Migration

Michael Samers, Michael Collyer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138924468
• eBook ISBN: 9781317408765
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

While the subject of migration has received enormous attention in academic journals and books across the social sciences, introductory texts on the matter are few and far between. Even fewer books have explored migration through a critical and explicit engagement with spatial concepts.

Now in its second edition, Migration remains the only text in more than a decade that emphasizes how geographical or spatial concepts can be used critically to understand migration. The multi-disciplinary text draws on insights from human geography, political science, social anthropology, sociology, and to a lesser extent economics. All of the chapters focus on key terms, theories, concepts, and issues concerning migration and immigration. The book argues that in the context of migration, two opposing 'spatial positions' have emerged in the wake of the critique of 'methodological nationalism'. On one hand is the significance of 'transnationalism', and on the other, the importance of 'sub-national' or local processes. Both require more nuance and integration, while many of the concepts and theories which have thus far neglected space or have not been 'treated' spatially, need to be re-written with space in mind. Pedagogically the text combines a carefully defined structure, accessible language, boxes that explore case studies of migrant-related experiences in particular places, annotated suggestions for further reading, useful websites and relevant films and summary questions for student learning at the end of each chapter.

Migration provides a critical, multi-disciplinary, advanced, and theoretically informed introduction to migration and immigration. Revised and updated with new material, new maps and illustrations and an accompanying website (https://migration2ndedition.wordpress.com/), it continues to be aimed at advanced undergraduates and Masters-level graduate students undertaking courses on migration and immigration.

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1

INTRODUCTION

On 3 October 2013, around 2 a.m., the diesel engine of a boat originating in Libya and carrying 518 migrants, stalled just a quarter mile off the island of Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea between the coast of Tunisia and the island of Sicily, Italy (see Map 1.1). Lampedusa is sought-after, not so much as a destination for migrants and the smugglers that bring them there, but as a stepping stone for migration to elsewhere in the European Union. According to witnesses, with the engine silent, the bilge pump ceased to function, sea water began to pour in, and the captain of the boat frantically tried to re-start the engine. When the engine refused, he lit a blanket with diesel fuel to attract the attention of the Coast Guard and other boats and persons near the shore. As he held the lit blanket, the captain burnt his hand on the flames and dropped it, which ignited residual diesel fuel on the upper deck. The flames spread, passengers awakened to the commotion, panicked, and hurried to one side of the boat. The boat leaned heavily to one side and eventually capsized. Those in the hot and crowded deck below stood little chance of surviving. Those on the deck above were plunged into the water, and as many could not swim, instantly drowned. Some survived by holding onto floating corpses. Of the 518 migrants, 366 would perish in the Mediterranean. The survivors of the sunken boat – covered in diesel fuel – were eventually rescued by the Coast Guard and other boats. The bodies of those who did not survive were transported to the Italian island of Sicily and buried in cemeteries there. A state funeral held by the Italian government had extended an invitation to Eritrean officials, officials of the very regime which had propelled the migrants to leave Eritrea in the first place. Yet Italian officials did not extend an invitation to the survivors of the tragedy and they were even prevented from attending the funeral while still being held in detention camps for asylum-seekers in Lampedusa and Sicily. While those who lost their lives were eventually given posthumous citizenship (Isin 2014), this tragedy added to a long list of other similar ones, not just in the Mediterranean, but in the waters between Indonesia and Australia; in the Andaman Sea between India, Thailand, and Malaysia; in the waters near the Canary Islands off the coast of northwest Africa; in the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece; in the southwestern deserts of the US near the border with Mexico; and in the mountains between Iran and Turkey (Guardian 2014; Heller and Pezzani 2016; IOM 2014).

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What lies at the roots of the Lampedusa tragedy, and why do such tragedies continually happen? Why did the migrants involved agree to undertake such an arduous and dangerous journey to an uncertain destination and future? Or to put it more broadly, why do people migrate, despite significant obstacles, and what sort of reception will they find in their new destination? Unlike other general (text) books you might read on migration, this book tries to answer these questions in general and many others related to migration through a geographical or spatial perspective. This perspective involves an attention to such spatial concepts or metaphors as ‘space’ itself, but also ‘place’, ‘node’, ‘friction of distance’, ‘territory’, and ‘scale’. We adopt such an approach because while so many volumes address the subject of migration, so few involve a critical and explicit engagement with spatial concepts.

Map 1.1 The location of Lampedusa and countries bordering the Mediterranean

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Let us return to the tragedy above. From what is known from survivors’ testimony, many of the passengers in this case were not actually from Libya at all, but from the country of Eritrea (see Map 3.2). How are such regions, countries or places connected, and how can an explicit attention to geographical concepts help to shed light on these series of events? To begin with, social networks (see the glossary at the end of the book and the discussion later in this chapter) allow migrants to communicate the value of particular destinations to other would-be migrants, and places such as Lampedusa may have both an imagined and potentially real promise for migrants. Second, these harrowing incidents point to different scales (territories) of regulation, among them the continuing ability of territories such as national states to decide who can enter and who cannot, and how supra-national territories such as the European Union step in to shape migration control. Yet the enforcement of migration regulation happens in particular places, and the interaction between migrants and Italian authorities in Lampedusa produce a particular local geography of enforcement. These more local spaces of regulation and enforcement seem to shape an entire migratory system which extends as far south as Eritrea. Above all, the events described above show the desperation of migrants in covering vast distances, often by the cheapest available option to reach the European Union and other wealthier states. What this discussion does not show perhaps is how the relationship between wealthier and poorer countries actually creates these migrations, and the reception that migrants might have once they do succeed in settling in the richer countries, but we will explore these issues later in the book.

This critical engagement with geographical concepts seems equally vital insofar as it enables us to assess what Sheller and Urry (2006) call ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ in the social sciences; in other words, the idea that the social sciences can be renewed again by exploring ideas of mobility rather than taking stability and stasis as the world’s natural state of affairs.¹ In the same vein, Favell (2008) argues that migration should be a subset of mobility studies, and mobility and migration accepted as the norm. Once we accept this, nation-states will no longer be the benchmark against which such migration and mobility is gauged negatively. Rather migration and mobility would be seen as natural, and territory as aberrant. While we applaud much of this emphasis on mobility rather than stability, stasis, or territorial/nation-state centred analyses, and we recognize that mobility is part and parcel of the lives of millions of people across the world, it also questions whether international migration – particularly of asylum-seekers, refugees and low-income migrants – can be uncritically subsumed within this mobility approach. We say this since territorially defined borders and immigration regulations do much to impede mobility, though they also serve to create it and to shape it.²

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This book draws unashamedly from across the social sciences, including works in anthropology, economics, human geography, political science, and sociology. Moving beyond the tidy world of disciplines that are typical of university departments is essential since migration is multi-faceted, having cultural, economic, political, and social dimensions. Yet its complexity also ensures that encapsulating these various dimensions in a single volume will forever be a challenge. In order to rise to this challenge, we maintain a focus on international low-income migration and immigration (including asylum-seekers and refugees), the causes and consequences of such migration, as well as the experiences of migrants and immigrants.

We choose this focus because we seek to provide a purposefully critical treatment of migration and immigration, not an arid and detached commentary on the geographical dimensions of migration, or a repository for a barrage of statistics, nor a synoptic review of every type or dimension of migration. By critical, we do not simply mean that this book is an attempt to think ‘long and hard’ about (spatial) concepts and ideas, but that this text is concerned with those migrants who are on the whole disadvantaged.

The volume has four additional foci. First, it places an emphasis on migration from the so-called ‘global south’ (or broadly speaking, poorer countries) to the ‘global north’ (in large measure, the richer countries). Nonetheless, we do not neglect internal migration (that is, migration within countries), especially within poorer ones. While this distinction between south and north may seem crude given the enormous diversity within these two hemispheres, we show in this book that making this distinction is important for explaining why people migrate, but may be less so for other issues related to immigration. Second, we focus on the experiences of migrants and immigrants within the global north, though experiences in poorer countries are also not neglected. Third, although this book focuses on disadvantaged migrants, it does provide some discussion of ‘highly skilled’ or ‘high-income’ migrants. It has often been asked by more critical observers to what extent highly skilled or high-income migrants should be the object of academic scrutiny since they are a comparatively privileged group of migrants. We share these concerns, although many of those who are considered highly skilled in their own countries end up performing menial jobs in the country of immigration, and they too are subject to racism and other exclusionary processes. By the same token, our interest in highly skilled migrants also stems from their role in constructing the sorts of economic activity and the kinds of jobs people perform in richer countries, often (but not always) at the expense of many people in poorer ones. Fourth, we also devote some attention to the migration of students, or what is now called international student mobility. Like highly skilled migrants, many student migrants may be relatively privileged compared to other low-income immigrants and asylum-seekers, but they too are subject to security fears and their manifestation in tighter visa controls, racist violence, discrimination and various forms of exclusion from jobs, public services, cultural spaces, and so forth. And like highly skilled migrants; international students serve the interests of governments in terms of economic development, and universities in terms of their search for greater financial resources, a diverse student body, and intellectual prestige.

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As the aims of this book suggest, migration involves different people in a variety of situations, some more desperate than others. Most academic discussions of these situations are often expressed in quite abstract terms. In this section then, we begin by discussing four vignettes of migrant lives in order to place a ‘human face’ on the discussion of migration categories that follow.

MIGRANT STORIES AND KEY TERMS AND CATEGORIES IN THE STUDY OF MIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION

Laika (Jacqueline), the ‘illegal’ immigrant in Malaysia

Hilsdon (2006: 4–5) recounts the story of Laika, 22 years old, who came to Sabah (the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo), in the 1990s from the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. She arrived as a teenager in Pulau Jaya, Sabah. Her passport and visa were ‘fixed’ (that is to say, illegally arranged) by a relative before she left the Philippines. In Sabah, she began working at a local restaurant and eventually met a man, Salim, whom she later married, in part because she could not live on her meagre wages of some 300 ringgit (about US$94) per month. In addition, her illegal visa had expired, and for that reason it could not be renewed and she could not obtain the necessary documents to return home legally. Jacqueline was hardly the only person to face this situation as many women (but not just women) have faced questions about whether their visas were ‘good enough’ to continually stand up to official scrutiny. Thus Jacqueline, like so many others, have avoided public places such as shopping centres, m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Migration
• Key Ideas in Geography
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface for Students
• Preface for Instructors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Explaining Migration across International Borders: Determinist Theories
• 3 Explaining Migration across International Borders: Integrative Theories
• 4 Geo-political Economies of Migration Control
• 5 Geographies of Migration, Work, and Settlement
• 6 Geographies of Migration, Citizenship and Belonging
• 7 Conclusions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index