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Migrant City tells the story of contemporary London from the perspective of thirty adult migrants and two sociologists. Connecting migrants' private struggles to the public issues at stake in the way mobility is regulated, channelled and managed in a globalised world, this volume explores what migration means in a world that is hyper connected – but where we see increasingly mobile, invasive and technologically sophisticated forms of border regulation and control.

Migrant City is an innovative collaborative ethnography based on research with migrants from a wide variety of social backgrounds, spanning in some cases a decade. It utilises recollections, photographs, poems, paintings, journals and drawings to explore a wide range of issues. These range from the impact of immigration control and surveillance on everyday life, to the experience of waiting for the Home Office to process their claims and the limits this places on their lives, to the friendships and relationships with neighbours that help to make London a home.

This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, social exclusion, globalisation, urban sociology, and inventive social research methods.

1 Mobile lives, moving borders

Introduction: ‘you’ve got a text from UKBA’

In 2009 Christian, one of the participants in our study, was informed by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) – now absorbed within the Home Office – that he no longer had leave to remain in Britain. They asked him to provide details of when he planned to leave the country. On Facebook, he informed his friends that he was coming home. He made plans, booked his flight and duly informed UKBA.

Christian made his way to the airport and prepared to leave Britain. After stowing his luggage in the overhead compartment he felt his mobile phone vibrate in his pocket. He settled into his seat for the flight. Before turning his phone off for the flight, Christian looked down and checked a new text message. To his surprise it was from UKBA. It read: ‘Have a pleasant journey.’ The politeness of the British immigration officials that had questioned him was somehow the hardest thing to take.

Christian’s story is emblematic of the new realities of border control and the mechanisms of division. The techniques of immigration policing and tracing are as mobile as the migrants and implicate a wide range of public servants, from school teachers to health care professionals, in border work. Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy (2017) call this ‘everyday bordering’. In a hyper-connected world, the regulation of movement is ever more complex and technologically sophisticated. As Mezzadra and Nielson (2013) point out, borders perform a ‘world-configuring function’ and shape the way we understand the world. They also show how the proliferation of border work inside the ‘host society’ has an impact on the migrant experience of time and differential inclusion (Mezzadra and Nielson 2013: 6–7). Without ‘papers’, undocumented migrants can try to live undetected within the anonymity of city life. Applying for leave to remain or claiming asylum means that migrants are forced to comply with restrictions on their capacity to work, while at the same time they have no or minimal recourse to public financial support. These measures imposed on migrants institutionalise forms of marginalisation. They also have to live with a sense of insecurity enhanced by the mobile phone in their pockets.

Mapping a mobile generation

In 1975 John Berger and Jean Mohr published A Seventh Man, their historic study of migrant workers in Europe. In many respects our book tries to address their key themes in a twenty-first century context. At the time of Berger and Mohr’s study one in seven men in Europe was a migrant. They argued that migrants were a necessary reserve of cheap unskilled labour for European capitalism. Driven to the cities because of rural underdevelopment, these migrants did dirty, unskilled manual labour working in factories, mines and abattoirs – precarious jobs from which they could be discarded when deemed unnecessary. Through photographs and words they offer a damning portrayal of the conditions of entrapment and confinement experienced by migrants. For example, they showed a Recruitment Centre in Istanbul where men were lined up, stripped naked and subject to humiliating medical inspections in order to qualify for entry into West Germany as a ‘gastarbeiter’ or guest worker (see Berger and Mohr 1975: 48–49).

A Seventh Man tells the story of an archetypal migrant, referred to throughout the book as simply ‘He’. Commenting on the book, Howard S. Becker suggests that what is so compelling about Mohr’s photographs and Berger’s text is that together they produce a ‘specific generalisation’ that is ‘both specific and general, abstract and concrete … that can lead you to believe that the abstract tale I’ve told you has a real, flesh and blood life’ (Becker 2002: 11). While we will not refer to a single archetype, this book aims to capture a similar quality, using thirty very different, particular lives to make a general argument. Berger and Mohr’s historic book also provides a point of reference to think about how different the twenty-first century context is compared to the one that they were describing.

A Seventh Man contained a map showing the main patterns of migration (see Figure 1.1). The map shows the important vectors of population mobility. They estimated that there were 11 million male migrant workers living in Europe (not including Britain). It captures the sense of a great move northwards – Italian and Spanish workers in France and Northern Europe as well as ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Greece moving to Germany. It also shows colonial citizens from Algeria and other parts of North Africa moving northward through Southern France, as well as movements across the Atlantic from the British colonies in the Caribbean – off this map – to the UK. Within the British Isles, Irish migrants moved to work on the British mainland. Net immigration reached Spain, Italy and other countries in Southern Europe much later, although a complex form of cultural interaction has existed within the Mediterranean region for centuries.

This map was drawn before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break up of the Soviet Union. One of things that is striking about it today is the lack of East/West mobility that was inhibited by what Winston Churchill called the ‘iron-curtain’. It is also striking in relation to today’s world that Berger and Mohr’s map seems so parochial. Europe is ‘boxed off’ and separated from the rest of the world.

All maps are failures in the sense that they never capture the terrain entirely. Maps of migration – even when they are drawn with critical intent – end up resembling a depiction of a military invasion. As Shivam Vij (2012) has commented, our minds are trained to think of our nations as maps rather than people. Iain Chambers points this out when he observes that the term ‘map’ comes from an Arabic word for a cloth in which ‘objects are wrapped in order to be carried around in a bundle’ (Chambers 2008: 50). Things and people fall off any map, no matter how carefully it is drawn. In the last 40 years the scale of human mobility has changed fundamentally, meaning that the map of movement needs to be redrawn (see Castles, De Hass and Miller 2014: 105).

Figure 1.1 Patterns of migration, 1975 after John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man (Granta, 1975)

One of our key arguments is that in order to grasp the complexities of how young people experience movement it is necessary to de-provincialise the understanding of migration itself. This requires what Doreen Massey called ‘a global sense of place’ (Massey 1991). As David Harvey commented famously, ‘“time space compression” has made contemporary society more interconnected and human beings both more mobile and spatially proximate’ (Harvey 1990: 240). For example, the historic sea voyage of the SS Empire Windrush that brought 492 colonial citizens from the West Indies to Britain took 22 days. Their arrival on 22 June 1948 at Tilbury Docks symbolised a key moment in the emergence of Britain as a multicultural society (Phillips and Phillips 1998). Many West Indian workers chose the sea route because it was cheaper: just £28 and 11 shillings compared to the flight from Jamaica, costing almost three times as much at £75. The Empire Windrush travelled at about 15 miles an hour; today the 4,600-mile trip from Jamaica takes just 9 hours by jet. It is easy to take for granted the wonder of rapid movement that air travel has enabled, which today has become unremarkable.

The speed of travel and interconnection today is also enhanced by the immediacy of communication within the digital age via social media and the mobile phone. A story from Berger and Mohr’s study illustrates the contrasting plight of migrants in the 1970s and today. In the 1970s, Portuguese migrants used to have a photograph taken of themselves before leaving which they would tear in half, giving one half to their ‘guides’ and keeping the other themselves (Berger and Mohr 1975: 44–45). This would be used as evidence that they had arrived, to be sent home to their families in Portugal upon reaching France: the complete, but torn, photograph would be the signal to pay the smugglers $350 – the equivalent of a year’s pay – for safe passage. Today, by contrast, as Christian’s story shows, a Facebook message would probably suffice to send a message ‘back home’. For today’s migrants the speed of communication offers some protection from abuses by unscrupulous people who profit from people smuggling.

The common image of a shrinking world conceals the fact that global mobility is only an option for some. Although many of our participants came to London by air, a mode of transport that has profoundly increased the potential for migration, air travel has also brought with it an increasingly more sophisticated network of immigration controls used to police and manage borders. However, our research has presented us with cases where the journey towards London was not an experience of rapid movement but rather a long and circuitous journey. For example, it took a young Afghani participant 2 years to travel to London, where his application for asylum was promptly rejected within 20 minutes. Others combined short flights with long overland journeys by rail and road, sometimes smuggled into the back of trucks in order to get past border control. These journeys often involve great expense; we have found instances where people smugglers have been paid between £5,000 and £10,000 to ensure passage to the UK from places as diverse as Albania and China.

By 2013, according to UN estimates, there were 35 million male migrants living in Europe (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014). However, one of the key differences in people flow since Berger and Mohr’s study is the proportion of female migrants living in Europe. Since the 1970s, when Berger and Mohr estimated there were just 2 million female migrants in Europe, the proportion has increased dramatically to approximately 33 million women (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2013c). It is also true that the nature of the work undertaken by migrants has changed, becoming increasingly more mobile with manufacturing industries moving to where labour is cheap rather than recruiting a reserve army of labour. Student migrations, as we shall show, have also played an important role in the changing demographic of people flow, challenging the predominant image of the migrant as a male worker. The diversity of gendered experiences within this mobile generation is another aspect borne out in our study.

In order to understand contemporary patterns of migration, we want to situate them within three distinct but interrelated historical and geopolitical contexts. The first is Britain’s post-colonial moment. It is our contention that understanding contemporary migration necessitates being able to comprehend the lasting impact of the unfinished legacy of empire in the present. In the last 20 years issues of migration have been progressively disarticulated from the legacy of Britain’s imperial past. So much so, that we have arrived at a moment where politicians and journalists from a broad spectrum of political views refuse flatly to accept that there is any connection between racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. The result is that the legacy of racism in Britain is either consigned to the past as a historical relic or disavowed completely. Imperial relations with former colonies largely channelled migration to the UK. When people from the former colonies came to Britain they travelled not as ‘immigrants’ but as citizens of the British Empire or what later became the Commonwealth. Those patterns of people flow have now been destabilised and largely drawn to a close. We argue that the legacies of racism that shaped the life changes of those citizen migrants have not disappeared but rather merely changed their form. As a result international mobility is both more heterogeneous and complicated, but no less haunted by a legacy of racism that is rooted in Britain’s imperial past (Gilroy 2004).

Throughout the twentieth-century imperial connections provided the main conduits through which international migration patterns were channelled between former colonial powers and the hinterlands of empire. As George Orwell pointed out in 1939: ‘What we always forget is that the over-whelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa’ (Orwell 1968[1939]: 437). Edward Said, in his book Culture and Imperialism, commented that, as a result, the histories of the colonisers and the cololonised become intertwined so that their cultural geographies overlap (Said 1993). In Britain, patterns of migration ordered by imperial relationships have been brought to a close. In Said’s terms, contemporary immigration policy cuts former colonial links and attempts to separate and disaggregate the post-colonial cultural landscape. This is creating profound difficulties for young people who have longstanding family and post-colonial connections with Britain but are currently excluded from entry.

The experience of Nana, who is now in his thirties, demonstrates the impact of these changes. His mother lives in London, as does his father, sister, three uncles and two aunts. He was conceived in London where his mother carried him for the first 7 months of her pregnancy. Nana’s mother decided that she wanted to give birth to him in Ghana. At the time she was studying fashion and Nana’s grandmother had offered to nurse him so that his mother could complete her studies. His mother wanted him to be schooled in Ghana. She is a British citizen and indeed all of his close family except for one of his uncles are permanent residents in Britain. In a sense, his family history illustrates the ‘overlapping histories’ and ‘intertwined territories’ of Britain and Ghana (Said 1993). He came to Britain for a year and a half when he was 9 years old and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A generation on the move
• 1 Mobile lives, moving borders
• 2 ‘We are here because you are there’: Rescaling the migration debate
• 3 Freshie from the boat
• 4 Waiting, dead time and freer life
• 5 Living across borders
• 6 Multicultural conviviality in the midst of racism’s ruins
• 7 Conclusions: London’s story
• Afterword: Writing ethnography differently
• Index