Migration in the 21st Century

Political Economy and Ethnography

Pauline Gardiner Barber, Winnie Lem

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415892223
• eBook ISBN: 9781136299186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This edited collection focuses on global migration in its inter-regional, international and transnational variants, and argues that contemporary migration scholarship is significantly advanced both within anthropology and beyond it when ethnography is theoretically engaged to grapple with the social consequences and asymmetries of twenty-first century capitalism's global modalities. Drawn from settings across the globe, case studies explore the nuanced formations of class and power within particular migration flows while addressing the complex analytics of a contemporary critical political economy of migration. Subjects include global migrants as capitalists, entrepreneurs and "cosmopolitans, " as well as workers and immigrants who are subject to varying degrees of precariousness under intensified competition for profits within contemporary global economies. By re-addressing the question of the relationship between changes in global capitalism and migration, the book aims for a timely intervention into the debates on migration which have come to be one of the most contentious emotionally fraught issues in North America and Europe.

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Migration, Political Economy, and Ethnography

Pauline Gardiner Barber and Winnie Lem

As the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008 continue to shake our world, the search for paradigms to explain the economic turmoil has been undertaken with some urgency. Increasingly analysts in the academy¹ and elsewhere² have turned to political economy perspectives for guidance on how to understand not only the financial upheaval but also the very nature, causes, and effects of such recurring global recessions, downturns, and crises. Political economy, particularly in its Marxian iterations, is explicitly dedicated to deciphering the inner workings of capitalism. Marx’s work has inspired many generations of scholars to debate the character of economies and societies. Today, no less than in earlier periods of upheaval and dislocations, his theories, concepts, and methodologies are devoted to analyzing the nexus of forces and social processes that contribute to capitalism’s formations, transformations, and crises. For scholarship on migration, this renewed interest in the diagnostics of political economy is propitious, for it has long been established that migration and capitalism are entwined in a relationship of complexity and inextricability.³ This intricate relationship is evidenced by the fact that the instabilities of capitalism and its cycles of crises are often accompanied by the intensification of the cross-border movements of people. Indeed, the vicissitudes of economic turbulence compel multidirectional human mobility, dislocation, and relocation. The perspective of political economy, therefore, promises significant insights into migration as one process that is deeply implicated in capitalism and its transformations both in the past and in the present.

In history, the movement of populations under the imperatives of colonialism and also imperialism has been allied with the development of capitalism as a global phenomenon,⁴ or as some would suggest, as a world system.⁵ At least since the last half of the twentieth century, migration has become more salient as a force in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, the restructuring of capitalist economies across the globe in the era of post-fordism and the realization of neoliberal doctrines that increasingly embed societies in market relations have both contributed to the intensification of migration within, as well as between nations. Migration then is as much a sign of ongoing trajectories of growth in the development of capitalism as it is of under- or uneven development. Migrant labor is deployed to the projects of capitalist development in mines, fields, and factories, or in the services that support such schemes. Moreover, both the development and the continuation of capitalism are consequences of migration. As participants in national economies, migrants may also incorporate themselves into societies in which they relocate as members of the entrepreneurial class who sustain capitalist economies by engaging in the pursuit of profits.

Furthermore, remittances provided by migrants of different classes can be seen to foster the redistribution of resources across the globe, albeit sometimes in a multidirectional as well as circular fashion. Often they are directed to societies of migrant provenance for supporting market economies and capitalist development when they are deployed in consumption and sometimes production. But sometimes remittances can also disguise migrant indebtedness, so it is controversial as to whether or not migrant remittances actually foster development in any straightforward manner. Countries of emigration are also sites for capital to draw upon labor reserves where costs of social reproduction are lower than in more established and diverse economies. Moreover, funds garnered through the remittance process are also used by labor-exporting states to service foreign currency loans to transnational banking agencies. The processes of capitalist change and development, therefore, both form and are in turn informed by the movement of people across space and time, while the very character of migration itself is contoured by changing economies and politics under capitalism. Hence the imbrication of capitalism and migration suggests that a diachronic application of a mode of analysis whose purpose is to apply the complexities of capitalism to the study of migration would also serve to disentangle the inner workings of migration itself. We argue, therefore, that a renewed interest in a theoretical orientation that is pre-eminently devoted to the study of the dynamics of capitalist formations and transformations is particularly salutary for scholarship on migration.

In this current period of economic crisis and turmoil, migration scholarship is coming of age. There is now a burgeoning literature that spans a variety of disciplines and constitutes the framework for new interdisciplinary modes of enquiry. The questions are numerous and the analytical perspectives are diverse. Such questions have been surveyed, for example by Brettell and Hollifield (2000), who also offer a comprehensive overview of theoretical, methodological propositions across the many disciplines that address questions of migration. Similarly, Hirschman, Kasinitz, and DeWind (1999), Massey et al. (1998, 1994, 1993), and Portes and DeWind (2007) provide a compendium of different analytical approaches from several disciplines.⁶ In reviewing these studies, it is evident that there are few sustained discussions of the relationship between migration and capitalism, and we hazard that a condition of theoretical stasis seems to prevail. Overviews of migration theory tend to be repetitive, continually rehearsing the strengths and weaknesses of a standard and predictable set of theories and ideas. This set includes neoclassical approaches to migration studies, structural approaches, and more recently migration systems theory, as well as transnational analysis.⁷ Indeed, in studies of migration the analytical framework of transnational analysis seem to stand alone as a significant innovative advancement in migration theory.⁸ Proposed by political economists, transnational analysis as theory and methodology promises insights into the fundamental forces that structure migration in its relationship to capitalism. But here also, as will be made clear by authors in this volume, blind spots prevail. Further, as a mode of analysis transnationalism becomes problematic. To an important extent, it is often rendered troublesome with respect to frameworks that stress “securitization” as both discourse and agenda. Methodological nationalism results from such an emphasis (Glick Schiller, this volume; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003).

The issue of the novelty of transnationalism may well belie our claim of a prevailing theoretical stasis. Still we suggest that a tendency toward limited advancements in theory might stem from the fact that much research on migration is state sponsored and therefore driven by policy imperatives. On the one hand, such imperatives reflect the predominant concern to execute forms of neoliberal governance including the project of ensuring that immigrants are, or can be turned into, economically productive citizens. Hence much research is inclined toward a focus on mechanisms of social inclusion and on how immigrants can be incorporated through processes of (neoliberal) assimilation, and integration. On the other hand, such imperatives also reflect the efforts by states to establish secure frontiers in the post-9/11 world. From an alternative viewpoint, responding to perceptions of migrants as threats, the directives of states tend to focus attention upon immigrant exclusion and to be pre-eminently concerned with securing borders against migrant influxes. Because of the complexities of implementing neoliberal policies combined with border securitization strategies, issues of migration and immigration have become matters of urgency on many state agendas. So much of the current research on migration reflects these concerns. Moreover, such directives and agendas for migration studies are often sustained through major international networks where migration research is deliberately targeted to policy-makers and migration agents. Examples of these include the International Metropolis Project (http://www.inter-nationalmetropolis.com/) which hosts major international conferences on migration as well as the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) (http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/) and International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion (IMISCOE) (http://www.imiscoe.org). Scholarship on migration then is often curtailed by a clutter of different and often competing agendas, leading toward what we perceive as a limited form of theoretical advancement, if not outright theoretical stasis

Such limitation, at least in the discipline of anthropology, has also resulted in part from the post-structural turn in the social sciences in which deconstruction and the use of literary metaphors has become dominant. In migration studies, this discursive turn is particularly reflected in the idea of ‘flows.’⁹ Uprooted and oftentimes celebratory discourses about global flows have arguably displaced questions about the structure, power, class, and economy that give capitalism’s flows, countercurrents, and blockages their particular character, including those associated with the mobilities of people as economic agents, not just cultural producers.¹⁰ We contend that despite and also because of the complexities of varying applications of neoliberalism as well as border securitization, any appreciation of the social consequences of the contemporary iterations of global capitalism is broadened by a deeper understanding of the relationship between migration and the transformations of capitalism. We further contend that state policies reflect concerns that can be productively examined through the lens of an ethnographically grounded political economy that takes account of both state agendas and migrant responses. In a context in which such directives promote incorporation rather than transformation, radical or critical perspectives are few, as are focused, critical, and sustained meditations on the relationship between migration and capitalism.

This book then brings together the work of anthropologists whose interventions in the field of migration studies are undertaken through an engagement with the analytics of political economy and Marxism. This engagement is undertaken in two ways. First, our work considers migration—or what we call here the “migration question”—in relation to the key concerns in political economy. As the contributors illustrate, we problematize migration, in various global contexts, with respect to the nature of production, the processes of accumulation, the dynamics of social reproduction, hegemony, exploitation, as well as class formation, power, and divisions of labor. Of particular significance to anthropologists is that Marx insisted on the social nature of the economy, that it is composed of social relationships which come to be ordered as classes relative to productive resources and labor. In focusing attention on the key thematic of class, authors illustrate the methodologies for class analysis, while illuminating the varied but comparable articulations of power that inform the lives of migrants and condition different forms of migration relative to questions of political economy. Our volume further illustrates how power infuses the malleable articulations between class, gender, and ethnicity relative to geographic scale. It can be seen that in different settings, varied social aspects of migrants’ identities become highlighted in negative ways and thus subjected to power mobilized by discourses of difference which renders migrants even more vulnerable to exploitation.

The second way of undertaking this engagement involves an attempt to move beyond orthodoxies of political economy that many critics, rightly or wrongly, suggest reduce and simplify.¹¹ Cognizant of such objections, our collaboration must be read as a critical engagement with political economy and also Marxism in that we try to shift optics and push analytical boundaries, while remaining faithful to fundaments. Furthermore our method of engagement with a political economy of migration is one that is dialectical. It is premised on the relationship of reciprocal formation and transformation that prevails between the social conditions of migration and the categories that are employed for its apprehension. It is a critique that emerges through our investigations as ethnographers of migration attuned to the realities of migrants’ lives livelihoods and the local logics of their migratory journeys. Hence the book illustrates the productive tension between field-derived observations, with due attention to historical conditions shaping migration trajectories, and the theoretical debates that define anthropological ethnography. Our book therefore is as much an exegesis on a method of inquiry as it is ethnography.

The authors in this volume are committed to asserting the heuristic significance of the theoretical and methodological apparatuses offered in political economy and Marxism, as it has been translated within anthropology to the study of migration. While retaining a commitment to framing the problematics of migration through political economy and Marxism, we attempt to move beyond the limits of orthodox, reductionist, and also static tendencies in materialism to illuminate the increasing complexities of migration and migrants’ lives. We argue, therefore, that an understanding of people’s spatial mobility is significantly advanced through the analytic lens of an anthropological approach to political economy, particularly in its Marxist variant. Each chapter, through deployment of a comparable conceptual language used with varying emphases and nuance, is an illustration of the key analytics in a reconstituted political economy for problematizing global migration within contemporary capitalism.

Part I, Perspectives, is devoted to a delineation of the theoretical and conceptual terrain of a political economy of migration in the discipline of anthropology. The chapters in Part I examine the ways in which migration is refracted through such core concepts as class, divisions of labor, accumulation, structure, agency, social reproduction, surplus population, value, power, and global capitalism. Also pivotal in a framework of political economy are broader questions about processes of class differentiation, dispossession, and exploitation, all of which are of concern to researchers contributing to this book.

Lem, for example, in Chapter 2 attempts to outline the points of departure in navigating through the theoretical and conceptual terrain of a political economy of migration for anthropology. She attempts this task by drawing attention to the foundations of political economy as a form of Marxist analysis and investigation. The chapter begins by outlining some ways in which political economy and Marxism have been understood as method and theory in anthropology. The second part of the chapter is an attempt to think through migration by using concepts in political economy to illuminate the processes of capitalist transformation and class formation in contemporary Chinese transregional and transnational migration. Her focus is on the ways in which dispossession through capitalist accumulation, particularly primitive accumulation, enables the formation of a class of freed labor which is segmented into a proletariat on the one hand and a relative surplus population on the other. By focusing on the example of Chinese migration she focuses on the processes of differentiation through members of the ‘surplus population,’ which by its very nature is a highly differentiated population, may follow varied trajectories to become incorporated into different classes over space and time. Class formation as a condition of possibility suggests ways of developing and deep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Migration, Political Economy, and Ethnography
• Part I Perspectives
• Part II Cases
• List of Contributors
• Index