Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power

Tamar Mayer, Trinh Tran, Tamar Mayer, Trinh Tran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367772932
• eBook ISBN: 9781000604368
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This book centres the voices and agency of migrants by refocusing attention on the diversity and complexity of human mobility when seen from the perspective of people on the move; in doing so, the volume disrupts the binary logics of migrant/refugee, push/pull, and places of origin/destination that have informed the bulk of migration research.

Drawn from a range of disciplines and methodologies, this anthology links disparate theories, approaches, and geographical foci to better understand the spectrum of the migratory experience from the viewpoint of migrants themselves. The book explores the causes and consequences of human displacement at different scales (both individual and community-level) and across different time points (from antiquity to the present) and geographies (not just the Global North but also the Global South). Transnational scholars across a range of knowledge cultures advance a broader global discourse on mobility and migration that centres on the direct experiences and narratives of migrants themselves.

Both interdisciplinary and accessible, this book will be useful for scholars and students in Migration Studies, Global Studies, Sociology, Geography, and Anthropology.

1 Displacement, belonging, and migrant agency in the face of power Challenging paradigms in migration studies

Tamar Mayer and Trinh Tran

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170686-1

Vivid and gruesome images of migrants in search of asylum have been abundant in the last decades and have called attention to the magnitude and severity of the problem: black and brown bodies washing ashore; hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America sailing or marching to EU and US shores and borders; and subhuman living conditions in detention centers and makeshift dwellings, where migrants in limbo seek housing are the markings of the biggest human rights disaster of our time.

The number of migrants from the Global South seeking refuge is staggering. In 2019 alone, over 80 million people were dislocated in search of safety.¹ They fled war, persecution, ethnic cleansing, intense economic, and political instability, as well as the devastating impact of severe climate calamities (UNHCR 2020). And like more than 200 million migrants before them (IOM 2020), they left their homes with no clear idea if, when, and where they would put down roots again. These migrants are resilient and courageous, and in asserting their rights to flee for a better and safer life, they each “demand to be accepted as a distinctive human being” (Hamilakis 2016:125). They flee despite all the known and unknown dangers they may encounter en route: securitized borders and unforgiving terrain and weather conditions, for example, handlers and cayotes who might take advantage of them, and xenophobia borne by right-wing nationalism. At places of arrival, many migrants will encounter social, political, and economic discrimination, which often lead many to a life of poverty, precarity, and marginalization.

The focus of migration research has changed over time. If in most of the twentieth century, it focused on internal or international migrations—emphasizing migration flows, patterns, and processes and stressing demographics, statistics, and governance—then the focus in the 1990s became more attuned to individual-level factors and centered on gender, family, health, and diversity (Pisarevskaya et al. 2020). Since the 2000s, however, migration research has become even more attuned to individual migrants. It has incorporated migrants’ narratives about their own experiences and paid attention to issues of diversity, racism, discrimination, and social-psychological issues (Pisarevskaya et al. 2020). In so doing, such research has given migrants a voice and acknowledged their agency. Our volume, Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power, continues this approach by probing how migrants experience their dislocation and manage to survive (at times even to thrive) despite their horrific experiences. Our anthology aims to enrich migration research in various ways: by prioritizing migrants’ voices and centering their agency; by seeing them as a heterogenous group with different experiences, intersectional identities, and multiple migration paths; and by presenting the work of transnational authors from different academic disciplines. Drawn from a range of disciplines and methodologies, broad in its regional scope, this volume challenges and pushes against the binary logic that has informed the bulk of previous migration research (such as migrant/refugee, push/pull, forced/voluntary, and places of origin/destination). Instead, we ask what we can learn about people on the move and their agency when we examine the complexities of mobility at different scales (both individual and community levels) and across different time points (from antiquity to the present) and geographies (not just the Global North but also the Global South).

Migrants’ representation

Much of the migration literature, at least until recently, relied on European migration experiences and tended to center on the Global North, presenting static models of migration that were unidirectional (south–north, for example) (Collinson 1993; Adepoju et al. 2010; Filindra and Kovács 2012; Cerna 2014; Grosfoguel et al. 2015). It also reproduced the Eurocentric perspective of migrants as passive, voiceless, helpless, and unlucky victims (Kaye 2001; Collins 2007; Awad 2012; Blinder and Allen 2015). Such representations, which have been used to admit some migrants and refuse others, were simplistic and did not consider that migrants of all genders, ages, ethnicities, and classes are knowing actors: resilient authors of their own lives.

Further, much of the twentieth-century literature on migration referred to migrants as a homogenous group without acknowledging that migration differs greatly by gender, age, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. These themes would take center stage starting in the 1990s (Pisarevskaya et al. 2020). The attention to heterogeneity (seen in the works of Hajdukowski-Ahmed et al. 2008; Jansen 2013; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014; Sigona 2014) established what the migrants already knew, that women’s journeys are often far more dangerous than those of men; that they are more often preyed upon and face sexism by fellow migrants, state agents, border patrol, and handlers on their route (see Chapter 5 in this volume); that gay and transsexual migrants too, as well as children who travel alone (see Chapters 17 and 19) have migration experiences unique to their identities and positionality; and that migrants who were economically better off before fleeing have easier journeys than poorer migrants (see Chapter 14).

This attention to heterogeneity has been important, but studying migration experiences, whether by gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, or age, risks essentializing those experiences into discrete and separate social categories. People’s social identities overlap and intersect, causing them to experience events in their lives differently, depending on the extent to which they intersect. In the context of this volume, it is important to consider that migration experiences for women will depend on their ethnicity, age, sexuality, class, and religion. A middle-class woman, for example, of a specific race or ethnicity, will most likely experience migration differently from a poor urban lesbian of the same ethnic group, whether documented or not (see Chapter 17). Indeed, theories of intersectionality help us complicate our understanding of the migration experience and offer an angle through which to focus on individuals as they are positioned both locally and globally, not just on the larger social categories.

The call to focus on individuals and their complicated migration stories comes from transnational writers who explore migrations from the Global South, including those whose paths involve many steps, perhaps even a return to the initial sending country. Following these authors,² our volume gives voice to the migrants from the Global South who have left homes in haste and who struggle through inhospitable environmental, social, political, and economic landscapes in search of a safer place to live. Focusing on the Global South, with its unique migration settings and patterns—rural to urban, intraregional, and south to north—allows us to illuminate drivers of displacement, such as the impact of colonial legacy and climate disasters, that until recently have been largely invisible in works on the Global North. It also allows us to explore the ideas of belonging and re-creating new homes in places that are not always hospitable to nonwhite migrants.

Challenging migration paradigms

Despite the changes evident in migration studies since the 1990s, scholars today still adhere to several binary constructions (paradigms) used in the past to analyze, explain, and characterize the reasons, patterns, and directions of migratory flows—even if assigning such constructions different levels of importance. These binaries include push/pull factors, forced/voluntary migrations, and places of origin/destination. In this section, we explore and challenge the value of each, aiming to move scholarship toward a closer examination of the multiple and complex drivers and consequences of displacement by considering the spectrum of the migratory experience. Although extant work has neatly labeled migrants and their experiences into discrete and separate social categories, the chapters in this volume destabilize this binary logic by centering the agency and voice of individual migrants.

Push / pull

This path-breaking theory, pioneered in 1966 by sociologist Evertt Lee, attempted to explain that migration occurs because of the interplay between “push” and “pull,” as conditions in one place repel and a potential new place attracts (Lee 1966). In addition to the conditions and the distance between two places, the theory’s proponents recognized that intervening obstacles and opportunities affect the volume of migration. Although their studies were useful for mathematical modeling and for explaining south–north migration (see, for example, Jenkins 1977; Zimmermann 1996; Datta 2004; Dago and Barussaud 2021) and its continuous flow (e.g., Dorigo and Tobler 1983), they did not consider two other factors: (1) migration involves multiple physical, social, and symbolic locations, not simply two physical places; and (2) places can never be classified as simply attractive or not. Further, these studies did not consider how social networks and social capital affect migration. Finally, given its opportunities and disadvantages, place is experienced differently depending on one’s social and cultural intersected positionalities. The push/pull construction provides no space for such considerations. By using feminist theory, paying attention to the strong ties between places left and places arrived at, and by focusing on agency, our volume complicates this binary and adds to the critique of the push/pull paradigm.

Forced / voluntary

This binary construction presupposes that migrants are either forced to leave their homes or choose to do so voluntarily. It follows the United Nation’s 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocols, which have been used since then by NGOs and governments to determine who will be granted entry and who will not (Betts 2013; Ottonelli and Torresi 2013). Because of this 1951 Convention, forced migration is associated with a real threat to people’s lives and livelihood as evident in extreme violations of human rights resulting from war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, or by severe political and economic instability. In contrast, therefore, voluntary migration refers to those who move for purely economic reasons, usually in search of a (better) job; their migration is considered a matter of free choice. As many scholars have already noted, this distinction is problematic because all migrations involve choice, including forced migrations (Bartram 2015), and because migrants are agents, involved in their own migration projects, who decide how much risk they can tolerate before choosing whether to flee or remain in place.

Because the UN and state organizations continue to use this binary construction to characterize migrations (either voluntary or forced), it is important to stress that contrary to the 1951 Convention, economics is a determinant in all migrations, not only in “voluntary” ones. When people’s economic situation is so dire, as in the cases of Venezuela, Eritrea, Puerto Rico, and many other places; when crops fail because of drought and there is no food or water; when calamities of climate change strike and eviscerate the infrastructure and homes are leveled; and when political and economic systems collapse and there is no hope, many people choose to flee (see the case of Venezuelans’ exodus in Chapter 5 and the Ghanaian internal migration case in Chapter 9). Since the categories established in the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocols were fixed, and since at the time there was no consideration given to climate-induced displacement or to economic refugees, those who dislocated because of environmental or economic reasons do not count among the refugees and do not qualify for assistance.³

A dichotomous construction of forced versus voluntary reifies legalistic distinctions between refugees and migrants. Such binary categories privilege the role of the state and speak more to its administering and management of borders than to the real experiences of migrants themselves. Instead of speaking to the reality of the migratory journey, arbitrary distinctions between forced and voluntary erect an unnecessary hierarchy of misery, serving as justification for the denial and receipt of aid by people on the move (Hamlin 2021).

Places of origin / destination

This category focuses on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Editors
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Displacement, belonging, and migrant agency in the face of power: Challenging paradigms in migration studies
• Part I Regimes of belonging
• Part II Drivers of displacement
• Part III Re-creating home away from home
• Part IV Gender, sexuality, age, and belonging
• Part V Challenges to migration research
• Index