Immigration, Integration and Mobility
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Immigration, Integration and Mobility

New Agendas in Migration Studies

Adrian Favell

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Immigration, Integration and Mobility

New Agendas in Migration Studies

Adrian Favell

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About This Book

A compilation of Adrian Favell's innovative and agenda-setting essays which, since the late 1990s, have charted the emergence of new migration patterns and politics in Europe. Tackling in turn issues of multiculturalism, immigrant integration, free movement, high skilled mobilities, new East-West migrations and regional integration, the collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the dynamic field of international migration studies. At the same time, it poses a sharp challenge to current complacencies, challenging researchers to escape methodological nationalism and the unreflective reproduction of concepts and assumptions in the field, as well as embracing new methodologies and theoretical resources. Moving fluidly across intellectual boundaries as much as national borders, Favell points the way forward to new thinking in this burgeoning and rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field.

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Publisher
ECPR Press
Year
2016
ISBN
9781910259467
Chapter One
Introduction – Immigration, Migration and Free Movement in the Making of Europe
Europe historically has been made, unmade, and remade through the movements of peoples.1 Despite the present day view of Europeans as a rather sedentary and socially immobile population – particularly when compared to the highly mobile spatial and social patterns of North Americans – contemporary Europe has essentially emerged out of a crucible of local, regional, and international population movements over the centuries.
In this introductory chapter, I consider the crucial impact of migration in Europe on European identity, by building a bridge between historical analyses of the phenomenon and emerging patterns that are shaping Europe as a distinctive new regional space of migration and mobility. My aim is to point out how migration is making and remaking Europe, less at the level of ‘identity’ in people’s heads – in fact, if anything, most migrations are contributing to the growth of anti-European sentiment – but more in a territorial and (especially) structural economic sense. This is less easy to see if a purely cultural view is taken of the question of Europe. After sketching the role of population movements in the making and unmaking of Europe historically, I explore in depth the three kinds of migration/mobility that are most salient to the continent today and its structural transformation: first, the ongoing, traditional ‘ethnic’ immigration of non-Europeans into European nation-states; second, the small, but symbolically important emergence of new intra-European ‘elite’ migrations, engaged by European citizens enjoying the fruits of their European Union (EU) free movement rights; and third, the politically ambiguous flows of East-West migrants – which fall somewhere between the other two forms – that have been connected to the EU enlargement processes formalised in 2004 and 2007. The distinctiveness of Europe as a world region – hence in this sense, its economic and territorial identity – can best be grasped by briefly comparing it again to the United States of America (USA) as a similar, but differently structured regional migration space, a theme I turn to in my conclusion.
Population movements in the making and unmaking of Europe
It is not uncommon to picture European nationals as somehow innately predisposed to not move. Europe is typically seen as a patchwork of ‘thick’ inherited cultures – divided up by proudly preserved languages and social practices – that map out a continent of stubbornly rooted peoples with strong national and local identities, not much affected by the efforts of European institutions – or globalisation – to get them to think differently. It is also seen as a continent largely hostile to new immigrants, struggling to integrate even the small numbers of ethnically and racially distinct minorities that do manage to get in.
The USA, as is so often the case, is often referred to in order to underline this contrast. If the EU can be thought of for a moment as a kind of federal United States of Europe, the numbers are stark. While around 12 per cent of Americans are foreign born (Batalova and Lowell 2006), less than one in fifty Europeans live outside his/her state of national birth; and even intra-regional migration within European nation-states is lower than cross-state migration in the USA, at 22 per cent compared to 33 per cent (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions 2006). European society is thus seen as the product of historically rooted cultures; America unequivocally has been built on immigration and the melting pot of newcomers. Despite fluctuating political resistance to new immigration, the base numbers and percentages moving to the USA are still bigger than anywhere in Europe, as is the sheer size of recent immigrant-origin populations over two or three generations – which in some states such as California now exceed 50 per cent. The attractiveness of the USA for new generations of the internationally ambitious and talented is still unanswered by Europe as a global economic force: two-thirds of tertiary-educated migrants from developing countries choose America as their destination, with dramatically beneficial consequences for the American economy (Peri 2005). It appears, in short, that Americans are willing to move and accept movers; Europeans are not.
A short pause for thought on this assumption will quickly reveal its historical ineptitude (see also Recchi 2006). America, after all, was largely populated by Europeans who moved and moved again: over sea, and then over great stretches of land. Thought of less shortsightedly, Europe is and always has been a continent of migratory flux. Early modern Europe – the kind of Europe celebrated by nationalists everywhere in terms of culturally rooted folklore (Hobsbawm 1983; Anderson 1991) – in fact was already a patchwork of circular, seasonal, and career mobility well before industrialisation. These revolutions then changed everything: sweeping peasants off the land, ripping apart rural communities, packing expansive cities full of new social classes, and creating economic channels of mobility that linked all of Europe, and eventually the world, in a new system of empire and capital (Hobsbawm 1987; Bade 2000; Moch 2003). On the ground, this meant continual flows of migration. By the late nineteenth century, unprecedented numbers were also moving across national borders as worker populations, and across seas as new world migrants and settlers (Hatton and Williamson 1998). Europeans went everywhere.
Why this is forgotten in the image of a sedentary Europe today is, of course, that the wars of the twentieth century stopped much of this migration. Nation-states finally reigned supreme as the dominant form of global social organisation: cementing the institutionalised role of state-centred power as explosive population containers, using military service, citizenship, and welfare rights in the name of national identity, to build political distinctions between insiders and outsiders and fix people spatially (Mann 1993; Torpey 2000). This, then, became the familiar, legitimate political topography of the modern world, leaving numerous ethnic groups on the wrong side of territorial borders or in despised social locations, the stateless residual populations of a now thoroughly nationalised Europe. This left one disaster – the Jewish holocaust – which scarred the continent forever, and an ugly aftermath of war that brutally shifted yet more populations, East and West. Europeans were once again moved, in search of a stable political solution that might for once and for all settle the ethnic and ideological frontiers of the so-called ‘shatter zone’ in Central and East Europe (Brubaker 1995; Mazower 1998; Mann 2005). Europe gave up its empires, and the Iron Curtain created a new, nearly impermeable material and psychological barrier, freezing East-West mobility and literally severing the latitudinal land movements and interactions that had, in longue durée geographical terms, been the greatest civilising resource of the continent (Diamond 1997).
In the West, generous welfare state structures in the postwar period – a kind of liberal democratic form of socialised nationalism prevalent throughout the continent up to 1970 (Mazower 1998) – cemented national populations in place like never before. The shrunken West European powers eventually re-emerged economically, but they did so by now servicing their migrant worker needs, first via a new wave of migrants from the peripheral South to North (from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Yugoslavia), then – as these movements too dried up – via a large, hitherto unprecedented immigration from former colonies and dependencies outside Europe (especially Turkey, North and Central Africa, the West Indies, South Asia, and Indonesia). This, of course, brought an even more explosive mix of race and cultural diversity into the fractious continent (Castles and Miller 2009).
A historical ground map to European population movements – breathless as this sketch is – is necessary for any discussion about the place of migration today in the making of a European identity. It is not an easy map to capture (King 2002). Conventional post-colonial and guest worker immigration was supposed to have ended in the 1970s, leaving only limited channels of family reunification and asylum as entry points for migration. Immigrant populations were supposed to have settled and integrated as nationals and citizens, turning more or less culturally homogenous national societies into reluctantly multicultural ones.
The 1980s, and especially 1990s, have changed all this again (Baumgartl and Favell 1995; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2012). A wave of ‘new migrations’ has mixed up the continent once more (Koser and Lutz 1998). A globalising economy has liberalised post-industrial societies, leading to a new dual service economy driven largely by a demand for cheap foreign labour (Piore 1979; Sassen 2001). Global transportation systems have facilitated movement to Europe from increasingly diversified and unpredictable sources (Held et al. 1999). European working classes, as in America, no longer wish to take on 3D (dirty, dangerous and dull) tasks that might be left to more motivated and cheaper foreigners. Migration here, as elsewhere, has also dramatically feminised, as women from developing countries have become the carers and domestic workers of the highly developed (Phizacklea 1998; Kofman et al. 2000). Asylum, which once functioned as a more symbolic gesture to enable small numbers of political refugees to escape to the West, has turned into an uncontrollable torrent as Europe has picked up the human pieces of numerous regional and global wars; asylum also has become effectively a channel of labour migration. Europe was supposed to become a fortress; by the early 2000s the reverse was happening (Favell and Hansen 2002).
Added to these new forms of immigration, novel intra-EU migrations have also become a feature of the European migrant tapestry (Tarrius 1992, 2000). The European Union was built on the four freedoms, including the free movement of persons. Long-standing EU15 member states (i.e. those older members prior to the Eastern enlargements) have enjoyed these rights for decades now (Romero 1991). The numbers of West Europeans on the move have by no means been large, but they are highly symbolic. For every one who moves to work and settle freely in a neighbouring member state of the EU, many more are moving temporarily as students, shoppers, commuters, and eventually retirees. Add to this the ever changing geographical definition of the EU with successive enlargements reuniting Europe, and the potential for a new kind of migration in Europe – ‘free movement’ – looks set to unmake and remake again the settled patchwork of national societies that had, more or less successfully, used the EU to rescue the European nation-state in the postwar period (Milward 2005). The most visible intra-EU free movers now are, of course, after 2004 and 2007, the socially and spatially dynamic mobile populations of new Eastern and Central Europe, grabbing access to a European space that is now all theirs again. But, arguably, free movers will, due to the concentric logic of an externalising, ‘neighbourhood’-building EU, in future be coming from Ukraine, Turkey, and Morocco as well, even if these bordering states never become members.
These combined phenomena leave a confusing setting for evaluating the impact of population movements on European identity. As I will show, by untangling the impact of these various new migrations on the making and unmaking of Europe, it can be seen that Europe is struggling to maintain distinctions among three distinctive groups, but moving towards a new solution. Here, I will sketch the outlines of this likely future, before going on to explore this scenario in more depth in the rest of the chapter.
A first kind of migration – traditional, poor, ‘ethnic,’ extra-European immigrants from Africa and Asia – insofar as they can be distinguished as such – is being processed, with a great deal of social and political conflict, in line with the established methods for dealing with postwar, post-colonial, and guest worker migrants. These immigrants continue to be framed as the legitimate concern of national societies, not just the EU; recent years have seen the return of nationalist integration policies across all of Europe, alongside a growing instrumental role they play in fuelling the symbolic closure of anti-EU and anti-globalisation politics. However, in Europe as elsewhere, this often ugly politics of immigration does not square with the economics of migration. Nostalgia for contained, culturally secure, citizenship and nation-based societies sits badly with a globalised dual labour market within service sector-driven economies run by multinationals, which demand an almost endless reserve army of flexible foreign labour.
The experiences of a second group of migrants, at the other end of the social scale – West European movers I call ‘Eurostars’ – tell a different story about Europe today. Unsurprisingly, they reflect a Europe at its most enthusiastically cosmopolitan and post-national. Yet, even with all formal barriers to migration down, they encounter limitations and resistance to their movement that suggest the resilience of national ethnicities in even the most structurally global and multinational of locations – London and Amsterdam being my examples.
A third group of migrants – the new East European movers – are the most ambiguous of all. Are they cadet Eurostars, as the theory of European integration predicts they will become one day? Or are they still more like traditional ‘ethnic’ immigrants, and likely to be treated this way? I argue that both are true. They are making a new European space of movement and fulfilling a new idea of European citizenship; but they are also being shuffled into economic roles in the West European economies assigned in the postwar period to traditional non-European immigrants. Herein lies the punch line. A kind of European fortress may yet be built on the back of this ambiguous spread and opening of Europe to the East. A tempting racial logic is at stake for Europeans today. Opening to populations from the East may enable the more effective closing of Europe to the South, filling the structural need for which Western Europe had historically to turn to colonial and developing country immigrants from more distant societies and cultures. Racial and cultural distinctions might be used to achieve what concrete, electronic surveillance, and barbed wire cannot.
The three migrations in Europe
I will now explore in greater detail each of the three migrations identified above: traditional non-European ‘ethnic’ immigrants; West European Eurostars; and the new East-West post-Enlargement movers. It is essential to distinguish them analytically before showing how the new migration scenario is blurring many of these supposedly clear distinctions.
Traditional non-European ‘ethnic’ (im)migrants
New forms of migration and mobility have changed the context of population movements in Europe, but the dominant story about immigration today in Europe is still, mostly, the ongoing classic post-colonial and guest worker scenario. Unquestionably, European economies still generate a strong demand for migrant workers, alongside an alluring image that generates a supply – alluring enough to offset the often highly costly and uncertain calculations that lie behind migrants’ decisions to move from Africa or Asia. Where the story has most changed is in the increasingly diverse source origins of ongoing immigration: now from a range of countries with little or no colonial connection to the destination countries. Previous generations of post-colonial immigrants could at least count on a symbolic connection to the metropolitan destinations, together often with having been socialised to some extent in the language and culture of the country. Nowadays sources and destinations are equally scattered, a factor that increases the tensions that emerge politically around the migration in the receiving society (Vertovec 2007). For example, the reception context of British West Indian migrants in the 1960s differs dramatically from the Sri Lankis or Kurds arriving in Denmark today. National integration systems thus find it that much harder to deal with the new migrations.
In addition, channels of migration today are much more ‘bottom-up’ than in the days of relatively planned post-colonial and guest worker recruitment migration. Some of the most remarkable migration systems that have emerged have been very specific in their internal self-organisation: Senegalese street vendors in Italy (Riccio 2001), Cape Verdean domestic workers in Italy and Spain (Andall 1998), Chinese migrants in Britain and France (Benton and Pieke 1998), Middle Easterners in Scandinavia (Diken 1998), and so on. For the main part, though, the largest groups of migrants – from Turkey and Morocco – are rather predictable and continuous migration systems built on long histories and easy connections with a range of countries (for some sources: Kastoryano 1993; Bousetta 2000; Lesthaege 2000; Phalet et al. 2000).
As everyone knows, these various immigrations have visibly put black, brown, and yellow faces in white Europe, including in some of the least likely places. Issues of multiculturalism or inter-ethnic conflict that were most familiar to former colonial powers like Britain and France are now raised in every country in Western Europe, including the South, and increasingly in East and Central Europe too. As a majority of these new immigrants hail from predominantly Muslim countries, the Islamic dimension of this immigration – whether practicing religious affiliation or merely the parent culture – has become the defining issue of twenty-first-century European identity most associated with immigration today (Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006).
This is of course an issue imprisoned in broader geo-political struggles linked to the ‘war against terror,’ and at the mercy of reductive, inflammatory visions of the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996). It is now difficult to see past the rhetoric to assess qualitatively how different these new migrations and the multicultural problems are from those of the ‘old’ immigration of the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the trajectory of these visible, so-called ‘ethnic’ immigrants in European society is a quite familiar one. At a macro-level, they have been a key structural feature of all postwar European societies. What impacted first the large post-colonial and guest worker countries has had similar effects in asylum-receiving countries in Northern, and later in Southern Europe. Each nation-state has faced similar ‘multicultural questions,’ albeit with different timings and political saliency (Kastoryano 1998a; Joppke and Lukes 1999). Europe as a whole has become a continent of immigration, and (with more difficulty) a continent of Islam; but the political and social processes raised by these questions have everywhere been dealt with as predominantly national ones, now raging at the core of domestic national politics everywhere, from Britain to Denmark, and The Netherlands to Spain.
Immigration, then, is certainly a European question; but the politics of immigration are still dominantly national in locus. Cooperation at the European level has had its effects, particularly on border control and entry policies; but the EU has little effect on the policies or processes of immigrant settlement. The basic problems for these non-European immigrants – ‘Third Country Nationals’ as they are known in EU jargon – is one of attaining formal national citizenship and recognised national membership: they are not European citizens, even when they have permanent residency. Naturalisation into their adopted host state provides the one sure route to becoming a European, but successful naturalisation is inevitably a nationalising process (Hansen 1998). The effect on European identity of these new immigrations is, in this sense, negative: it helps to preserve the nation-centred status quo. Whatever transnational, even pan-European social forms migrants might develop – Islam, for example, has taken specific ‘Euro’ forms in the visions of young leaders like Tariq Ramadan – the socialisation pressures faced by Muslim immigrants are overwhelmingly national. Nearly every European nation-state has formulated in recent years a policy on ‘integration’ of immigrants that reflects mainly nation-building concerns about imparting national culture and values to newcomers, and very little of the kinds of post-national responses to immigration that would be the consequence of a through Europeanisation of the issues involved (Favell 2003b). The most encouraging message all such immigrants get from their host societies is: ‘integrate – or else…’. I explore these issues in greater depth in Chapter Five.
Immigration is thus dominantly a national issue everywhere because of the integration question – even progressive, inclusionary ...

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