Mediating Migration

Radha Sarma Hegde, Radha Sarma Hegde

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745646336, 9780745646329
• eBook ISBN: 9781509503100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Media practices and the everyday cultures of transnational migrants are deeply interconnected. Mediating Migration narrates aspects of the migrant experience as shaped by the technologies of communication and the social, political and cultural configurations of neoliberal globalization. The book examines the mediated reinventions of transnational diasporic cultures, the emergence of new publics, and the manner in which nations and migrants connect. By placing migration and media practices in the same frame, the book offers a wide-ranging discussion of the contested politics of mobility and transnational cultures of diasporic communities as they are imagined, connected, and reproduced by various groups, individuals, and institutions. Drawing on current events, activism, cultural practices, and crises concerning immigration, this book is organized around themes – legitimacy, recognition, publics, domesticity, authenticity – that speak to the entangled interconnections between media and migration.
 
Mediating Migration will be of interest to students in media, communication, and cultural studies. The book raises questions that cut across disciplines about cutting-edge issues of our times – migration, mobility, citizenship, and mediated environments.

1
Introduction

In the summer of 2008, an unverified piece of gossip made its way into the Brazilian Voice, an ethnic newspaper published in Newark, New Jersey. A report in the newspaper claimed that the winning ticket of the New Jersey state mega-millions lottery had been purchased by a Brazilian immigrant, at a supermarket in a neighborhood with a large Brazilian and Portuguese population. A guessing game began and conjectures started to fly. Was the winner an undocumented immigrant and therefore reluctant to claim the prize for fear of being deported? Another rumor claimed that the winner was from Governador Valadares, known as Brazil’s most American city, and home to a large number of immigrants in the United States. While this news was bouncing back and forth between the United States and Brazil, the owner of the supermarket in Newark where the ticket was sold identified the winners and described them as humble, hardworking, and living the American dream.¹

The plot line of this riveting story features the key themes of our times – immigration, communication, and speculation. Its global contours are shaped not only by the rapid travel of information through talk, text, Internet, telephone, and print, but also by the crisscrossing of intricate, transnational networks of connection. An ethnic newspaper that typically raises no fanfare rapidly converges with other forms of technology speeding up the global dispersal of information, revealing the continuing connections maintained between nations, homelands, and the diaspora. The rumor that ricocheted from Newark to Rio de Janeiro captures a basic premise of globalization: that an immigrant community’s local identity is always already transnationally situated. The story itself, a public recital of the precarity of immigrant life, hinged on a familiar binary: was the winner legal or illegal? In the ethnic neighborhoods of Newark, the story raised a compelling question: what would an undocumented immigrant do in such a circumstance? After all, claiming the prize meant inviting the risk of being investigated. First and foremost, what was being evoked was the line separating the settled, legal migrant possessing papers from the undocumented migrant whose presence was unregistered and hence invisible. Migration has always been about navigating new risks, uncertainty, and the contested terrain of mobility. However, under the social conditions defined by the global economy and communication technologies, the politics and problematics of migration have been radically recalibrated.

Migration, a contested topic on national agendas, is at the forefront of current discourses on globalization. Political crises, instabilities, and deep structural inequities within countries and between nations have led to the increased flow of migrants in search of better economic opportunities and stable political conditions. Media representations of migrants frequently stir up controversies about the presence of the Other in the national imaginary. The public, particularly in the West, are routinely exposed to images of men, women, and children undertaking the harsh journey across Central America, migrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa on their perilous sea voyages to reach Spain or Italy, or refugees fleeing war-torn regions like Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. These accounts are often sensationalized or exaggerated through the use of apocalyptic representations of exodus (de Haas, 2008), sometimes through the narrative of unassimilability and difference (Chavez, K. R., 2013), or through the entangled framing of migrants either as threat or as victims eligible for compassion (Horsti, 2003, 2013). We are witnessing both a surge in the number of irregular or undocumented migrants crossing borders and a significant increase in the efforts by governments worldwide to regulate and control the flow of migrants (Castles, de Haas, and Miller, 2013). Migratory flows have also intensified nationalist discourses and stirred up debates on border control, racial difference, immigration regulations, and the meaning of citizenship. As the growing structural demand for labor drives immigration and shapes the dreams of hopeful migrants particularly from the Global South, the repercussions are felt not only in terms of policy and state action, but also in the transformations of localities, markets, and lived experiences. In the contemporary context, the way in which these social and cultural changes are experienced is intricately connected to the world of media and communication.

The media, argue Mitchell and Hansen (2010: xxii), broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible, and “rather than determining our situation, we might better say media are our situation.” The media frame the very manner in which the contemporary realities of migration are articulated and publicized. Hence media forms, communicative practices, and the nature of mediated connections have to be factored into current theorizations about migration. Issues about immigration and borders explode in transnational space even as they are sensationalized in new echo chambers of convergent media. It is through diverse and changing media practices that migrants themselves create networks of transnational connections and reimagine the meaning and reach of communities. Writing about globalization, Jameson (1999) notes that although it is by no means a new phenomenon, its definitional contours have changed due to the technological character of contemporary life. Similarly, media and communication technologies have redefined the terms and conditions of the migrant experience with reference to both the immediacy of connection and the urgency of its implications.

Media practices have historically shaped the imagining of forgotten pasts and possible futures. Old letters in shoeboxes, fading black-and-white images of distant histories, and long-distance telephone calls with crackly connections have given way to new media platforms and affordances, which now constitute the transformed epistolary base and the communication infrastructure of the migrant experience.² Electronic mediation and mass migration, according to Appadurai (1996: 4), “mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination.” This book builds on and extends a similar premise: that examining migration and mediation together provides a vantage point from which to understand the politics of mobility in the global present. There is a descriptive and not deterministic narrative to relate about the devices and technologies of reproduction that migrants now use to stay connected, to plan their pathways, manage their affective worlds, and navigate their contested locations. The discussions in this book follow Mitchell and Hansen’s (2010: xv) suggestion: to take note of the shift in emphasis from media as artifactuality to media as processes of mediation. For instance, the point is not merely to view migrants as producers or consumers of one particular media form or another, but rather to understand how the cultural politics, social dynamics, and lived geographies of migrants are entrenched within media worlds. A less mediacentric approach, as Morley (2011: 744) argues, which takes into account cross-border mobilities, “effectively places questions of media and communication in the broader frame of their material context and settings.” Taking its cue from these lines of argument, this book contextualizes the complex constitutive connection between media forms and practices, mediated environments, and the politics of migration. Using diasporic itinerancy as a point of departure also forces a rethinking of assumptions that structure bounded and fixed understandings of community, belonging, communication, and location. In the chapters that follow, I offer a particular narration of migrant experiences as shaped by technologies of communication and the social, political, and economic configurations of globalization.

Transnational Topographies of Affiliation

The arguments and descriptions in this book cohere around the perspective that the subject of immigration and the debates around it have to be understood in terms of their transnational and cross-border implications. Here in this section, I capture some aspects of these transnational entanglements that we need to consider in our contextualization of migration. Every story and crisis around immigration reveals that the subject of migration is neither linear nor contained within the nation-state. The dramatis personae involved, the issues and implications, are all geographically dispersed and yet transnationally interconnected. However, historically the study of migration has been framed by the centrality of the nation and the compartmentalization of immigration as an isolable subject that can be turned on and off according to national interests (Castles, 2002: 1145). Migrants and their relocated lives have for long been studied as modular, exchangeable units that move across borders. Writing about the state of research on Mexican migration to the United States, Rouse (1992: 47) notes that there has been a general tendency to oversimplify immigrant worlds, by construing them in “the anodyne language of adaptation, coping and fit.” He argues that migration in general has been analyzed mainly in bipolar terms, where communities are conceptualized as autonomous bodies who simply shift their social ties from one community to another. These forms of reductive oversimplifications have been fairly common in the dominant approaches to the study of immigrants and borders in the social sciences. A strictly behavioral emphasis on studying the adaptation patterns of individuals and groups largely obscures the innovative practices and multi-layered relations that migrants forge as they construct new forms of transnational communities (see Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc, 1995).

The longevity of the nation and the individual, as organizing units of analysis in the research and policy on migration, has also limited our ability to examine the assemblage of factors within which the subject of migration is embedded (Sassen, 1998). While the nation-state remains the arbiter of immigration policy, the materiality of the migratory experience is deeply rooted in processes that cut across and between nations and cultures. The human drama of immigration and the everyday realities of mobile populations stand often in strong contrast to the official narratives of citizenship proclaimed by nations. As Quayson and Daswani (2013: 2) note, “taken together the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism promise a broad understanding of all the forms and implications that derive from the vast movements of populations, ideas, technologies, images, and financial networks that have come to shape the world we live in today.” The multi-layered contexts and contested experiences of migration today require a critical rethinking of the ways in which the nation as a category is mobilized in the global present: a rethinking that critically works the idea of the transnational in order to draw attention to the transformatory aspects of social life and imagination in the global present.³

In his eloquent, pioneering, and widely cited publication Modernity at Large, Appadurai theorizes the global disjunctures that exist between the economy, culture, and politics through a series of interconnected landscapes (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes). He describes the “scapes” as “perspectival constructs inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors” (Appadurai, 1996: 33). Appadurai’s discussion of the various “scapes” has been profoundly important in shaping scholarly engagement with the fluid cultural forms of globalization, and the deterritorialized modalities of action and performance that drive transnational communities. Returning to the issues of global circulation, capital, infrastructure, and social justice, Appadurai (2006: 30) describes how the grounded, centralized, vertebrate structures of the nation are now encountering the mobile, modular, and cellular forms of global capital:

Returning to the always fragile idea of a world of national economies, we can characterize the current era of globalization – driven by the triple engines of speculative capital, new financial instruments, and high-speed information technologies – as creating new tensions between the wanton urge of global capital to roam without license or limit and the still regnant fantasy that the nation-state assures a sovereign economic space.

This distinction, yet dependence, between vertebrate and cellular systems captures the crisis of circulation and the nature of capitalism in the contemporary context.⁴ Appadurai’s provocative model and insightful arguments open up lines of inquiry about the transformations in the interdependent fields of migration and global capitalism. The tension between the vertebrate structures of the nation and the cellular logics of flexible capital provides a rich contextual framing of the current politics and global pathways of migration. This tension characterizes many of the issues and examples raised in the chapters that follow.

The global flow and flexible forms of capital accumulation have led to an expansion of precarious forms of labor that include temporary, short-term, and subcontracted jobs that typically fall outside of forms of state protection (for example, social welfare, insurance, or benefits). At the same time, globalization has also accelerated the increasing erosion of the welfare state, the rise of privatization, and the emphasis on the individual over the collective. The steady expansion of zones of insecure employment has consequently benefited the labor needs of the Global North Atlantic societies (Papadopoulous, Stephenson, and Tsianos, 2008). Other factors like deindustrialization, the economic policies of the Global North, growing inequalities between rural and urban life, militarization, and war have led to massive demographic movement of people from rural to urban areas and from the Global South to the North.⁵ Migrants follow the pathways of capital typically in search of refuge, employment, and the hope of a better life. The very idea of a better life is itself visualized and experienced transnationally, as the chapters in this book will show. The goal here is not to reduce the migration narrative to one that is merely economistic, but rather to emphasize that migration is a dynamic process that shapes, exceeds, and cuts across individuals, communities, economies, nations, and borders. The scholarly challenge is to find the methodological a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Legitimacy: Accumulating Status
• 3. Recognition: Politics and Technologies
• 4. Publics: Eyeing Gender
• 5. Domesticity: Digital Visions and Versions
• 6. Authenticity: Pursuits of Auras
• 7. Conclusion: Destinations and Beginnings
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement