Migration: Policies, Practices, Activism

Martin Bulmer, John Solomos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138816992
• eBook ISBN: 9781317995722
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration: Policies, Practices, Activism brings together a range of scholarly research papers to examine the place of international migration in the modern world, starting with the overview of migration and development by Alejandro Portes. There are many aspects to migration today which are treated in this collection, including new patterns of migration flows, asylum and the handling of refugees, multiculturalism, religious and cultural diversity, identity formation among immigrant communities, and the impact of migration upon social and economic development. Chapters in this book look at a variety of migration case studies, including aspects of international migration in Europe; movement from sub-Saharan Africa northwards; movement from Albania to Italy; a comparison of the USA and Germany; the entry of international brides to South Korea; and the concept of diversity and its use in the study of the outcomes of migration. This is a stimulating collection which looks at many facets of the phenomenon.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Introduction

Martin Bulmer and John Solomos

In their influential overview of the field of migration Stephen Castles and Mark Miller make the bold claim that: ‘International migration is part of a transnational revolution that is reshaping societies and politics around the globe’ (Castles and Miller, 2009). This statement may have seemed somewhat overblown when first made but the relevance of understanding the impact of changing patterns of international migration has become ever more important over the past decade. The movements of economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers across the globe have become an important theme in political and policy debates, in media coverage and in popular culture. More generally new patterns of migration have done much to influence how societies perceive the position of racial and ethnic minorities and the role of transnational social and cultural identities (Bloemraad et al., 2008; Castles, 2010; De Genova, 2010).

The chapters in this edited collection cover important facets of this evolving and changing scholarly field. Though all the chapters included in this book were written independently, they speak to some common conceptual and empirical concerns. Without assuming that the various authors in this book are speaking with the same voice, we want to take the opportunity offered to make some introductory comments that may help to bring out some common themes.

The past three decades have seen a radical transformation of the academic study of international migration in all its facets. Major programmes of research on international migration have been funded in a number of European countries and in North America, as well as other parts of the globe. In addition we have seen a steady flow of academic monographs, general books and journals that have focused on the changing dynamics and flows of migration across various parts of the globe. As a leading scholarly journal that covers race and ethnicity as well as migration, Ethnic and Racial Studies, where these papers originated, has played a role in the development of this field of scholarship. Over the past decade and more, Ethnic and Racial Studies has been able to publish much of the most influential and cutting edge research in this field, both in the form of regular articles and in special issues. The latest of our special issues in this field was edited by Steven Vertovec on New Directions in the Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism (Vertovec, 2010). It brought together the work of leading scholars working at the interface between migration and migration studies, a theme that remains at the heart of contemporary political debates in various parts of the globe. We have also published a growing number of stand-alone articles that have addressed aspects of the changing morphology of migration in the current globalised environment. Transnational migration is one subject we have regularly featured.

This expansion of scholarship and research on migration is not an accident. It is closely linked to current political and policy preoccupations about a range of questions, including new patterns of migration flows, asylum and refuge, multiculturalism, religious and cultural diversity, identity formation among migrant communities and the impact of migration on economic and social development, migration and work, inter-ethnic relations, generational change among migrant communities and the governance of migration. Political and social debate about these, and other, questions has been an important factor in shaping both the scope of research and some of the specific preoccupations of academic research. For example, an important consequence of the terror attacks of 9/11 in the US and of 7/7 in the UK has been a growth of scholarship on issues of religious and cultural diversity, migration and security, and forms of transnational mobilisation. A key concern in some recent discussions has been on the question of whether policies promoting multiculturalism have somehow reduced a sense of national identity and social cohesion (Calhoun et al., 2002).

Contents of volume

In this volume, based on a themed issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, we have pulled together a number of chapters that are connected by some common concerns. The individual chapters are spread over a wide range of empirical examples and conceptual frameworks; although it is not our intention in putting together a themed issue to assume that all authors are addressing a related set of objectives. The first chapter by Alejandro Portes, reproduces his 2008 Ethnic and Racial Studies Annual Lecture delivered in London. Portes is one of the leading students of Latin American migration to the United States, who has written extensively upon transnationalism and the second generation. More recently, he has extended his research focus to encompass European developments. He takes up a recurrent theme in the literature on migration, namely the interrelationship between migration and development. This is a particularly vexed issue in the literature on Latin America. Portes provides a clinical dissection of the empirical evidence on this issue, as well as drawing out some of the wider implications for the wider study of migration and development. In doing so Portes argues forcefully for the need to look at migration as a phenomenon that is interlinked to, and in turn shapes, global economic and social transformations.

The following two chapters explore more specific dimensions of contemporary trends in European societies. Alison Bowes and her colleagues take up the question of the impact of asylum policies on asylum seekers in Scotland. The question of asylum and popular responses to it has been a hugely controversial issue in the UK over the past decade and the authors of this chapter are able to show that questions of asylum need to be seen within particular regional and local experiences of settlement and interaction between communities. This is followed by a chapter by Xavier Escandell and Alin M. Ceobanu focused on attitudes towards migrants in Spain. The experience of Spain, along with other south European countries, has attracted much attention in recent years. This is partly because these are countries where migration is seen as a relatively new phenomenon. As Escandell and Ceobanu forcefully argue, however, the experiences of the past decade and more have placed questions about migration and the position of ethnic minorities very much on the social and political agenda of Spanish politics and society.

The chapter by Andrew Eungi Kim provides an insight into the impact of migration in South Korea. Relatively little research has been done in countries such as South Korea about migration as a social and cultural issue, although as Kim seeks to show there are reasons to believe that global migration trends are likely to have a major impact on counties that have been seen as largely monocultural. Indeed, Kim’s critical analysis helpfully seeks to situate the terms of discussion about migration in South Korea and is very much linked to the terms of discourse that we have seen in North America and elsewhere.

An important issue in current scholarly debates about migration is the role of migrants themselves as social actors. Anna Triandafyllidou’s chapter takes up this dimension and explores it in relation to the mobilisations of sub-saharan immigrant activists. Triandafyllidou’s account highlights the need to look beyond the image of migrants as vulnerable victims and to analyse their role as actors who seek to shape their own social and political environment. Drawing on original research among sub-saharan migrants in a number of European countries, her account provides a forceful reminder of the need to see migrant activism within a broader social and cultural framework.

Following on from the issue of immigrant activism and forms of mobilisation the next two chapters by Russell King and Nicola Mai, and Hermann Kurthen and Barbara Schmitter Heisler provide insights into patterns of migrant incorporation. King and Mai’s analysis focuses on the specific example of Albanians in Italy, and seeks to show that there is no necessary symmetry in the ways in which migrant communities are accommodated or excluded within particular national settings. Indeed, they go on to suggest that there are often messy patterns of inclusion and exclusion operating at the same time. Kurthen and Schmitter Heisler revisit evidence about integration from the US and Germany and seek to highlight both the similarities and differences between the two situations.

The final chapter in this book is a discussion article by Thomas Faist on the interplay between growing forms of diversity and modes of incorporation. Addressing issues that relate to current trends in both Europe and North America, he addresses the need for greater theoretical precision as well as empirical detail if we are to understand the interplay between diversity and incorporation of minorities in contemporary societies. Drawing on the proliferation of recent discussion of this issue Faist’s account is framed by the need to situate debates about diversity against a comparative analytical frame that allows us to understand the complex social, economic and cultural processes that shape the experience of different societies.

We envisage that as processes of migration and movement across the globe become ever more complex, Ethnic and Racial Studies will continue to provide a forum for publishing the latest research in this field from scholars working in all parts of the globe. We offer this edited collection as a sample of the contributions being made currently to contemporary scholarly and public debate.

References

ADDIN EN.REFLIST BLOEMRAAD, I., KORTEWEG, A. & YURDAKUL, G. 2008 ‘Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 34, pp. 153–79.

CALHOUN, C. J., PRICE, R. & TIMMER, A. (eds) 2002 Understanding September 11. New York: New Press.

CASTLES, S. 2010 ‘Understanding Global Migration: A Social Transformation Perspective’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 36, no. 10, pp. 1565–1586.

CASTLES, S. & MILLER, M. J. 2009 The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World Fourth Fourth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

DE GENOVA, N. 2010 ‘Migration and Race in Europe: The Trans-Atlantic Metastases of a Post-Colonial Cancer’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 405–419.

VERTOVEC, S. (ed.) 2010 Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism: New Directions. London: Routledge.

Migration and development: reconciling opposite views

Alejandro Portes

Abstract

In this essay, I review opposite positions on the relationship between migration and the socio-economic development of sending countries and regions, and the theoretical schools that underlie each of them. In order to adjudicate between these competing perspectives, it is necessary to distinguish between the human capital composition of different migrant flows, their duration, and their structural significance and change potential. This theoretical discussion culminates in a typology that seeks to clarify under which conditions migration can have developmental effects and under which it will be contrary to the advancement of home communities and countries. Policy implications of this analysis, in particular the role of governments in sending and receiving nations, are examined.

Debates and research on consequences of contemporary South–North migration have been overwhelmingly focused on the impact migration has on the nations and localities at the receiving end. Much less attention has been paid to the effects of such movements on the countries left behind. The general view among analysts and the public is that out-migration should be good for sending countries because of the safety valve to poverty and unemployment that it provides and, above all, because of the river of remittances sent by expatriates which contributes significantly to the survival of families and the financial stability of sending nations (Diaz-Briquets and Weintraub 1991; Massey et al. 1998; Guarnizo 2003).

Arrayed against these optimistic views are a number of global South scholars who have become fierce critics of out-migration and its consequences for their nations. From their point of view, migration is not only a symptom of underdevelopment, but a cause of it, as it depopulates entire regions, turns sending families from producers into rentiers, and allows governments to escape their responsibilities by relying on migrant remittances. Such views have been summarized in a number of public documents, of which perhaps the best known is the 2005 ‘Declaration of Cuernavaca’:

The development model adopted in the immense majority of laborexporting American countries has not generated opportunities for growth nor economic or social development. On the contrary, it has meant the emergence of regressive dynamics; unemployment and job precarization; loss of qualified workers; productive disarticulation and stagnation; inflation and greater economic dependency. As a consequence, we experience a convergence between depopulation and the abandonment of productive activities in areas of high emigration.

(Delgado-Wise and Covarrubias 2006)

How can we reconcile these opposing views? On the one hand, we have governments of sending nations pleading with the United States and Western European countries to let their nationals in and not to deport them, so that they can continue sending remittances. On the other hand, development experts from the same countries denounce the very same outflows as inimical to the national interest. Adjudicating between these opposite views requires us to make several practical and conceptual distinctions in order to separate disparate phenomena obscured under blanket statements:

1. Between the structural importance of migration flows and their change potential; the latter being a subset of the former.

2. Between high human capital flows and those composed primarily of manual workers.

3. Between cyclical or temporary flows and permanent or quasi-permanent migrations.

The first distinction calls attention to the possibility that out-migration acquires structural importance for sending nations not by developing them, but precisely by consolidating entrenched elites inimical to their development. The ‘safety valve’ function of large outflows and the role of remittances in buttressing public finances play a role in this process: they do not change the institutional underpinnings of economic stagnation and social inequality, but can actually perpetuate them. This is, in part, the reason why, as critics of migration argue, there are no documented instances in which such movements have actually lifted sending countries out of poverty and a subordinate position in the global system (Reichert 1981; Castles 2004; Delgado-Wise 2004).

In turn, the change potential of migration does not always yield effects conducive or congruent with developmental goals. Migration-induced social change is not always for the better. To see these differences more clearly, it is best to organize the discussion on the basis of the second distinction, namely that between manual and high human capital flows. The two movements possess different dynamics, although, as we shall see, their potential contribution to sending countries’ economic and social development hinges largely on the same set of factors.

Manual labour international migration

The mass migration of peasants and workers out of the global South and into wealthy nations is what critics of these flows commonly have in mind. Despite sustained criticism by nativists in host nations, these movements can play a significant positive role in their economies by, among other effects, compensating for a declining and ageing population and meeting demand in labour-intensive sectors such as agriculture, construction, and low-tech industries (Bean and Stevens 2003; Portes and Rumbaut 2006, ch. 3). Two economic schools have generally favoured the onset and continuation of these flows. The first is the orthodox economic position, associated with the classic studies of Brinley Thomas (1973) and W. Arthur Lewis (1959). It sees these movements as natural equilibrating mechanisms between labour-surplus regions, where the marginal productivity of labour is near zero, and those where it can be put to productive use. Migration helps both regions by allowing productive investments in receiving areas, while helping raise wages in sending ones (Todaro 1976).

The second school is the ‘New Economics of Migration’, which also takes a positive stance toward such flows, but for different reasons. They are seen as a func...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Migration and development: reconciling opposite views
• 3. Asylum policy and asylum experiences: interactions in a Scottish context
• 4. When contact with immigrants matters: threat, interethnic attitudes and foreigner exclusionism in Spain’s Comunidades Autónomas
• 5. Global migration and South Korea: foreign workers, foreign brides and the making of a multicultural society
• 6. Sub-Saharan African immigrant activists in Europe: transcultural capital and transcultural community building
• 7. Italophilia meets Albanophobia: paradoxes of asymmetric assimilation and identity processes among Albanian immigrants in Italy
• 8. Immigrant integration: comparative evidence from the United States and Germany
• 9. Discussion article: Diversity – a new mode of incorporation?
• Index