The Cultures of Economic Migration

International Perspectives

Tope Omoniyi, Suman Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754670704
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317036548
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the processes of economic migration, the social conditions that follow it and the discourses that underlie research into it. Reflecting critically on economic migration and on the process of studying and creating knowledge about it, the contributors address the question of whether recent enquiries into modernity bring a newer and better comprehension of the nature of dislocation and movement, or whether these serve simply to replicate familiar modes of placing people and individuals. The book is organized into perspectives in and on specific continents - Europe, Asia and Africa - in order to explore notions regarding economic migration within and across regions as well as towards displacing the Eurocentrism of many studies of migration.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Socio-Cultural Attitudes to Migration and the Academic Disposition of Migration Studies

Suman Gupta
Faculty of Arts, Open University UK

This volume brings together studies of socio-cultural attitudes toward and perceptions of migration, and the modalities of expression and political implications of these, in different geopolitical contexts. In planning this volume it was felt that ‘migration’ itself has a myriad of contextually and culturally defined nuances and emphases: in some contexts immigration seems of more moment, in others emigration; in some places internal migration is uppermost in people’s minds, in others international; at times the contemplation of migration seems to focus on physical movements and settlements, at others it appears to be constructed in a social imaginary. The authors agreed that space should be left for all these nuances, and that particular emphases would be determined by the geopolitical contexts addressed. However, the authors also felt that this openness might lend itself to a complete diffusion of focus, and that they were keen to focus on contextual views of migration in a way that is free of strong normative preconceptions. A focus on ‘economic migration’ – with the purposive emphasis of the economic – seemed to serve this purpose well. The materiality of the economic itself seems to promise (and usually does not deliver) a normatively neutral starting point; more importantly it draws away from immediately normatively-charged views that attach to forced migration, asylum or refuge status seeking, conflict-driven movement, and so on. A provisional definition of economic migration for the purposes of this volume was in fact assumed – more of that in due course. The result, the papers that follow this introduction, is diverse and yet coherent. All contemplate socio-cultural perceptions and expressions of economic migration, and some perform them as well, and, in different ways, most of them are in a continuing conversation with each other from widely dispersed contexts.

This volume was planned with a self-conscious desire on the part of the authors to make a definite and considered contribution to migration studies. That meant that each author was enjoined, in an explicit fashion, to keep the field of migration studies in view when working on their chapters. This could mean interrogating the field, complying with the dominant preoccupations of the field, or trying to give it a new or different bent. I think each chapter of this volume has done this in more or less obvious ways, and from their particular standpoints. In undertaking the task of introducing this volume, it seems to me prudent to start here – to provide in quick strokes a background on the current disposition of migration studies, particularly insofar as the main concerns of this volume, ‘social and cultural texts of economic migration’, go. This introductory and generalizing background is, naturally, only attempted so that it can be dismantled in the chapters that follow. In the final section of this introduction I give my sense of how that dismantling proceeds.

Public Attitude Surveys and Xenophobia

Migration studies are an area fraught with socio-cultural anxieties. These anxieties are derived from and generated for, or at any rate constantly hover on the fringes of staid academic pursuits, a wider sphere of cultural attitudes and political/media rhetoric. Where resources are expended on taming or exacerbating these anxieties by an industrial production of scholarly information about migration, migration studies consist to a not insignificant degree in the generation of neat figures (how many? from where? why? of what categories? and so on) to reckon with. These figures nourish migration studies, and feed into and upon policy and legislative and media and political and other organizational documents in seemingly measured ways, only tacitly belying or prodding anxieties – they simply open themselves to anxious reckonings.

Public attitude surveys (what do ‘our’ people think on this issue?) is one of those odd areas within migration studies where the reckonings and the anxieties are themselves turned into neat figures. In contemplating the field of migration studies, it is always worth pausing on this most obvious of sticking points. Public attitude surveys juxtapose the measured quantitative approach on the intractability of anxieties, and reveal a drift. These convey an immediate sense of what migration studies impinge upon and work within and are up against and are in some sense inevitably constituted by. Any (inevitably) random selection of reasonably methodologically-sound surveys speaks for itself. In Canada, a series of Angus Reid surveys of January 1996–October 1998 found that 42 per cent of those surveyed felt that there were too many immigrants and 8 per cent felt there were too few (Palmer, 1999). Surveys in 1996 in Australia (mainly an AGB McNair telephone poll of 1996) showed that 65 per cent of Australians felt that the level of immigration to Australia was too high, while 29 per cent felt it was about right – proportions which generally characterized the period 1990–1996 (Betts, 1996). Examining a range of 1998–1999 surveys Goot found that this had changed, and that in these years the former figure had reduced to 47 per cent and the latter increased to 42 per cent (Goot, 2000), though his interpretation of these data were questioned (Betts, 2000). The South African Migration Project (SAMP) conducted surveys in 2001–2002 which showed that 21 per cent of South African respondents wished to ban the entry of foreigners completely, and another 64 per cent preferred to have strict limits on immigration (Crush and Pendleton, 2004, p. 9). The SAMP report examined comparative figures from other countries and found that the desire to place strict limits on the number of foreigners is very far from uncommon in other countries, though the desire to completely ban foreigners varies widely. A Eurobarometer study of 1997 showed that 70 per cent of surveyed European citizens believed that only a limited number of people of other races, cultures and religions should be admitted to their societies; 65 per cent felt that their countries had reached the limit; and 45 per cent felt that there were too many people of religious and ethnic minority background in their countries (Eurobarometer, 1997, March–April). Subsequent Gallup polls in the USA found that between 2001 (with a sharp increase after 9/11) and 2005 a majority of people felt that immigration levels should be lowered – in early 2005 (3–5 January), 52 per cent were so inclined, while 39 per cent felt it should continue at current levels. Another poll of 2002 (3–9 June) found that 52 per cent of Americans felt that on the whole immigration is a bad thing for the country, against the 42 per cent who felt it was a good thing (Carroll, 2005).

Britain is worth singling out – within Europe the British appear to be more concerned than average about immigration. In 2004, 41 per cent of the British surveyed by Eurobarometer considered immigration to be among the two most important issues facing their country, which was more than twice the figure for any other surveyed country (Eurobarometer, 2004, Spring). A Cabinet Office report of 2001 found, on examining a range of recent surveys, that:

The British population has a highly erroneous impression concerning the number of ethnic minorities and migrants in the UK. In one poll, the average estimate of the size of the ethnic minority population in the UK was 26 per cent of the population, despite the correct figure being closer to 7 per cent. In another it was 20 per cent. When asked to estimate the proportion of population consisting of migrants and asylum seekers, the modal estimate was 51 per cent plus, despite the real situation being closer to 4 per cent (Saggar and Drean, 2001, p. 3).

Overestimation of numbers and anxiety are not necessarily the same thing, of course, but these figures are augmented with others – too numerous to mention here – which show that overestimation is related to negative attitudes towards immigrants and doubts of various sorts about immigration.

All the above-mentioned figures – often aggregates of a large number of surveys conducted independently of each other – are complicated by a range of considerations. Numerous factors play a role in interpretations: the extent and timing of surveys; educational level, age-group, employment and earnings, identity-based convictions and other factors among respondents; modes of conducting surveys (for example in terms of degree of anonymity allowed); the phrasing of questions and the definitions of terms in questions when conducting surveys; local political environment (such as existing government policy, perceptions of extrinsic threat to security, concerns about rising unemployment); the reach of the agency conducting surveys (governmental, academic, media); and so on. Also, often such results come with other public attitude measures which suggest contradictory adherence to principles. Thus, it is occasionally possible for the same survey to show both that a majority feels that there are too many immigrants and a majority feels that immigrants have a positive effect on society, or that a majority wishes that there was more control on immigration and simultaneously a majority maintain that no discrimination should occur in processing immigrants. Despite these caveats, there is a remarkable degree of uniformity in most countries, and over a sustained period, of doubt, anxiety and mistrust regarding immigrants. In countries where there already are significant numbers of immigrants, and which are popular migrant destinations – such as USA, Canada, Britain, South Africa, Australia – generally over 40 per cent of the population, and usually majorities, regard immigration with reserve. Pew Survey figures from 2002 (Pew Research Centre, 2002) showed that immigration is regarded as a problem in almost every country which features there (covering all the continents).

Of course, the field of migration studies is not necessarily, or even significantly, devoted to the quantification and explanation of public attitudes to migration. But this field of study is inevitably within, so to say, the field of public attitudes – however tacitly or unconcernedly – and is necessarily cognizant of the remarkably one-directional drift in the latter where its object of study (migration) is concerned. It seems reasonable to infer that migration studies must, however resistantly or unresistingly, construct itself … cautiously … circumspectly … intentionally … within a social-cultural-political world which is, to be blunt, xenophobic in a widely dispersed and remarkably even fashion. As Robin Cohen, in a wide-ranging study of past and present perceptions and constructions of migration and migrants, has recently observed:

Despite more guards, more laws and more restrictions, the symbolic and real boundaries that divide societies are eroding. This is a result of ideas, images, money, music, electronic messages, sport, fashion and religions that can move without people, or without many people – forms, if you like, of virtual migration. But nothing is as disturbing to national societies as the movement of people (Cohen, 2006, p. 5).

The Social Construction of Migration Studies

Occasionally, researchers trying to come to grips with public discourses of migration find complicities that emanate from and are immanent within the academic field of migration studies itself. In charting the rise of a new kind of racism centred on migration (primarily with reference to Canada), whereby racism shifts ‘from notions of biological superiority to exclusion based on cultural difference’ (Ibrahim, 2005, p. 163), Maggie Ibrahim finds herself confronting a set of systemic collusions: ‘Due to the assertions of international organizations, states, academics and journalists, migration has become synonymous with a new risk to the liberal world’ (Ibrahim, 2005, p. 164). In a related fashion, Btihaj Ajana’s reflections (spurred by Michael Howard’s anti-immigration 2005 election campaign for the British Conservative Party) on the current political discourse of migration, suggests that its dominant xenophobic bent derives not from academic migration studies per se, but from an extrapolation of forms of argument and rhetoric which have a base in the academic. These distort academic – or more precisely ‘expert’ or ‘specialist’ – discourse on migration with immanentist predetermination, while alluding to and drawing upon the authority of academic discourse:

[…] the figurations of immanentist politics are manifested through immigration controls by means of spatialising, technologising and articulating absolute figures within the political imaginary, giving rise to modes of inclusion and exclusion. Such figurations are problematic insofar as they are deeply ensconced within the determinism of sovereignty in which identity, citizenship, and belonging are reduced to and burdened by the illusive belief in a fixed common substance and the need to sustain a state of self-enclosure (Ajana, 2006, p. 265).

The ‘figures’ derive from quantitative migration studies (‘quotas and numbers are becoming metaphors for dignity and worth’, it was clarified earlier [Ajana, 2006, p. 259]), but the allusion/distortion of the academic is not just in drawing upon the production of quantitative ‘figures’ but also in the ‘figuration’ thereof, which comes in a distinctly academic-sounding register – ‘spatialising, technologising and articulating’.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of migration studies as a passive component in a wider arena of public exchanges about migration, with their anxieties and dominant drift and consequent polarizations. Migration studies also and necessarily and actively responds and intervenes with political intent – this too is a constitutive aspect of the field that locates it within those public exchanges. A familiar play of normative and political advocacy marks the socio-political weight the field carries, and is well worth registering briefly. On the left, migration studies are now powerfully allied with the politics of identity, or the politics of difference. This consists primarily in contesting all forms of xenophobia by elucidating its complicity with global capitalist regimes that breed inequality and injustice. Here it is often persuasively argued that control of labour and markets is facilitated by manipulating existing xenophobic tendencies, and it is maintained that removing border restrictions on immigration and promoting the coexistence of different constituencies in their own terms would lead to a just, fair, equal and economically viable condition. Such arguments take the form of analysing the inequities and oppressions that are engendered by xenophobia in cohort with state-policy (for example, Wrench and Solomos, 1995; Hayter, 2000; Cohen, Humphries and Mynott, 2001; Harris, 2001); examining the historical development of xenophobia in relation to contemporary experiences (for example Taylor, 1993; Jelloun, 2000; Sassen, 2003; Wilder, 2004) and examining the normative principles associated with liberal democracy and human rights in political philosophy terms (for example Dummett, 2001). Such arguments also associate themselves with the salutary contributions of immigrant groups in terms of cultural production and contribution to recipient societies – particularly in, for instance, post-colonial examinations of diasporic texts (King, White and Connell, 1995; Phillips, 1997; Suleiman, 1998; Kumar, 2003). Roughly at the centre of the political spectrum is located an alluring political philosophy strain that examines, in a careworn but well-meaning fashion, the difficulties of pluralism and multiculturalism in liberal democracies. The apprehension of a resistance to accommodating immigrants in so-called liberal democracies, together with the ethical desirability of tolerance and optimism in pluralistic accommodation are here widely debated issues (Gutmann editor, 1994; Kymlicka, 1995; Young, 2002; Benhabib, 2004). Interestingly, the conservative right that presents arguments as favour of immigration control, and regards xenophobia as deriving from rational anxieties based on politically real problems, often derives from and expands on liberal principles too. The problems of reasonable pluralism could easily come to be regarded as insurmountable in liberal democratic rationality: this is amply demonstrated in the initially left-leaning Rawls’s struggles to rationalize pluralism leading gradually to the distinctly conservative conception of a ‘closed society’ (describe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Socio-Cultural Attitudes to Migration and the Academic Disposition of Migration Studies
• PART I: EUROPE
• PART II: AFRICA
• PART III: ASIA
• Index